Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life by Hugh
Brogan (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2006). 724 pp.

JOSEPH A. AMATO is Professor Emeritus of History
at Southwest State University in Marshall, MN.

Having written on Tocqueville, modern
France, and the history of the United
States for almost three decades, Hugh Brogan
comes well prepared to write this truly
substantive biography. The bibliography and
index alone to this 724-page tome attest to
his careful attention the eighteen volumes of
Tocqueville’s Oeuvres, especially the last three
volumes, which include his exceptionally
important correspondence. In addition, Brogan
has also made use of a vast number of
secondary articles and books, along with
André Jardin’s substantive Tocqueville: A Biography
(1984, Eng. trans., 1988).

Brogan’s work proves him a master at
evoking the social circumstances, personal
relations, and inner life of his subject. He
depicts Tocqueville as a son of a sickly
mother and a wise, prudent, and caring
father, and as a student who found both love
and learning under the tutelage of the family
priest. Brogan introduces us to a shy but
amorous young man, whose soul emotionally
belongs to the Romantic era. He took his
youthful friendships to heart and transformed
them into life-long loyalties and allegiances.
Attributing a doubting spirit to the young
Tocqueville, Brogan describes a single and
irrevocable night during which sixteen-year old
Tocqueville suffered what can only be
considered a reverse religious conversion. In
a matter of a few horrible hours, his turbulent
and doubting mind took away his Catholic
faith that had so ordered his meaning, defined
his family’s identity, and so profoundly
consoled his sickly mother. Tocqueville awoke
from that awful night a skeptic, thereafter
never to believe in the truth of religion,
which he, nevertheless, paradoxically judged
in his writings to be so important to order,
tradition, and a required providential view
of history.

Brogan suggests the young scholar read
with passion such French writers as Racine,
Pascal, Rousseau, and Montesquieu. Along
the way, he also assimilated a fair share of
Greek and Roman classics in philosophy,
politics, and history. Brogan acquaints us
with an indisputably brilliant young man
whose passion, one so common to the Enlightenment
and Romantic eras, was for
public fame and responsibility. Tocqueville
sought glory first as a young judge, then as a
keen observer and interpreter of democratic
society’s development. Finally, thanks to the
long-term influence of modern scholar-historian-
politicians Adolphe Thiers and François
Guizot, Tocqueville, conceding that he was
unable to change France, elected to define it
as a master historian.

Tocqueville began his career as a promising
novice juge auditeur at Versailles during the
reign of Charles X. His career and aspirations
were truncated by the Revolution of 1830,
during which he remained loyal to Charles X
until the latter fled for England, taking the
monarchy itself with him. His aristocratic
distaste for the bourgeois revolution did not
prevent Tocqueville, who by long family
inheritance was a noble of both sword and
robe, from swearing allegiance to the middle
class king, Louis Philippe.

Both Tocqueville and his aristocratic supervisor
and friend, Gustave de Beaumont,
decided that an absence from France would
provide temporary protection and keep open
the possibility of future public service. In
1831 they traveled, at their own expense, to
America to assess whether the young
republic’s penitentiary system could serve as
a model for the reform of punishment in
France. Though constantly sick, Tocqueville
persisted with his work. Information gathered
on the nearly yearlong American journey
formed the core of his commentary on
American democracy. This project fit his
ambitions, which in large measure were
those of an age when literate Europeans
looked to Russia and America for prognostications
of their own futures. With the first
volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville
established his intellectual importance not
just in France, but also in the United States,
England, and elsewhere in Europe.

Simultaneous with its 1835 publication,
the celebrated author affirmed his full adult
independence. Having opposed his parents
in religion and politics, he then went on to
defy them by marrying a middle-class English
Protestant. At the same time, believing
himself deserving of authority, Tocqueville
worked in the government of Louis Philippe.
In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848
he served for two years as minister of foreign
affairs under Louis Napoleon, until the latter,
intent on governing France alone, ran and
was elected by a democratic plebiscite. The
reign of Napoleon III, which marked France’s
failure as a republic, realized Tocqueville’s
worst fear of the convergence of democracy
and tyranny, and once and for all ended his
political career.

Brogan argues, at points aggressively, that
Tocqueville never intellectually escaped the
social cocoon into which he was born. Membership
in a prominent aristocratic family
with roots in Normandy equipped the young
Tocqueville with an abiding presumption
that he should judge and rule France. This
prejudice was reinforced by the fact that at
no time in his life did Tocqueville lack
financial means to pursue a public career, to
own and rent several residences, to employ
servants, to seek out the best medical care,
and to pursue his research and travel plans.

Nevertheless, Brogan also observes that
the armor of birth and privilege did not
eliminate Tocqueville’s sense of historical
vulnerability. His father and other family
members were detained in prison, while his
mother’s eminent aristocratic maternal grandfather,
Lamoignon de Malesherbes, and other
members of his family were guillotined during
the French Revolution for their loyal
service to the monarchy.

Brogan suggests that Tocqueville’s sense
of vulnerability was rooted in his mother’s
sickness and compounded by his marriage to
his beloved Marie, who was actually the
volatile and sickly Mary Mottley, daughter
of the bursar of the British seaman’s hospital
at Gosport. Though she remained his lifelong
love and companion, her weak constitution
became apparent during her sickness on their
extended honeymoon. Her frequent maladies
interfered with travel and, especially in
their later years, darkened their childless
marriage.

Brogan argues that Tocqueville is a prophet
neither of his own times nor of ours. He
denies the “prescience” that Russell Kirk
assigned to Tocqueville, contending that he
stereotyped women by assigning them fixed
domestic roles and by ignoring the contentions
of their contemporary advocates; that
he underestimated the importance of slavery
in forming American society; and that finally
he showed neither an empirical nor
empathetic understanding of the working
class. Tocqueville, Brogan contends, wore
the blinkers of his class in his discussions of
equality, liberty, and democracy and his
underlying appreciation of English political
traditions.

Tocqueville, according to Brogan, corrupted
his major works by his class interest.
A staunch and constant defender of inherited
rights and freedom, with the support of
Montesquieu and other classic writers,
Tocqueville favored parliaments, the division
of power, and the autonomy of social
constituencies. His preference for legal and
differentiated social orders accounts for his
criticisms, so popular among conservatives
of the post-World War II era, of leveling
egalitarianism, disaggregating individualism,
and the centralizing state.

Brogan is especially critical of Tocqueville’s
second volume of Democracy in America.
Underlining the empirical weakness of
Tocqueville’s methodology, Brogan contends
that simply on the basis of an interview
or two, Tocqueville deduces ideas about an
entire subject and then proposes logics that
govern the course of social and political
development. Not without parallel to Hegel
and other contemporaries who joined philosophy
and history to over-reaching theories,
Tocqueville, as Brogan judges him, was
a brilliant intuitive observer, who, in his
study, working on phrase after phrase and
draft upon draft, crafted what in truth was a
philosophical commentary rather than an
empirical study.

Brogan, however, does not extend this
indictment to Tocqueville’s Recollections,
which he admits is based on lived experience
and participation in the events of the years
from 1848 to 1850. Of all his works, Brogan
judges the Recollections to be the one that he
“could least spare for oblivion,” saying,
“The wit, the eloquence, the deep feeling,
the predominant pessimism, and the occasional
sparks of hope: the characteristics that
are to be found in his letters and the records
of his conversation are here deployed by the
artist.” In the very course of his hurried
writing, “Tocqueville,” earning Brogan’s
full praise, “turns into a historian before our
eyes,” as he grasps the plurality of causes that
move human affairs in such passages as this:

The more I study society in former times, and the
more I learn in detail how society operates now,
and when I consider the prodigious diversity that
once comes across, not only of laws, but of
principles of laws, and the different forms they
have assumed and which the property assumes,
whatever men say, here on Earth, I am tempted
to believe that what we call necessary institutions
are often only those to which we are accustomed,
and that where the organization of society is
concerned, the field of possibility is much vaster
than the men who live in particular societies ever
imagine. (500)

For Brogan, Tocqueville’s last book,
L’Ancien Régime, which occupied his twilight
years, proved him a true historian. It is
a fruit of his innovating regional archival
research. It offers a singularly novel argument
that state centralization, which until
then had been assumed to be the consequence
of the Revolution and Napoleon, had a long
development under the monarchy and had
been intensified in the course of the eighteenth
century. Though not in the end bestowing
the prophet’s mantle so vigorously
denied at the outset, Brogan concludes with
earnest acclamation: Tocqueville was a true
and great historian of France.

This last work was “the creation of a
master historian.” “Extensive, powerful, and
convincing,” it showed the “inexorability of
the Revolution’s coming” and penetrated
the plight of French peasants, while searching
for the movement of social and institutional
history, not on the surface of events but in la
France profonde. Not absent flaws and shortcomings,
L’Ancien Régime was the culmination
of Tocqueville’s passionate preoccupation
with the fate of France. Paying homage
to his own craft, Brogan argues that L’Ancien
Régime, not Democracy in America as Kirk
would have it, redeemed Tocqueville’s life
insofar as a great book can.

Brogan’s narrative, which moves between
the primacy of Tocqueville’s life over his
thought and his ultimate achievement as a
historian, might have found mediating
ground by assuming that Tocqueville was
one of the true master thinkers of the great
kaleidoscopic period from 1776 to 1848 that
juxtaposed the Enlightenment and Romanticism
and took form between the French
Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.
Along with the era’s greatest minds, he
wrestled with the meaning of what were truly
unprecedented events. The world had become
a stage for the enactment of a new
order.

Tocqueville, I would have it, singularly
sought to ponder what democracy was and
what it boded for America and Europe. He
was a man who puzzled deeply over the
events of his times and the very making of
modern America, France, and Europe. On
this count, Tocqueville remains, though many
times removed, a cousin worthy of visiting.