TOCQUEVILLE
A Biography
Andre Jardin, translated by Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988
548 pp., $19.95
None of the great thinkers of the modern era is so imperfectly known and understood as Alexis de Tocqueville. This is not to say that his work is obscure; on the contrary--his magnum opus, the two volumes of Democracy in America (1835-40), is still widely regarded as one of the profoundest investigations of democracy and most insightful and enduring portraits of the United States ever written. The Old Regime and the French Revolution, moreover, left tragically unfinished at Tocqueville's death, remains a touchstone for the exploration of France's modern history. Yet the man behind the work has not excited anything like the same interest as the work itself; certainly not when one thinks of the near-obsessive interest shown in the character and deeds of Nietzsche, Freud, or Marx, who are his rightful peers. A small but telling indication of this lack of interest is the fact that Americans so often misrender his name as "de" Tocqueville, an inconsistency that is even reflected in R.R. Bowker's Books in Print. For some mysterious reason, Tocqueville's work has existed, at least in the rather self-interested imaginations of his American readers, as a freestanding entity, a rich if unsystematic oeuvre filled with haunting presentiments and astounding prophecies.
But, as Andre Jardin demonstrates in this magisterial biography of the elusive Frenchman, to concentrate on Tocqueville's writings without investigating his life is to miss the meaning of both. For Tocqueville was most emphatically not what we in our day would call "an intellectual." He was not a man whose thoughts and writings existed in a reserved intellectual ether. Nor, despite the characteristic discipline and thoroughness with which he undertook his archival research, did he have about him the temperament or the aims of an academic historian or sociologist. Instead, Tocqueville was intensely involved in the bitter and confusing political struggles of his time, struggles to which he brought the most admirable elements of his privileged upbringing, and in which he gave an exemplary accounting of himself, even in losing causes. His writings, as Jardin argues, are the distilled reflections of an extraordinarily perceptive, high-minded, and often troubled man who lived his life perched uneasily upon the crest of history. He was not merely an observer; he was a participant in the things of which he wrote.
A Child of Revolution
From the moment of his birth, it seemed the French Revolution would cast a long shadow over the life of Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel de Tocqueville. He was born in Paris on 11 Thermidor of the year XIII, or so it was reckoned by the revolutionary calendar; July 29, 1805, by our own. His father, Herve, came from a very old Norman family, old enough for one of his ancestors to have fought with William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. Like many younger French nobles, Herve was liberal enough to be sympathetic to the Revolution at the beginning. Alexis' mother, Louise, was the granddaughter of the great French statesman, writer, and promoter of the Encyclopedie, Malesherbes. Herve and Louise were married in March 1793--an anxious time, to be sure, given the spreading Reign of Terror,
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