Ecrits sur Tocqueville (review)

Michel Brix, who is well known for his authoritative studies and editions of Nerval, has had the good idea of bringing together in a single small volume, the three articles on Alexis de Tocqueville published by Sainte-Beuve over a period of thirty years. The earliest of these articles is a review of the first two volumes of De la Démocratie en Amérique, which appeared in April 1835 just a few weeks after their publication. The second and third articles, which are more substantial, appeared in 1861 and 1865 and were reviews of several of the volumes of Tocqueville's work and correspondence published following the great liberal's death in 1859.

Although Tocqueville and Sainte-Beuve were not close personal friends, they understood and appreciated each other. In acknowledging the 1835 review, Tocqueville wrote Sainte-Beuve of the "intellectual and moral intimacy" that would "reign between you and me if we had the opportunity to know each other better." They never had that opportunity. But thirty years later Tocqueville's friend and executor, Gustave de Beaumont, could tell Sainte-Beuve, speaking of his 1861 review, that "even though here and there you criticized a book that others could only praise, you were the only person who really understood Tocqueville as a writer and a stylist." One of the obvious interests of this volume is the opportunity it gives us to see how well Sainte-Beuve understood Tocqueville and to reconsider our own views concerning some of the issues raised by Sainte-Beuve.

Not surprisingly, Sainte-Beuve's reviews mix biographical detail with literary analysis and criticism. Although Sainte-Beuve has little to say about the fine points of Tocqueville's analysis of Old Regime France and Jacksonian America, there is much on Tocqueville as a stylist and on the psychological and moral foundations of his thought. Taken together, the reviews add up to a richly textured intellectual portrait of Tocqueville as a man of complexity and nuance and a political thinker divided in his loyalties. "Although belonging to the Old Regime by birth and by his refined and delicate tastes," writes Sainte-Beuve, Tocqueville "fully accepted '89." And Sainte-Beuve sees very well the fundamental tension in Tocqueville's thinking between liberty and equality: "A man of '89, he is nevertheless so jealously devoted to liberty that he is watchful and wary with regard to equality, for which he is such a sullen adviser that he might at times be called an enemy." Elsewhere Sainte-Beuve writes of Tocqueville's "éloquence douloureuse" concerning the rise of democratic societies and compares him to Aeneas weeping for Dido as he founds Rome.

Sainte-Beuve's main argument with Tocqueville focuses on the claim, presented most forcefully at the outset of De la Démocratie en Amérique, that human history is unfolding according to an irresistible and "providential" plan, according to which traditional distinctions and hierarchies are giving way to an increasingly egalitarian and uniform society. Here Sainte-Beuve argues, in terms that seem to ignore Tocqueville's nuances and oft-stated qualifications, that history rarely displays such long-term trends and patterns, that history is the realm of the contingent, and that individual choices can never be reduced to clear patterns of cause and effect.

Sainte-Beuve has little sympathy for what he describes as Tocqueville's excessive fondness for abstract categories, a fondness that leaves him in his first work much less concerned with grasping the specific features of American democracy than with understanding "the effects and dangers of equality in the modern world." In the case of L'Ancien Régime et la révolution, where Tocqueville's main concern is with the negative effects of monarchical centralization, Sainte-Beuve criticizes the narrowness of Tocqueville's perspective – his imposition of "a fixed and exclusive viewpoint" on the complex history of the Old Regime. Sainte-Beuve also argues, writing under the Second Empire, that centralization itself is not such a bad thing...