TOCQUEVILLE ON COLONIZATIONFootnote ¹

Tocqueville's involvement with the French colonial empire and its compatibility with his analysis of democracy have been the subject of a lively debate. On one side of this controversy stands the claim that Tocqueville's position on the colonies is a departure from his principles, and that there is a marked “dissonance between Tocqueville's liberal and imperial voices” (Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 311). Consequently, efforts to reconcile Tocqueville's moral and analytical vision with his political support for colonization “must ultimately fail” (Pitts Reference Pitts2000, 301; also Boesche Reference Boesche2005; Hereth Reference Hereth1985; Kahan Reference Kahan, Geenens and Rosenblatt2012; Pitts Reference Pitts2006; Richter Reference Richter1963; Welch Reference Welch2003; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014). On the other side, scholars have noted the parallels between Tocqueville's colonial and analytical works, and between his liberalism and his endorsement of the French empire. Pointing out temporal and substantive continuities, these commentators argue that Tocqueville embraced the colonial project as a geopolitical necessity and/or a remedy for the dangerous tendencies inherent in democratic society (Alen Reference Allen and Henderson2014; Benoît Reference Benoît2001; Bohlender Reference Bohlender2005; Boyd Reference Boyd2001; Capdevila Reference Capdevila2012; Dion Reference Dion1995; Duan Reference Duan2010; Kohn Reference Kohn2008; Mélonio Reference Mélonio1991; Todorov Reference Todorov1993).Footnote ² Interpretive differences notwithstanding, one common feature of the growing literature on Tocqueville and colonization is the entrenched perception of Tocqueville as an “avid colonizer” and “militant imperialist” advocating conquest (Capdevila Reference Capdevila2012, 219; Pitts Reference Pitts2000, 296). Even when noticing Tocqueville's skepticism about civilizing justifications of imperialism, and his misgivings about the benevolence of colonial rule, scholars seem to agree that Tocqueville viewed colonization as a positive good and threw himself into the colonial venture with youthful if naïve enthusiasm.Footnote ³

The first goal of this essay is to adjust this perception which, I suggest, has led to fundamental misunderstanding of Tocqueville's view on colonization and of his liberalism. Revisiting Tocqueville's writings on Algeria, and placing them in historical and rhetorical context, I aim to show that from the beginning of his colonial engagement, Tocqueville was a reluctant supporter and stern critic of French colonization. Far from an enthusiastic colonizer, as a statesman and legislator Tocqueville sought to make the best of a situation, which from the outset he considered tragic.

To briefly recall the situation: France's occupation of the Ottoman regency of Algiers began in July 1830 with a punitive expedition targeting what one historian calls “the most powerful and intractable of the Barbary states” that for centuries harbored piracy and the slave trade in the Mediterranean (Thomson Reference Thomson1989, 108). The Barbary states were autonomous provinces of the Ottoman empire, inhabited by Arab, Berber, and Jewish populations, and governed by a small Turkish elite. From the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, most of their income came from privateering that enriched the rulers of the coast, while the interior remained economically poor, and ethnically and politically fragmented. Although essentially exploitative, and run by and in the interest of foreigners, the regime was well adapted to the customs and conditions of native populations, and enjoyed a degree of religious legitimacy (Ageron Reference Ageron1991, chap. 1; Danziger Reference Danziger1977, chap. 1).

It is generally agreed that the French invasion was prompted by the Restoration government's domestic concerns. Launched on the pretext of a diplomatic blunder, the Algerian campaign was an effort, ultimately failed, by the embattled Bourbon monarchy to avert a political crisis at home. What has gone unremarked is that this opportunistic campaign was, at the same time, the culmination of a European cause célèbre dating back to the mid-seventeenth century and championed by Enlightenment luminaries such as Abbé Raynal and Thomas Paine (Thomson Reference Thomson1989, 109–110). Armed with prerevolutionary arguments and relying on military leadership and strategy developed by Napoleon, the invasion of Algiers was a long-contemplated act backed by vested ideological interests. It was also the last of a series of confrontations that sought to contain the predatory practices plaguing commercial and political relations in the Mediterranean (Lambert Reference Lambert2005). Although the 1830 intervention was originally aimed at political and economic reconfiguration rather than permanent occupation, the fall of the Bourbon government triggered a vigorous debate, which in the decade following the surrender of Algiers was eventually settled in favor of colonization.Footnote ⁴

Dating from 1837, Tocqueville's earliest writings on the colony—the two Letters on Algeria—echo this debate. Occasioned by Tocqueville's first electoral campaign, they single out as their chief interlocutor Amédée Desjobert, a vocal parliamentary critic of colonizing the lands that in 1838 the French government would officially name Algeria (Shepard Reference Shepard2006, 5; Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 5). An otherwise minor figure, Desjobert has been hailed as a lone hero of anti-imperialism in an age obsessed with economic and political expansion (Pitts, Reference Pitts2006, 185–7). However, a closer look at his writings reveals that even this anticolonial opposition was no less in favor of exerting French influence in Northern Africa. Insisting that national interest alone should guide foreign policy, Desjobert opposed lavish military and colonial expenditures and urged “maritime occupation without colonization” (Desjobert Reference Desjobert1846, 112; also Desjobert Reference Desjobert1837; Pitts Reference Pitts2006, 185–7 and note 99). So without much simplifying one can say that the debate surrounding la question d'Afrique was less about the whether than about the how of maintaining France's presence in the region, and about the ultimate objective of that presence (Kahan Reference Kahan, Geenens and Rosenblatt2012, 160).

Too often ignored, this fact seems significant. It outlines the terms of the African debate, hence the practical limits within which an aspiring politician like Tocqueville could hope to speak and act effectively. Insofar as Tocqueville as a lawmaker sought to influence affairs, and not only—as observer and moralist—to analyze them, his stance in the Algerian debate was necessarily informed by political circumstances and guided by available alternatives.Footnote ⁵ Tocqueville's official engagement with the African colony began nearly a decade after the capture of Algiers, at a point when the occupation was a fait accompli, and a political consensus in favor of colonization was crystallizing. This timing is critical. It is one thing to justify invading another country, and another to consider France's responsibilities in the anarchic aftermath of a “mission accomplished.” Whatever his opinions about the early stages of the occupation (and little is known about them), as Bégin shows, at no point in his political career did Tocqueville advocate conquest (Bégin Reference Bégin2009, 187–8).Footnote ⁶ While often speaking the vernacular of glory and honor, he consistently denounced the French military's drive to territorial expansion (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 20, 124-6, 134–7, 168–173; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 328).

On the other hand, from the beginning of his African involvement, Tocqueville insisted that, having expelled Algeria's three centuries-old Ottoman overlords, France must take political and historical responsibility for the territories and populations that have come under her power. What this would entail in actual practice was as controversial in the France of the 1840’s as it was in the United States after 2003, and the tragic parallels abound. In Tocqueville's view, without an effort to modernize the ethnically divided and politically and economically underdeveloped territory—in today's terms, to engage in nation-building—the occupation would be pointless. Unless Algeria was made to flourish on its own, France's presence in Northern Africa would be “ruinous for the treasury, destructive of our influence in the world, and above all precarious.” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 92).

Tocqueville's writings on Algeria elaborate on themes first broached in Democracy in America. Key among them, I suggest, is the clash and mingling of civilizations that colonization brings about, and the ensuing challenges to coexistence. Tocqueville reflects at length on these challenges in the chapter on the three American races—by far the longest in the book—that concludes the first volume of Democracy. As has been noted, while claiming to consider subjects particular to America, Tocqueville's account has broader implications.Footnote ⁷ These are signaled by its focus on race: a term that, for Tocqueville, marked cultural rather than natural differences, including social, economic, and political dimensions (Allen Reference Allen and Henderson2014, 246–55). Although the chapter's title and structure intimate that the Red and Black races effectively had no part in the U.S. constitution, its analysis makes clear that the political future of the American Union will largely depend on the possibility of their inclusion, a possibility Tocqueville regards with profound skepticism.Footnote ⁸ Put otherwise, Tocqueville's assessment of the prospects for the United States—the democratic society par excellence—points to integrating racial and civilizational differences both as a decisive factor and the most momentous challenge to democracy's future. More than American, the race chapter exemplifies the universally democratic problem of melding different cultures and ways of life.

During his decade-long engagement with France's colonies, Tocqueville analyzed this problem comparatively and in detail. Upon entering the chamber of deputies, he studied the so-called old colonies in the French Antilles and penned a parliamentary report, followed by an 1843 series of articles, advocating an abolitionist program for colonial reform.Footnote ⁹ After the 1837 Letters on Algeria, Tocqueville made two visits to Algeria that resulted in a body of writings and four parliamentary interventions on the political, social, and economic condition of the colony. Reaching for a comparative perspective, he also studied closely and planned to write a work on British India.Footnote ¹⁰ In contrast to the chapter on the three American races, which is by turns elegiac and debunking—sounding, in Welch's words, “a tone of mournful inevitability”—Tocqueville's colonial writings strike a more optimistic note that reflected “the hope of political action” (Welch Reference Welch2006, 228, 239). Geared to the practical objectives of governance and reform, Tocqueville's language in these writings is for the most part pragmatic, calibrated less to raising moral questions than to promoting political solutions. Differences in tone and genre notwithstanding, to suggest that, upon entering political life, Tocqueville abandoned his political and moral principles to become an enthusiast of colonization is to vastly overstate the case (Bohlender Reference Bohlender2005, 530; Kohn Reference Kohn2008, 262; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 311).Footnote ¹¹

From the outset of his official involvement with the African colony, Tocqueville's analysis is sober and sobering. Although expressing support for the policy of colonization, his private notes and letters as well as public oratory and the two reports he drafted on behalf of a parliamentary commission are replete with indictments of the way in which this policy was conducted, and the government to which it gave rise (Bégin Reference Bégin2009, 200).Footnote ¹² To adduce two early examples: In the fall of 1840, in preparation for his first trip to Algeria, Tocqueville surveyed the documents pertaining to the initial decade of the French occupation. “Perusing these reports,” he writes, “leaves a painful impression. It is inconceivable that in our times, and coming from a nation that calls itself liberal, near France and in the name of France, a government is established that is so disorderly, tyrannical, officious [tracassier], so profoundly illiberal even in the portion where it could safely afford not to be such, so estranged from the elementary notions of a good colonial regime . . . one sees generals and administrators, who, having suffered at home the yoke of public opinion, the application of the principles of liberty, and the rule of law [l'empire des règles], seize with delight the occasion to act freely at last, and to satisfy passions and tastes spurred by the restraints, in a country whose exceptional situation serves them as pretext” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 197; my translation).Footnote ¹³ Around the same time he states in a letter to Corcelle, his parliamentary colleague and friend: “I think that we shall never do in Algeria all the great things of which we delude ourselves and that, all in all, we have there a rather sorry possession” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1983a, 151; my translation).Footnote ¹⁴

As Tocqueville contemplates in these early notes and will reiterate in public later on, the French presence in Algeria, rather than imparting orderly ways to a new society, provides an occasion to indulge motives and behavior normally repressed at home. Instead of the metropolis civilizing the colony, the colony brings out the worst of the mother country both in the kind of people it attracts and in the conduct of those people in the circumstances of colonial life. Tocqueville reserves his harshest censure for the army. In a frequently cited passage, he confesses to have returned from Africa “with the distressing notion that we are now fighting far more barbarously than the Arabs themselves. For the present, it is on their side that one meets with civilization. This manner of conducting war seems to me as unintelligent as it is cruel. . . It was certainly not worth taking the place of the Turks to recreate that aspect of their rule that deserved the world's abhorrence” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 70; 1958, 216–7; Reference Tocqueville1962, 197, 323, 421–2).Footnote ¹⁵

Doubting France's capacity to govern her own nationals, Tocqueville's reservations only magnified when he considered the indigenous peoples. In the 1841 Essay on Algeria—a sustained exposition of Tocqueville's colonial policy drafted after his first Algerian visit—Tocqueville states: “I am under no illusion about the nature and value of the domination France can found over the Arabs. I know that even if we handle it in the best possible way, we shall never create anything but an often troubled and habitually onerous government there.” Among the chief reasons Tocqueville pinpoints is “the social organization of this people” which France “can do nothing about for a very long time, perhaps ever” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 62, 65; italics added).

Tocqueville viewed the native peoples’ nomadic way of life and tribal organization as a major obstacle to setting Algeria on a path of self-improvement. In his judgment, so long as this mode of social organization persists, there would be no hope of initiating political and economic development in Algeria by co-opting local powers; and changing that organization—which in the Letters he called “the most tenacious of all human institutions”—would entail a social revolution whose effects, as he wrote to Corcelle in 1846, would be “very painful” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 23).Footnote ¹⁶ Thus, from the beginning of his involvement with the colony, Tocqueville supported settling the African territory by attracting agricultural colonists from Europe who would commit their destiny and fortune to developing the land.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, as he well knew from the American case, far from a simple solution settler colonization would only multiply difficulties. Colonists require land. The threat of dispossession incites a warlike population to take up arms with all the greater energy. This in turn entails the “unfortunate necessities” of a struggle for pacification (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 70).Footnote ¹⁸ Aware of these repercussions, Tocqueville notes in the Essay that renouncing colonization would greatly facilitate maintaining French control. “But such domination would always be unproductive and precarious” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 62, 52; italics in the original; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 321).

Not only is colonization likely to ignite resistance and further violence. Introducing European settlers creates the intractable problem of integrating on the same territory and under the same government different and, soon enough, mutually hostile modes of life. Tocqueville's 1837 Letters on Algeria expressed unexampled optimism about cultural intermixing that is absent both from the chapter on the three American races published two years prior, and from his later pronouncements on the North African colony. How to account for this momentary change of rhetoric remains an unresolved question for Tocqueville scholars. In the American writings, Tocqueville contrasted the racial pride of the English with the readiness of the French to mingle with the Indians (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 573, 534, note 17). His short-lived optimism about Algeria may have issued from related hopes. An expectation about decline of religious passions may also help explain the Letters’ upbeat tone, as do their publication as part of Tocqueville's bid for election (Allen Reference Allen and Henderson2014, 252; Benoît Reference Benoît and Henderson2014, 286–97; Kahan Reference Kahan2015, 188–9; Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 25–6).Footnote ¹⁹

Whatever the reasons for his optimism, after traveling to Africa, Tocqueville consistently declared all hopes of amalgamation “chimerical” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 275, 290, 293–4; Reference Tocqueville1985a, 565–6). By 1841, he was convinced that the hatreds born of the iniquities of conquest, and sustained by discrepancies in mores and ways of life, raised enormous barriers between settlers and natives. Not only was the gradual fusion of Christian and Muslim societies, anticipated in the Letters, an unlikely prospect. The challenges to peaceful coexistence seemed insuperable. As Tocqueville had observed in the confrontation of the three American races, the asymmetry of power and modes of life—what he termed “civilization”—proved extremely difficult to overcome. Any attempt, however well intentioned, at bridging deep cultural divides was inevitably tainted with violence:

This passage from Tocqueville's first Report on Algeria, drafted on behalf of a parliamentary commission reviewing the 1848 budget for the colony, spotlights the central contradiction of colonial rule. In the context of a culturally divided society, insisting on uniform rules and legal equality ends up instituting moral tyranny, i.e., imposing norms and practices that are seen not merely as foreign but as sacrilegious, and incompatible with deeply held beliefs about dignified and righteous human life. Napoleon III's attempt, two decades later, to extend “perfect equality” to Algeria's native inhabitants corroborated Tocqueville's point (Ageron Reference Ageron1991, 38). Proclaiming Algeria “an Arab kingdom,” and himself the Emperor of the Arabs and the French, Louis Napoleon offered full citizenship rights to all native Algerians who would renounce their religious status and accept French law. In Ageron's words, “the requirement to abandon their status under Islamic and Jewish law meant in effect that neither Muslims nor Jews applied for the full citizenship on offer” (Ageron Reference Ageron1991, 39, and notes).Footnote ²⁰

As Welch notes, Tocqueville's “rich sociological appreciation of the persistence of moeurs” made him consistently oppose any program of enforced legal or cultural assimilation (Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 314). Instead, Tocqueville called for creating a differential justice system that would recognize religious and moral differences, and work toward integration incrementally (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 142, 146, 19–20). Yet, if imposing legal equality through assimilation was inevitably perceived as morally oppressive, this alternative approach—which in French colonial jargon came to be called association—was bound to produce legal inequality and stratification that could not but radicalize in time the subject populations (Kohn Reference Kohn2008, 268–74; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 325–8).Footnote ²¹ What is more, it required the “tutelage” of an all-powerful state, charged with arbitrating between colonists and natives.Footnote ²²

Tocqueville articulated most vividly this colonial dilemma in an 1858 letter to Henry Reeve, his English friend and the original translator of Democracy in America. The letter was a response to Reeve's article on India published in the aftermath of the 1857 Sepoy uprising. Begun as a mutiny within the army of the British East India Company, the uprising escalated into a large-scale civilian conflict that earned it the name of India's First War of Independence. Commenting on Reeve's article, Tocqueville grants its central claim: that Britain “cannot retain India without the consent, at least tacit, of the Hindus.” Yet pointing to the insurrection, he explains why and how colonization puts this consent out of reach. Tocqueville blamed the insurgence of the Hindu army not on poverty or oppression, but on the lack of camaraderie between soldiers and captains. The “real or pretended superiority” of the Europeans mortifies the pride and self-respect of the Hindus, and “the resulting anger is much greater than any political oppression can produce.” Differences in civilization and “race,” and the exceptional pride of the English—haughtiness, he added, “intimately tied to their great qualities”—introduce insurmountable distance between the two peoples, and daily reminded them of their inequality (Allen Reference Allen and Henderson2014, 261–2; Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Boesche1985b, 360–5; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 330–2).

Analyzing the colonial question in psychological terms, Tocqueville's letter to Reeve suggests that colonialism is unsustainable not only, or primarily, because it violates rights, but because it offends against pride and the self-understanding—as we would say, identity—of the subject peoples. Far from obliterating this identity, intensified contact between different modes of life reawakens it and makes it more defiant. In another letter of the same year, addressed to Adolphe de Circourt, Tocqueville states, with characteristic sweep and insight, that the Sepoy rebellion is more than a rebellion. It reveals “a new and general fact: a universal reaction against the European race . . . [which] is occurring everywhere and is the common cause of a thousand different effects.” While too weak at present, it is only a matter of time before this “universal reaction” seeks to dismantle Europe's domination (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1983b, 486; translation and emphasis mine).

To recapitulate: Tocqueville devoted the greater part of his political career to trying to shape, with limited success, French colonial policy (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 280 n1, 351 n2, 280 n1).Footnote ²³ In the heated debates about Algeria's future, he defended colonization as the only viable way of building a modern society on the shores of Northern Africa. Nevertheless, throughout his official involvement in Algeria, Tocqueville was as critical of the French colonial regime as he was skeptical about its long-term prospects. It is crucial to note that, for Tocqueville, the difficulties of Algerian colonization were due not merely to the economic and social conditions of the native peoples, or the incapacity of the French. The decisive challenges inhered in the very nature of colonial rule that brought face-to-face different political cultures and moral systems. Tocqueville, in short, balanced his support for colonization with a clear-sighted assessment of its probable future. Rather than crush or assimilate subject peoples, he expected European powers to mobilize their sense of cultural distinctness, and hand them the means of successful resistance. Already in the late 1830s, Tocqueville's analysis of Abd-el-Kader's leadership—the fiercest opposition the French encountered in Algeria before the Front de Libération Nationale that ended their rule in 1962—highlights the chief among those means: political centralization and nation-building (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 18–22, 39, 63–80; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 333). It points to the rise of Arab nationalism that exploits religious passions to build moral unity and consolidate political power over a territory deeply divided by centuries-old ethnic and tribal hatreds. Likewise, in the drafts for the book on British India he never completed, Tocqueville anticipates that sooner or later “the English will end up putting the Hindus in a position to resist them” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 481; Reference Tocqueville1954, 230, 236; Kahan Reference Kahan, Geenens and Rosenblatt2012, 1650).Footnote ²⁴ As a whole, Tocqueville's colonial works signal that the most likely result of European expansionism is neither cultural integration of colonists and natives, nor lasting imperial domination, but wars of decolonization and the making of new nations.

COLONIZATION AND DEMOCRACY

Far from a single-minded enthusiast of colonization, as we have seen, Tocqueville was a prescient critic of European expansionism. His comparative analysis of colonial society identified its structural and moral contradictions, and anticipated its eventual demise. If a more balanced view of Tocqueville's involvement with colonization may attenuate the perceived dissonance between the political philosopher and the statesman, it also makes this involvement more perplexing. Given his unsparing account of colonial rule, why would Tocqueville put Algerian colonization at the center of his political career, and declare it to be of greatest importance for France?

Melvin Richter has argued that, on entering political life, Tocqueville put his country and its international standing first. When confronted with the choice between national and humanitarian interests, or between the political advantages of colonization and its moral ambiguities, Tocqueville the politician “set aside his ethical and sociological awareness” and became a proponent of realpolitik (Richter Reference Richter1963, 368). In a related argument, Cheryl Welch submits that Tocqueville saw France's engagement in Algeria as a unifying project that could bridge partisan and class divides, thus reinvigorate broad-based commitment to the French nation (Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 307–8, 315–6). For Richter and Welch, Tocqueville's liberalism stands in unresolvable tension with his national loyalty, as does the democratic universalism of his analytical works with his allegiance to France (likewise Brogan Reference Brogan2006, 399; Kahan Reference Kahan, Geenens and Rosenblatt2012, 161–2).

Tsvetan Todorov, by contrast, grants Tocqueville's nationalism but denies its incompatibility with liberal commitments. Liberalism does not mandate that domestic and international relations be governed by the same principles. On the contrary, from its beginnings it has distinguished between the rule of law at home and the anarchy that marks relations between states and peoples (Dion Reference Dion1995; Todorov Reference Todorov1993, 194–207). Continuing this line of reasoning, Demin Duan calls attention to the historical context and international determinants of democratic liberty. In Duan's account, Tocqueville saw imperialism as irresistible. An objective geopolitical reality, the nineteenth century scramble for colonies left France with one of two options: either maintain her status as a great power by participating in imperial domination, or be dominated in turn (Duan Reference Duan2010, 432; also Bohlender Reference Bohlender2005).

On this view, rather than a self-contradiction, Tocqueville's simultaneous defense of democratic liberty and support for colonization reflects his realism about what David Clinton calls “imperious necessity” (Clinton Reference Clinton, Atanassow and Boyd2013, 242).Footnote ²⁵ In a world defined by great power politics, and divided into unequal states oriented by incommensurable values, to insist that foreign policy ought to obey the same principles that govern fellow citizens is to be dangerously naïve about international relations. Given this fragmented and unequal world, sustaining liberty at home may paradoxically require domination abroad. And so, these commentators conclude, in his capacity as legislator and statesman, Tocqueville's very commitment to liberty necessitated that he prioritize French national interests over those of other peoples.

Differ as they may, these various interpretations converge in diagnosing a rift between liberal democratic principles espoused at home and the nature of inter-state relations, between humanitarian and national interest, democratic ethics and politics. The existence of such a rift and the necessity for prudent policy-makers to take it into account is the conventional wisdom in the theory and practice of international relations and, as Todorov argues, a starting point for liberalism (Todorov Reference Todorov1993; Waltz Reference Waltz2001).

However, a more careful look at Tocqueville's colonial and foreign policy writings shows that this was not—or not entirely—his own persuasion.Footnote ²⁶ To be sure, Tocqueville called European expansionism “the movement of the century” and urged France to participate in that movement in order to safeguard her say in world affairs. He also pointed to “balancing the political, commercial and industrial influence of England” as a precondition for France's sovereignty and global liberty (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1985a, 271, 289–301, 345, 43).Footnote ²⁷ Yet, while stressing the need to uphold the global power-balance and steadfastly confront the colonial reality, Tocqueville insisted nevertheless on embedding France's exterior politics in a principled long-term view. Since his first parliamentary address in 1839 through the brief tenure as minister of foreign affairs ten years later, Tocqueville strove to articulate a systematic approach to foreign policy (Gannett Reference Gannett and Minkov2006). Far from asserting an irreducible gap between foreign and domestic relations, his parliamentary oratory and journalism highlighted their interrelation under the conditions of democracy. In speeches and articles, Tocqueville summoned France to recognize liberal democratic principles as fundamental not only to her domestic political culture, but to her international standing and her mission as a modern nation. Consider this excerpt from an 1845 speech:

In a similar spirit, in the 1843 series of articles advocating the abolition of slavery in France's old colonies in the Caribbean, Tocqueville exhorted his compatriots to live up to their liberal democratic commitments: “These notions of freedom and equality that are weakening or destroying servitude everywhere: who spread them throughout the world? This sentiment, disinterested and yet impassioned with the love of men, which all at once made Europe hear the cry of slaves—who propagated it, directed it, illuminated it? We were the ones. Let us not deny it. It was not only our glory but our strength . . . Thanks to us, these ideas have become the symbol of the new politics” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 207).

Tocqueville's approach to foreign policy has been characterized as a nationalist argument for humanitarian ends (Boyd Reference Boyd, Atanassow and Boyd2013, 276–9). Speaking the language of national greatness, Tocqueville strove to direct as much as to rouse his country's historic ambition to world leadership by attaching, in Welch's words, “the notion of French grandeur to the spread of democratic liberty” (Welch Reference Welch2006, 228; also Kahan Reference Kahan2015, chap. 3; Winthrop Reference Winthrop2002, 113). In his oratory and journalism, Tocqueville argued that propagating the ideals born of the French Revolution, and which made that Revolution a world-historical event, was not only France's moral duty but the mainspring of her power and claim to global leadership. Liberal democratic principles, Tocqueville contended, are what made France great in the eyes of the world; it is by an earnest commitment to these principles that she can maintain her greatness (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 88, 110–1, 125–6, 329–30; Reference Tocqueville1985a, 291, 326–7, 421–37, 745–58).Footnote ²⁸

Just as Tocqueville's foreign policy speeches seek to reconcile universalist ideals with loyalty to the French nation by defining national grandeur in liberal-democratic terms, so too his colonial works resist a simple dichotomy between the interests of France and those of her colonial subjects. As in the antislavery articles, a recurrent trope in the Algerian writings is the coincidence of justice and national interest. Warning that colonial failures would provoke reactive violence, Tocqueville argued that establishing a “good government” that would promote the “well-being and enlightenment” of the native populations was a matter of expedience as much as duty (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 146 with 57; Reference Tocqueville1962, 48, 75, 226, 318–9, 323, 329–30, 351, 423; Reference Tocqueville1985a, 328–9). Even as he called, in a frequently cited passage from the Letters on Algeria, for erecting on the shores of Northern Africa “a great monument to our country's glory,” Tocqueville claimed that it was only with “time, perseverance, ability and justice” that this monument could be made to stand (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 25; Bégin Reference Bégin2009, 191). From his early polemic with Desjobert onwards, he maintained that only as a flourishing society could Algeria advance French interests and prestige. Admitting that in the foreseeable future France could not dispense with the use of force, he urged nonetheless that the “permanent tendency and general spirit” of French rule ought to be based on liberal principles and oriented by high-minded commitments (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 8, 145, 139; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 325).

For Tocqueville, then, rather than permanently opposed national interest well-understood and the “new politics” of freedom and equality can and should be reconciled (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 207). Not only is it possible to harmonize external affairs with the liberal and egalitarian values cherished at home; it is necessary to do so if France wishes to uphold her status as a global leader and beacon of modern civilization—an aspiration Tocqueville consistently encouraged, not least by appealing to French glory and honor (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 110, 124, 300, 323, 355, 423; Reference Tocqueville1985a, 326, 332 Winthrop Reference Winthrop2002, 113).

Yet, is it possible to harmonize the apparent idealism of these pronouncements with the harsh realism of Tocqueville's analysis of colonial rule? And how seriously can we take the call on France to live up to her liberal democratic ideals vis-à-vis Tocqueville's own sober account of the challenges to institutionalizing those ideals in the colonial context? I suggest that these questions can only be satisfactorily addressed by taking into consideration Tocqueville's civilizational and historical vista, and his view of the relationship between colonization and democratization. The starting point of Tocqueville's science of politics, this historical and political vision informs his position on Algeria and his foreign policy as a whole.

In the Introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville portrays the victorious march of equality through history. Beginning from eleventh-century France, where the only means of action is force and the origin of power landed property, Tocqueville depicts a society striding toward democracy defined as a condition of social equality, whose each step is marked by diversification of the sources of power and growing complexity of social relations and needs. These, in turn, issue in ever-wider diffusion of learning, political participation and material goods. The culmination of this moving picture is a society of knowledge and wealth in which the progress of equality—in Tocqueville's word, its “conquests”—extend along the lines traced by enlightenment and civilization. Not restricted to France, Tocqueville claimed that the same egalitarian movement is taking place “in all of the Christian universe,” and is soon to encompass the entire world (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 9–10).

As early as 1835 Tocqueville hailed democracy's global rise and proclaimed the spread of a comprehensively egalitarian form of life as the distinguishing feature of the modern age. He believed that, once brought into broad daylight by the American and the French revolutions, the principle of social equality and its political counterpart—popular sovereignty—had left no politically viable or morally respectable alternatives. From that moment on, the primary political question was not whether but how to embody the democratic principle of legitimacy in concrete institutions and practices. First formulated in the Christian West, Tocqueville expected this same question to reach and revolutionize every corner of the world (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 81, 109, 114–5; Reference Tocqueville2009, 3–32;).Footnote ²⁹ From its opening pages, his first and most famous work announced the impending global democratic revolution, and called for “a new political science” to illuminate and guide the democratizing process (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 16).

Yet, if Tocqueville dubbed democratization a “providential fact,” he did not see it as abrupt or simply predetermined (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 10 and note q).Footnote ³⁰ Rather than a sudden break, the evolution of social equality in the West was long-drawn-out, driven by power struggles, and contingent on religious, technological, economic, and intellectual developments. Nor does the movement toward social equalization fully determine the institutional outcome. As Tocqueville argued, it could lead to two vastly different alternatives: one that guarantees rights and equal freedoms; and another, predicated on an omnipotent state that demands the equal powerlessness of all (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 89, 90). Though “a universal, lasting, inescapable force,” in each concrete case the general egalitarian trend is inflected by the particularities of time and place, as well as by character and culture, or what Tocqueville called “the point of departure” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 45–7, 1373–5; Reference Tocqueville and Mayer1959, 150; Allen Reference Allen and Henderson2014, 243ff, Halévi Reference Halévi, Atanassow and Boyd2013; Reference Halévi2016, 39–40)).

In Democracy’s Introduction and later in the book, Tocqueville lists colonization among the factors that pushed forward the democratizing process, and stresses the “method of colonization” as critical for shaping the long-term social and political consequences of that process (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 60, 9–10, 49–50, 649–652), hence his original concern for, and later involvement with, French colonial policy. Tocqueville's recounting of the Anglo-American “point of departure” highlights the doctrinal and political specificity of Puritan settlements both as “the key to the great social enigma that the United States presents to the world today,” and the “key to the whole book” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 49, 62).Footnote ³¹ It argues that the particular features of New-England colonization were crucial for the success and distinctively liberal character of American democracy (Allen Reference Allen2005; Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 52–3, 60–2, 455).Footnote ³²

In the conclusion to the first volume of Democracy, recapitulating the reasons for the prosperity of the British colonies in North America and the decline of the French, Tocqueville puts “[i]n first place this one: free peoples accustomed to the municipal regime succeed much more easily than others in creating flourishing colonies. The habit of thinking for yourself and governing yourself is indispensable in a new country, where success necessarily depends in large part on the individual efforts of the colonists” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 650 n.1). Colonization, as this note intimates, requires self-reliance, practical intelligence, and widespread capacity for self-organization—all qualities Tocqueville extolled in America's democratic citizenry, and whose lack he deplored in the French (Gannett Reference Gannett2003). Put otherwise, the colonial experience both critically relied on and greatly enhanced the political education and civic virtues of the Americans.Footnote ³³

Yet it is not only as a laboratory in self-governance that the North-American colonies furthered democratic development. Opening “a thousand new paths to fortune [. . .] wealth and power,” the discovery of America advanced democratization also by triggering imperial rivalries on a global scale (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 9). In an 1831 letter to his brother Édouard, Tocqueville ruminated on the vicissitudes of the Seven Years war—arguably, the first truly global conflict that put an end to the French empire in North America—and imagined the course history could have taken, had the war's outcome been different. “Pressed from the back by the French and their Indian allies. . . the States would not have revolted against their mother country. They all recognize it. There would not have been an American revolution, perhaps not even a French revolution, at least not in the conditions under which it took place” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1998, 146; my translation). Taking a global view, Tocqueville saw the imperial rivalries of the eighteenth century as decisive for the outbreak of democratic revolutions in America and France. Likewise in Democracy in America, he credits the American war of independence with precipitating democratization and helping establish popular sovereignty as the “law of laws” of the American regime (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 93; compare with Palmer Reference Palmer2014, chaps. VI, IX, X, and Doyle Reference Doyle2001).

For Tocqueville, then, the rise and fall of modern colonial empires was instrumental for propelling the movement toward equality. Neither in Europe, nor anywhere else was this process quick, spontaneous or peaceful. Although claiming that American society saw “the results of the democratic revolution . . . without having the revolution itself,” Tocqueville indicates that the political culture of the Anglo-American settlers was attained in the “rude school” of centuries-long partisan and religious conflict; and he points to the colonial experience, and its racial confrontations, as a crucible of democratization (Allen Reference Allen and Henderson2014; Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 27, 49; 578–66, 1141). As Bohlender has argued, both Tocqueville's analytical works and his colonial writings reveal the essentially violent dynamic of the equalizing process (Bohlender Reference Bohlender2005, 525 ff). Rather than a “natural and tranquil development,” equality is born in the throes of prolonged social and political struggles spurred by the economic and political rivalry of European states (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 47 with 1134). Like Marx and Engels later, Tocqueville assigns a special role in this process to the unrelenting dynamism of the British Empire and its former colonies (Marx and Engels Reference Marx and Engels1978, 474–5 and note).Footnote ³⁴

Just as Democracy in America declares the rise of democratic equality “irresistible,” so too Tocqueville's colonial works view Algeria's entering the equalizing process an irreversible fact (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 60–1; Reference Tocqueville2009, 28). By removing the Ottomans, France's intervention in Northern Africa had opened a pervasive power struggle that precipitated revolutionary change in the life of the native populations.Footnote ³⁵ In Tocqueville's account, prompted by the fall of their centuries-old rulers, and availing themselves of the “arts and even the ideas of Europe,” local elites fought a two-front battle: to resist the French on the one hand, and to overturn the structure of their own societies on the other (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 65, 17–9). Pretending to defend the ancestral way of life, tribal warlords strove to consolidate power by reducing the hereditary aristocracy and undermining traditional hierarchies. France's influence and proximity had thus contributed to a political and social transformation “very much like that which took place in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 67). According to Tocqueville, once brought into the ambit of European politics and the global power balance, Algeria would be neither able nor willing to leave it: for, paradoxically, the very forces that resisted the French had benefited from the French presence and power.Footnote ³⁶

Tocqueville's Algerian works thus suggest that a major effect of France's invasion was to put the native populations on the path to democracy by revolutionizing their social and political relations (Capdevila Reference Capdevila2012, 217–9).Footnote ³⁷ His First Report on Algeria called on France to steer this democratizing process not by forcefully assimilating native peoples to Western values and ways of life, but by respecting religious and legal differences and fostering the development of indigenous cultures. “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 [. . .] Islam is not absolutely impenetrable to enlightenment: it has often permitted certain sciences and certain arts. Why not seek to make these flourish under our empire? Let us not make the indigenes come to our schools; but let us help them rebuild their own, multiply teachers, educate men of law and men of religion, without which the Muslim civilization cannot do any more than our own can” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 142).

Throughout his involvement in Algeria, Tocqueville expounded on the social and political importance of Islam, and criticized the adverse effects of French presence on Muslim society. In an impassioned speech of 1847, he berated the government's “unjust and impolitic suppression” of religious and educational establishments, as a result of which “the Muslim cult . . . has fallen into a misery that casts shame not only on France but on all civilization.” Staining the honor of France, this suppression detracted from her moral power, “the first among the powers of this world.” Once again, Tocqueville highlighted the coincidence of justice and expedience: a policy of religious pluralism was not only right in itself but also in France's best interest. By contrast, destroying monuments, “ruining temples, letting schools decline” could not but undermine France's authority and radicalize her subjects (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 421–2, 169; my translation).Footnote ³⁸

In the Essay on Algeria, analyzing the rise to power of Abd-el-Kader, Tocqueville called him “a sort of Muslim Cromwell” who capitalized on the “religious hatred” inspired by the French to centralize and bolster his political control. Seizing on religion as the only bond that could bridge inveterate tribal divisions, the Emir fanned fanaticism as a way to legitimize his rule.Footnote ³⁹ Warning against the political use of religious fervor, and highlighting the pivotal role of Islam for the cultural identity of native populations, Tocqueville's Algerian writings stress the need to respect mores and religious feelings as a first principle of colonial government. They urge France to promote the culture and traditions of the indigenous inhabitants not only as worthy in itself, but also as a means to forestall the rise of politicized Islam and smooth the road to modernization (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 23–4, 143–6).

This is not to suggest that Tocqueville was sanguine about reconciling traditional Islam with modern democratic values.Footnote ⁴⁰ Early in his engagement with Algeria, he immersed himself in a study of the Koran and of Islamic institutions, which he considered central to understanding the mores of Algeria's native peoples. In the course of this study Tocqueville's view of Islam grew increasingly critical (Kahan Reference Kahan2015, 183 ff). The core of his criticism is captured in a brief passage from volume two of Democracy: “Mohammed made not only religious laws, but also political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories descend from heaven and placed them in the Koran” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 746–7).Footnote ⁴¹ The lack of separation between secular and sacred realms is a leitmotiv in Tocqueville's account of Islam. As an 1840 fragment states, it is “the first cause of despotism” and key obstacle to social and political change in the Muslim world (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 174, and note 52 above). Although fundamentally egalitarian and, as Kahan has argued, meeting many of Tocqueville's own requirements for democratic religion, because of its confounding religious and secular authority, Tocqueville judged that Islam “cannot long dominate in times of enlightenment and democracy” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 747; Kahan Reference Kahan2015, 187–8).

While the same passage from Democracy asserts the Gospel's superiority to the Koran, and its better prospects for reigning in the modern world, as Kahan observes, Tocqueville's was a “tone of false confidence” (Kahan Reference Kahan2015, 186). On the one hand, Tocqueville had grave worries about the future of Christianity in democracy, and insisted on separating church and state chiefly as a means to protect religion. On the other, he was well aware that this separation, virtually absent in colonial New England and still incomplete in France and Europe of his day, was a hard-won historical achievement. Not simply a Scriptural conclusion, it was attained in the protracted religious and political conflicts that marked the end of the Middle Ages—i.e., of the very history Tocqueville saw reprised in the actions of Abd-el-Kader (Gannett Reference Gannett2003, 7–8; Kahan Reference Kahan2015, 187–8; Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 67). Even if Islam had failed to separate secular from sacred, as had Christianity for most of its history, this did not preclude the possibility of future separation. Indeed, Tocqueville's colonial policy could be understood to aim at stimulating such a development. By calling on the French to promote Islam under their empire and support native religious and educational institutions while taking a firm hold on the government, Tocqueville gestured at the role France might play in encouraging the separation of religion from politics, and—by abating religious hatred—in liberalizing Algerian mores (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 23–5, 138–9, 235 n7).

If Tocqueville emphasized France's role in advancing the political and cultural development of Algeria's native inhabitants as critical for their preservation and flourishing, he did not view it as a one-way street. Sheldon Wolin has argued that educating the bourgeoisie into a virtuous political class was a key motive behind Tocqueville's endorsing the colonial project (Bohlender Reference Bohlender2005, 528–30; Gannett Reference Gannett and Minkov2006, 248–9; Wolin Reference Wolin2003, 414).Footnote ⁴² A stern critic of the French “taste for uniformity,” and of the apathy and corruption that compromised the liberal promise of the July monarchy, Tocqueville hoped that, if properly guided, France's attempt to build a modern society in Algeria might provide French democracy with a political education and experience it vitally needed to reform its own political culture (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1985a, 386–7, 745–58; Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 23).Footnote ⁴³ An 1846 letter to General Lamoricière articulates this hope and exemplifies Tocqueville's efforts to inform and invigorate colonial leadership. Tocqueville writes:

At the time of this letter the young general, soon to become national hero by effecting Abd-el-Kader's surrender, had just been elected a deputy to the Chamber. Written in a blunt manner carefully tailored to its addressee, the letter reflects Tocqueville's attempt to groom parliamentary support for his Algerian vision.Footnote ⁴⁴ As it makes clear, legislative oversight and direct ministerial responsibility are fundamental tenets of Tocqueville's colonial policy. Viewing personal accountability as indispensable for decent administration, Tocqueville signals that in the context of democratic politics, the way to enhance that accountability is to thrust the colonial question into the very center of the nation's life. Arguably, it is in order to spur the ambition of political actors and mobilize domestic supervision of the colony that Tocqueville repeatedly pointed to Algeria as the “greatest task” and national interest, on which hang France's role in the world and—“most formidably”—her honor (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1962, 413, 423; Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 168, 127).Footnote ⁴⁵

Yet stressing the need to train able and responsible statesmen, Tocqueville's letter suggests that, if the “immense African question” were to be auspiciously resolved, France's involvement in Algeria would have to accomplish an educational task of much greater magnitude. The effort to establish a modern society in Northern Africa could succeed only if it redressed the ignorance and advanced the political understanding not of isolated individuals but of the nation at large. Throughout his Algerian engagement, Tocqueville castigated the centralizing mindset and collectivist underpinnings of French colonial practices (Bégin 191–3; Welch Reference Welch and Henderson2014, 321–5). He recognized in the colonial debates and administrative conundrums the very contest of liberal and socialist ideas that convulsed public life in France (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 89).Footnote ⁴⁶ Though doubtful of the colony's long-term future, Tocqueville hoped that the Algerian experience might enlighten public opinion, and—by instilling “a certain number of true notions”—contribute to reforming French political life.

For Tocqueville, then, as a result of France's invasion, and of the larger context in which it took place, Algerian and French interests had come to be closely intertwined. And it was on the long and rocky path to democratic equality that they might be reconciled—a path along which, Tocqueville wagered, France and European powers in general could be a force for good in fostering the development of non-Western societies, even while advancing their own (Allen Reference Allen and Henderson2014, 252). This hopeful vista notwithstanding, Tocqueville was clear that, even if in the long run Algerian and French interests may lie on the same side of modern democratic civilization, under colonial conditions these interests would not, as he states in the Essay, “for a very long time, perhaps ever” be perceived as harmonious (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville and Pitts2001, 62).

COLONIZATION AND TOCQUEVILLE'S NEW POLITICAL SCIENCE

In the preceding sections of this essay I have argued that, while lending political support to France's imperial projects, Tocqueville was a vocal and clear-sighted critic of colonial rule. His political analyses and parliamentary interventions brought to light the dilemmas that turned colonial society into a dystopia and compromised its future. Pointing out the inherent contradiction and instability of modern European empires, Tocqueville anticipated their eventual dismantling. I also reconsidered the questions of whether and how Tocqueville's qualified support for the French empire relates to his analytical defense of liberal democracy. Tocqueville's theoretical and practical engagement with colonization, I maintain, was informed by—and sheds light on—the historical vista underpinning his analytical works. The interrelation between the construction of colonial empires and the global expansion of democracy is a cornerstone of that vista, and a starting point for Tocqueville's “new political science.” In conclusion I recapitulate the contribution of Tocqueville's colonial writings to his analytical vision, and their relevance today.

The Introduction to Democracy in America famously calls for “a new political science” to address the realities of a “world entirely new” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 16). While never explicitly pointing to the aspects of political science that have become obsolete, Tocqueville's works can be read as an extended meditation on the unprecedented social and political phenomena that make the modern world “entirely new,” thus pose theoretical challenges and new practical tasks for political science. For Tocqueville, I submit, the most momentous among those distinctly modern challenges is the confrontation of cultures and value systems brought about on a global scale by Western colonial empires.

Democracy in America signals the enduring significance of colonial legacies and the inevitable tensions to which they give rise. Tocqueville's comprehensive account of the American polity puts its colonial origins in the foreground, and plays up the exceptional character and decisive importance of these origins for the liberal character of the American regime. In light of this account, colonization emerges as a key factor in propelling the democratizing process and shaping its social and political consequences. Although Tocqueville portrays the rise of American democracy as exemplary, he contends that it is not the only road to democratic modernity. By contrasting Anglo-American with Spanish and French colonization, Democracy intimates the variety of colonial patterns (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 50, 266, 366, 495–6, 546–7). Moreover, the chapter on the three races illustrates that even the seemingly best-case American scenario is fraught with political and moral dilemmas that compromise its integrity and threaten its existence.

Although sketching the momentous importance of cultural diversity and its colonial roots, Tocqueville's analysis of American democracy leaves undeveloped the relationship between specific colonial patterns, conflict and democratization. It is in his detailed and richly contextual colonial writings, I suggest, that this relationship comes under sustained scrutiny. Tocqueville's comparative accounts of French and British colonization make manifest the expansive character of democratic equality, and enlarge on its global ramifications. These include the geo-political dimension of democratization, the impact of imperial rivalry as a catalyst of the equalizing movement, as well as the historical preconditions and the social and psychological determinants of this movement.

Likewise, if America provides Tocqueville with a model of racial and cultural conflict and reveals its importance for democracy's future, it is only in the colonial writings that this model is elaborated into a full-blown social, institutional, and policy analysis. Tocqueville's writings on the colonies, more expressly than the analytical works, expound on cultural confrontation as both a crucible of, and greatest challenge to, social and political equalization. As they show, it is in the cohabitation and rubbing together of different modes of life that the question of universal norms and common humanity arises in all its urgency and practical significance. At the same time, studying up-close the encounter of human alternatives triggered by colonization, Tocqueville shows how and why this encounter is inherently violent even when relatively peaceful. Whether in the context of Algeria, the French Antilles, Ireland, or British India, his analysis points to the tenacity of cultural and moral divides whose deep roots—in collective memory, identity, and cultural pride—frustrate, even as they give impetus to the process of civil and political equalization.Footnote ⁴⁷

In short, Tocqueville's colonial works make clear that democratization is not a uniform template or simply linear trend; and that different colonial situations may lead to vastly different trajectories of equalization. They lay bare the dialectical dynamic of modernity (Atanassow Reference Atanassow, Atanassow and Boyd2013a). Written in a variety of genres, and reflecting different audiences and contexts, these works epitomize the careful attention to “times and places . . . circumstances and men” that Tocqueville demanded in his programmatic call for a new science of government (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville2009, 16). Taken as a whole, they present a remarkably coherent analysis that anticipates and stands to inform contemporary research in comparative democratization.

Tocqueville's studies of colonization do not only clarify the object of the “new political science” and exemplify its key principles. They also embody its ethos. And herein above all may lie their enduring significance.

The colonial works, like the analytical ones, are premised on cautious optimism about the human capacity for governance and self-improvement. They reassert the irresistible spread and potential advantages of the egalitarian trend, and insist on the possibility, through enlightened policy, to steer this trend toward a liberal outcome. Yet, even as Tocqueville embraced the inexorability and potential goodness of egalitarian civilization, and heralded its global rise, soberly he warned against utopianism and unwarranted hopes for the future. Tocqueville's colonial writings disclose the inevitably violent character of the equalizing process. Putting on display its human and civilizational toll, they evidence that the global rise of democracy is intertwined with episodes of conquest and domination. Along with “the dark side of Tocqueville,” the colonial works shed light on the dark side of democratic modernity, to which Tocqueville bore discerning witness (Boesche Reference Boesche2005). Tocqueville's oeuvre as a whole, and the colonial writings in particular, thus call into question facile assumptions about the moral status of modernity. Forcing us to acknowledge vexing truths about the origins and preconditions of modern civilization, they offer a salutary antidote against triumphalism and complacent celebration of progress.

As Tocqueville saw from afar, the “entirely new” world of democratic equality is an increasingly interconnected one, in which mutual dependence is no longer a choice but a fact. Along with the efficacy of state borders, this new fact calls into question time-honored distinctions between foreign and domestic, national and humanitarian, hence between “realist” and “idealist” approaches to international relations. As I have argued, Tocqueville's position on colonization was rooted in his belief that freedom and democracy are universal values; and that France's “permanent interest” was to “replace despotic institutions with liberal ones everywhere” (Tocqueville Reference Tocqueville1985a, 426).

Tocqueville charged France, and Western nations in general, with the responsibility to disseminate the world over liberal democratic principles in the very interest of sustaining these principles at home. Though we must repudiate the odious forms this presumptive responsibility took in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we cannot simply reject the charge for this would mean forfeiting our democratic creed. Likewise, we may dispute the categories of Tocqueville's analysis or its ramifications, but we cannot easily dismiss the questions it puts to us: Do liberal democratic societies have a duty to improve the life of other peoples and regimes, and how can they live up to such a duty? Does a commitment to human solidarity entail the right, or perhaps impose the obligation, to interfere in internal affairs of sovereign states, even by military force? Under what conditions, and to what extent, is intervention justifiable? And what kind of political and historical responsibility does it entail?

In pressing these questions, Tocqueville's writings on colonization challenge us to reconsider the practical implications of democratic universalism, and to recognize the difficulties inherent in efforts to spread freedom and democracy. Perhaps more directly than his great analytical works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville's colonial writings paint a vivid picture of the dilemmas of modernity, and elaborate a framework for probing these dilemmas. They offer an invaluable resource for thinking through the moral and political conundrums of a democratizing world.