Event
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by Bruce Kent
Both Tocqueville and Marx were concerned with how to reconcile the rapid emergence of political democracy with the maintenance of civil liberties and the promotion of social justice. Each saw the French revolution of 1848, which ushered in a short-lived republic founded upon universal male suffrage, as a trial run for democracy; and each published brilliant analytical accounts of the events in France which are still indispensable texts for historians of the period. Tocqueville's Recollections are the elegant, but unfinished, memoirs of a political insider. They set the scene for the events of 1848 by recounting his experience as an independent opposition member in the Chamber of Deputies under the July Monarchy in the 1840s. They then provide an eye-witness account of the onset of revolution in Paris on 24 February, the process of the author's election to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 as a representative of the Normandy Department of La Manche, his subsequent participation in the Committee which drafted the Constitution of the Second Republic, and finally his brief stint as Foreign Minister of the Republic in the second half of 1849. Marx, an outsider both geographically and socially, wrote two polemical, but exceptionally well-informed, extended pieces on the revolution. The first, entitled The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, provided an incisive analysis of the socio-economic character of the July Monarchy and the bloody confrontation which developed between the bourgeois republican regime which had been brought into being by universal suffrage and the stripling working class moverment which the revolution also propelled onto the political stage in Paris. The second, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, was a satirical account of how the political adventurer, Louis Bonaparte, a soi-disant nephew of Napoleon I, traded upon the name of his uncle and the Angst created by revolution and counter-revolution to have himself elected President of the Republic in December 1848 and to install himself three years later as Napoleon III, the dictatorial monarch of the Second Empire.
This paper provides some illustrations of the frequently remarked convergence between the views of Tocqueville, the liberal-conservative Norman landed aristocrat, and Marx, the radical Rhineland political philosopher and social theorist, about the causes of the revolution and the social and institutional fault lines of the Second Republic. It will then reflect briefly upon why Tocqueville and Marx, despite their similar diagnoses of the social and political malaise of France, offered such contrasting prescriptions to ensure the health of the French body politick in the future. Manning Clark's dissertation 'The Ideal of Alexis de Tocqueville' is an elegant analysis and critique of the underlying idealism of Tocqueville's political and social thought which helps to explain why his prognostications differed from those of Marx. Yet Tocqueville was no more a crude idealist than Marx a crude materialist. Although the conflicting views of the two thinkers about how democracy was to be house-trained stemmed partly from their divergent philosophical standpoints, they were also coloured by their social position, which led them to designate different social groups as the principal agents of transition to a more egalitarian and just society.
The strictures of Tocqueville and Marx on the July Monarchy indicate that they both detested the society spawned by the growth of the capitalist system in France. Tocqueville's aristocratic disdain and Marx's Young Hegelian moral outrage are focussed on a common enemy. Tocqueville's antipathy to the bourgeois rulers of France is clear in the opening pages of his Recollections:
'The spirit peculiar to the middle class became the general spirit of the government. Mistress of all, as no aristocracy ever has been or perhaps ever will be, the middle class, which must be called the ruling class, entrenched in its power and, shortly afterwards, in its selfishness, treated government like a private business, each member thinking of public affairs only in so far as they could be turned to his private profit, and in his petty prosperity easily forgetting the people. Posterity ... will perhaps never know how far the government of that time towards the end took on the features of a trading company whose every operation is directed to the benefit that its members may derive therefrom. These vices were linked to the natural instincts of the dominant class, to its absolute power, and to the enervation and corruption of the age. King Louis-Philippe did much to make them grow. He was the accident that made the illness fatal. ( Tocqueville 1971 : 6)
Tocqueville's demolition of the head of the July Monarchy was merciless:
(He) 'shared most of the good and bad qualities associated primarily with the lower ranks of society. ... His politeness was extreme, but without discrimination or dignity - the politeness of a tradesman rather than of a prince. He had no taste for letters or the fine arts, but cared passionately for business. ... His mind was distinguished, but restricted and clogged by the meanness and narrowness of his soul. ... Placed at the head of an aristocracy, he might perhaps have had a happy influence upon it. At the head of the bourgeoisie, he pushed it down the slope that it was by nature only too inclined to go. It was a marriage of the vices, and this union, which first provided the strength of the one and then brought about the demoralization of the other, ended by bringing both to destruction'. (7-8)
Tocqueville's prediction of a social revolution in the Chamber of Deputies on 28 January 1848 was prescient. The working classes, he observed, were
' ... constantly repeating that all the people above them are incapable and unworthy to rule them (and) that the division of property in the world up to now is unjust. ... Do you not realize that when such opinions take root and spread ... they must sooner or later (I do not know when, I do not know how) bring in their train the most terrifying of revolutions? Gentlemen, my profound conviction is that we are lulling ourselves to sleep over an active volcano. (16-19)
Marx's appraisal of the July Monarchy was similar, although it pinpointed the leading role of what he called the finance aristocracy, an asset-stripping clique of shady nobles and corrupt businessmen, who were likened, in a somewhat shrill passage, to the lumpenproletariat, the urban under-class:
'The July Monarchy was nothing other than a joint-stock company for the exploitation of France's national wealth, the dividends of which were divided among ministers, Chambers, 240,000 voters and their adherents. Louis Philippe was the director of this company ...'. The finance aristocracy, Marx declared, dominated a society pervaded by a mania 'to get rich not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others. Clashing everywhere with the bourgeois laws themselves, an unbridled assertion of unhealthy and dissolute appetites manifested itself, particularly at the top of bourgeois society - lusts wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes debauched, where money, filth and blood commingle. The finance aristocracy, in its mode of acquisition as well as in its pleasures, is nothing but the rebirth of the lumpenproletariat on the heights of bourgeois society'. (Marx and Engels 1951: 130-31)
Tocqueville and Marx also concur about the reasons for the social and institutional fragility of the Second Republic which succeeded the July Monarchy. The Second Republic owed its birth partly to the panicky abdication of Louis-Philippe, and began with a flurry of gestures by an equally nervous liberal Provisional Government (hastily formed in the offices of the two leading opposition newspapers in Paris) which aroused expectations of a thorough-going transformation of society. The institution of universal male suffrage (for the first time in modern European history since the Convention of 1792) and the abolition of the death penalty for political offenses were major advances towards political democracy. Also significant were the abolition of slavery, the prohibition of imprisonment for debt and the establishment of the Luxembourg Commission, presided over by the Socialist Minister of Progress, Louis Blanc, which was to investigate how to improve working conditions. These measures kindled the hopes of the small, but vocal, radical left that a social as well as democratic republic would be achieved. Symptoms of the heady pluralism which flourished in response to the proclamation of the freedoms of the press and assembly, were the appearance of 479 new newspapers (not all democratic), the growth of a tangle of political clubs, and a rash of posters of different hues promoting causes such as rights for women (in yellow), the old age pension (blue), and the right to divorce (bright pink and ubiquitous). Disillusionment began to set in when the overwhelming majority of the Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage in April turned out to be conservative republicans and royalists from the provinces. It was not long before the Assembly's decision to downsize the National Workshops (an outdoor work-for-the-dole system established in February as a sop to the Parisian unemployed) triggered the bloody class struggle of the June Days in which 3,000 Parisians perished. (Price 1972; Robertson 1952: 56)
Although they viewed events from opposite sides of the barricades, both Tocqueville and Marx recognised the destructive effect of this emerging class war on the democratic institutions of the Second Republic. Tocqueville's horror and loathing of working class socialism was clearly indicated by his description of the veteran (former student) revolutionary leader, Auguste Blanqui, when he appeared on the rostrum of the newly elected Constituent Assembly during an occupation of that body by protesting radical revolutionaries and club members on 15 May:
'...Although I have never seen him again, the memory of him has filled me with disgust and horror ever since. He had sunken, withered cheeks, white lips, and a sickly, malign, dirty look like a pallid, mouldy corpse; he was wearing no visible linen; an old black frock coat covered his lean, emaciated limbs tightly; he looked as if he had lived in a sewer and only just come out. I was told that this was Blanqui.' (Tocqueville 1971: 147-8)
He therefore insisted that the subsequent repression during the June Days was 'a necessary crisis' which 'delivered the nation from oppression by the Paris workmen and restored it to control of its own fate'. But he conceded that henceforward 'the nation would be in some way changed. The former love of independence would be followed by a dread of, and perhaps distaste for, free institutions; after such an abuse of freedom, the reaction was inevitable'.(205-6)
The June Days and the resulting provisional dictatorship of the conservative Republican, Eugene Cavaignac, encouraged the Drafting Committee of the Constitution, of which Tocqueville was a member, to vest excessive power in the President of the Republic. Tocqueville agreed with the majority of the committee that executive power should be entrusted to one man: but he was initially concerned that popular election of the President would provoke a power struggle between the President and Legislative Assembly which would undermine the Republic and lead to a restoration of the monarchy:
'In a country without monarchical traditions , in which the executive branch has always been weak and continues to be thoroughly restricted, nothing could be wiser than to entrust the choice of its representative to the nation. A president lacking the strength derived from such an origin would be the plaything of the (legislative) Assemblies, but our situation was quite different. We were emerging from a monarchy, and even the Republicans' habits were monarchical. In any case, centralization made our position unique, for it meant that the whole administration of the country, from the greatest to the most trivial matters, would be in the president's hands' ( 218-24)
In the aftermath of the 'anarchy' of the June Days, however, he eventually cast aside these fears and spoke out in favour of a directly elected President who would be able to check any radical behaviour on the part of the single chamber legislature. (Jardin 1988: 419-20)
Marx heartily concurred that the bourgeois republic had been mortally wounded by the June Days; and he also considered, like Tocqueville, that its demise was hastened by the Constitution's encouragement of a power struggle between the President and the Legislature As he observed in the Eighteenth Brumaire:
'On one side are seven hundred and fifty representatives of the people, elected by universal suffrage, and eligible for re-election; they form an uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence ... and, by its permanence, holds the front of the stage. On the other side is the President, with all the attributes of royal power, with authority to appoint and dismiss his ministers independently of the National Assembly, with all the resources of the executive power in his hands, bestowing all posts ... He has the whole of the armed forces behind him ... enjoys the privilege of pardoning individual criminals, of suspending National Guards, of discharging, with the concurrence of the Council of State, general, cantonal and municipal councils elected by the citizens themselves.'
He also endorsed Tocqueville's view that what we now call the problem of cohabitation was compounded by the direct election of the President:
'While the votes of France are split up among the seven hundred and fifty members of the National Assembly, they are (in the presidential election), on the contrary, concentrated on a single individual. While each separate representative of the people represents only this or that party, this or that town ... he (the President) is the elect of the nation and the act of his election is the trump that the sovereign people plays once every four years. ... As against the Assembly, he possesses a sort of divine right; he is President by the grace of the people.' (Marx and Engels 1951: 236-7)
Finally, both Tocqueville and Marx entertained serious reservations about Louis Napoleon, who was elected President in December 1848 and three years later destroyed the Second Republic with his coup d'etat of December 1851. Although Tocqueville viewed Louis Napoleon, like the June Days, as a necessary evil, his Recollections were so unflattering to France's self-appointed leader as to encourage many modern scholars to classify him as a proto-fascist. Napoleon III, Tocqueville concluded,
'owed his success and strength more to his madness than to his sense, for the world's stage is a strange place. Sometimes the worst plays are the ones that come off best there. If Louis Napoleon had been a wise man, or a genius if you like, he would never have been President of the Republic. He trusted in his star, firmly believing himself the instrument of destiny. .... He was also quite incapable of giving any reason for his faith, for while he had a sort of abstract adoration for the people, he had very little taste for liberty. In political matters, the basic characteristic of his mind was hate and contempt for assemblies. ... The pride he derived from his name, which knew no limit, would willingly bow before the nation but revolted at the idea of submitting to the influence of a parliament. ..For all his good manners, traces of the adventurer and the prince of gamblers shone through. He continued to take pleasure in inferior company when he was no longer obliged to live in it. ...His inferiority in discussion made the company of men of parts uncomfortable to him. ... He wanted believers in his star and vulgar adorers of his fortune. So one could not reach him except through a group of intimate servants and personal friends ... a pack of sharpers and knaves. To conclude, nothing was worse than his familiars except his family, who were mostly good-for-nothings and hussies. This was the man whom the need for a leader and the power of a memory had set at the head of France...'. (Tocqueville 1971: 250-3)
Whereas Tocqueville despised Louis Napoleon for the company he kept, Marx sought in his Class Struggles to ridicule him as 'king of the lumpenproletariat'. He attributed his ability to win three quarters of the vote in the presidential election of 10 December 1848 primarily to his exploitation of the Napoleonic myth. Most important was his reminder to the French peasantry, who were resentful of the increased taxation levied by the Republic, of how well they had done under the First Empire. Also influential was the sedulously cultivated notion that a second Bonaparte would somehow restore to the nation, and particularly the Army, the international prestige which it had enjoyed under Napoleon I. (Marx and Engels 1951: 159-60) To demystify this empty demagogy Marx published his sequel to Class Struggles under the title The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte - a satirical reference to 18 Brumaire 1799, the day on which the original Napoleon seized power. To drive home the point he began the piece with the famous quip:
'Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' (225)
Marx's detailed account of the rise of Louis Napoleon from 1849 to 1851 corroborates Tocqueville's judgment of him as a political charlatan: but it also reveals the fascist-style political skills he displayed in discrediting both the left and the right wing of the Legislative Assembly, subverting the bureaucracy and the Army, deploying the thugs of his Society of 10 December to intimidate the electorate, and finally using a red scare in order to reconcile the bourgeoisie to his eventual coup. It was this last ploy which prompted Marx to observe: 'The French bourgeoisie balked at the domination of the working proletariat; it has brought the lumpenproletariat to domination, with the chief of the Society of December 10 at the head'. (299) Yet the price the bourgeoisie payed for this tactic, he emphasised, was their own subjugation.
So much for the remarkable consensus between Tocqueville and Marx about the socially and politically dysfunctional character of the 'bourgeois' July Monarchy, the fatal flaws of the Second Republic, and the seedy political career of Louis Napoleon. What, finally, can we glean from their writings about the sort of democratic polity which they believed would maximise civil liberty and social justice? To discover Tocqueville's views we must begin with Democracy in America, which was researched and written in order to explain the viability of democratic institutions in the United States. It is significant that the early chapters of the work focus on the system of local government in New England, which he distinguishes clearly from the less democratic insitutions of the South. Tocqueville concludes from his study that 'the birth and growth of local independence', as practised in the intricate New England system of township self-management, is 'the mainspring and lifeblood of American freedom'. (Tocqueville 1994: 44) Such a devolutionary system, which he also considered to be the chief source of Britain's material progress and political stability, (Mayer 1939: 19-20) was in stark contrast to the centralised control of French local government which was reinforced when the French Revolution of 1789 swept away what he described in his classic work, The Ancien Regime, as the last 'rags and tatters' of the disintegrating feudal system. There is plenty of evidence in the Recollections that Tocqueville's hopes for the trouble-free transplantation of democracy to France are founded on the creation of an American-style system of local self-government managed, on behalf of the people, by a network of responsible secular and spiritual local notables, the 'superior individuals' to whom Manning Clark calls our attention in his thesis. (Clark 1943: 62-5) It should be emphasised that Tocqueville was not advocating the social and political restoration of the French aristocracy. On the contrary, he attributed the viability of New England democracy in large part to the rapid circulation of wealth in that region which would have been impossible if the restrictive laws on inheritance (such as the law of entail) characteristic of English aristocratic society had been allowed to remain in force there.(Tocqueville 1994: ch. 3) Importantly, however, the feasibility of Tocqueville's ideal polity - and here his vision runs athwart that of Marx - depends on the absence of rapid capitalist development and its attendant industrial working class.
To obtain an understanding of Tocqueville's social and political milieu one needs to look no further than the passage in the Recollections where he tells us that in the Department of La Manche, - within which his ancestral village of Tocqueville was located and which duly elected him to the Constituent Assembly in April 1848 - there was 'an almost entirely rural population ... no large towns and few factories, and, with the exception of Cherbourg, no place in which workers come together in large numbers.' (Tocqueville 1971: 108-20)
Tocqueville's vision of the pivotal democratic function of a class of local notables is indicated when he describes his relations with his constituents in Tocqueville on election day in April 1848:
'The local people had always been kindly disposed to me, but this time I found them positively affectionate, and I never had so much respect shown to me before a crass equality was placarded on every wall. We had to go in a body to vote at the town of Saint-Pierre, a league (five kilometers) away from our village. On the morning of election day all the electors, that is to say the whole male population over twenty years old, assembled in front of the church. They formed themselves into a double column in alphabetical order; I preferred to take the place my name warranted, for I knew that in democratic times and countries one must allow oneself to be put at the head of the people, but must not put oneself there. (Like me the priest and curate were in their place) ... We were in all a hundred and seventy persons. When we got to the top of the hill overlooking Tocqueville , there was a momentary halt; I realized that I was required to speak. I climbed to the other side of a ditch. A circle formed around me, and I said a few words appropriate to the occasion. I reminded these good people of the seriousness and importance of the act they were about to perform; I advised them not to let themselves be accosted or diverted by people who might, when we arrived at the town, seek to deceive them, but rather to march as a united body with each man in his place and to stay that way until they had voted. "Let no one', I said, "go into a house to take food or to dry himself (it was raining that day), before he has performed his duty." They shouted that they would do this, and so they did. All the votes were cast at the same time, and I have reason to think that almost all were for the same candidate'. (119-20)
The relationship between the local notables and the Parisian working class was, inevitably, far less cordial. Later in the Recollections (204-5), when describing his experiences during the June Days, Tocqueville records his gratification at the arrival of 1500 volunteers from La Manche (which was 80 leagues - 400 kilometeres - from Paris) on the fourth day of the insurrection: 'I was touched to recognise among them landowners, lawyers, doctors and farmers, my friends and neighbours. Almost every member of the old nobility of the district had taken up arms and formed part of the column '. 'The same was true almost everywhere in France. The most stick-in-the-mud little squire from the backwaters and the elegant, useless sons of the great houses all remembered that they had once formed part of a warlike ruling class, and all displayed dispatch and energy, such vigour there is in these old aristocratic bodies. Even when they seem reduced to dust, they keep some trace of their former selves; and they rise again out of the shadow of death several times before they finally sink into eternal rest'. (204-5)
Tocqueville's insistence on the crucial role of the new breed of local notables, as opposed to the old aristocracy, was also reflected in his support for a proposal to the Constitutional Drafting Committee by the pioneer Social Catholic thinker, Lammenais, that it should look first at the communal (local) system of government because of the importance of 'local liberties'. Tocqueville's frustration when the Committee decided to shelve this proposal is reflected in his terse comment: 'In France there is only one thing we cannot make: a free government; and only one that we cannot destroy: centralization'. ( 210-11)
If the feasibility of Tocqueville's scheme for civilising democracy depended on decentralisation and the retardation of capitalist development, the reverse was true for Marx's vision. Marx had for a number of reasons pinned his hopes on the proletariat as the 'universal class' by which he meant the ultimate repository of the social virtues needed to sustain liberty and social justice. (Hunt 1974; Lovell 1984: ch. 2; McCarthy 1978) Initially he did this to cock a snook at the elitist political philosopher, Hegel, who portrayed the Prussian bureaucracy as a universal class which embodied civic virtue. The real universal class, the young Marx claimed, was not Prussian oficialdom, whose censorship laws had deprived him of his job as a journalist in the early 1840s, but the proletariat. Marx's inverted idealism was reinforced by the ouvrierisme which he absorbed from French socialists such as Proudhon who asserted that only those engaged in creative labour could embrace the idea of justice which was the key to social harmony. Finally, and most importantly in the context of this paper, he had concluded from his study of the works of British political economists that capitalism would expand rapidly because of its ability to appropriate the surplus value created by labour; and that the industrial working class would for this reason be kept indefinitely at subsistence level. This meant that with the expansion of capitalism the vast majority of the people, being propertyless, and hence with 'nothing to lose but their chains', would be transformed into the agents of an unstoppable egalitarian social revolution.
Even assuming the validity of this long-term scenario, Marx's study of the revolution of 1848 highlighted serious problems for the proletariat as an agent of social transformation in the period before capitalism reached maturity. Although the intervention of the Parisian workers had forced the Provisional Government to proclaim the Republic, the proletariat was still too weak in 1848 to achieve social emancipation. As he observed in Class Struggles:
'The development of the industrial proletariat is, in general, conditioned by the development of the industrial bourgeoisie. ... French industry is more developed and the French bourgeoisie more revolutionary than that of the rest of the Continent. But was not the February Revolution levelled directly against the finance aristocracy? This fact proved that the industrial bourgeoisie did not rule France. The industrial bourgeoisie can rule only where modern industry shapes all property relations to suit itself, and industry can win this power only where it has conquered the world market, for national bounds are inadequate for its development. But French industry, to a great extent, maintains its control even of the national market only through a more or less modified system of prohibitive duties. While, therefore, the French proletariat, at the moment of a revolution, possesses in Paris actual power and influence which spur it on to a drive beyond its means, in the rest of France it is crowded into separate, scattered industrial centres, being almost lost in the superior numbers of peasants and petty bourgeois.' (Marx and Engels 1951: 136-7)
The corollary of Marx's obstetric view of revolution - that the new society grows in the womb of the old - is that the proletariat should remain in that womb until the capitalist system has reached full term. The more likely scenario is, however, that an immature proletariat will make a premature entry onto the political stage because of the collapse of political regimes in response to pressures for which that proletariat is only partly responsible. The upshot of this is likely to be either stern repression by the non-proletarian majority, as in 1848 and 1871 in France, or the creation of a beleaguered authoritarian substitutionist proletarian regime, as in the case of post-1917 Russia. The other problem, now universally acknowledged, but unforeseen by Marx, is that, partly in response to the working class movement which Marxist theories helped to evoke, industrial entrepreneurs and bourgeois states have taken steps to prevent the capitalist system from shooting itself in the foot by ensuring that the workers have rather more to lose than their chains.
As Clark pointed out, the notions of the liberal aristocrat from Normandy about how to ensure that democracy maximises freedom and social justice were well received for many years after he put pen to paper. (Clark 1943: Ch.1) One reason for this was the leisurely growth of capitalism and the lagging development of working class political parties which, apart from decreasing the relevance of Marx's prognosis, provided a breathing space in which government by more or less enlightened local notables could be instituted. Tocqueville's ideas were clearly relevant to the caciquismo and trasformismo political systems manipulated by the local elites of late nineteenth century Spain and Italy; and they were attractive to the would-be 'bunyip aristocracy' of colonial Australia. Yet their congruence to the corporatist regimes of the ethically ill-assorted modern managerial class is less apparent.
References.
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Hunt, R. N. 1974. The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels. Vol. 1. Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press
Jardin, Andre. 1988. Tocqueville: A Biography. Tr. L. Davis and R. Hemenway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
Lovell, David W. 1984. From Marx to Lenin: An Evaluation of Marx's Responsibility for Soviet Authoritarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick. 1951. Selected Works. 2 vols. Moscow: Foreign Langiages Publishing House.
McCarthy, Timothy. 1978. Marx and the Proletariat: A Study in Social Theory. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press
Mayer, J. P. 1939. Prophet of the Mass Age: A Study of Alexis de Tocqueville. London: Dent
McLellan, David. 1973. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. London: Macmillan
Price, Roger. 1972. The French Second Republic: A Social History. London: Batsford
Robertson, Priscilla. 1952. Revolutions of 1848: A Social History. Princeton: Princeton U.P.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1955. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. New York: Doubleday Anchor
----- 1971. Recollections. J. P. Mayer and A. P. Kerr, edd. Tr. G. Lawrence. New York: Anchor Books
------ 1994. Democracy in America. J. P. Mayer,ed. London: Fontana
Bruce Kent was a Reader in Modern European History at the Australian National University until his retirement in 1997. He is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Economic History, Faculty of Economics and Commerce, Australian National University.