Tocqueville in America

The grand journey, retraced and reimagined.

Last month, Nadia Bloom, an eleven-year-old girl who had been missing for four days, was found, unhurt, in alligator-infested Florida swampland. A local church congregation had mobilized teams of searchers, but the man who discovered her, James King, was on his own. Well, not quite, because he had divine assistance. Armed with a machete, a G.P.S.-equipped BlackBerry, trail mix, and a Bible, the devout father of five let the Lord guide him to Nadia. As he slogged through the marshes, quoting Scripture and calling out Nadia’s name, he wonderfully heard a response. “God sent me and pointed me directly to her,” he said later. The local police chief told reporters that if he had not believed before in miracles he certainly did now.

Tocqueville is always tacking from anxiety to optimism and back again.Illustration by David Hughes

Setting aside the always troublesome exceptionalism of such “miracles” (their logic dictates that every missing girl not so fortunate was being either punished or neglected by the Lord), what was remarkable was how very American the happy story was, as if James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Cormac McCarthy had collaborated. A European observer would probably be struck by the unpeopled landscape and the alligators, the intense local and voluntary involvement (a congregation, a united small community), but also by the defiant individualism—the solitary seeker rigged up as if for nineteenth-century missionary work—and, of course, the slightly insane theological certainties. These are the same American peculiarities that Alexis de Tocqueville noticed when he journeyed here in 1831, at the age of twenty-five. He was constantly struck by the country’s intense religiosity; he admired its provincial decentralization, marvelling at the busy way every small township managed its own affairs and happily organized committees and meetings on every subject; but he also recognized, amid this admirable collectivism, the country’s deep strain of individualism. The participatory nature of American citizenship, in all its forms, impressed him deeply. In “Democracy in America,” he describes an incident that might be read as a darker version of the lucky discovery in Florida. During his visit, he “saw the inhabitants of a county where a great crime had been committed spontaneously form committees for the purpose of pursuing the guilty one and delivering him to the courts” (in Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop’s rendering). In Europe, he continues, “the criminal is an unfortunate who fights to hide his head from the agents of power; the population in some way assists in the struggle. In America, he is an enemy of the human race, and he has humanity as a whole against him.” In France, the innkeeper might find a back door and a change of clothes for the miscreant; in America, he will lead a quasi-religious tribunal against him.

Of course, Tocqueville was aware of the dangers of this kind of sleepless communitarianism; he wrote forebodingly about stifling conformism, the tyranny of the majority, the soft despotism of modern equality. He worried not that Americans would raise up tyrants but that they would elevate schoolmasters. (William Gass, in his 1995 novel “The Tunnel,” jokes that if Americans ever had a dictator they would call him Coach.) But by and large Tocqueville enthusiastically approved of American religious belief and the enormous freedom of association that the country permitted its citizens. The French Revolution, he argued, had set itself against both royalty and provincial institutions; it was at once republican and centralizing, and thus equality and tyranny were always struggling with one other. So far, America had avoided that error.

Tocqueville’s democratic curiosity about democracy permeates his great book, which was published in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840. Open-eyed, restless, theoretical but also pragmatic, interested in everything most American and most un-French, he enacts the love of freedom he proclaims. He is the connoisseur of difference. His unadorned intellectual charm has to do with his lack of pettiness. Unlike some other European visitors (Charles Dickens and Fanny Trollope, and, more recently, Jean Baudrillard and Bernard-Henri Lévy come to mind), he reserves serious judgment for mortal American sins, not venial ones. His anguish and scorn are provoked not by tobacco-chewing or unreal dentistry but by slavery and the extermination of the Indians. He often teeters on the edge of disdain—as when he notes the poor calibre of American politicians, or the people’s “immense opinion of themselves”—only to find the hospitality of explanation more interesting than the solitude of dismissal. To most non-Americans, American patriotic self-regard can be hard to take (an entire country seemingly innocent of the idea that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel), but Tocqueville is interested in the rationality of American pride, which he sensibly locates in the success, against all odds, of the young democracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville was a nobleman, descended from a line of distinguished public servants and defenders of the French crown. Members of his mother’s family were guillotined during the Revolution; his parents were imprisoned by Robespierre, and narrowly escaped execution. His parents remained Royalists, eager to restore the ancien régime. But their son, though an instinctive aristocrat who retained a great dread of revolution, also had a sound instinct for liberty, and was certain that democracy was both inevitable and God-given: universal, enduring, and beyond the power of humans to stop it, as he asserts in the introduction to “Democracy in America.” Movingly, Tocqueville is always trying to negotiate a contract between his élitism and his populism, his anxiety about equality and his love of freedom: his great book is really its fine print. The intellectual power of the book is lodged in his profound understanding—both a hope and a dread—that the logic of equality will insist on more and more equality. Thus Tocqueville holds in focus a political story in which, as he sees it, things are likely to get better and worse at the same time. On the one hand, future democracies will probably be milder and more mediocre than aristocratic societies: there will be less brutality and brilliance, as we all drift toward a vast, undemanding median. In the book’s second volume, he warns that modern democracy may be adept at inventing new forms of tyranny, because radical equality could lead to the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and to the selfishness of individualism (whereby we turn away from collective political activity toward the cultivation of our own gardens). In such conditions, we might become so enamored with “a relaxed love of present enjoyments” that we lose interest in the future and the future of our descendants, or in higher things, and meekly allow ourselves to be led in ignorance by a despotic force all the more powerful because it does not resemble one: “It does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born.”

These proto-Orwellian words are justly famous, and have often appealed to conservatives and anti-totalitarians, but they should not be allowed to neutralize Tocqueville’s fruitful ambivalence, which is always tacking from anxiety to optimism and back again. Tocqueville may not personally approve of some elements of this “decadence,” but he declares that God is wiser than he is, and “what wounds me is agreeable to him. Equality is perhaps less elevated; but it is more just.” We may be all too happy to be led, but we also always want to be free. “If it is true that the human mind leans at one extreme toward the bounded, material, and useful, at the other it naturally rises toward the infinite, immaterial, and beautiful.”

Tocqueville’s decision to come to America was almost a voluntary version of the kind of enforced exile that the tsar was imposing at this time on “troublesome” Russians. As Leo Damrosch narrates, in his scintillating new book, “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont shared a somewhat precarious position in post-revolutionary France. They were magistrates in Versailles, of liberal inclination but Royalist lineage, and “the new government was suspicious of aristocratic employees who might be covertly disaffected.” The young men saw that it would be sensible to leave the country for a while, in order “to keep clear of political booby traps,” and came up with the idea of writing an official report on the American penal system. Tocqueville and Beaumont diligently visited American prisons (the most famous of which were Sing Sing and the Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia), but the official project was a pretext for a much larger, private endeavor: Tocqueville wanted to see what the future looked like, and to write a great book about it. “Not to determine whether democracy shall come, but how to make the best of it when it does” was John Stuart Mill’s succinct assessment, when he reviewed the first volume of “Democracy in America.” The friends set sail from Le Havre on April 2, 1831, and landed thirty-eight days later at Newport, Rhode Island. Tocqueville thought the town “a collection of little houses the size of chicken coops,” but found the neatness charming. They set off immediately for New York, in a steamboat of intimidating size and sophistication.

Remarkably, given the excitements and reach of Tocqueville’s nine-month American trip, it is seventy years since the last full account of the itinerary. Leo Damrosch is well qualified to do the renovation. A distinguished specialist of eighteenth-century literature at Harvard (in the department where I also teach), and a biographer of Rousseau, he is deeply familiar with Tocqueville’s literary and intellectual contexts; the book is filled with his translations, many of them new to English, from Tocqueville’s letters, notebooks, and marginalia. (Tocqueville amassed thousands of pages of drafts as he worked on his book, and kept voluminous notes in little books that he folded and stitched by hand.) There is a sense of large scholarship quietly compacted, from the use of a source like David Lear Buckman’s “Old Steamboat Days on the Hudson River” (first published in 1907), to the work of modern historians and political theorists like Sean Wilentz and Sheldon Wolin. When Tocqueville and Beaumont finally get to visit Andrew Jackson in the White House, Damrosch informs us that Tocqueville could not get over the idea that a head of state would meet visitors on his own, and then reminds his readers that in those days the White House was an informal place—when John Quincy Adams was President, a conversation with Henry Clay was interrupted by the arrival of the dentist, who extracted one of the President’s teeth. When Damrosch writes that Tocqueville enjoyed the “pithiness of ordinary American speech,” he also cites the nineteenth-century English writer Captain Frederick Marryat, whose diary of his American travels approvingly mentions an eating house in Illinois with a sign that read “Stranger, here’s your chicken fixings.”

Damrosch contagiously enjoys himself, and happily enters into the enthusiasms of the two young Frenchmen, as they let the strange, loud, free, placeless society disturb and excite them. Tocqueville noted that servants here acted like neighbors who have come in to lend a hand, and was frustrated by the committed chastity of American women. Barbarically, there was little or no wine at meals, and oysters were served not at the start but at the end. He thought the country relatively unagitated by intense political questions, and was astounded by the freedom of the press. The roads were in an atrocious condition. After six weeks in New York City (where the drinking water was extremely dicey and pigs roamed the streets), Tocqueville and Beaumont took a steamboat up the Hudson. At Albany, they were guests of honor at a Fourth of July celebration, and Tocqueville was at once amused by the bareness and impressed by the sincerity of the event. In his notebook, he recorded that perfect order prevailed:

Silence. No police, no authority anywhere. The people’s fete. “Marshal of the day” has no restrictive power, yet obeyed. Orderly presentation of trades. Public prayer. The flag present, and old soldiers. Real emotion.

“Can we role-play a couple who are too tired to have sex?”

In a letter to a friend, he remarked that “in all of this there was something profoundly felt and truly great.” Damrosch is a sensitive reader of Tocqueville’s shifts of mood, of the way in which an aristocrat’s passing snobbery or complacent amusement might quickly correct itself into solemn admiration or severe critique. And nothing is subjected to angrier analysis in “Democracy in America” than those two great wounds in nineteenth-century American society: the institution of slavery and the steady eviction and extermination of the Indian tribes. After travelling to Michigan, Wisconsin, Quebec, and back to Boston, the two young men went south. (Tocqueville jokily called the South le Midi.) It was an arduous journey, because the winter of 1831-32 was unprecedentedly harsh, and the Ohio River froze over. Eventually, they reached Memphis, where the initial impression was bathetic. “Memphis!!! the size of Beaumont-la-Chartre!” Beaumont exclaimed. (Both men had eponymous family seats—the Tocqueville château was at Tocqueville, and the Beaumont pile was at Beaumont-la-Chartre.) At this unlikely little river town, the men witnessed an event that provoked some of the most moving lines in “Democracy in America.” A group of Choctaw Indians, with drums and dogs, emerged from the wood, led by a federal agent who, in accordance with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, was charged with transferring them to Indian Territory, in what is today Oklahoma. The agent stopped and arranged onward passage with a steamboat captain. Tocqueville confessed in a letter that he had witnessed “the expulsion—one might say the dissolution—of the last remnants of one of the most celebrated and ancient American nations.” Spiritually a classicist rather than a nineteenth-century Romantic, he describes the sad scene (the rendering here is Damrosch’s) as Tacitus might have done, in a tone of upright anguish, the emotion transferred from human to animal audience:

In this great throng no sobs or cries were heard; they were silent. Their misfortunes were long-standing, and they felt them to be irremediable. All of the Indians were already in the vessel that was going to carry them, but the dogs still remained on the bank. When the creatures understood at last that they were going to be left behind forever, they burst all together into a terrible howl, and plunging into the icy Mississippi, they swam after their masters.

These pages are followed by Tocqueville’s lucid, bitter attacks on the way that America was acquiring Indian land; in a moment that reminds the contemporary reader of the Iraq occupation, he notes that America is expert at talking a noble language while committing ignoble deeds. The extermination of the Indians has been done “tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without spilling blood, without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world.” An even greater threat to the republic, he thought, came from the institution of slavery. Christianity, he argues, had abolished ancient slavery, only to reintroduce it in the sixteenth century: “but they accepted it only as an exception in their social system, and they took care to restrict it to a single one of the human races. They thus made a wound in humanity less large, but infinitely difficult to heal.” As so often in Tocqueville, the symmetry of the paradoxes forces an equilibrium of anger the more ferocious for its restraint.

But Tocqueville also believed that American expansion westward was blessed by God, and though Damrosch’s book never hides its subject’s contradictions from the reader, it slightly obscures this less appealing figure. Damrosch deals relatively lightly, for instance, with Tocqueville’s religiosity. There was a crisis of faith as a teen-ager—he had the run of his father’s library—that left him full of doubt. Tocqueville wanted to remain a Christian, Damrosch says, but “more accurately he was an agnostic lamenting the loss of the faith of his earliest years.” This is technically accurate, but it plays down the obsessive religiosity of Tocqueville’s thinking, especially after 1835.

Repeatedly, he returns to three religious concerns: he earnestly believed that American democracy was providential; he thought that there was an intimate connection between social equality and Christian equality (since Christ had proclaimed the good news for all, irrespective of color and creed, and insisted that the last shall be first); and he lamented that, in France, religion was not on the side of equality but on the side of order and hierarchy. Seen in this stained-glass light, “Democracy in America” is obviously a nineteenth-century book about the fragility of faith, written on the threshold of the age of Darwin and Flaubert and Ernest Renan, a book as much about moral authority as about freedom, and about how to retain the former in an age of the latter—when, as he writes, “all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished,” and “the lights of faith are obscured.” The prestige of royal power has vanished, Tocqueville says, “without being replaced by the majesty of the laws.” Matthew Arnold could not have put it better.

Just as Rousseau, in “Discourse on Inequality,” is really writing a theological history of society’s fall (man has been expelled from an original Eden, into the corruptions of modern civil society), so Tocqueville is really writing a theological history of society’s rise, which culminates in the founding of America. Christianity, he felt, was inherently democratic and inclusive, and Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine: “it also blended at several points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.” American democracy was thus a providential fact; North America was discovered for a reason—“as if God had held it in reserve and it had only just emerged from beneath the waters of the flood.” The greatest geniuses of ancient Athens and Rome had not been able to grasp that slavery was wrong, or that equality was the ideal state of man, because they were pagans: “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”

Religion is thus vitally beneficial, but not only because it equalizes. It also places crucial checks on equality’s equalizing tendencies—it cleans up its own joyous mess. Society, Tocqueville felt, needs religion’s emphasis on the afterlife. God guarantees the authority of morals (goodness comes from God), and, more generally, religion leads democratic man away from the narcissism and materialism endemic to non-aristocratic societies. Yet how does one continue to renew religious belief in an age of radical doubt? Tocqueville’s solution has a whiff of characteristic French cynicism, even of hypocrisy. It is basically what Voltaire called croyance utile, “useful belief.” Religion doesn’t have to be true, Tocqueville thought, but it is very important that people profess it. So, he writes, whenever religion has put down deep roots in a society, one must “guard against shaking it; but rather preserve it carefully as the most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries; do not seek to tear men away from their old religious opinions to substitute new ones.” Materialism seems to have been a fearful abyss for Tocqueville, teeming with the devils of unbelief, nihilism, and disorder. In a pungent sentence, he avers that, if a democratic people had to choose between metempsychosis and materialism, he would rather have citizens believe that their souls will be reborn in the bodies of pigs than that they themselves are just matter. This is a more conservative Tocqueville than we are used to; it is the fearful aristocrat, and conventional Catholic moralist, who doubted that democracy could occur in India, for instance, because it had not been blessed by the liberal sweetness of Christianity, and who stoutly defended the French conquest of Algeria. In the end, his reviewer and correspondent John Stuart Mill, a good deal less hospitable to Christianity than Tocqueville was, emerges as the more thoroughgoing liberal. Damrosch offers perhaps a slightly sweeter, more progressive, less religious subject, though, in fairness, the fluidity and ambivalence of Tocqueville’s thought are very hard to contain within the form of what is an elegantly compact book.

Constantly amazed by the mobility of American society, Tocqueville noted that he met Americans “who have successively been lawyers, farmers, businessmen, ministers of the Gospel, and physicians.” The Australian novelist Peter Carey, long resident in New York, has written a new novel that shares some of that jubilant many-headedness. “Parrot & Olivier in America” (Knopf; $26.95) is a delicious, sprockety contraption, a comic historical picaresque that takes as its creative origin Tocqueville and Beaumont’s 1831 journey, but freely improvises many English, and even Australian, extras. Like several of Carey’s previous novels, such as “Oscar and Lucinda” and “Jack Maggs” (a rewriting of “Great Expectations”), his book has an eighteenth-century robustness, a nineteenth-century lexicon, and a modern liberality. Into this mad portmanteau is stuffed Olivier de Clarel de Barfleur de Garmont, a French aristocrat born in 1805, modelled on Tocqueville. (Carey acknowledges his indebtedness to many Tocquevillian sources, and has woven into the text what, in his acknowledgments, he calls “distinctive threads, necklaces of words which were clearly made by the great man himself.”) There are few contemporary writers with such a sure sense of narrative pungency and immediacy; Carey’s early pages are full of sharp reverberations. Olivier, who narrates the book’s opening section, tells us about his childhood at the Château de Barfleur. He discovers some dusty little parcels in an obscure nook of the house. They are sheets of newspaper wrapped around dead pigeons. The boy’s teacher explains, “The peasants put the birds on trial for stealing seeds. They found them guilty and then they wrung their necks.” Olivier comments that “at six years of age, I had my first lesson in the Terror.”

Like Tocqueville, Olivier has Royalist parents, and is appointed a magistrate at Versailles, alongside his Beaumont—named Blacqueville—who will accompany him on the eccentric voyage to America. But Blacqueville dies during the Atlantic crossing, and his place is taken by the man who is the novel’s other narrator, John Larrit, a.k.a. Parrot, an English engraver. Parrot is the novel’s animating spirit. He is intelligent but uneducated, canny, bawdy, proud. Parrot’s father is arrested in England—he was working for a radical printer involved in forging French Revolutionary banknotes—and the suddenly orphaned little boy (his mother had died years before) finds himself packed onto a boat full of English convicts, headed for Australia. After many years in Australia, Parrot arrives in France, and is appointed by Olivier’s mother, the Comtesse de Garmont, to act as her son’s servant; his secret job is to keep an eye on Olivier and report back to Maman.

It is an irksome task. “The trouble with the general class of de Garmonts,” Parrot tells us, “is that they cannot imagine the life of anyone outside the circle of their arse.” His beefy patois, rich in pithy, prole Englishisms, gives Carey the chance to mobilize the kind of hybrid idiom, streaked in Strine, that he has used so brilliantly in the past. Parrot has private names for Olivier, like Little Pintle d’Pantedly, Lord Snobsduck, Lord Migraine. (Carey’s language is always tending toward the life of private slang; it was one of the energies of his remarkable novel “True History of the Kelly Gang.”) He likes using those little Dickensian adjectives that end in “y”: here, a nose is “long and bossy”; a man swims unclothed in an English river, and is seen as “nudey in midstream”; Parrot says he has “a squiddy soul.” Parrot is always the instinctive democrat to Olivier’s instinctive aristocrat. His earthy language—“fit as a scrub bull” and “I toweled his brainy noggin” are characteristic emanations—appalls the straitlaced Olivier, who also dislikes this peculiar Englishman’s informality. Parrot is “neither upstairs nor downstairs and sarcastic in between,” as he complains.

Carey’s story is in what eighteenth-century novelists called the “Cervantick” tradition, which means that this Quixote and Panza must first be at loggerheads, then at ease, and finally in love with each other, and that the master must finally need the servant’s help. In the course of this transformation, the two men have many American adventures, some of them loyal to the narrative of Tocqueville and Beaumont’s journey: Olivier shoots a floating barrel in the Atlantic, from the deck of the boat to America, as Tocqueville did; visits the Eastern State Penitentiary; complains about the lack of wine and the poor carriages; and witnesses a Fourth of July parade in Albany. To the amusement of his servant, Olivier is always a relentless interrogator, steadily storing away the fuel for his big book.

But Carey’s departures from the Tocqueville biography are as interesting as his loyalties. Olivier is prissier and more snobbish than Tocqueville was. Though he warms to the American experiment—he, too, is moved by the Fourth of July event—the warmth is intermittent, banked with superiority. Carey makes much of Olivier’s myopia, and it seems obvious enough that America, and thus the future, belongs to Parrot, not to Olivier. Parrot sets up a happy household with his French mistress, Mathilde, and ends the novel a man of means, with a large house on the Hudson. Olivier falls in love with an American girl—a series of wonderful scenes—but finally retreats from the proposed marriage because he cannot imagine bringing her back to France, where she would be looked down upon. There is a nice moment when Olivier, who has sent Parrot off to New York to fetch a copy of “Tartuffe,” awaits his servant’s steamboat. It arrives, and standing on the deck is “what might have been the emblem of America”:

Frock-coated, very tall and straight, with a high stovepipe hat tilted back from his high forehead. I thought this is the worst vision of democracy—illiterate, hard as wood, overdressed, uncultured, with that physiognomy I had earlier observed in the portrait of the awful Andrew Jackson—a face divided proudly in three equal parts: hairline to eyebrows, eyebrows to nose, lips to chin. In other words, the face of one who will never give any weight to the wisdom of his betters. To see the visage of their president is to understand that the farmer and the mechanic are the lords of the New World.

This man raises a hand, and Olivier realizes that it is Parrot, his non-American servant. But there is surely a second joke in this exchange, which is the suggestion in the portrait—tall, stovepipe hat—of another President, who will presently save the Union, and rid the country of that moral blight which so consumed the real Tocqueville. No wonder Carey has Olivier joke, “You can say this was due to my myopia.”

So it is Parrot who dominates this book and wrests it away from Olivier; Parrot whose invented, novelistic scenes are more vivid and wholehearted than Olivier’s vaguely biographical ones; and Parrot who perhaps makes a secret authorial communication—America belongs properly not to the posh Frenchman but to the socially more modest, artistic Englishman who was carted off to Australia and nearly stayed there. Not for nothing does this novel reproduce Parrot’s map of Australia, which he drew when he was living in Sydney. The real Tocqueville has one dry little comment about Australia, in “Democracy in America”: “In our day, the English courts of justice have taken charge of peopling Australia.” This, in damning contrast to the free and providential peopling of New England. Dry, but the dry seed, perhaps, for this blooming Australian-New English-New American novel. ♦