TOCQUEVILLE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE MEDIEVAL COMMUNE IN GUIZOT'S LECTURES

Prior to setting foot in America, Tocqueville recognized the importance of the township, or commune, as an indispensable, if often turbulent and unstable, incubator for local liberties. For decades, our understanding of the importance of this conceptual underpinning for his associational thought has been obscured, however, by a gap in Tocquevillian scholarship that has only recently begun to be filled: the recognition of François Guizot as “one of the essential interlocutors of Tocqueville, and perhaps the principal among them” (Furet 1984, 230). To grasp the significance for Tocqueville of his discovery in America of the New England township, we must begin by examining his response to Guizot's portrayal of the medieval commune in his 1828–30 lectures at the Sorbonne. And to grasp the novelty of our own emerging understanding of the importance of that response, we must briefly recap 150 years of Tocquevillian scholarship.

Until the mid-1980s, Tocqueville studies proceeded in relative ignorance of Guizot's influence on Tocqueville's thought. The reason is not hard to discern: Tocqueville himself had no desire to trumpet his debt to his most prominent political rival, and Gustave de Beaumont, in his own hagiographic role as posthumous editor of Tocqueville's works, neglected even to mention Guizot in either his 1861 “Notice” or his 1864 “Preface,” let alone incorporate in his nine-volume Oeuvres complètes any portion of the extensive lecture notes that Tocqueville had transcribed as a rapt student at Guizot's Sorbonne lectures in 1829–30. The result of Tocqueville and Beaumont's systematic discretion was to obscure the influence of Guizot for many decades: Thus, we look in vain for more than a passing reference to Guizot in the writings of generations of Tocqueville scholars (e.g., Drescher [1964a, 1964b], Marcel [1910], Mayer [(1939) 1960], and Schleifer [1980]). Each probed Tocqueville's historical and sociological method, often with great care and insight, but with scant reference to Professor Guizot's influence on his most precocious student's reflections on civil and political society.⁴

It was the French Revolutionary historian, François Furet, who took the two essential steps that marked the decisive turn toward Guizot in Tocquevillian scholarship in a 1984 article, provocatively entitled “Birth of a Paradigm: Tocqueville and the Voyage in America (1825–1831).”⁵

First, he highlighted the importance of Tocqueville's astonishing claim to Kergorlay in January 1835, just after he had published the Democracy, volume 1, that “it has already been almost ten years” since he had first contemplated modernity's inevitable move to equality of conditions, adding that “I was only in America to clarify this point for myself” (Furet 1984, 227–28). Based on this claim, Furet pushed the search for the roots of Tocqueville's historical insights back in time to 1825 in France … a period for the understanding of which Guizot's lectures and writings suddenly assumed immense significance. Second, he sought to pinpoint Guizot's influence more precisely (229–31) by analyzing it within an October 5, 1828, letter to Beaumont in which Tocqueville provided his fellow Versailles magistrate with a synopsis of English history spanning 1,000 years. In keeping with his earlier recognition of the abiding ambivalence of the relationship of student and professor, Furet took great care to distinguish the important differences in Tocqueville's and Guizot's respective analyses of English history, in general, and of the precipitating causes of the English Revolution of 1688, in particular (230–32).

It was not until the publication in 1989 of Tocqueville's (1989, 439–534) complete lecture notes, containing his personal observations on Guizot's lectures carefully delineated by the editor, as well as the 1997 republication in the English-speaking world of Hazlitt's translation of Guizot's 1828 lectures on The History of Civilization in Europe, that the link with Guizot was finally made explicit, ushering in the surge of “Tocqueville–Guizot” commentary and studies since that time (e.g., Craiutu 1998, 1999; Hancock 2001; Mélonio [1993] 1998, 8, 34, 118–20; Siedentop 1994, 20–40, 42–43, 1997, xxx–xxxiii; and Welch 2001, 24–31). Should a further translation of Guizot's 1829–30 lectures on The History of Civilization in France appear, we can expect that it will provide new impetus to our recognition of the Guizot/Tocqueville parallels … and distinctions. If the 1960s featured a wave of important Montesquieu–Tocqueville studies (e.g., Aron 1965 and Richter 1969, 1970), the 2000s seem destined to solidify the complementary Guizot–Tocqueville intellectual lineage.

For the purposes of our discussion of the intellectual antecedents of Tocqueville's associational probes, we can thus now state with confidence that the future American voyager had closely examined the commune's evanescent role in European and French civilization when he attended or read Guizot's three cycles of Sorbonne lectures, delivered from April 9, 1828, to May 29, 1830. In his initial series of 1828 lectures, Guizot heralded the dramatic appearance in Europe of the medieval commune—home to the Third Estate, his principal protagonists in the rise of Western civilization. Winning its charter by fiery rebellion against oppressive feudal lords, Guizot's ([1828] 1997, 121) commune exercised a measure of local self-government:

But local liberty in such communes was turbulent, Guizot ([1828] 1997, 135) proceeded to say, with the principal check on the power of local magistrates often consisting of popular riots by the larger body of inhabitants, who possessed a “blind, unbridled, and ferocious spirit of democracy.” Guizot documented both the rise and the eventual fall of such chaotic communes during the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, showing how at the end of this period they succumbed to a sweeping process of royal centralization that united the nation and made possible the eventual rise of representative institutions. And what was Guizot's verdict on this historical process in which the traditional liberties of Europe, in general, and England, in particular, perished? “It must be understood,” he emphasized, “that this revolution was not only inevitable, but beneficial [utile] also” (188).

Three months after the conclusion of Guizot's first cycle of lectures, Tocqueville (1988, 21–41) certainly appears to have woven his professor's theatrical account into his own earliest written reflections on English history. In his October 5, 1828, letter to Beaumont, he highlighted the appearance of “the third estate or the communes” in France and England in the eleventh century, with such communes composed “of all the industrious men of independent spirit on whom feudal or royal tyranny trampled on all sides” (27). Like Guizot, Tocqueville applauded the manner in which these thriving municipal centers exercised their local liberties in the manner of “a true republic”—electing magistrates, administering finances, raising a militia—while adding his own judgment that their success resulted from “a reasonable equality [that] is the only state natural to man” (28). Accurately reflecting the nuances of Guizot's account, Tocqueville characterized the local life of Europe's pioneering communes as a “bizarre blend of oppression and liberty” (27).

But where Guizot had portrayed the loss of communal liberties as a boon to centralization, Tocqueville decried the craven submission to the monarchy by members of the House of Commons who “had lost all of that republican energy that had marked their fathers” during a new era of absolutism when “the standard of one [ruler] everywhere succeeded the oligarchic liberty that had been enjoyed for two centuries” (38). He castigated the Tudor kings individually and collectively, while also decrying to Beaumont the English people's surrender of their precious constitutional liberties. “I don't know who can see in this time a step towards the Revolution of 1688,” he stated with evident reference to Guizot (39).⁶

He argued instead that the Revolution was made possible by the ability of the Commons to take advantage of surviving forms of constitutional government: “When the nation finally awoke, it found all of the instruments of its regeneration near at hand” (39).

Tocqueville's dismay with Guizot's tendency to “sell off communal liberties at a bargain price” (Pouthas 1923, 331) can be detected as well in his lecture notes of 1830. It was in the third and final cycle of his lectures that Guizot brought his portrayal of civilization's history in France to a climax. In a concluding four-lecture unit on the French medieval commune based upon further study of 236 royal acts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he differentiated his earlier 1828 portrayal of a generic commune into three distinct classes (Guizot [1829–30] 1868, 11–12). Tocqueville's (1989, 516–34) notes on these communal lectures display several signs of his discomfort with Guizot's portrayal, as he isolated and then judged for himself Guizot's two most distinctive strains of the bourgeois historical tradition. He urged particular attention to the first strain of the “true communes”—the independent, turbulent, fiercely proud and self-reliant “democratic” communes (520, 523, 526–27) that won their charters by insurrection but then surrendered them owing to fatigue caused by liberty's precarious status. Conversely, he disdained Guizot's second, triumphant bourgeois strain forged in communes granted by royal concession and exemplified by the orderly, docile, “excessively timid” group of bourgeois legists (521, 533–34) who assisted the king in expanding and codifying his central powers in exchange for personal equality and order, or what Tocqueville pejoratively dubbed “equality under a master” (516) or “the calm of servitude” (531). At the end of this third cycle, Guizot concluded his communal sequence and larger Sorbonne courses by repeating his own positive verdict on the demise of French communal liberties (534).

In these ways Tocqueville demonstrated his early recognition of the commune's importance as both an incubator for local liberties and a potential antibody to France's ubiquitous, stifling, centralized administrative regime. Fifteen and one-half months later, in fall 1831, Tocqueville would discover in America the thriving New England commune … and instantly recognize it as a prima facie rebuttal of Guizot's assumption that national liberty could only rest on a centralized foundation made possible by the sacrifice of local liberty.

TOCQUEVILLE'S DISCOVERY OF THE NEW ENGLAND TOWNSHIP

Tocqueville departed for America on April 2, 1831, 12 days after the passage by the July Monarchy's newly minted Chamber of Deputies of the nation's most significant decentralizing legislation in 40 years. For the first time since 1792, the laws of March 21, 1831, gave to France's 40,000 communes the right to elect their own municipal councils. Moreover, while the king could still appoint local mayors and their deputies, he now had to choose them from among the duly elected councillors. Changes in voter eligibility increased participation in each commune to 10%–14% of all males—qualified by the level of “cens” they paid or their superior “capacity” as demonstrated by a prestigious vocation or membership in a learned society—totaling more than 1 million municipal voters throughout France, five times the narrow electorate for the national legislature. Political participation, debate, and accountability were thus “reintroduced … into the villages where [politics] had been virtually extinct since 1800, if not 1792” (Furet 1988, 333–34).

I take this to be the context for Tocqueville's (1985a, 56) June 29, 1831, lament shortly after his arrival in America to his cousin, Louis de Kergorlay, in which he regretted that the Bourbon kings themselves did not create such local political institutions during the 1814–30 Restoration:

In Tocqueville's view, local government could have provided an elite group of residents in each French community—“the most enlightened and most moral classes of the society” (56)—with an opportunity to gain by local experience the savvy, discipline, and respect for laws needed to bring “order and stability” to the chaotic process instituted by unfolding democratic equality.

Perhaps it was fitting that Boston's enlightened Brahmins were the first to apprise Tocqueville of the existence and significance of the New England township, since they were the very group whose elite counterparts in France stood to benefit most by the new communal electoral procedures. When Tocqueville first arrived in Boston on September 9, 1831, he appears to have had no notion of the important historical role played by the township in New England governance. Indeed, he was obsessed by two quite different paradigms that had monopolized his earlier thinking and tended to reflect American and French discontinuity: that of the need for Canada's French peasants to rebel against their English overlords (Pierson [1938] 1996, 339) and that of the evident “ease,” as he told Kergorlay, “with which [the American people] does without government” (Tocqueville 1985a, 57). Such observations possessed no useful lessons for France, however, a point both Tocqueville and Beaumont emphasized repeatedly in their letters home (see, for example, Pierson [1938] 1996, 370–72). But Tocqueville's discovery in Boston of the New England township contained the seeds of such edification, causing him to launch on September 20 “a very sober investigation,” in Pierson's words, “of [the theory and practice of local self-government] that had not hitherto engaged his attention” (380). The fortuitous fusion of Tocqueville's political beliefs with his field research findings thus made New England “the intellectual pivot of [his] voyage” (Mélonio 1986, 16), constituting the spark that would ignite his book.

In Boston, between September 20 and September 29, Tocqueville (1971, 38–39, 46–48) learned from Josiah Quincy, Jr., and Jared Sparks, present and future presidents of Harvard, of the Massachusetts township's indigenous “communal spirit” and of its subsequent exportation westward, thanks to New England's pioneers; he commenced his study of the American jury (41–42, 229–30, 310–16); he began to read the Town Officer or laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Duties of Municipal Officers…, given to him by President Quincy; and he encountered repeated eloquent statements of the benefits to American life afforded by the townships, such as that by State Senator Francis Calley Gray, closely paralleling his own comments to Kergorlay three months earlier:

By September 30, Tocqueville was able to note in his journal the useful comparison that now resonated in his thinking between America, where “free habits have created free political institutions,” and France, where “it's for free political institutions to create the habits” (Pierson [1938] 1996, 414, with journal entry misdated as September 13; Tocqueville 1991, 167). “There is the goal at which we must aim,” he could now declare.

Preparing to leave Boston, Tocqueville inaugurated a new course of investigation: he submitted lists of written questions to American friends seeking corroboration for his new insights. On October 1, he and Beaumont left Sparks a lengthy list of specific questions about the township (Tocqueville 1986, 29–33). Two months later, on December 2, writing from Cincinnati on a day when he queried Western informants about the New England township's influence there (Tocqueville 1971, 84–86), Tocqueville (1986, 36) politely pressed Sparks for answers:

In the midst of his request for these answers, he peppered Sparks with a series of additional questions refined by two months of reflections and his reading of the Town Officer. His two sets of questions jointly probed five key issues about the township.

1. Its legal powers, including definition of its permissible functions, its executive powers, its ability to carry out its affairs without external interference from the State, and its status as a “corporation.”
2. The relationship with other townships, either mandated or voluntary, in counties or in districts, relating to such objects as petitioning the legislature or constructing roads.
3. Its actuality. Was it only a model on paper or did its officers and laws in fact perform the assigned tasks?
4. The role of faction within it. Did political passions and inequalities in education, income, and political leadership skills thwart the fair and impartial functioning of the town assemblies and lead to oppression, intrigue, and turbulence?
5. The entanglement of church and state within it. Was there a religious influence in the selection of teachers and curriculum at the local schools? Were there electoral and tax requirements linking the town and its churches, as well as religious requirements for its inhabitants? Did this not establish “up to a certain point a State religion and entangle politics and religion in a mélange that Americans had seemed to make a point to avoid?” (37).

Sparks's answers, contained in his letter of February 2, 1832, and accompanying short treatise, “Observations by Jared Sparks on the Government of Towns in Massachusetts” (Adams 1898, 15–38), were received by Tocqueville just before he sailed for home from New York City on February 20. They provided satisfactory assurances on all points but one. The township was authentic: It did in practice what was said it would do on paper. It was able to transact business in public, without recourse to secret deliberation on sensitive points. It could moderate unruly passions. It could control faction. It could keep the educated citizen from becoming a source of unrest. And it could keep the poor from using their majority status to exploit the rich or deny them a voice in key decisions. But Sparks's single warning flag—in the area of the historic entanglement of church and state in New England (25)—confirmed the premonitions of the very mingling that Tocqueville had foreseen in his letter of December 2.

On October 7 and 10, Tocqueville also sent queries from Connecticut to Ernest de Chabrol, Ernest de Blosseville, and his father in France for information on the French Ministry of Interior, its administrative courts, and its internal functionings at all levels (Pierson [1938] 1996, 403–5). The thoughtful and detailed descriptions of the phenomenon of French “centralization” that his three informants provided in response should best be viewed, however, as documents that served to confirm, rather than edify, Tocqueville's thoughts in these matters. For despite his professed naiveté in his letters soliciting the three reports, he already possessed the powerful intuitions and ample knowledge evident in his detailed communal questions previously submitted to Sparks. His father's “Overview of French Administration” (Hervé de Tocqueville 1831) is particularly remarkable as a concise, unapologetic synopsis of France's system of administrative centralization, written by a one-time prefect and subsequent member in 1828–29 of the Martignac ministry's commission that had sought, unsuccessfully, to fashion a compromise among Martignac's highly restrictive electoral proposals, the Left's demands for more extensive suffrage, and the Right's resistance to elections of any kind (Mélonio [1993] 1998, 10; Monnet 1885, 363–70).

Following his son's suggested framework, Hervé divided his memoir into two distinct parts. In the first, he described the three levels of France's administrative structure in 1831—the department, the arrondissement, and the commune. For each component part, he graphically detailed the king's direct, personal mechanisms that gave him effective control over every aspect of local political life. The brilliantly conceived French monarchic administrative system extended checks, not balances, throughout France, with the checks designed to ensure that no action by any council at any of the three administrative levels could evade the king's control: “No deliberation of any municipal Council is valid unless it is approved by the prefect on the advice of the under-prefect” (Hervé de Tocqueville 1831, 35) captured the gist of his common refrain. The crown thus fixed the meeting times of all local councils and their meeting agendas; it restricted discussion to preapproved topics and curtailed all public proclamations and correspondence with other councils; it insisted that all council decisions be submitted to layers of royal scrutiny and control; and it retained the ultimate sanction of dissolving any council at any level at any time whose “deliberations might become a cause of perturbation for the State, department, arrondissement, or commune” (25). We can only fully appreciate the extraordinary reach of the tentacles of such a system—and the extent of the tutelage it instituted throughout France—when we recall that the king and his agents utilized these broad powers to supervise Councils whose every member they themselves had appointed! Hervé made no apologies, however, when he clarified the rationale for these multiple layers of oversight, saying that “without it, the intimate union of all of the parts of the State would not hesitate to be replaced [several words crossed out] by small republics” (25). In his second section, he clearly encapsulated as well the risks he saw in the changes wrought by the March 21st legislation:

On January 24, 1832, in his final letter to Hervé from America, Tocqueville thanked his father for his report and shared a number of his writing strategies that he had been pondering during the preceding six weeks. His emerging view of his book called for him “to present only subjects that bore more or less direct connections to our social and political state [in France]” (Tocqueville 1998, 166). He proceeded to assert that he must write what he believed but added that “the entire truth is not wise to say,” creating difficult choices “that I have constantly in mind.” How far should he push his criticism of administrative centralization and his support for independent local political life? we can imagine as two such choices, knowing the status of each as an explosive political issue in France and knowing his own aspirations for a future political career. The answer, it will turn out, was very far, regardless of whose political beliefs, including those of his own father, he might offend in the process.

TOCQUEVILLE'S “MIRACULOUS” TOWNSHIP IN THE 1835 DEMOCRACY

Tocqueville unveiled his discovery of the robust American strain of the transplanted European commune in a four-chapter unit in Democracy in America, volume 1, part 1, chapters 2–5, in which he traced its roots to Tudor England and made it the focal point of his work's principal political argument. Township government, he began, had insinuated the dogma of the sovereignty of the people “into the very heart of the Tudor monarchy” (DA, 29). Exported to the New World, old England's resilient local liberty then became the basis for New England's “singular” and “original” foundation (32), a rebirth that he highlighted with imagery of procreation and light mirroring his own creative efforts (28, 29, 32). Hazy mists concealed the truth of the origins of European civilization—the subject of Guizot's history; American civilization, in contrast, brought truth to light as it allowed observers “to specify the influence exerted by the point of departure on the future of states” (28). Properly differentiated and interpreted by one such intent observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, New England's rays of local governance might even serve to reillumine their depleted European source.

Drawn to America's shores in the early 1600s, Tocqueville's “civilized men” (27) were ardent, feisty, well-educated, and devout bourgeois Englishmen. Possessing a spirited love for freedom, they shamed their obsequious confreres of continental Europe, who, deprived of political life, were oblivious to “notions of true freedom” (42). Indeed it had been just those timid, conciliatory, legally attuned, and soon-to-be-religiously-deprived bourgeois Frenchmen who had sacrificed their local liberties to curry favor with and solidify the power of newly ascendant monarchs, making them heroes in Guizot's ([1828] 1997, 135, [1829–30] 1868, 86–87) lectures. Tocqueville's Anglo-Americans bore hearty witness to the fact that civilization's progress need not spawn partisans of absolute government. Thanks to communal government, they established local liberty in the American township, preserved it there “in secret” for almost 200 years (DA, 54), and then artfully deployed it at the time of the American Revolution to provide the nation as a whole with its own foundation in freedom (“the dogma of the sovereignty of the people came out from the township and took hold of the government”). Civilization, they demonstrated, could indeed lead to “the bourgeois and democratic freedom of which the history of the world had still not offered a complete model” (30).⁸

Placing his early New Englanders on a participatory pedestal, Tocqueville ascribed to them six defining acts of local liberty: they directly participated in enacting their own laws, they freely voted their taxes, they appointed a broad number of officials accountable to them, they made peace and war, they possessed individual freedom in their personal affairs, and they enjoyed the right to trial by jury. At the same time that they enjoyed rights, they also possessed “a more elevated and more complete idea of the duties of society toward its members” (41), leading them to provide for the poor, maintain their roads, keep sound order, and furnish universal public education. The English king's law might have ruled the colony as a whole, but “a republic [was] already very much alive in the township” (40).

In his desire to accentuate the contrast viewed “with profound astonishment” (42) by himself and other observers between American and French carriers of civilization, Tocqueville highlighted the manner in which the Puritans “marvelously combine[d] … the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom” (43). In the political realm, the commune seethed with tension and struggle, often unleashed by men who sought to exploit the inherent malleability of its man-made principles, laws, and institutions. Such contention bred “independence, contempt for experience, and jealousy of every authority” (43). Tocqueville did not fear these qualities and the turmoil they produced—he welcomed them, despite their accompanying risks, since they fostered each man's natural creativity, intelligence, and capacity for bold action. But unlicensed and unregulated freedom, on its own, might end in chaos and anarchy unless a force of equivalent power could check it. For Tocqueville, religion provided this essential communal counterweight, since it established a realm in which “everything is classified, coordinated, foreseen, decided in advance” (43). Freedom and religion thus complemented each other, producing initiative and self-control, tempestuous challenge to authority and obedient respect for it, supreme energy and supreme order. Their delicate balance made communal liberty possible.

Tocqueville's glowing account of this early “Massachusetts miracle”⁹

is overblown. Sparks, as we have seen, was the first to confirm the unseemly mix of religion and politics in Massachusetts: Tocqueville's subsequent readings of Marshall (1804, 108), Hutchinson ([1764] 1936, 24–25), and Pitkin (1828, 42) attested to the tension that often led the Puritans to reserve political life as the exclusive domain of church members.

Choosing to focus his discussion on religion's positive role in circumscribing individual freedom, Tocqueville pushed aside the inconveniences posed by this evidence of New England's blurred institutional boundaries, as he artfully made his persuasive case for religion and liberty's seamless merger in the early township. He quickly sought to establish his own impartiality by chastising certain of the Puritans' moral laws as “bizarre or tyrannical” (DA, 39). He then used more liberal political compacts—such as those of Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor in Connecticut and of Rhode Island—from which to generalize that all political life in the whole of New England was “completely democratic and republican” during this period (40), suppressing the potent contrary evidence from the Massachusetts of Sparks, Marshall, Hutchinson, and Pitkin. He highlighted the universal consent required in New England's founding compacts (35n) while failing to mention that in the case of New Haven, for instance, the compact itself restricted participation to church members (The Code of 1650 [1821] 1999, 117–18; Pitkin 1828, 46). He drew heavily for support for his arguments upon the histories of Puritan apologists such as Cotton Mather, whose Magnalia Christi Americana of 1702 was itself a work of persuasion designed to exonerate Puritan elders, including his own father and grandfather, of charges of intolerance that threatened the renewal of Massachusetts's charter after the passage of the Toleration Act in England in 1689. Tocqueville featured Mather as his preferred New England historian (DA, 686–88) since they pursued parallel objectives in their respective projects: to demonstrate how religious zeal abetted political freedom in the early New England township.¹⁰

Having separated his discussion of the commune's liberal “body of political laws” (39) into a single compartment untainted by religious zeal, Tocqueville reintroduced at the end of his section the positive influence of the churches in instituting universal public education. The Puritans' commitment to universal education was crucial to resisting Satan's wiles (41); in Tocqueville's account, it provided the philosophical basis for the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, wherein “each individual is therefore supposed to be as enlightened, as virtuous, as strong as any other of those like him” (61). Such belief in every man's abilities and virtue led to two practical results: the right of every inhabitant to vote and the duty of every inhabitant to accept township office when called upon (61). Despite considerable personal ambivalence in this matter of universal participation (Tocqueville 1990a, 46n), Tocqueville highlighted its status as a fundamental New England principle.

Tocqueville's early New England township displayed further “miraculous” powers, beyond the mutual support of politics and religion and the universal participation of its citizens. It owed its existence to an unprecedented combination of nature and history, making it a unique hybrid in political thought, with even communal freedom possessing a natural basis (DA, 57).¹¹

It both avoided and embraced representative institutions, conducting public affairs “in the public square and within the general assembly of citizens,” as in Athens (40), but also quickly forming representative institutions such as the General Court of Connecticut, which promulgated The Code of 1650 ([1821] 1999) and imposed its terms upon the citizenry. And it managed both to support and to forestall the Revolution (DA, 54, 65), artfully shifting its role in line with the exigencies of the times.

Tocqueville's opening unit on the commune built steadily during I:1:5 to its climactic section—“On the Political Effects of Administrative Decentralization in the United States”—which culminated with his rejection of the standard French endorsement of administrative centralization as a praiseworthy “conquest” of the Revolution (92, 692). Having traced Tocqueville's dismay at the tendency of Europe's centralized monarchies to stifle local independence and initiative—in both Tudor England and Bourbon France—we are not surprised that he approached the topic with heightened animation. Indeed, in a letter of June 15, 1834, containing advice on Tocqueville's manuscript, his brother ´Edouard criticized Alexis' injection of his personal sentiments into this section of his text:

Tocqueville began this climactic section by famously distinguishing between governmental centralization and administrative centralization (DA, 82–83): The former was positive and indeed indispensable in matters affecting the general interest such as national security, foreign diplomacy, and a unified justice system, while the latter was negative and readily dispensable in affairs best addressed by local districts. Perhaps because of his brother's cautionary comments, he presented a well-balanced argument. America, he believed, had “overstepped the limits of sound reason” by granting too much independence to its feisty, local, independent municipalities (85); he proceeded to argue that a special brand of government official should be posted in each American county to bring judicial action against townships that exceeded their rightful powers (85n). He then cataloged the township's administrative success stories, all attributable to the increased energy and patriotism felt by residents connected to the public interest: more numerous and efficient schools, more responsive churches, better-maintained highways, better vigilance and help to police on crime, universal assistance in the suppression of smuggling, and prompter fire response (87, 91, 691). Tocqueville did not view private initiative as the magical answer to these local problems; rather, he emphasized public–private partnerships, situated at the township level, where local neighbors could provide the wisdom and vigilance both to aid and to restrain the local administration (90). He did not seek an end to governmental centralization, only to excessive governmental administration. By concentrating administration at the local level, America increased “the force that the state administers” 100-fold (87), more than compensating for its less tidy and less skillful operations.

Concluding his 1835 Democracy, Tocqueville argued that America's republican institutions possessed a good chance for a long future, since they melded republican characteristics at both the local and the national levels (DA, 381). “The country par excellence of provincial and township government” (380), America benefited from the infusion of its traditional habits of local governance into the ideas, opinions, mores, and laws of the nation as a whole. Tocqueville's circle of republican liberties—in which local vitality led to national order, making possible more local vitality—produced his final township miracle, one that again defied conventional political wisdom. Vast territorial size, he claimed, contributed to democracy's success in America in two mutually supportive ways—it thwarted the ready imposition of a central administration, and it fostered among the people a desire to pursue their own provincial and township freedoms.¹²

TOCQUEVILLE'S INVESTIGATIONS OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNE

The acclaim that greeted Tocqueville after the publication in January 1835 of Democracy in America, volume 1, fed the dual flames of his literary and political ambitions—ever fused in his mind as complementary means to fulfill his societal duty. “I have always placed action above all else,” he would tell Kergorlay in 1837, adding, however, that when the path to “action” was blocked, he could usefully pursue “thought,” since immaterial ideas had demonstrated repeatedly for 300 years their own ability to move the world (Tocqueville 1977, 1: 479). Tocqueville's “action” agenda consisted of his flirtation in November 1836 with a run for provincial council as a candidate from the canton of Beaumont-Hague, his unsuccessful campaign in 1837 for national deputy from the arrondissement of Valognes, and his successful candidacy in 1839 for that same position. His program of “thought” gave precedence to his “monomania” (Tocqueville 1954, 309) with the second volume of Democracy in America, but led first to his publication in 1835–36 of two journal articles, both of which testified to his continuing communal reflections.

In his Memoir on Pauperism, written between January and April 1835 (Tocqueville 1989, 117n) and published in Cherbourg a short distance from his ancestral chateau, possibly to burnish his local credentials as an expert on social problems (Drescher 1968, ln), Tocqueville denounced the English welfare system. He traced the system's origins to a tyrannical act by a Tudor monarch—namely, Henry VIII's abrupt seizure of the same convents that had long served as the centers of the nation's private relief system. Elizabeth I instituted the great Poor Law of 1601 to address the needs of the nation's unattended poor. Her system reflected the Tudors' centralizing spirit, as she required every English commune to appoint commissioners who would assign and collect an arbitrary communal tax to pay for the needs of each parish's poor (Tocqueville 1997, 52). Tocqueville hated both the Tudors' cavalier overturning of a national institution and their penchant to impose a governmental solution upon a problem best addressed by private initiative. He proceeded to highlight two unintended consequences of these Tudor policies that further poisoned English communal life: the effective imprisonment of the poor within their local parishes and the breakdown of trust caused by the spying of local residents on their neighbors to lessen their own welfare burden (62–63).¹³

In his 1836 essay for John Stuart Mill's London and Westminster Review, “Political and Social Condition of France,” Tocqueville urged the English to protect their communal institutions and to modify their landowning patterns so as to forestall both excessive centralization and revolution, never uncoupled in his thought. Traditionally, in England and France, local liberty had best been preserved by aristocratic institutions:

But such aristocracy had no place in modern times, leading Tocqueville to dismiss it as a viable safeguard for liberty. In its stead, he offered a democratic lineage and philosophical basis for a French “democratic liberty” that could also forcefully challenge, rather than timidly abet, the central government. He placed the origins of such liberty in the same French commune portrayed by Guizot in his lectures: “Never did the spirit of democratic liberty show itself with more energy, and I would almost say more savagely, than in the French communes of the Middle Ages” (244). Building upon, but now correcting portions of, Guizot's own history, he proceeded to chronicle the brief heyday in France of such bourgeois “democratic liberty” and its subsequent extinction in the fifteenth century (248), its preservation by alternative aristocratic carriers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its reemergence and transformation during the eighteenth century into “the modern, the democratic, and, I venture to say, the only just notion of liberty” (247). Such democratic liberty owed its “just” character to its adaptation to the emerging equality of conditions, described in detail in the essay's opening analysis of French civil society and harking back to Tocqueville's (1988, 27, 28) acknowledgment in his 1828 letter to Beaumont of the same “natural,” “rational” equality in the early English commune. Propelled by men's hunger for equality, this new variant of an old passion reemerged in the eighteenth century as a potent viral antibody to France's potent central government, forcing even kings to acknowledge its power (Tocqueville [1836] 1862, 248). Since the French monarchy “had destroyed even the semblance of a local government” in the towns and provinces (243), liberty lacked the intermediate institutions to sustain and nurture it, accounting for its intermittent, capricious, and often contradictory character (249). By emphasizing “the great utility of popular institutions” for sustaining liberty over time (250), Tocqueville encouraged his English audience to recognize and capitalize upon their own local assets.

From 1835 to 1837, Tocqueville expanded his studies of the commune through conversations, readings, firsthand observations, and probes by friends undertaken at his behest. On June 8 and 14, 1835, during his travels in England, he conducted interviews with the London lawyer Sutton Sharpe on the workings of the English commune, or parish, asking many of the same communal questions he had explored so fruitfully with Jared Sparks in America, with particular emphasis on the parish's participatory mechanisms and judicial constraints that provided checks on its activities in the absence of direct central administration (Tocqueville 1988, 233–38, 1991, 480–89). In early 1836, Tocqueville requested and received an in-depth study from Reeve that highlighted the popular administration of London parishes as so many “small democracies” (Schleifer 1983, 33–36); he responded on April 17, with reference back to his own trip to England of the previous summer, that Reeve's report provided “the entire confirmation of my ideas in this matter” (Tocqueville 1954, 29).¹⁴

On July 27, 1836, during a visit to Switzerland, he explained to Corcelle that Switzerland's diminished civic life resulted from the urban bourgeoisie's imposition of “a small bourgeois centralization … equivalent to our royal centralization” that stifled communal liberty and erased local accountability (Tocqueville 1985a, 108); he subsequently studied the checkered history of the independent Swiss canton and its unsettled status within a federal form of government (Tocqueville 1991, 615– 32). On August 1, during the same Swiss sojourn, he read Machiavelli's 1507 report of his posting to Germany, noting the many “benefits of communal liberty” that Machiavelli had found among the German “free towns” (Tocqueville 1989, 541–43). Writing to Kergorlay four days later, he expressed in passionate terms his response to the same communal investigation of northern Italy based on his reading of Machiavelli's History of Florence (Tocqueville 1989, 543–50) upon which we have already commented. In the medieval Florentine republic, he told Kergorlay, he found the immense political vitality and consequent explosive economic growth that he would have expected in a local republic, unchecked, however, by religion owing to superstition in the lower classes and skepticism in the upper—“in a word the evils of barbarism and high civilization united together” (Tocqueville 1977, 1: 390). The resulting vice, violence, and scorn for the laws, combined with the extraordinary political corruption of the Medicis, rendered moderate, balanced liberty untenable in Florence. Writing to Beaumont on September 22, 1836, Tocqueville (1967, 166–67) reported that a “revolution” was visibly taking place in his cousin, Le Peletier d'Aunay, and might reasonably take place in many others as well: The more d'Aunay “savor[ed] provincial liberty and the consideration that it [gave] to all those who [were] its representatives,” the more his love of centralization was being transformed into “a reasoned taste for the independence of localities.” Two weeks later, testing the political waters for his own candidacy in Normandy, he reported to Corcelle a whiff of resurgent communal vitality in that province, thanks to the renewed experience of local elections mandated by the 1831 communal election laws and the subsequent departmental reforms of 1833: “It is not the elected, it's especially the candidates that impart this movement to the machine,” he declared (Tocqueville 1983, 74).

Tocqueville most clearly explained the purpose and relevance of these continuing communal probes in his remarkable letter to Kergorlay of October 10, 1836. Offering practical advice for a philosophical and political voyage that Kergorlay was making in Germany, he concisely summarized the methodological tools he himself had used so effectively in his own field investigations (Tocqueville 1977, 1: 408–9). Chiefly, he sought Kergorlay's help in gaining precise intelligence on a topic of the greatest personal importance: “the Prussian provincial and communal system, as well as … the limits of centalization” (408). Provincial and communal liberties flourished in Prussia, he believed, because the nation's authoritarian rulers liberally granted their subjects “all the secondary liberties that can be compatible with absolute monarchy,” while denying them “political great liberty” (407–8). The absolute Prussian government thought it was mollifying its people through such a strategy; Tocqueville however, thought it was unknowingly issuing its own death warrant, since the people were gaining local political expertise and skills that eventually would lead them to obtain national liberty, peacefully (sans secousse) and in due course. Most importantly in our consideration of Tocqueville's communal thought, he believed that the Prussian experience might allow him to “attack with advantage French centralization” since France's own “antiliberal” rulers could be convinced to make local reforms only if they were presented with arguments based upon an absolutist (i.e., Prussian) rather than a republican or semirepublican (i.e., American) model (408). In Tocqueville's long view, secondary local liberties granted unwittingly by the French government would sharpen the people's political skills, build their political understanding, and eventually inspire them to procure the moderate, balanced constitutional government that alone could assure “great liberty.”

On two occasions in the following year, Tocqueville injected his strategic vision into the political arena, although he chose in both cases to confront with a hammer the central government's suffocating administrative power, rather than to attempt to coopt it with a velvet glove. On June 23 and August 27, 1837, he published letters on Algeria in which he predicted that anarchy would result unless France halted its forcible attempts to impose a tabula rasa in that country “with no regard for law and rights” (Tocqueville 2001, 15), followed by its efforts to institute a rationalized French central bureaucracy in the vacuum thus created. Later that fall, announcing on October 14 his candidacy for national deputy to the small college of privileged electors of Valognes, he stated his principal rationale for seeking office, adding that it predated and was reinforced by his American travels: to advance liberty so as to counter the government's “absolute power [that] will never create anything in France except an eternal succession of servitude and anarchy” (Tocqueville 1985b, 42). The spirit of liberty must be extended—slowly, gradually, with infinite caution—and “fortif[ied] daily by frequent and peaceful exercise” (43). In arguing for a potentially tempestuous local liberty to a people craving order from a government all too happy to grant it, Tocqueville showed his courage, if not his electoral viability.

TOCQUEVILLE'S EXPANDED VIEW OF DESPOTISM AND ITS NECESSARY ANTIDOTES IN THE 1840 DEMOCRACY

During the period of these continuing investigations, reflections, and political activities, Tocqueville was simultaneously engaged in the writing of Democracy in America, volume 2. By the time of his trip to Switzerland in the summer of 1836, for example, he had planned to complete his first draft of part 1 on equality's influence on America's intellectual ideas (Tocqueville 1967, 160). In November 1836, six weeks after his letter of inquiry to Kergorlay in Germany, he announced to Reeve that he had been working on his book “day and night” for almost a year and that he was planning a “great voyage” of his own to Germany within a year (Tocqueville 1954, 35–36), presumably to probe for himself, after his book's completion, the interplay of national and local liberties that he had described to Kergorlay and already woven into his book's initial drafts, at times even with reference to Germany (see Tocqueville 1990b, 49n). Given the persistence of Tocqueville's communal interests, we are not surprised that they were never far from the surface of his book, forming one key component of “the political side of the work that I must never allow entirely to slip from view” (92n). In two cases, Tocqueville addressed the commune directly, explicitly in the short chapter that treated the role of “free institutions” in combating individualism (DA, II:2:4), and implicitly in his long-planned grand finale—part 4—in which he explored the ramifications for political society of equality's influence in the civil sphere on men's ideas (part 1), sentiments (part 2), and mores (part 3).

Tocqueville's treatment of the commune in II:2:4 consists of two parallel essays written in two stages. He drafted the first in fall 1836, when he was most actively engaged in his communal investigations, and wrote the second in 1838, when he revised his text and chose to personify his expanded vision of democratic despotism in a cunning figure who shrewdly “chang[ed] the natural sense of words” (DA, 485) by redefining citizenship as a condition of isolation from one's fellows and obedience to one's ruler. For his definitive text, he simply placed the two essays in succession, one (1836) after the other (1838).

While the subject of a shift in Tocqueville's perspective during his writing of Volume Two has elicited a lively scholarly exchange, dubbed the “two Democracies” debate,¹⁵

I am more interested here in what I believe are the close connections binding his 1836 chapter draft both to America and to his European communal investigations. In that early draft, Tocqueville focused on America and its success in combating democracy's isolating tendencies by building sentiments of cross-cultural, cross-class communal collaboration. The Americans, he began, constructed “a political life in each of the limbs [of the body of the nation]” and thereby “multiplied infinitely for its citizens the opportunities to act in concert,” thus binding society by making all individuals “feel at each instant that they depend upon one another” (Tocqueville 1836–39, 5).¹⁶ American “municipal liberty,” operating with a multiplier effect upon citizens already placed in “a permanent manner” in proximity to each other, allowed them to discover “the tight tie [that] unites private interest to the general interest” (5[b]). It thus accomplished what “political great liberty” could never accomplish, since the latter only brought together a nation's “principal citizens,” and in very brief encounters at that (5). The local “elective system” made class barriers disappear, since the wealthiest citizens, recognizing that they depended for political support upon the poorest, learned to hide “almost all of the passions that divide men … carefully at the bottom of [their] hearts,” especially pride, scorn, and egoism (7). It broke down cultural barriers, too, as the most “enlightened” members of each canton applied themselves daily to discover “new secrets to create public riches,” with the goal that they could then “deliver them to their fellow-citizens in order to merit their [political] favor” (7). “It's not the elected magistrate that makes Democracies prosper,” he concluded in a comment that mirrored his October 7, 1836, assertion to Corcelle (Tocqueville 1983, 74), “but they prosper because the magistrate is elected” (7[b]). With these arguments, Tocqueville grafted current and past European communal lessons, confirmed by his readings and travels in summer and fall 1836, to his American focal point to document the political roots of American democracy.

In his culminating part 4 of Democracy in America, volume 2, written in 1838, Tocqueville expanded his critique of the Faustian trade-off demanded by democratic despots of their all-too-compliant citizens, a trade-off reminiscent of Guizot's own sell-off of local liberties in his lectures a decade earlier: They countenanced private bourgeois activity and comfort in return for the voluntary relinquishment of public responsibilities, all in the name of building the central state. Writing to Beaumont on July 8, 1838, when he was in the heart of this writing, he indicated that he had managed to achieve a vantage point “very much higher” than that from which he had treated the topic of administrative centralization in volume 1. There he had seen administrative centralization as a subsuming by the central government of local political life, consisting “especially of replacing the secondary powers by the central power.” With his new vision, he told Beaumont, he could now elevate that analysis by presenting a far more frightening portrait of the death of the citizen, caused by

As Tocqueville extended his view of the manifold ways in which a despotic state could insinuate its despotic tentacles within civil society, he also broadened his portrayal of the antidotes needed to combat such a state, with his expanded list of remedies to his expanded democratic threat appearing in his next-to-last chapter, II:4:7. There he highlighted “secondary bodies formed temporarily of plain citizens,” a “provincial assembly,” and the need for “elective officials” (DA, 667), and he broadened his civil remedies to include powerful associations—“very opulent, very influential, very strong beings—in a word, aristocratic persons” (668)— now marshaled to resist the new despot's insidious appropriation of men's minds and souls. Tocqueville's final word on liberty emphasized its resistant, watchful, and, yes, combative qualities, all needed to counter that despot (673). With his new tableau, Tocqueville (1990b, 265n, 270n) hoped to “jolt” (frapper) the senses of his fellow citizens in the July Monarchy. As we have seen repeatedly in our study, Tocqueville thus promoted liberty's invigorating tumult over general indifference and apathy, be it induced by tyrannical Tudors, French monarchic tutors, absolute Napoleons, or limited and visionless middle-class July Monarchists.

HABERMAS' AND ARENDT'S RESPONSES TO TOCQUEVILLE'S POLITICAL VECTOR

Jürgen Habermas was the first of the new wave of civil society theorists to engage these reflections of Tocqueville. He did so both implicitly, without reference to Tocqueville, in his historical account of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in mideighteenth-century France, and explicitly, in his praise for Tocqueville's role in 1848 in crafting a “liberalist apologetic” that redefined that bourgeois sphere to make it a more “realistic” arena of contention that could both enlarge and diversify public participation (Habermas [1962] 1991, 67–71, 129–40, with quotes on 130–31). In his applause for Tocqueville as a contemporary counterpoint to the young Marx, Habermas showed how both thinkers divined the essential weakness of the emerging bourgeois model of the public sphere (its propensity to suppress conflict and rationalize bourgeois political domination, in keeping with Guizot's historical philosophy and political leadership during the July Monarchy) and how they similarly recognized and sought to challenge the power of Napoleon III's suffocating state apparatus. But Tocqueville did not seek to smash that bureaucratic-military machinery, as did Marx; rather, he championed in opposition to it the creation of those “associations of plain citizens,” formulated as we saw in his penultimate chapter of the Democracy, volume 2, that “can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies” (Habermas [1962] 1991, 137). Through his writings and 1848 speeches to the National Assembly, Tocqueville triggered a reappraisal of the bourgeois conception of an elite, restricted public sphere; by doing so, he helped to save it, in Habermas' view, from its conceptual thinness and susceptibility to despotic manipulation.

In On Revolution, published a year later, Hannah Arendt similarly engaged Tocqueville as a major dialogical presence. “Following Tocqueville's insights” that portrayed equality as a “[frequent] danger to freedom,” Arendt ([1963] 1990, 30) sought to provide more precise referents for this generic danger: She thus criticized the modern revolutionaries' concurrent drives to meet “the urgent [social] needs of the people” (60), to satisfy private welfare through the “pursuit of happiness” (115–40), and to safeguard civil liberties at the expense of the establishment of a foundation of freedom, “that is, the foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where freedom can appear” (125). Sidetracked by their pursuit of such objectives, they neglected the original source of their revolutionary inspiration, namely, the insistence upon each individual's right to participate in public affairs.

Arendt's public space is a political realm of freedom. Framing her discussion with references to Tocqueville's own treatment of the New England township (166, 176 [n. 64]), she placed the township at the center of this space, both historically and conceptually. There, it embodied “an entirely new concept of power and authority” (166), providing a “working reality” for freedom by which she meant a recognized means for the legitimate election of delegates to a Constitutional Convention and a reservoir of practical experience in generating bonds of trust through mutual promises that would aid those delegates in framing their state and national constitutions. The towns of New England alone numbered 550 in 1776, she stated, thus demonstrating the “extraordinary degree of political articulation of the country” as a whole (306 [n. 46]); their proliferation ensured the widespread suffusion of that “elementary grammar of political action and its more complicated syntax …of human power” (173), which for Arendt consisted of mutual pledges and promises. As Tocqueville (DA, 42) cited Winthrop on freedom, Arendt ([1963] 1990, 309 [n. 58]) cited Winthrop on freedom. As Tocqueville (DA, 40) cited Connecticut's earliest constitution, Arendt ([1963] 1990, 176 [n. 63]) made glowing reference to the same document. And as Tocqueville (DA, 43) emphasized the “marvelous” combination of religion and freedom in the early township, Arendt ([1963] 1990, 172, 308–9) also highlighted the influence of Puritan covenant theology upon early New England political thought and structures, although she took pains to distance her argument from that aspect of those covenants that could lead to inequality and exclusion.

But Arendt's conception of the New England township's role in promoting freedom ultimately diverged in important respects from Tocqueville's view. Her principal emphasis was on the political act of foundation through which men mutually pledged and bound themselves together “for the purpose of action” (175). Tocqueville's township was less a point of embarkation based on a defining initial contract than a “primary school” (DA, 57) where citizens learned the skills and gained the habits of discussion and decision-making essential to freedom. For Arendt ([1963] 1990, 279) her public act of binding was enacted by “those few from all walks of life” who cared more for public participation than for private happiness. Tocqueville saw his township as a catalyst for majority participation, both politically in its assemblies and socially and economically through the ripple effects it created throughout society as a whole, as he stated in Democracy in America, volume 1:

Arendt ([1963] 1990, 182) defined “association” in a precise and carefully limited fashion: “the gathering-together of people for a specified political purpose”; she relegated other forms of association to a social sphere that she argued must be rigorously segregated from the political one (Cohen and Arato 1992, 190–92). Political associations—both permanent and voluntary—comprised, of course, two essential sectors in Tocqueville's associational frame, but he believed that they both encouraged and were supported by voluntary civic groups and the informal socializing facilitated by the bevy of small private groups in democratic society. Finally, Arendt ([1963] 1990, 261) placed her hopes for the reclamation of the “lost treasure” of the revolutionary tradition—its legacy of political participation—in revolutionary councils that constituted “the only entirely new and entirely spontaneous institution in revolutionary history.” Tocqueville, on the other hand, saw township government itself as a continuing viable incubator for “local liberties,” one that he sought to retransport from America to Europe—in spirit, if not in every practical detail—as the principal catalyst for local participation and accountability in a properly balanced system of French local and national government.¹⁷