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Tocqueville and the French Revolution
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13464 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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9 / 1987 |
7,350 Words |
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Seymour Drescher
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On July 4, 1831, early in his famous journey to America, Alexis de Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont witnessed their first American national festival. The celebration, in Albany, New York, made a deep impression on the two travelers. The solemn procession that marked the day was unlike any national parade in nineteenth-century France. Absent were the great military displays with which any self-respecting French provincial city would have garnished the event. There were no dashing calvary and no well-drilled infantry marching with regimental flags and battle honors to the stirring sound of military bands. Absent was an assemblage of resplendently dressed officials of Church and State seated in stately carriages. In the capital of the largest state in the American union, the military demeanor of the straggling citizen militia struck the young visitors as truly comic.
They were equally amused at the ceremonial music that followed the parade. The orchestral accompaniment consisted of a single flute vainly trying to make itself heard amid the din of patriotic songs.
However, the two Frenchmen were more intrigued by what the commemoration contained than amused by what it lacked. The only people riding in a carriage were a handful of surviving veterans of the Revolutionary and 1812 wars. The groups dominating the procession were the tradesmen and workingmen of Albany: the butchers, mechanics, carpenters, painters, carmen, volunteer firemen, apprentices, and typographers. The last group moved by on a float carrying a printing press churning out copies of the American Declaration of Independence for distribution among the onlookers.
The principal ceremony centered on the reading of that document, then fifty-five years old. It was not, noted the French observers, a theatrical ritual. The crowd was deeply affected: "There was," wrote Tocqueville,
in the reading of those promises of independence so well kept, in this return of an entire people toward the memories of its birth, in this union of the present generation to that which is no longer, sharing for the moment in all its generous passions, there was in all that something deeply felt and truly great.
The unity of the celebrants about the idea of liberty centered on a single documentary expression of that idea, and the institutions which embodied it struck these newly arrived visitors from France with particular force. They had left behind them not only a government created less than a year before on the barricades of Paris but a regime whose existence was continually challenged until it fell before Parisian barricades in February 1848.
The contrast between promises fulfilled in ordered liberty and a seemingly endless cycle of French revolutions and despotisms constituted the background for Tocqueville's last great work, the Old Regime and the French Revolution. It was published in 1856, exactly twenty-five years after Tocqueville's American journey and just over twenty years after the appearance of his Democracy in America.
Tocqueville's life was entwined with the failure of constitutional government and liberal ideals in France during the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in 1805 at the peak of the autocratic empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, he died in 1859
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