Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859 Part 20

Tocqueville, February 10, 1858.

I was delighted, my dear Senior, to receive a letter from you dated Ma.r.s.eilles. You are right in remaining till the spring in the South. We trust to meet you in Paris in March.

I say no more, for I cannot write to you on what would most interest you--French politics. Much is to be said on them; but you will understand my silence if you study our new Law of Public Safety, and remember who is the new Home Minister.[1] For the first time in French history has such a post been filled by a general--and what a general!

I defer, therefore, until we meet, the expression of feelings and opinions which cannot be safely transmitted through the post, and only repeat how eager I am for our meeting.

Kind regards to Mrs. Senior.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[Footnote 1: General Espina.s.se.]

Tocqueville, February 21, 1858.

I received your letters with great pleasure, my dear Senior, and I think with still greater satisfaction that I shall soon be able to see you.

I shall probably arrive in Paris, with my wife, at about the same time as you will, that is to say, about the 19th of next month. I should have gone earlier if I were not occupied in planting and sowing, for I am doing a little farming to my great amus.e.m.e.nt.

I am delighted that you intend again to take up your quarters at the Hotel Bedford, as I intend also to stay there if I can find apartments.

I hope that we shall be good neighbours and see each other as frequently as such old friends ought to do. _A bientot!_

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[Mr. Senior ran over to England for a few weeks instead of remaining in Paris. The meeting between the two friends did not, therefore, take place till April.--ED.]

CONVERSATIONS.

_Paris, Sat.u.r.day, April_ 17, 1858.--We had a discussion at the Inst.i.tut to-day as to a bust to fill a niche in the anteroom. Rossi was proposed.

His political merits were admitted, but he was placed low as to his literary claims as an economist and a jurist. Dupin suggested Talleyrand, which was received with a universal groan, and failed for want of a seconder. Ultimately the choice fell on Dumont.

'Nothing that is published of Talleyrand's,' said Tocqueville to me as we walked home, 'has very great merit, nor indeed is much of it his own. He hated writing, let his reports and other state papers be drawn up by others, and merely retouched them. But in the archives of the _Affaires etrangeres_ there is a large quarto volume containing his correspondence with Louis XVIII during the Congress of Vienna. Nothing can be more charming. The great European questions which were then in debate, the diplomatic and social gossip of Vienna, the contemporary literature--in short, all that one clever _homme du monde_ could find to interest and amuse another, are treated with wit, brilliancy, and gaiety, supported by profound good sense. When that volume is published his bust will be placed here by acclamation.'

_Monday, April_ 19.--I dined with Lanjuinais, and met Tocqueville, Rivet, Dufaure, Corcelle, Freslon, and one or two others.

They attacked me about the change of sentiment in England with respect to Louis Napoleon.

'While he was useful to you,' they said, 'you steadily refused to admit that he was a tyrant, or even an usurper. You chose to disbelieve in the 3,000 men, women, and children ma.s.sacred on the Boulevards of Paris--in the 20,000 poisoned by jungle fever in Cayenne--in the 25,000 who have died of malaria, exposure, and bad food, working in gangs on the roads and in the marshes of the Metidja and Lambressa.'

'We did not _choose_', I answered, 'to disbelieve any thing. We were simply ignorant. _I_ knew all these facts, because I have pa.s.sed a part of every year since 1847 in Paris; because I walked along the Boulevards on the 20th of December 1851, and saw the walls of every house, from the Bastille to the Madeleine, covered with the marks of musket-b.a.l.l.s; because I heard in every society of the thousands who had been ma.s.sacred, and of the tens of thousands who had been _deportes_; but the untravelled English, and even the travelled English, except the few who live in France among the French, knew nothing of all this. Your press tells nothing. The nine millions of votes given to Louis Napoleon seemed to prove his popularity, and therefore the improbability of the tyranny of which he was accused by his enemies. _I_ knew that those nine millions of votes were extorted, or stolen by violence or fraud. But the English people did not know it. They accepted his election as the will of the nation, and though they might wonder at your choice, did not presume to blame it.'

'The time,' they answered, 'at which light broke in upon you is suspicious. Up to the 14th of January 1858 the oppression under which thirty-four millions of people within twenty-four miles of your coast, with whom you are in constant intercourse, was unknown to you. Their ruler insults you, and you instantly discover that he is an usurper and a tyrant. This looks as if the insult, and the insult alone, opened your eyes.'

'What opened our eyes,' I answered, 'was not the insult but the _loi de surete publique_. It was the first public act which showed to England the nature of your Government.

'When we found, erected in every department, a revolutionary tribunal, empowered to banish and transport without trial; when we found a rude soldier made Home Minister, and the country divided into five districts to be each governed by a marshal, we saw at once that France was under a violent military despotism. Until that law was pa.s.sed the surface was smooth. There was nothing in the appearance of France to show to a stranger that she was not governed by a Monarch, practically, indeed, absolute, but governing as many absolute Monarchs have done, mildly and usefully.

'Of course we might have found out the truth sooner if we had inquired.

And perhaps we ought to have inquired. We busy ourselves about our own affairs, and neglect too much those of other countries. In that sense you have a right to say that we chose to be ignorant, since our conduct was such as necessarily to make us ignorant. But it was not because Louis Napoleon was our ally that we chose to be ignorant, but because we habitually turn our eyes from the domestic affairs of the Continent, as things in which we have seldom a right to interfere, and in which, when we do interfere, we do more harm than good.'

We talked of the manner in which the _loi de surete publique_ has been carried out. And I mentioned 600 as the number of those who had suffered under it, as acknowledged to me by Blanchard in the beginning of March.

'It is much greater now,' said Lanjuinais. 'Berryer on his return from Italy, a week ago, slept in Ma.r.s.eilles. He was informed that more than 900 persons had pa.s.sed through Ma.r.s.eilles, _deportes_ under the new law to Algeria. They were of all cla.s.ses: artisans and labourers mixed with men of the higher and middle cla.s.ses. To these must be added those transported to Cayenne, who were sent by way of Havre. As for the number _expulses_ and _internes_ there are no data.'

'In the Department of Var, a man was found guilty in 1848 of joining in one of the revolutionary movements of that time. His complete innocence was soon proved; he was released, and has lived quietly on his little estate ever since. He was arrested under the new law and ordered to be _deporte_ to Algeria. His friends, in fact all his neighbours, remonstrated, and sent to Paris the proof that the original conviction was a mistake. "Qu'il aille tout de meme," was Espina.s.se's answer.

'In Calvados the Prefet, finding no one whom he could conscientiously arrest, took hold of one of the most respectable men in the department.

"If," he said, "I had arrested a man against whom there was plausible ground for suspicion, he might have been transported. This man _must_ be released."'

'Has he been released?' I asked.

'I have not heard,' was the answer. 'In all probability he has been.'

'In my department,' said Tocqueville, 'the _sous-prefet_, ordered by the Prefet to arrest somebody in the arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, was in the same perplexity as the Prefet of Calvados. "I can find no fit person," he said to me. I believe that he reported the difficulty to the Prefet, and that the vacancy was supplied from some other arrondiss.e.m.e.nt.

'What makes this frightful,' he added, 'is that we now know that deportation is merely a slow death. Scarcely any of the victims of 1851 and 1852 are living.'

'I foretold that,' I said, 'at the time, as you will find if you look at my article on Lamartine, published in the "Edinburgh Review."'[1]

[Footnote 1: See _Journals in France and Italy_.--ED.]

_April_ 20.--We talked of the political influence in France of the _hommes de lettres_.

'It began,' said Tocqueville, 'with the Restoration. Until that time we had sometimes, though very rarely, statesmen who became writers, but never writers who became statesmen,'

'You had _hommes de lettres_,' I said, 'in the early Revolutionary a.s.semblies--Mirabeau for instance.'

'Mirabeau,' he answered, 'is your best example, for Mirabeau, until he became a statesman, lived by his pen. Still I should scarcely call a man of his high birth and great expectations _un homme de lettres_. That appellation seems to belong to a man who owes his position in early life to literature. Such a man is Thiers, or Guizot, as opposed to such men as Gladstone, Lord John Russell, or Montalembert.'

_Wednesday, April_ 21.--I dined with D. and met, among several others, Admiral Matthieu the Imperial Hydrographer, and a general whose name I did not catch. I talked to the general about the army.

'We are increasing it,' he said, 'but not very materially. We are rather giving ourselves the means of a future rapid increase, than making an immediate augmentation. We are raising the number of men from 354,000 to 392,400, in round numbers to 400,000; but the princ.i.p.al increase is in the _cadres_, the officers attached to each battalion. We have increased them by more than one third. So that if a war should break out we can instantly--that is to say in three months, increase our army to 600,000 or even 700,000 men. Soldiers are never wanting in France, the difficulty always is to find officers.'

'I hear,' I said, 'that you are making great improvements in your artillery.'

'We are,' he answered. 'We are applying to it the principle of the Minie musket, and we are improving the material. We hope to make our guns as capable of resisting rapid and continued firing as well and as long as the English and the Swedish guns, which are the best in Europe, can do.

And we find that we can throw a ball on the Minie principle with equal precision twice as far. This will double the force of all our batteries.'

'Are _you_,' he asked me, 'among those who have taken shares in the Russian railways?'

'No,' I said. 'They are the last that I wish to encourage.'