Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859 Part 29

the true one?'

'The answers to your first question,' said Beaumont, 'are two. In 1835 Tocqueville was young and inexperienced. Like most young politicians, he thought that he ought to be an independent member, and to vote, on every occasion, according to his conscience, untrammelled by party connections.

He afterwards found his mistake.

'And, secondly, if he had chosen to submit to a leader, it would not have been Mole.

'Mole represented a principle to which Guizot was then vehemently opposed, though he was afterwards its incarnation--the subservience of the Ministry and of the Parliament to the King. In that house of 450 members, there were 220 placemen; 200 were the slaves of the King. They received from him their orders; from time to time, in obedience to those orders, they even opposed his Ministers.

'This, however, seldom occurred, for the King contrived always to have a devoted majority in his Cabinet.

'It was this that drove the Duc de Broglie from the Government and prevented his ever resuming office.

'"I could not bear," he said to me, "to hear Sebastiani repeat, in every council and on every occasion, 'Ce que le Roi vient de dire est parfaitement juste.'" The only Ministers that ventured to have an opinion of their own were those of the 12th of May 1839, of which Dufaure, Villemain, and Pa.s.sy were members, and that of the 1st of March 1840, of which Thiers was the leader; and Tocqueville supported them both.

'When Guizot, who had maintained the principle of Ministerial and Parliamentary, in opposition to that of Monarchical Governments, with unequalled eloquence, vigour, and I may add violence, suddenly turned round and became the most servile member of the King's servile majority, Tocqueville fell back into opposition.

'In general it is difficult to act with an opposition systematically and, at the same time, honestly. For the measures proposed by a Government are, for the most part, good. But, during the latter part of Louis Philippe's reign, it was easy, for the Government proposed merely to do nothing--either abroad or at home. I do not complain of the essence of M.

Guizot's foreign policy, though there was a want of dignity in its forms.

'There was nothing useful to be done, and, under such circ.u.mstances, all action would have been mischievous.

'But at home _every_ thing was to be done. Our code required to be amended, our commerce and our industry, and our agriculture required to be freed, our munic.i.p.al and commercial inst.i.tutions were to be created, our taxation was to be revised, and, above all, our parliamentary system--under which, out of 36,000,000 of French, only 200,000 had votes, under which the Deputies bought a majority of the 200,000 electors, and the King bought a majority of the 450 deputies--required absolute reconstruction.

'Louis Philippe would allow nothing to be done. If he could have prevented it we should not have had a railroad. He would not allow the most important of all, that to Ma.r.s.eilles, to be finished. He would not allow our monstrous centralisation, or our monstrous protective system, to be touched. The owners of forests were permitted to deprive us of cheap fuel, the owners of forges of cheap iron, the owners of factories of cheap clothing.

'In some of this stupid inaction Guizot supported him conscientiously, for, like Thiers, he is ignorant of the first principles of political economy, but he knows too much the philosophy of Government not to have felt, on every other point, that the King was wrong.

'If he supposed that Tocqueville wished to be in his place, on the conditions on which he held office, he was utterly mistaken.

'Tocqueville was ambitious; he wished for power. So did I. We would gladly have been real Ministers, but nothing would have tempted us to be the slaves of the _pensee immuable_, or to sit in a Cabinet in which we were constantly out-voted, or to defend, as Guizot had to do in the Chamber, conduct which we had disapproved in the Council.

'You ask why Tocqueville joined the Gauche whom he despised, against the Droit with whom he sympathised?

'He voted with the Gauche only where he thought their votes right. Where he thought them wrong, as, for instance, in all that respected Algeria, he left them. They would have abandoned the country, and, when that could not be obtained, they tried to prevent the creation of the port.

'Very early, however, in his parliamentary life, he had found that an independent member--a member who supporting no party is supported by no party---is useless. He allowed himself therefore to be considered a member of the Gauche; but I never could persuade him to be tolerably civil to them. Once, after I had been abusing him for his coldness to them, he shook hands with Romorantin, then looked towards me for my applause, but I doubt whether he ever shook hands with him again. In fact almost his only point of contact with them was their disapprobation of the inactivity of Louis Philippe. Many of them were Bonapartists like Abbatucci and Romorantin. Some were Socialists, some were Republicans; the majority of them wished to overthrow the Monarchy, and the minority looked forward with indifference to its fall.

'They hated him as much as he did them, much more indeed, for his mind was not formed for hatred. They excluded him from almost all committees.'

'Would it not have been wise in him,' I asked, 'to retire from the Chamber during the King's life, or at least until it contained a party with whom he could cordially act?'

'Perhaps,' said Beaumont, 'that would have been the wisest course for him--and indeed for me. I entered the Chamber reluctantly. All my family were convinced that a political man not in the Chamber was nothing. So I let myself be persuaded. Tocqueville required no persuasion, he was anxious to get in, and when in it was difficult to persuade oneself to go out. We always hoped for a change. The King might die, or he might be forced--as he had been forced before--to submit to a liberal Ministry which might have been a temporary cure, or even to a Parliamentary reform which might have been a complete cure. Duchatel, who is a better politician than Guizot, was superseding him in the confidence of the King and of the Chamber.

'In fact, the liberal Ministry and Parliamentary reform did come at last, though not until it was too late to save the Monarchy.

'If Tocqueville had retired in disgust from the Chamber of Deputies, he might not have been a member of the Const.i.tuent, or of the Legislative a.s.sembly. This would have been a misfortune--though the shortness of the duration of the first, and the hostility of the President during the second, and also the state of his health, prevented his influencing the destinies of the Republic as much as his friends expected him to do, and indeed as he expected himself.'

'I have often,' I said, 'wondered how you and Tocqueville, and the other eminent men who composed the committee for preparing the Const.i.tution, could have made one incapable of duration, and also incapable of change.'

'What,' he asked, 'are the princ.i.p.al faults which you find in the Const.i.tution?'

'First,' I said, 'that you gave to your President absolute authority over the army, the whole patronage of the most centralised and the most place-hunting country in the world, so that there was not one of your population of 36,000,000 whose interests he could not seriously affect; and, having thus armed him with irresistible power, you gave him the strongest possible motives to employ it against the Const.i.tution by turning him out at the end of his four years, incapable of re-election, unpensioned and unprovided for, so that he must have gone from the elysee Bourbon to a debtor's prison.

'Next, that, intending your President to be the subordinate Minister of the a.s.sembly, you gave him the same origin, and enabled him to say, "I represent the people as much as you do, indeed much more. They _all_ voted for me, only a fraction of them voted for any one of you." Then that origin was the very worst that could possibly be selected, the votes of the uneducated mult.i.tude; you must have foreseen that they would give you a demagogue or a charlatan. The absence of a second Chamber, and the absence of a power of dissolution, are minor faults, but still serious ones. When the President and the a.s.sembly differed, they were shut up together to fight it out without an umpire.'

'That we gave the President too much power,' said Beaumont, 'the event has proved. But I do not see how, in the existing state of feeling in France, we could have given him less. The French have no self-reliance.

They depend for everything on their administrators. The first revolution and the first empire destroyed all their local authorities and also their aristocracy. Local authorities may be gradually re-created, and an aristocracy may gradually arise, but till these things have been done the Executive must be strong.

'If he had been re-eligible, our first President would virtually have been President for life. Having decided that his office should be temporary, we were forced to forbid his immediate re-election.

'With respect to his being left unprovided for, no man who had filled the office decently would have been refused an ample provision on quitting it. As for this man, no provision that we could have made for him, if we had given him three or four millions a year, would have induced him to give up what he considered a throne which was his by descent. He swore to the Const.i.tution with an _idee fixe _to destroy it. He attempted to do so on the 29th of January 1849, not two months after his election.

'I agree with you that the fault of the Const.i.tution was that it allowed the President to be chosen by universal suffrage; and that the fault of the people was that they elected a pretender to the throne, whose ambition, rashness, and faithlessness had been proved.

'No new Const.i.tution can work if the Executive conspires against it. But deliberating and acting in the midst of _emeutes_, with a Chamber and a population divided into half a dozen hostile factions, the two Royalist parties hating one another, the Bonapartists bent on destroying all freedom, and the Socialists all individual property, what could we do? My wish and Tocqueville's was to give the election to the Chamber. We found that out of 650 members we could not hope that our proposition would be supported by more than 200. You think that we ought to have proposed two Chambers. The great use of two Chambers is to strengthen the Executive by enabling it to play one against the other; but we felt that our Executive was dangerously strong, and we believed, I think truly, that a single Chamber would resist him better than two could do. The provision which required more than a bare majority for the revision of the Const.i.tution was one of those which we borrowed from America. It had worked well there. In the general instability we wished to have one anchor, one mooring ring fixed. We did not choose that the whole framework of our Government should be capable of being suddenly destroyed by a majority of one, in a moment of excitement and perhaps by a parliamentary surprise.

'With respect to your complaint that, there being no power of dissolution, there was no means of taking the opinion of the people, the answer is, that to give the President power of dissolution would have been to invite him to a _coup d'etat._ With no Chamber to watch him, he would have been omnipotent.

'I agree with you that the Const.i.tution was a detestable one. But even now, looking back to the times, and to the conditions under which we made it, I do not think that it was in our power to make a good one.'

'Tocqueville,' I said, 'told me that Cormenin was your Solon, that he brought a bit of const.i.tution to you every morning, and that it was usually adopted.'[1]

'Tocqueville's memory,' answered Beaumont, 'deceived him. Cormenin was our president. It is true that he brought a bit of const.i.tution every morning. But it scarcely ever was adopted or capable of being adopted.

It was in general bad in itself, or certain to be rejected by the a.s.sembly. He wished to make the President a puppet. But he exercised over us a mischievous influence. He tried to revenge himself for our refusal of all his proposals by rendering our deliberations fruitless. And as the power of a president over a deliberative body is great, he often succeeded.

'Many of our members were unaccustomed to public business and lost their tempers or their courage when opposed. The Abbe Lamennais proposed a double election of the president. But of thirty members, only four, among whom were Tocqueville and I, supported him. He left the committee and never returned to it. Tocqueville and I were anxious to introduce double election everywhere. It is the best palliative of universal suffrage.'

'The double election,' I said, 'of the American President is nugatory.

Every elector is chosen under a pledge to nominate a specified candidate.'

'That is true,' said Beaumont, 'as to the President, but not as to the other functionaries thus elected. The senators chosen by double election are far superior to the representatives chosen by direct voting.

'We proposed, too, to begin by establis.h.i.+ng munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions. We were utterly defeated. The love of centralisation is almost inherent in French politicians. They see the evil of local government--its stupidity, its corruption, its jobbing. They see the convenience of centralisation--the ease with which a centralised administration works.

Feelings which are really democratic have reached those who fancy themselves aristocrats. We had scarcely a supporter.

'We should perhaps have a few now, when experience has shown that centralisation is still more useful to an usurper than it is to a regular Government.'

[Footnote 1: See Vol. I. p. 212.--ED.]

_August_ 18.--We drove in the afternoon to the coast, and sat in the shade of the little ricks of sea-weed, gazing on an open sea as blue as the Mediterranean.

We talked of America.

'I can understand,' said Madame de Tocqueville, 'the indignation of the North against you. It is, of course, excessive, but they had a right to expect you to be on their side in an anti-slavery war.'

'They had no right,' I said, 'to expect from our Government anything but absolute neutrality.'

'But you need not,' she replied, 'have been so eager to put the South on the footing of belligerents.'