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2 / Color, Race, and the Spectacle of Opinion in Beaumont’s Marie If Tocqueville struggled to name the new thing that haunted him about U.S. political and social life, it would seem that his traveling companion had no such trouble. Gustave de Beaumont’s novel, Marie; or, Slavery in the United States, opens with the frank admission that “a single idea dominates the work and forms the central point around which all the developments are arranged.” He continues, “The reader is aware that there are still slaves in the United States; their number has grown to almost two million. Surely it is a strange thing that there is so much bondage amid so much liberty; but what is perhaps still more extraordinary is the violence of the prejudice which separates the race of slaves from that of the free men, that is, the Negroes from the whites.”1 Beaumont finds in the United States a “double element”—an institution of slavery created and maintained by the state, and (“still more extraordinary”) a customary practice of racial exclusion and debasement which he finds to be ubiquitous in public life. Although he indicates that “slavery” will be the singular focus of his work, once he mentions this double element and separates the customary practices of racial prejudice from the institution of slavery, Beaumont finds his “thing.” Beaumont’s Marie is not the study of “slavery in the United States” that the title promises; indeed, this is one of only a few explicit references to slavery in the text. Instead, Beaumont focuses intently on the concept and the practice of “race,” isolating the mechanisms of racialization and tracing “the violence of the prejudice” through those who both enforce and suffer it. In part, the turn that Beaumont makes in his foreword from 76 / color, race, and the spectacle of opinion institution to custom is dictated by his efforts to distance his project from Tocqueville’s. As he claims, “It is solely the customs of the United States that I propose to describe,” thus leaving “the most brilliant illumination upon democratic institutions” to his friend (Marie, 4). If Beaumont ’s text labors under the shadow of Tocqueville’s, it is not entirely the fault of critics and historians, who for more than a half-century have regarded Marie as little more than a companion piece to the Democracy.2 Beaumont himself inaugurates the tradition of relegating Marie—with its fictional form and singular focus—to secondary status. He mentions Tocqueville’s book three times in his short foreword, repeatedly explaining the different aims of the two projects and directing his reader to Tocqueville for analysis of political forms and governing institutions. By choosing to examine the side of the “double element” that he does—the practice of racial prejudice—Beaumont makes an attempt to keep himself within the boundaries of custom that he designates as his concern. But, clearly, his isolation of custom in no way distinguishes his work from Tocqueville’s—again and again, Democracy in America exposes how permeable the lines between law and custom, state and public, have become. Instead, it is Beaumont’s singular focus on race and its centrality to life in the United States that marks his departure from Tocqueville, though he acknowledges this only obliquely. At the end of his foreword, Beaumont justifies the very different impressions of America that a reader might take away from Marie and the Democracy as follows: “Now, in the United States, political life is far finer, and more equitably shared than civil life . . . . Envisaging American society from such diverse viewpoints , we have not been constrained to use the same colors in order to paint it” (7). The difference between their texts is one of color. Without respecting the divide between “American” subjects and “democratic” ones that structures volume 1 of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Beaumont’s novel attempts to examine democratic culture exclusively through the lens of race, a concept which he first comes to understand when he witnesses the hallucinations and manipulations of color in the public sphere. Beaumont’s final justification of his work in relation to Tocqueville’s— “we have not been constrained to use the same colors in order to paint it”—serves a double function. Overtly, it explains—for the fourth time, at least—his decision to write a novel in order to treat America’s customs as distinct from its political institutions. But in apologizing for his own fictions, Beaumont ends up exposing...

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