Alexis de Tocqueville tried to make an American-style constitution work in France. The character of its first president killed it.
Alexis de Tocqueville tried to make an American-style constitution work in France. The character of its first president killed it.
I n parts one and two of this essay on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Recollections, I looked at the fall of the July Monarchy of King Louis-Phillippe and the failure of the socialist revolutionaries to capitalize on that fall. Today’s installment examines Tocqueville’s account of the effort to write a new French constitution and make the Second Republic work.
The Philosopher-Lawyer in the Arena
With the revolution accomplished, even before the socialists were suppressed, the next order of business was creating the French Second Republic. Tocqueville felt it essential for the new assembly to “hasten to take advantage of the moral force the assembly derived from being elected by the people” and establish a new, durable republic. Instead, he witnessed the causes of its premature death.
No living figure in the Second Republic had real experience with constitutional, republican, or democratic politics. Even Tocqueville had only studied it, and complained that, by 1849, “everyone wanted to get rid of the constitution, some by way of socialism, others by monarchy. . . . Maintaining the Republic was a very difficult challenge because those who loved it were for the most part incapable or unworthy of leading it, while those who were in a position to establish and govern it hated it.”
Rising on the reputation made by Democracy in America, Tocqueville had served as a deputy in the national assembly since 1839. In 1848–49, in recognition of his reputation as a political thinker, Tocqueville took on important leadership roles. He sat on the committee charged with drafting a new constitution for the Second Republic and later served as foreign minister to Louis-Napoleon.
Like Edmund Burke and John Adams, Tocqueville was trained as a lawyer, which inclined him to think in terms of rules and how they worked when applied. Tocqueville saw lawyers as natural allies of order but also a class that could menace the regime if they were denied the status they crave. “There is infinitely more natural affinity between men of law and executive power,” he concluded, “than between men of law and the people.”
He turned his skeptical eye on the mental habits that lawyers brought to politics. “Some lawyers are in the habit of arguing for causes in which they do not believe, while others easily persuade themselves that the cause they are pleading for is indeed the right one; it is difficult for any lawyer to escape one or the other of these two positions.” In the assembly, Tocqueville commented on one celebrated attorney “who became so accustomed at an early age to the playacting that is the daily fare in our courtrooms that he had lost the ability to express his true feelings, if by chance he had any.”
Describing M. Hébert, a rigid, unbending magistrate who became a minister but “remained a prosecutor to his very marrow,” Tocqueville sketched how he “had the character of one and looked the part”:
Imagine a narrow, pinched weasel’s face, compressed at the temples; an angular forehead, nose, and chin; cold, penetrating eyes; taut, pinched lips; and a long quill generally held across his mouth, which from a distance looked like the bristling whiskers of a cat, and you will have before you the portrait of a man who resembled a carnivorous animal more than anyone I have ever known.
The Representatives, Assembled
When the new assembly met in early May, there was more posturing and playacting than statesmanship. Tocqueville noted various factions interrupting proceedings to shout “Vive la République” and all others competing to join as loudly as possible in the show. There was a decree to have everyone dress like stage actors playing Robespierre, which was mostly ignored. Between the political veterans who pretended bonhomie while hating one another and the political novices who didn’t know what was important and what was routine, Tocqueville quipped (prefiguring William F. Buckley Jr.), “nine hundred English or American farmers chosen at random would have made a more convincing political body.”
Tocqueville grasped the dynamics of how political bodies actually reach decisions. He noted how politicians had “a faculty that is precious and at times even necessary in politics, to create temporary convictions in accordance with their passions and interests of the moment, so that they are able to do honorably things that are not very honorable.” He was willing to work with anyone who brought something to the table: “Virtues of any kind are rare enough that those who have them should not be harassed about their type and relative importance.”
On the other hand, in spite of his own gifts as an aphorist, Tocqueville had little use for political rhetoric: He did “not regard as talent the ability to turn brilliant but empty phrases, which are like fine engraved dishes with nothing on them.” Even genuinely good speeches could be counterproductive. On one occasion, he concluded that one of his allies “turned the tide against us by making a very fine speech in our favor,” alarming opponents. “Parties consistently make the same mistake because they think only of the pleasure they take from the words of their great orators and never of the danger that those words may goad their adversaries into action.” And that was before televised legislatures, 30-second commercials, and viral moments. By contrast, “when the circumstances are right the artless speaker can sometimes have a greater effect than the finest orator” because he “comes to the podium with but a single idea — the idea of the moment.”
He noted the difficulty of dealing rationally with parties in the grip of populist enthusiasms: “A demagogic party has so many heads, and chance plays such a large, and deliberation such a small, part in its actions, that it is virtually impossible to say what the party wants after the fact or what it wanted before.” Parties that don’t know what they want are likewise too familiar to us now.
Making a Republic
As one of 18 members of a commission, Tocqueville took up in May 1848 the work of drafting a new constitution. But he immediately recognized that its deeply divided membership — much of it staffed with men who knew nothing but how to administer a monarchical bureaucracy, and few of whom had seriously studied other forms of government — “bore little resemblance to the men who, with Washington in the chair, drafted the American constitution sixty years ago — men sure of their goal and thoroughly familiar with the means of achieving it.” Worse, in contrast to the Philadelphia convention’s determination to shut out the outside world and think through every point of contention, the commission rushed its work in the crisis of the June Days.
Tocqueville hoped, for the sake of the commission, that its minutes were never published: “Of all the commissions I ever served on, I never saw one worse than this.” He complained that the man responsible for assembling the final draft “spoke as if it were a chemistry experiment” and “exemplified the habits and failings of the writer’s trade” because he was consumed with the search for novelty: “Institutions that had been previously tried in other times and places were as detestable to him as clichés, and in his eyes the primary merit of a law was to bear no resemblance to anything that had gone before.” This likewise contrasted with the American framers, who imitated state, English, and Roman institutions where possible and forged their own creations only to avoid the specific pitfalls of past republics.
Much of the debate turned upon the balance of power between the executive and the assembly. Tocqueville wanted a bicameral legislature on the American model, but proponents of a single chamber won the day. What he conceded to be their best argument was that “in France executive power exercised by a single individual elected by the people would surely become dominant if checked solely by a legislative power weakened by its division into two chambers.” By contrast, Tocqueville felt that the usual argument for a directly elected president — that he would need a popular mandate to avoid becoming “the plaything of the legislature” — did not apply in France due to its centralized bureaucracy with the habits of following the monarch.
Tocqueville was not reflexively wedded to the American example. He felt that the French constitution should be easier to amend than the American constitution, because given the French history of revolutions, “I thought it best to treat the French people as one would treat a madman, who is best left unshackled lest the constraint drive him wild.” He concluded that a republican executive was not right for France, as it “always promises more but delivers less freedom than a constitutional monarchy.” He argued during the debate over executive power, citing the American experience of the day, that “in America the president has little power. He appoints only a small number of officials. But in France, where the executive power controls a large [number] of positions and can thus make many officials beholden to him, the president’s excessive influence would constitute an enormous danger.”
At the time, both Tocqueville and his friend and American traveling companion Beaumont (also on the commission) supported limiting the president to a single four-year term in order to constrain the presidency. Tocqueville came to recognize, three years later, that this was “a serious error, which I fear will have very unfortunate consequences.” They failed to foresee what sort of man might win the presidency.
Tocqueville’s greatest success on the committee was to strengthen the French judiciary’s immunity from political removal. On this, the lawyers on the commission prevailed over the more radical republicans. Judicial independence, in Tocqueville’s view, “does far more to preserve the independence of citizens than to enhance the power of those who govern.” That remains true.
Riding the Tiger
By November 1848, the Republic was pledging not lofty abstractions but “family, work, property and public order.” Popular opinion was united only on hatred of the Ancien Régime. The French people desperately wanted order, they desperately wanted change, and they still longed nostalgically for the glory of Napoleon Bonaparte. Only Louis-Napoleon — Bonaparte’s nephew and heir to the family title — could promise all three, and he had the virtue of being out of the country. The thirst for an outsider combined with the lure of a dynast proved overpowering.
Elected to the assembly in June, Louis-Napoleon was in England during the June Days because the assembly insisted on enforcing a Bourbon-era law against the Bonapartes living on French soil. His stock with the public soared in absentia in contrast to the mayhem and squabbling in Paris, which made the ruling class look small in comparison to the man offstage.
Louis-Napoleon returned to France in September after five different constituencies elected him to the assembly in the next round of legislative balloting. In December 1848, to the shock of the entire political class (including Louis-Napoleon himself), he was overwhelmingly elected president of the new republic, with 74 percent of the vote out of 7.5 million cast. The margin of victory compelled the assembly to overlook the fact that Louis-Napoleon, as a Swiss citizen, was constitutionally ineligible for the office. From the outset, the restraints of law were inadequate to hold him.
Among all the flawed individuals elevated to office in 1848, Louis-Napoleon was the one whose vices were fatal to the Second Republic. As Tocqueville observed, “had Louis-Napoleon been a wise man or a genius, he would never have become president of the Republic.” Reckless in two prior efforts to seize power, which had led to his imprisonment, “his mind was inconsistent and confused, filled with large but ill-assorted ideas, which he borrowed from . . . very different and often contradictory sources.”
Raised under constant surveillance and steeped in conspiracies, he had developed a sphinxlike gift of inscrutability. Tocqueville commented that “words addressed to him were like stones tossed into a well; one could hear the sound they made, but one never knew what became of them.” He required the aid of more organized men, however, because he was too much a libertine — especially with his profligate womanizing — and thus “squandered his energy this way daily and blunted and constricted his ambition” as a result.
Many of his backers “chose him not for his worth but for his presumed mediocrity. They thought they had found an instrument they could use at will and break whenever they chose. In this they were quite mistaken.” Ultimately, “ambitious men found their master in a man they had chosen to head France solely because they thought he was an imbecile, which he was not, and because they believed they would be able to get rid of him when the time was right and it pleased them to do so, which they could not.” Louis-Napoleon “often hinted to me himself that they despised him but also sought to control him.” Writing in 1851, Tocqueville concluded bitterly, “I feel no pity for them right now. . . . My consolation is the thought that posterity will mock these great geniuses as they deserve.”
For Tocqueville’s own part, “once [Louis-Napoleon] was elected, my first thought was that the best course of action would be to try to reach an understanding with him, not to overthrow the republic but to modify it in such a way as to create an ample place for him within it.” Like the mainstream Republicans of the Trump era, he tried everything he could to ride the tiger. The result did more to degrade Tocqueville than to elevate Louis-Napoleon.
Tocqueville kept old rivals of the new regime at bay; he “overwhelmed” them “with deference” by asking their advice “which I hardly ever followed.” As he observed, “in a negotiation an appeal to the vanity of one’s partners is the best way to proceed because it often yields substantial benefits in return for minimal concessions,” but first “one has to put one’s own vanity entirely aside and worry exclusively about the success of one’s designs.” He was adept at gathering dirt, too: “Nothing about public life amused me more than to entice politicians into talking about their enemies . . . especially when they had previously been confidants or friends. . . . At such times some fine truths are revealed in passing.”
Critics warned against joining Louis-Napoleon’s cabinet, which combined serious figures and inept hacks. On that score, Tocqueville concluded that “our critics were right” that joining a cabinet with two incompetents was a mistake: “Their notorious inadequacy meant that their positions were in a sense always open, thus creating a sort of permanent ministerial crisis.” Looking back on the internal dynamics of that government, he quoted “the old Norman proverb ‘God preserve me from my friends, and I will take care of my enemies myself.’”
The coup that killed the Second Republic would come from its putative friends.
In part four: How the Second Republic died.