Lucien Jaume takes a bold tack in his long-gestated Tocqueville, winner of the 2008 Prix François Guizot of the Académie Française and newly available to English readers in a customarily superb translation by Arthur Goldhammer. Shunning hundreds of contemporary commentaries on Tocqueville (thus mirroring his subject’s own professed modus operandi), Jaume provides an intricate, nuanced, multilayered portrait of mid-nineteenth-century France’s intellectual and ideological landscape and then seeks to situate Tocqueville’s Democracy in America within it through his own careful reading of the text. “The whole era is in the text,” Jaume alerts his readers, “which bristles with contradictory voices” (p. 6). Through his contextual analysis and perceptive reading, Jaume promises new insights on a host of correlated questions that, in fact, have marked the very Tocquevillean scholarship he eschews: questions of Tocqueville’s authorial intent, intended audience, deliberate masking or veiling of his own thoughts, strategies for writing well, political leanings, personality quirks, and most deeply held beliefs. “Who was Tocqueville the man?” Jaume finally aims to determine (p. 4), and “what did the author conceal behind what he revealed?”
Jaume organizes his probes by considering by turn four principal Tocquevillean personae in what he tells us is an ascending order of importance: Tocqueville as political scientist, as sociologist, as moralist, and as writer. His presentations of each precede a final concluding synthesis in Part V. Drawing on his own writings on French Jacobinism, liberalism, and nineteenth-century political thought, he traces with a sure hand a vast terrain of shifting French political, psychological, moral, and literary currents and cross-currents that marked the succession of regimes of Tocqueville’s lifetime: the Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire. Within such a milieu, Jaume confidently sets his subject, drawing on his equally strong familiarity with most aspects of Tocqueville’s ever-expanding corpus of both published and unpublished correspondence, manuscript drafts and annotations, academic and political writings and speeches, reading notes, and archival ephemera.
As promised, Jaume’s claims of intellectual lineage can be revelatory. He makes a strong case for Tocqueville’s “covert” or “muffled” or “sustained if veiled” polemics (pp. 11, 106, 214n) against hidden interlocutors (such as François Guizot with his support for elitist government and the bourgeois spirit of the July Monarchy, Joseph de Maistre, other counterrevolutionary traditionalists, and proponents of Romanticism). He argues convincingly that Tocqueville is heir to Chateaubriand as a writer opposing new waves of Romanticism and likens Tocqueville’s notion of a unifying social state to Montesquieu’s general spirit, although “of course Tocqueville inflected [Montesquieu’s concept] in his own way” (p. 103).
Jaume is less convincing in asserting that Tocqueville “quite likely” read the texts of Michel Chevalier, “probably” drew on Benjamin Constant’s characterization of patriotism, “probably knew” Louis de Bonald’s major work, was “greatly indebted” to Félicité Robert de Lamennais, “perhaps” had read Jean Domat in his early legal career, or “probably [shared] a certain spiritualist interest” with Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (pp. 46, 30, 97, 8, 177, 191). In his dogged effort to document such links, Jaume adduces electronic indexing and other forms of semantic evidence to quantify and contrast the prevalence of Tocqueville’s use of such concepts as “civic spirit” (pp. 40–41), “repository” (pp. 91–93), “generative principle” (pp. 110–12), and “individual reason” (pp. 113–14). While the author with his investigations may diminish our view of the originality of several of Tocqueville’s celebrated theses, he seeks to balance his assessment by arguing that Tocqueville drew upon his current culture for “raw material that he subsequently modified and transformed” (p. 96).
Jaume intends his interwoven depiction of Tocqueville’s four personae to illuminate his subject’s treatment in Democracy in America of his central problem: the collapse of authority in a postaristocratic world. Here, the author is at his best in his consideration of Tocqueville’s text. He highlights Tocqueville’s discovery of a new basis for political authority in the popular sovereignty of the New England town, where citizens recognize that their personal interest will most fully be served by pursuing the general interests of the collectivity. At the same time, he emphasizes Tocqueville’s unveiling of an additional layer of democratic horizontal authority created involuntarily by citizens as they acquiesce in their ideas, opinion, and religious beliefs to “the superior wisdom of the Public” (p. 71) and its numerical ally, the Majority. Jaume rightly captures Tocqueville’s concern that this subservience to public opinion will inject constant tension into a democracy, as it not only sets horizons and reaffirms stability but also can quickly mutate to new forms of despotic control. He portrays Tocqueville as moralist doing his part to confront such threats by using an array of rhetorical strategies to ennoble democracy, rechannel its passions, moderate its preoccupation with material possessions, spiritualize its politics, and seek, in his own words, “to exalt men’s souls, not to complete the task of laying them low” (p. 225). In doing so, Jaume argues, Tocqueville also satisfies his personal goals as an aristocratic writer in a democratic age who appeals to all democratic citizens’ natural propensity for poetry by arguing for the preciousness of their free will, individual reason, human dignity, and potential for grandeur.
In his concluding synthesis in Part V, Jaume claims to discover Tocqueville the man hidden behind the curtain or veil he has constructed for himself in his book. This concluding portrait is a disturbing one. He finds, he believes, a Tocqueville imprisoned by his aristocratic prejudices, nostalgic for the values of the feudal aristocracy and medieval commune, and riven with contradictions as he attempts, consciously and unconsciously, to convert “historical ‘memory’ into a present-day program of reform” (p. 292). Rather than take seriously Tocqueville’s own surprise at his own discoveries in America of multiple forms of associational life that could provide a modern-day program of democratic resistance to democratic despotism, Jaume portrays him searching futilely in a vanished past for a “source of inspiration” for future democrats (p. 292). Ultimately, Tocqueville is “unclassifiable” politically (p. 326), “self-delusion[al]” (p. 299n) in characterizing his own archival studies, and a mystery even to himself—a conclusion that is depicted visually on Jaume’s book’s cover in the defacement of Théodore Chassériau’s famous portrait.
Thus stripping Tocqueville of his own persona as an impartial arbiter of the emerging democratic era and a new kind of political liberal within it, Jaume strips him as well of his creativity and resourcefulness as a researcher and observer par excellence of American institutions, laws, and mores. I have already commented on Jaume’s eschewing of commentaries by other scholars; he also blithely announces that he has chosen to dispense with the examination of any of Tocqueville’s American sources (pp. 12–13). Why read sources from America, he appears to ask, when Tocqueville’s book was on a foreordained path from 1833–34 when its author was “already in possession of the keys to his analysis thanks to family tradition” (p. 300)?
Jaume is not the first to make claims of Tocqueville’s nostalgia and self-deception, although he is perhaps the first to do so with principal reference to Democracy in America. General readers and scholars will be challenged by his book to explore for themselves whether Jaume’s partial and harsh judgment of Tocqueville the man is supported by his partial and bifurcated research.
