The Psychology of Social Disintegration

In an 1841 letter to John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville wrote,

Citing a motif of his private writings, Tocqueville complained to Mill that France was relinquishing its “proud attitude,” “[consoling] itself by making railroads,” and succumbing to an “enervating taste that drags it more each day towards material enjoyments and small pleasures.”Footnote ²⁰

The two liberals were intellectual kin. Mill had favorably reviewed both volumes of Democracy in America (1835, 1840), and his own work drew on Tocqueville's analysis of “the tyranny of the majority.” Yet their attitudes diverged sharply on the matter of glory's importance. The Englishman answered Tocqueville's letter with a pointed rebuke: “posterity have a right to expect from men such as you… that you should teach to your countrymen better ideas of what it is that constitutes national glory and national importance.”Footnote ²¹

The dispute points to liberalism's unique trajectory in France. Like their English counterparts, French liberals prioritized “the liberty of the moderns.” Benjamin Constant had immortalized the term, and it was vulgarized in François Guizot's infamous prescription, enrichissez-vous! Thanks to the French Revolution's shadow, however, French liberals were also preoccupied with mitigating society's dissolution in the age of democracy. In their view, the Revolution had bequeathed to France the twin legacies of political centralization and social atomization. In abolishing the society of orders, the revolution emancipated individuals from the hierarchical bonds of the ancien régime. But it also left citizens with no bonds with which to cohere other than the state. Thus, as Larry Siedentop has argued, French liberals believed that “the growth of state power was intrinsically connected with the atomisation of society.”Footnote ²² Indeed, Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, a leading Doctrinaire and mentor to Tocqueville, explicitly named this problem the “atomization” of society in a speech to the Chamber of Deputies in 1822.Footnote ²³

Vexed by atomization, French liberals were reluctant to accept a vision of society reduced to the equilibrium of competing private interests, as a Mill or Madison might. Instead, they appropriated contemporary scientific developments to argue that liberty required renewing the associational bases of social cohesion and civic-mindedness.Footnote ²⁴ To conceptualize “the social,” they turned away from natural law theory to anthropological theories of kinship, the comparative historical method, new organic conceptions of society, psychology, and political economy.Footnote ²⁵ In other words, the postrevolutionary origins of French liberalism intersected with the invention of modern social theory, and that fact stamped the former with an abiding interest in society's mechanisms of reproduction such as kinship, education, and habits. It also made French liberalism “the first truly sociological idiom” of political theory.Footnote ²⁶

Like his contemporaries, Tocqueville worried about atomization. His visit to America with Beaumont in 1831 provided him his first major occasion to assess its causes and consequences. In Democracy in America, he joined Royer-Collard in observing that equality of conditions brought with it individualisme or la société en poussière. Since the Restoration, socialists such as Saint-Simon had identified individualism as an antisocial, acquisitive disposition fostered by market competition. Tocqueville agreed that material forces were partly responsible for contemporary atomization. He was especially preoccupied with the abolition of primogeniture which altered the form of the social in observable ways.Footnote ²⁷

At the same time, Tocqueville's investigations in America revealed that revolution was not exclusively responsible for la société en poussière. French revolutionaries may have abolished seigniorial privileges for individualistic private property on the night of August 4, 1789. They may have passed Loi Le Chapelier in 1791 which proscribed voluntary associations as unconstitutional, seditious, and in violation of the rights of man. But unlike France, America had not undergone a social revolution, and it, too, showed symptoms of individualisme. In the clarity of its democratic experience, Tocqueville believed he could glean atomization's deeper causes, which connected France and America in a common, providential pattern of history: the equality of conditions and the ascendance of middle-class values such as materialism, petty self-interest, and diffidence to politics and public ventures—in a word, embourgeoisement.

It is noteworthy, for example, that Tocqueville's portrait of atomization in America placed the accent on its psychological aspects. For all the analytical importance he assigned to power and property's centrifugal dispersion, it was its impact on the psyche that captured his attention. He worried that man had “withdrawn into himself” and was living “virtually [as] a stranger to that of all others.” In such a state, citizens had become isolated, adrift, and deprived of the inner fortitude that genuine moral conviction conferred. Self-interest was reduced from a vector for public concern (“self-interest rightly understood”) to atomizing “petty and vulgar pleasures.” With the ties between private and public interests snapped, man may live “alongside [his fellow citizens] but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them.” Led only by narrow self-interest, “he exists only in himself and for himself” (DA 818). His mind becomes “nothing more than intellectual dust, blown about by every wind and unable to coalesce into any fixed shape” (DA 487), or alternately, the “shifting, impalpable dust, on which democracy rests” (DA 54). Nor was Tocqueville immune to these effects himself. He complained bitterly about his loneliness and isolation, and believed himself born “too late,” having missed the era of great statesmanship.Footnote ²⁸ The heights of political passion, such as they were known in the age of Robespierre and Napoleon, had been supplanted by trivial commercial interests. Political life under the July Monarchy had been reduced to a “game in which each person seeks only to win.”Footnote ²⁹ For all its benefits, the equality of conditions had cheapened the meaning of politics.

Tocqueville's choice to attribute atomization to embourgeoisement had roots in a wider French revolt against the sensationalist psychology of John Locke.Footnote ³⁰ That fact has not yet received the attention it deserves, even though it helps explain why French liberals departed from their Anglophone colleagues in repudiating the latter's vision of society as an ensemble of private interests.Footnote ³¹ Locke had critiqued the existence of “innate ideas” in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690). He claimed that all knowledge derived from sensory experience, which language organized and indexed for the purposes of drawing logically consistent inferences. Although Locke's argument would ground British empiricism, its impact was different in France. Whereas the British (and Voltaire) viewed the Essay’s argument as a triumph of reason over prejudice, in the 1730s, a Lockean-inspired Newtonianism appeared in the French academies that interpreted the critique of innate ideas differently: if all knowledge derives from sense perception, sensation rather than reason grounds knowledge. This doctrine was called “sensationalism” in France.Footnote ³²

Tocqueville was involved with the critique of sensationalism by both temperament and personal filiation. He was acquainted with Victor Cousin, the foremost French philosopher of the mid-nineteenth century and sensationalism's greatest critic. A normalien, Cousin had been recruited to the circle of Doctrinaires by Royer-Collard. He later succeeded the latter as a philosophy professor at the University of Paris. He also served on the Restoration's Council of Public Instruction and shaped the philosophical curriculum for generations of students. His lectures on the history of philosophy were considered major events among the educated public.Footnote ³³

Cousin criticized Locke's sensationalism for portraying the psyche as something passive and fragmented. A tabula rasa, the Lockean self was limited to reproducing within the mind fragmentary sensations impinging from without. “It is certain,” Cousin conceded, that “upon the first examination of consciousness, we perceive a succession of phenomena which, decomposed into their elements, may be traced back to sensation.” However, “if everything in man is reduced to sensation, then everything is reduced to enjoyment and suffering; avoiding pain and seeking pleasure would be the sole rule of our conduct. … This system is that of the Sensual school.”Footnote ³⁴ Criticizing sensationalism was no mere philosophical quibble. Its account of the psyche as fragmented and ruled by sensations reinforced the atomization brought about by the equality of conditions. There was a reciprocal relation, in other words, between the psychic and the social: sensationalism was a philosophy of mind symptomatic of an age of democratic disintegration.

For these reasons, mitigating atomism required replacing the Lockean subject.Footnote ³⁵ Cousin sought to provide that new postrevolutionary self by “showing that personality, the ‘me’ is at bottom free and voluntary activity.”Footnote ³⁶ He encouraged citizens to rediscover voluntarism by remembering that experiences such as the inner will “clearly had no source in perception.” They were instead “volitional facts,” essentially psychological, “which sensation by no means explains.”Footnote ³⁷ By discovering this voluntarist self as the starting point of psychology, philosophy could offer a new psychic anchor for modern society. Liberty itself was at stake. As Cousin explained, “To place ourselves beyond the conditions of sense, to will, without regard for its consequences… this is true liberty.” If a person could “hold the will within itself” and “let it act without outward manifestation,” if they could avoid “marking [their] will with sensual effects,” then they would “be completely emancipated from the material world.”Footnote ³⁸

Tocqueville was acquainted with Cousin's work. He was only a degree removed from Cousin and his associates. He also held Cousin's writing in high esteem. Years later, he would chastise Arthur de Gobineau for not appreciating his contemporaries, asking, “what better writer than Cousin” was there in France?Footnote ³⁹ It is thus not surprising that Tocqueville dedicates several sections in Democracy in America to explaining skepticism's deleterious consequences for social cohesion. After all, besides defending the voluntarist personalité, Cousin was preoccupied with denouncing the ways sensationalism led to skepticism (“To limit philosophy to observation [of sensations] is, whether we know it or not, to place it in the path to skepticism”).Footnote ⁴⁰ In those sections, Tocqueville claimed the sensationalist epistemology of the seventeenth century “destroyed the empire of tradition, and overthrew the authority of the master” (DA 485). If individuals believed only what their senses conveyed, they would lose access to “a certain number of ready-made beliefs” without which “men may still exist, but they will not constitute a social body” (DA 490). For the social body to cohere, it needed to be “held together by certain leading ideas” that were drawn “from the same source.” Readers of Democracy in America would have had little trouble connecting Tocqueville's discussion of skepticism to wider debates over sensationalism's socially disintegrating effects.

Alongside Cousin, François Guizot taught Tocqueville that the psychic and the social were interdependent.Footnote ⁴¹ Guizot was an esteemed historian, Doctrinaire, and minister of the interior under Louis-Philippe. Known for advocating “liberalism through the state,” Guizot and Cousin were close.Footnote ⁴² Together with Royer-Collard, the two intellectuals were involved in the circle of Maine de Biran, a philosopher dedicated to theorizing voluntarism. They worked together as the principal voices of the journal Le Globe before it was transferred to Saint-Simonians. Importantly, Guizot also taught Tocqueville. Beginning in 1828—the same year as Cousin's famous Sorbonne lectures on the history of philosophy—Guizot offered lectures on the history of civilization. For two years, Tocqueville traveled from Versailles to Paris each week to attend the historian's lectures. Guizot's History of Civilization in Europe was the only book Tocqueville requested upon landing in America. He and Beaumont carried it with them as they traveled, using its categories to frame their observations.

In these lectures, Guizot claimed that civilization was much more than a collection of social facts. It consisted, rather, in “two elements,” inner moral development and external social progress. Civilization existed at the intersection of these two domains, just as men (according to Cousin) “live… on the confines of two separate kingdoms [inner freedom and outward necessity], of which we form the mysterious union.”Footnote ⁴³ The subjective moral life and objective social conditions of peoples were linked such that “wherever the external condition of man extends itself, vivifies, ameliorates itself; wherever the internal nature of man displays itself with lustre, with grandeur; at these two signs, and often despite the profound imperfection of the social state, mankind with loud applause proclaims civilization.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Guizot was at pains to emphasize that the “social development and the moral development” of Europe must be seen as “closely connected together,” as possessing “so intimate and necessary a relation between them” that they “reciprocally produce” one another. Indeed, that interplay made regeneration possible. Just as Christianity had “regenerated the moral man,” equality of conditions had “changed and regenerated society” by altering “his external condition.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Together, Cousin and Guizot's arguments suggested to a generation of liberals in France that the triumph of narrow private interests in France pointed to more than a deplorable generational mindset. It also endangered the psychological bases of social cohesion itself. As the liberal paper Le National put it, “Deprived of all moral unity, profoundly indifferent to the general interest, broken up and reduced to powder like the sand of the seas by the most narrow egoism, the French people is a people in name only.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, if Tocqueville critiqued the bourgeois vision of society, it was not because he was compromised by an aristocratic nostalgia.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather, it was because he was a liberal: a thinker eminently preoccupied with the psychological and social bases of modern liberty. To enjoy modern liberty in the age of democracy, Cousin and Guizot suggested, it was not enough to possess its “external” aspects such as a vibrant commercial society. As Tocqueville sought to explain to Mill, one also needed to regenerate “the internal nature of man.” One needed glory.

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Guizot had already nominated glory as a countermeasure to social etiolation explicitly. In his 1838 lectures on the history of civilization, the historian explained to his audience, including the enthralled Tocqueville, that even in societies afflicted with disorder, humanity could “[stand] forth in more grandeur and power” if its people enjoyed inner moral development.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Tocqueville echoed this appraisal of glory across decades of writing. In an 1837 letter to Royer-Collard, Tocqueville condemned the “almost universal pettiness” that robbed France of its “grandeur” and “brilliance.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In an 1840 letter to Gustave de Beaumont, he reminded his friend, “You know what a taste I have for great events and how tired I am of our little democratic and bourgeois pot of soup.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Fifteen years later, he was still complaining that however “wealthy, sophisticated, attractive, even impressive” a democracy might be, without an active citizenry, it would not have “great citizens, still less a great nation.”Footnote ⁵¹

Tocqueville was so keen on greatness that, despite his antipathy to Napoleon's despotism, he respected him. Guizot's appreciation of national grandeur had done nothing to allay his animosity towards the emperor's legacy, and undoubtedly, Tocqueville shared that hostility to “the nonliberal side of [Napoleon's] institutions.” But that hostility did not prevent Tocqueville from appealing to the passions the general inspired to revivify the French psyche. He extolled to Paul Clamorgan the emperor's grandeur, calling him “the most extraordinary being… who has appeared in the world for many centuries.”Footnote ⁵² In an unfinished study of the French Revolution, he would add in praise that Napoleon knew how “to direct enthusiasm” to “[make] people die in battle.” Unlike Tocqueville's effete generation, Napoleon understood that “high passion [was] always needed to revivify the human spirit, which otherwise decays and rots. It would have never occurred to [Napoleon] to make hearts and spirits concentrate merely on their individual welfare.”Footnote ⁵³

At least two reasons explain why Tocqueville comfortably invoked the Napoleonic legacy. First, the American solution to atomization—associational politics—was not available to the French. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville showed that associational activity curbed individualisme by providing citizens concrete ways of exercising political participation and self-rule (DA 67–78). Civic associations such as local townships conveyed self-seeking individuals towards public affairs, so that in pursuing their own concerns, Americans would naturally link their private interests to that of the public, political realm. In contrast, townships in France mitigated individualism by crushing it with a statist vision of the good. Devoid of the American impulse towards limited government, French municipal politics had become centralized, leading citizens to a dull administrative obedience rather than active participatory citizenship (DA 75, 98–100). Indeed, associations served altogether different functions in Europe. If “there are peoples among whom the freedom to unite is purely beneficial and a source of prosperity,” Tocqueville explained, “there are others who pervert it through abuse.” He meant the French, who “still look upon associations as weapons of war.” Where American associations offered “schools of liberty,” the French saw “freedom of association as nothing more than the right to make war on the government” (DA 220–22).

The second reason Tocqueville could turn to the Napoleonic legacy was that its nationalism counteracted the embourgeoisement that afflicted French culture. Unlike the realities of imperial rule, Bonapartism's popular legacy idealized voluntarism and public-spiritedness. As Hazareesingh has explained, “Restoration Bonapartism represented a collective French yearning for political unity and social cohesion. … But it also expressed something more subversive: the desire for greater public involvement in the collective life of the nation.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Depending on how it was understood, Richard Boyd continues, Bonapartism could “simultaneously appear as anathema and apotheosis of liberalism.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Forged from the historical memories of the wars of liberty, popular Bonapartism had grown into a generic language of political dissent that foregrounded voluntarism, virtue, egalitarianism, and selfless sacrifice for the patrie. It became “a left-wing code word,” even “a manifesto for political freedom and the elimination of privileges associated with the Ancien Régime.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Thus, even if Bonapartism continued to name a specific party affiliation, its normative representation of democratic violence appealed across ideological divides because it offered something much more: “a renewable legacy and the basis of a truly national culture.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Underlining Bonapartism's novelty is important. Tocqueville's praise of glory has often been interpreted as an aristocratic “corrective” to his liberalism, even anachronistic.Footnote ⁵⁸ But Tocqueville's occasional appreciation of the Napoleonic legacy urges us to appreciate how modern and liberal his love of glory could be. In Machiavelli, love of gloria was typically bound up with the “one man ordinatore.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In Hobbes, glory belonged to God. In the hands of citizens, it was a source of anarchy, not social cohesion.Footnote ⁶⁰ And glory was typically the possession of heroic individuals in Greek antiquity.Footnote ⁶¹ But the glory celebrated in revolutionary republicanism and elaborated by Bonapartist militarism was different. The possession of neither the prince, the legislator, nor God, it could now be the property of citizens defending the patrie en danger. Battles like Valmy in September 1792 had proved that the age of democracy had earned its own idioms of glory.

Tocqueville was forthright on this latter point. Comparing the public monuments of old Europe with those in America, he observed that American monuments differed from the former in both form and function. Where aristocratic monuments drew attention to the heroic individual or courtly grandeur, democratic monuments praised the greatness of the people qua the state. That was why Americans who were otherwise individualistic and self-seeking nevertheless “nurse[d] gigantic ambitions when they turn[ed] their attention to public monuments” (DA 536). If public monuments were decorative or ornamental accouterments to royal power under absolutism, in democracies, they were essentially pedagogical instruments of self-awareness. They provided a means for the people to glory in their own agency. In memorializing the state, they paid homage to themselves.

In short, to mitigate la société en poussière, French inclinations needed to be guided towards passions “immaterial to a certain degree” and which “[raise] souls above contemplation of private interests.”Footnote ⁶² As Tocqueville reiterated in his marginalia on public monuments in America: “in democracies the State must take charge of large and costly works not only because these large works are beautiful, but also in order to sustain the taste for what is great.”Footnote ⁶³ If France's citizens were to overcome psychological withdrawal, the state would need to foster a taste for glory, even if doing so was economically imprudent, maybe even because it was economically imprudent. It needed to encourage its citizens’ utilitarian self-interest to grow into a voluntarist self, capable of great public acts. How, then, to “sustain the taste for what is great”? How to seize glory to attach citizens to the public interest? Between the publication of Democracy in America’s two volumes, Tocqueville nominated one opportunity: “The future seems to me to be in our hands, and I shall tell you sincerely that with time, perseverance, ability, and justice, I have no doubt that we shall be able to raise a great monument to our country's glory on the African coast.”Footnote ⁶⁴

The Glory of the Armée d'Afrique

There were already hints that Tocqueville might turn to colonization for glory. Discussing the difficulties in finding proper statesmen to stand for election, Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that the greatest public monument to the people was the one illuminated by the fires of war and combat:

War, Tocqueville suggested, was one place where citizens could undergo the “inner moral regeneration” Guizot had argued was necessary for civilization. Perhaps if the French were “struck by the perils they face,” they could awaken to the public interest seemingly forgotten in the midst of decadent economic self-satisfaction.

The year 1840 provided just that opportunity. That year, France commenced the domination of Algeria. Tocqueville and Beaumont immediately made plans to visit Africa to study its society. After some initial delays, Tocqueville left for Algiers with Beaumont from Toulon on May 4, 1841, landing in Algiers three days later. The two traveled the region for a month, interviewing General Bugeaud, his subordinates, and local Arabists.Footnote ⁶⁵ Even before the trip, Tocqueville had drafted a raft of essays criticizing contemporary anticolonial arguments and defending peaceful racial integration in the regency. In 1837, for example, he pondered “how easy it is for the French, who are richer and more industrious than the Arabs, to occupy a large part of the soil without violence. … It is easy to predict a time in the near future when the two races will be intermixed in this way throughout much of the regency.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Settlerism based on nonviolent integration was plausible because Arabs were nearly civilized: “These, you will agree, are singular savages. What do they lack… to resemble civilized men entirely?” They even already possessed the institution of private property.Footnote ⁶⁷

After his trip with Beaumont to Algeria in 1841, however, Tocqueville's attitude towards colonization hardened. Where he had once advocated for settlerism qua integration “to form a single people from two races,” Tocqueville now proposed differentiated legal systems and the violent conquest of indigenous populations.Footnote ⁶⁸ He turned his visit's notes into a series of effective reports justifying his new position. Instead of opting for the British strategy of indirect rule in India, Tocqueville now recommended France “replace the former inhabitants with the conquering race.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The effort would be two-pronged: domination and colonization. Domination entailed systematic violence, the destruction of indigenous homes and harvest, and systematic raids on Arab communities. Colonization named settlerism's “constructive” prong. Spearheaded by institutions like the bureaux arabes, the French state would consolidate the rule of law, centralize government, offer language instruction and professional advancement for civil administrators, regulate property titles, and provide capital for new settler families to plow their land. Where other politicians recommended each prong separately or in sequence, Tocqueville insisted the two be pursued concurrently. “Colonization and war… must proceed together.”Footnote ⁷⁰ It was a stance he defended, albeit with varying degrees of ardor, even after his second trip to Algeria in 1846 as part of the Chamber of Deputies’ delegation.

Tocqueville's evolution from defending integration to defending domination can be partly explained by settlerism's imperative for territorial expropriation. As Wolfe has argued, “territoriality is settler colonialism's specific, irreducible element.”Footnote ⁷¹ Whatever else settlerism is about, it is about access to land. Thus Tocqueville admitted that however disquieting domination may be, settling French citizens required the expropriation of land, and that meant “domination is the necessary means we must use.” Tocqueville conceded, almost as an aside, that he was “quite hostile to violent measures,” but reminded his readers that “we must recognize that we shall never manage to possess the land around Algiers without the aid of a series of such measures.”Footnote ⁷²

Even so, Tocqueville's justification for abandoning integration went beyond acknowledging the requirements of territorial conquest. Specifically, he defended domination by appealing to the demands of glory, which he believed to be the overriding principle of French geopolitical expansion. Glory, national grandeur, and international prestige were first principles. They expressed values superior to and independent of economic desiderata, “great in themselves.”Footnote ⁷³ The first sentences of Tocqueville's 1841 memorandum on Algeria were unequivocal on this point: “I do not think France can think seriously of leaving Algeria. In the eyes of the world, such an abandonment would be the clear indication of our decline. … Any people that easily gives up what it has taken and chooses to retire peacefully to its original borders proclaims that its age of greatness is over. It visibly enters the period of its decline.”Footnote ⁷⁴ France could not abandon Algeria without jeopardizing its prospects for grandeur. Tocqueville was unambiguous in declaring this reason the “foremost in [his] view” for African colonization. Consistent with his claim that “it would never have occurred to [Napoleon] to make hearts and spirits concentrate merely on their individual welfare,” Tocqueville even conceded that if Algeria flourished, it would hurt metropolitan markets. So much the worse, then, for domestic bourgeois interests:

Glory was that “great political interest that dominates all others.” This conviction characterized Tocqueville's entire approach to Algeria. France needed “a great theatre for her glory,” whatever the economic cost.Footnote ⁷⁶ It was a commitment so unconditional that France could only abandon Algeria “at a moment when she is seen to be undertaking great things in Europe.”Footnote ⁷⁷ She could find glory in the African or European theater, but under no circumstance was she to surrender the search altogether.

These passages reveal the great ironies of Tocqueville's liberalism: state centralization at home was to be checked by extraordinary projections of state power abroad. The civic voluntarism and public-spiritedness required to mitigate la société en poussière in France depended on shattering the social body in Algeria. Yet it was an irony consistent with Tocqueville's liberalism. It could be seen as an application of Cousin and Guizot's insights to the international arena. By conquering Algeria at whatever cost, France would partake in the greatest source of glory in democratic modernity: “the enslavement of four parts of the world by the fifth.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Like the monuments in America, French citizens would be able to discover “self-interest rightly understood” in the monument that was Algiers, its glistening white edifices reflected in the coastal skyline.

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Tocqueville's hardened approach to settlerism raised an obvious problem for transforming Algeria into a theatre for French glory: there was nothing glorious about exterminating indigenous peoples. Tocqueville admitted as much, in both Democracy in America when he decried the extermination of Native Americans and in 1847 after Algeria's conquest was an accomplished fact: “Let us not, in the middle of the nineteenth century, begin the history of the conquest of America over again.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, Tocqueville was well aware that the notion of glory inherited from Bonapartist militarism placed specific demands on war, namely, that it be waged for national defense and on behalf of persecuted liberty. As numerous historians have shown, Bonapartist culture bound glory indissolubly to the spirit of self-defense.Footnote ⁸⁰ The expansionary wars of liberty were consistently misremembered in France, not as a “quest for world domination, although this was its result, but the revitalization of the national defense force.”Footnote ⁸¹ That was why the Napoleonic armies could be analogized to the example of the Spartans at Thermopylae, as in Jacques Louis David's Leonidas at Thermopylae from 1814.Footnote ⁸² David was a Jacobin and a Bonapartist, and in his painting, he depicted Leonidas and the three hundred with Napoleonic visual motifs to suggest a world-historic filiation between ancient Sparta and imperial France.Footnote ⁸³ The analogies emphasized how Bonapartist militarism idealized glory, not only in leaders, but also in volontaires, the willing conscripts of the wars of liberty. Personifications of virtue, volontaires did not fight wars of aggression motivated by chauvinistic self-interest. They fought defensive wars as citizens called to protect the most public interest of all. It was only in the process of transcending narrow self-interest for the patrie en danger that, in a rite of virtue, men seized glory.

From this perspective, colonial warfare in Africa was anything but glorious. Even the Armée d'Afrique acknowledged this fact. In the years following Bugeaud's appointment as marshal, many soldiers died from malnutrition, alcoholism, and exhaustion, but only upwards of a hundred or so soldiers died in combat in any given year. In contrast, the number of Algerians killed, often directly through massacres such as those at Dahra, exceeded tens of thousands. The sheer mismatch in violence was so indisputable that even the label of a “war” seemed farcical.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thanks in part to the normalization of slaughter, rape, and looting, the Armée d'Afrique developed problems with suicide. Jean-de-Dieu Soult, the French minister of war and Guizot's colleague, became sufficiently concerned with the poor optics of French terror in Africa that he worked diligently, if in vain, to redact the violence from the regular military bulletins published in metropolitan newspapers.Footnote ⁸⁵

In such a context, how could colonial total war be squared with the demands of glory? How could Tocqueville describe Bugeaud's terror in 1847 as an example of “a war conducted ably and gloriously”? The Restoration government had solved this dilemma by analogizing the conquest of Algeria to the evangelism of the Christian Crusades. According to Charles X and ecclesiastical leaders, conquering Algiers would be a victory for enlightened Christendom against oriental despotism, a crusade against infidels.Footnote ⁸⁶

Tocqueville was unsympathetic to these royalist strategies. In Democracy in America, he had already criticized the proactive pursuit of military glory as an example of “the coldest, most calculating” spirit (DA 320). Thus, Tocqueville came to square the realities of colonial terror with the demands of glory in a different way: he brought it closer to the normative representation of violence inherited from Bonapartist militarism by blurring the lines between colonial aggression and national defense. Specifically, he shifted culpability for the war onto the indigenous population by fundamentally revising his characterization of native society from the late 1830s. Where he had earlier minimized the differences between French and Arab civilization by emphasizing Arabs as industrious owners of private property, he now invoked what Karuna Mantena has called “culturalist alibis” to exaggerate the differences between the two.Footnote ⁸⁷ No longer a civilized people ready to cohabitate with the French in a peaceful vivre ensemble, Tocqueville now believed indigenous society was incompatible with French values and responsible for compromising France's best efforts at nonviolent integration. In other words, Tocqueville's shift from integration to extermination turned on a new understanding of native society that transformed total war into a defensive engagement. In these reversals, Tocqueville's arguments were symptomatic of French colonial culture, which was already invoking Napoleonic tropes in poetry, vaudeville, songs, and fiction to recast the Algerian War as a war of national defense.Footnote ⁸⁸

We can see Tocqueville shift culpability for total war to natives in at least two places. The first is in his treatment of Abd-el-Kader, the local emir leading the resistance to French settlement. According to Tocqueville, Algerian society should be capable in principle of peaceful coexistence with the French. Ottoman rule left Algerian society fragmented, and some local tribes appeared receptive to cultivating shared commercial interests with the French. The Kabyles in particular were “a prosaic and interested race who worry far more about this world than the other, and that it would be much easier to conquer them with our luxuries than with our cannon.”Footnote ⁸⁹ However, Abd-el-Kader—”a sort of Muslim Cromwell”—had undermined the prospects for peaceful integration. As Tocqueville explained, he was “convinced that before Abd-el-Kader's power developed, it was possible” for the French to rule the region “without exactly waging war but only stirring up the Arabs’ passions and setting them against one another.”Footnote ⁹⁰ However, Abd-el-Kader was using Machiavellian means to unite the warring tribes to undermine French efforts at settlement.Footnote ⁹¹ Having manipulated native religious enthusiasm and local networks of power, the emir now “stands at the head of a united army that can fall on those who would betray him, at any moment and upon the least suspicion.”Footnote ⁹² Even if a native tribe had wanted to peacefully cohabitate with the French, Abd-el-Kader's new army could coerce and conscript them into the war of resistance.

Thus, by unifying the Muslim tribes, Abd-el-Kader's Machiavellianism was responsible for dashing the prospects of peaceful cohabitation. France now had no choice but to defeat Abd-el-Kader through total war, for only a war that indiscriminately attacked the civilian population and the land which fed them could raise the costs of allegiance to Abd-el-Kader to prohibitive thresholds: “We shall never destroy Abd-el-Kader's power unless we make the position of the tribes who support him so intolerable that they abandon him. This is an obvious truth.”Footnote ⁹³

In blaming Abd-el-Kader for integration's failures, Tocqueville was at pains to compare the Muslim Cromwell and French society. But where these comparisons had once served to draw the two societies closer together, they now served to measure the distance between them. For example, in his 1841 “Essay on Algeria,” Tocqueville suggested that Abd-el-Kader's centralization resembled not only that of Muhammad and the first caliphs, but also Europe—yet from several centuries earlier:

Abd-el-Kader's European semblance was one of Tocqueville leitmotifs. The emir “gave [his] battalions a European organization, an organization powerless against our own, but that made him master of his countrymen.” His method of nation building was “quite new among the Arabs. … He is the first who took from his contact with Europe the ideas that would make his own enterprise similarly durable.” Yet this semblance no longer proved that Arab society was a society of “singular savages,” so proximate to French civilization that integration was possible. Instead, it now provided evidence of “half-savage African countries.” This descent from “singular savages” (1837) to “half-savages” (1841) provided an alibi for total war.

This reconsideration of the nature of native society is the second place we see Tocqueville deflect culpability for total war from the French. The French could have colonized Algeria peacefully through racial integration, Tocqueville insisted, were they not conquering a population intractably predisposed to violence for cultural reasons. In this argument, total war was provoked, not only by a Muslim Cromwell, but by indigenous “culture” itself, which was “something we can do nothing about for a very long time, perhaps ever.”Footnote ⁹⁵ As he explained,

If France had deceived indigenous leaders into believing that they sought only peaceful governance, perhaps war could have been avoided. But now that land had been taken, native “prejudices” had been awakened. Even if France wanted a peaceful settler society, Algerians would refuse it because of their warrior ethos.

Tocqueville insisted that this warrior ethos was no context-dependent feature of native society, but a defining quality virtually impossible to eradicate. That was why any indigenous leader would find himself compelled to wage war against the French. If not Abd-el-Kader, Algerians would conscript someone else:

Thus, the French were forced into waging total war, not only because of Abd-el-Kader's machinations, but also because of something intrinsic to the Arab social state. Their zealotry placed them beyond reasonable discourse. Even if France sincerely sought governance rather than land, Arabs would never permit a French presence. For them, war against the French was expressivist rather than strategic. It articulated their values and religious orientation. Indeed, Arabs were not even retaliating against a French invasion. They were simply playing out their cultural esprit. As Tocqueville forced himself to conclude, “To flatter ourselves that we could ever establish a solid peace with an Arab prince of the interior would, in my view, be a manifest error.” That was because “the permanent state of such a sovereign would be war with us, whatever his personal inclinations might otherwise be, and whether he were as pacific by nature or as fanatical in his religion as one could imagine.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Algerian leaders were personifications of culture. They expressed, but could not alter, the social state of those they ruled. And that social state was intractable hostility to France. Ergo, the French had to wage total war, for as a matter of culture, Arabs were unlikely to ever surrender voluntarily. Since their barbarism stemmed from something below the level of politics or institutions, it was a fact of culture the French could not undo. As Tocqueville admitted, “Domination over semi-barbarous nomadic tribes, such as those around us, can never be so complete that a civilized, sedentary population could settle nearby without any fear or precaution. Armed marauding will long outlast war itself.”Footnote ⁹⁹ And so his prescription was domination without end, demanded by Algerian native society rather than French values.

Conclusion: From National Defense to Total War

In the 1841 “Essay on Algeria,” Tocqueville asked, “What type of war… can and must [we] wage on the Arabs”? Known for his defense of local liberties and critique of despotism, the liberal answered: total war. Since “the war cannot be won at one blow,” no choice remained but to undermine the conditions of life for indigenous communities.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ France must “ravage the country,” and “we must do it, either by destroying harvests during the harvest season, or year-round by making those rapid incursions called razes, whose purpose is to seize men or herds.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ These razzia not only starved Abd-el-Kader's army, but also robbed locals of their means of subsistence. In this war, civilians were fair game because native society itself was the enemy, and it made all natives potential allies of Abd-el-Kader. Tocqueville admitted that his answer might shock European sensibilities, but he insisted that “if we do not burn harvests in Europe, it is because in general we wage war on governments and not on peoples.”Footnote ¹⁰² In the history of political thought, this is an incredible admission. Although it may be cynically familiar to contemporary critics, in early nineteenth-century France, waging war on an entire people stood far outside the accepted conventions of combat. Tocqueville was justifying a new application of terror, forged in the crucible of the African theater, and which made war on an entire people not only strategically compulsory, but glorious. Here in the colonial theaters of Africa, in other words, lay a precedent for the subsequent “total wars” of Europe's twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁰³

Five years after Tocqueville first visited Algeria, his position on colonial violence softened. France had largely crushed Abd-el-Kader's power in the intervening years. Although resistance to French settlerism would continue for generations, by 1846–47, Tocqueville believed Bugeaud's war had been successful. Thus, he raised anew the prospect of an integrated colony with the caveat that “it is not along the road of our European civilization that they must, for the present, be pushed, but in the direction proper to them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In a prophetic turn of events, France even fulfilled Tocqueville's call to “raise a great monument to our country's glory on the African coast.” In 1840, a small detachment of French soldiers were attacked at their outpost at Mazagran. The metropolitan press exaggerated the skirmish into another Thermopylae, a scene of proud volontaires besieged by hordes of infidels.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ To commemorate “the Siege of Mazagran,” the city of Algiers and Louis-Philippe's press collected funds for the construction of a commemorative monument. A commission led by Marshal Gérard, a veteran of the Napoleonic wars, suggested the monument be built on the Champs Elysées to complement other Napoleonic monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe. Lack of funds compelled the state to forgo this grand scheme in favor of a smaller construction, and the result was a commemorative monument in Algeria: a column on top of which stood Victory.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Looking back with a measure of pride in 1847, Tocqueville tried to summarize France's accomplishments since his first visit:

“War in Africa is a science,” Tocqueville wrote. The reader is reminded of his proclamation in Democracy in America that “a world that is totally new demands a new political science” (DA 7). It is as if the political science Tocqueville had been searching for since 1831 to mitigate la société en poussière had reached its conclusion in Bugeaud's total war. The French had learned how to subdue, not “a real army, but the population itself.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ They had learned how to “subjugate a people” with a continuous application of violence that would not cease even in times of peace.

David Bell has remarked that an unexpected discovery occurs in the nineteenth century concerning “western attitudes towards war,” namely, that “the dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of total war have been bound together in complex and disturbing ways, each sustaining the other.” Tocqueville's Algerian writings suggest that their complex interdependency was no anomaly in the history of liberalism. In Europe, as elsewhere, a link persisted between liberalism's anxieties over political centralization and an enthrallment with total war, or what Bell calls the “powerful tendency to characterize the conflicts that do arise as apocalyptic struggles that must be fought until the complete destruction of the enemy and that might have a purifying, even redemptive effect on its participants.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It has been easy for liberal historians of political thought to portray such inclinations as the exclusive possession of the Left or of twentieth-century totalitarianism. And yet, under the July Monarchy, France's most prominent liberal succumbed to just that vision of war. Tocqueville was prepared to appeal to republican and Bonapartist tropes of glory to answer the central dilemma posed by the Revolution to French liberals: how to mitigate individualism and repair the psychic and social bases of modern liberty. But as he translated vision into politics, he found himself an apologist for force and terror.