Abstract
Being critical yet without being revolutionaries, and first as scholars and then later as politicians, Beaumont and Tocqueville attempted to reform the French political system from within. Their liberalism often manifested itself in concrete projects such as their attempt to argue for a modernised prison system and in addressing extreme social inequality by proposing social and political reforms, particularly by dealing with the burning problem of pauperism. The two collaborators were perhaps most successful in their common fight against slavery. However, abolition was one thing, colonialism another. Tocqueville took particular interest in England’s imperial possessions in the Caribbean and in India; for Beaumont it was Ireland and Irish conditions that attracted his attention. It might perhaps come as a surprise that being abolitionists and critical liberals Tocqueville and Beaumont remained French patriots who supported and defended the French colonial presence in Algeria, despite their criticism of actual government policies and what exactly these entailed to dominate and colonize in Algeria.
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Notes
- 1.
For the American edition Francis Lieber provided the translation. Lieber was a German liberal and expatriate who had made America his new home and would later support Lincoln and the abolitionists’ cause. Lieber was also the editor of the Encyclopaedia Americana, a primer for those interested in American politics and institutions, a publication for which he is now regarded as one of the founding fathers of American political science. It is perhaps worthwhile noting that the first American edition of the Penitentiary System contained some rather excessive footnotes and commentaries by the translator, which later editions have eradicated. For further comments on such a problematic attitude to translation and editorship see the foreword by Herman R. Lantz and Lieber’s own preface in the first modern edition that was published with Southern Illinois University Press in 1964 (vii–xi and 3–33).
- 2.
Beaumont and Tocqueville also paid attention to the question of who contracted the labour and its products. In the American system this was done through an outside contractor while in France it was left to the administration to control everything that needed to be purchased and sold. The advantage of the American system seemed obvious to Beaumont and Tocqueville: it separated administration from profit seeking. Differences also existed in terms of wages for prison work. In the American system all money earned would be returned to maintain the penitentiary and penal system and the costs of running them. In France a part of the produce of their labour belonged to the prisoners (Beaumont and Tocqueville 1964: 67ff).
- 3.
It is speculative but perhaps not totally unreasonable to hint here at some finer distinctions in Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s background. As pointed out in the introduction, both came from an aristocratic background; however, they did not belong to what we could call the upper echelons of French aristocracy. True, Tocqueville’s estate and family seem to have been considerably wealthier than Beaumont’s. Particularly later in life Beaumont would have to give his estate all his attention, due to an inherited debt. It is also worthwhile noting in this context that Tocqueville and Beaumont came from different rural parts of France with Normandy less backward and less poverty-ridden than Sarthe – hence perhaps Beaumont’s passion and emotionally deeper feelings for those who had been left out in the democratic process. The fact that Beaumont and his wife Clementine had children while Tocqueville and Mary did not might also have played a role. It explains some sensibilities and a principled openness in Beaumont that we do not find in Tocqueville. The exiled German poet Heinrich Heine may have been right in regarding Beaumont as the more sociable, spontaneous and passionate person, while he described Tocqueville as being the more sceptical, observant, and somewhat solitary figure.
- 4.
Tocqueville relied here mainly on information from Nassau Senior who had been involved in the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission of 1832 into labour and social reform and whose recommendations led to the Poor Laws of 1834. How effective or disastrous these new laws were, is still subject to debate. For two, partly competing, interpretations see Eric Hobsbawm (1968) and Joel Mokyr (2012). As to the extensive communication between Tocqueville and Nassau Senior see Tocqueville and Nassau Senior (2009).
- 5.
Having said that, until the end of his life Tocqueville was in two minds as to whether the British Poor Laws and other measures of social reform were part of what he saw as an overall centralising tendency of modern democracy or not. See also the next subsection of this chapter and the following chapter on Tocqueville’s changing perceptions of Britain. The best comprehensive overview and discussion of Tocqueville’s perception of Britain can be found in Drescher (1964).
- 6.
Note that Marx would use a similar figure of speech except that he stood Tocqueville on its head with his argument that the proletariat signified the future universal class – and therefore symbolised the promise of universal human emancipation.
- 7.
However, as his journal and letters show, some doubts remained. His thought on centralisation for example clashed with his admiration of some aspects of the British political system. But in terms of colonial relations and empire-building Tocqueville clearly saw great advantages in the way the English government conducted its affairs in India. It provided a way for the English and Scottish aristocracies to become useful, not just in terms of military matters but also in terms of enterprise and trade. Tocqueville even thought about writing more extensively about this aspect of Britain’s colonial relationship with India. He gathered material and wrote down notes for a study on India between 1841 and 1843. However, such projects came to nothing and the project remained a torso (now reprinted in the modern French edition of Tocqueville’s collected works). As we will see later in this chapter, Tocqueville and Beaumont would be much more explicit about Ireland, the West Indies and Algeria, with Britain remaining an important reference point when compared with French colonial ambitions and policies.
- 8.
Like most of Tocqueville’s prophecies concerning American democracy, most, but not all, of Beaumont’s prophecies concerning Ireland came to pass. The Irish Famine of the 1840s radicalised the Catholic majority further. It also caused the British government finally to write off the Irish Ascendancy. Later in the century Westminster tried to change horses in Ireland and side with the vast peasant-cum-farmer majority against the landlords. Following on O’Connell’s precedent, a series of mass movements, agitating for land reform and a native government (“Home Rule”) emerged. Beaumont foresaw the land reform, and prophesised the emergence of an Ireland of small owner-occupier farmers, as duly happened in the period 1880–1903. However, he also expected the Irish to settle down after land reform as part of a British-Irish constitutional democracy. Strangely enough, he did not foresee the rise of a large, successful and vengeful Irish-American community in the United States that willingly encouraged and financed Irish militant insurgents from 1865 on.
- 9.
For an overview and assessment of the role of French aristocracy see Furet’s discussion in Interpreting the French Revolutuion (1981: 104–113). In his later work, such as for example Revolutionary France 1770–1880 Furet (1995: 284ff), distinguished between different liberal thinkers and factions in the time of the earlier Restoration period, some of them maintaining a comparative outlook, some not. Madame de Stael and her companion Benjamin Constant, for example, drew constantly on comparisons both historical and in the present. This applies partly also to Chateaubriand, the writer whose aristocratic habitus was visible to all but whose opinions were leaning much more to the liberal side and whose nostalgia for noble status and behaviour of the past set him against the restoration kings. The Doctrinaires, so called after having formed a joint opinion against the conservative ultras, counted potent and power-hungry realpolitik liberals like Guizot amongst their midst. Most of them did not have an aristocratic past, which did not prevent them from trying to steer the restoration as long as the new monarch was seen as representing the course of reason and history (something that was to be determined by comparison). For an extended discussion of the various phases of aristocratic liberalism see also the study by de Dijn (2008).
- 10.
The law of 1802 dealt with some of the contradictions of the 1794 law, and which was meant to address the changing political landscape in France and the colonial situation in the Caribbean. The confusion that arose was due to the ever-changing and competing sovereignty claims to some Caribbean islands, particularly between Britain, which vowed to abolish the slave trade in 1807, and France. Depending on the individual colonial history of each disputed island and the policy of the respective Empire that claimed sovereignty over it, abolition had been introduced or not. The law of 1802 was meant to clarify France’s relation to its colonies but in the context of renewed attempts to extend the Empire through colonisation rather added to the confusion because this law meant a de facto re-introduction or re-affirmation of slavery to some islands. By the time the Commission had been established and Tocqueville became its spokesperson – the chairperson had been De Broglie – France had officially abolished the slave trade and the infamous regulations of the Code Noir by decree, yet appeared still to be rather lax in applying the decree – hence the need for the new Commission. For the record, it should be pointed out that while some new regulations and laws regarding slavery came into effect in France in 1845, full abolition only came about with the Revolution and the arrival of the Second Republic in 1848.
- 11.
In 1843 a parliamentary commission and Louis Philippe had declared its objective of turning Algeria into a part of France. This was reaffirmed in 1848 when the newly founded Second Republic declared Algeria to be part of France, an official and legal status that would last until the declaration of Algerian independence in 1962.
- 12.
The Kabyle region and its Berber population, which remained for some time off-limits for both the French military and the colons, have never been the focus of colonisation. The region came, despite some minor scuffles and provocations, to some kind of ‘unofficial’ arrangement with the French. However, the local Arab resistance in the rest of Algeria, mainly organised around the leadership and military command of Abd el-Kader, was less easily pacifiable and was only defeated in 1871.
- 13.
Interesting in this respect are the differences between the anticipation in relation to the American journey and the one to Algeria. In the former hopes seemed not to have been disappointed, in the latter case the reverse was true. We witness here clearly a clash between two different political projects that were dear to Tocqueville and Beaumont; America was not France after all but could show France and Europe and emerging democracies the way. This was not the case with Algeria; here France had to lead and to show the way.
- 14.
It seems that toward the end of his life Tocqueville finally realised and understood Beaumont’s warning better. In a letter to Henry Reeve, written in January 1858, he notes, almost as if to correct his earlier occasionally misguided thinking on the subject of colonisation and Empire building: “I have always [sic!] noticed that wherever one introduced, not European authorities, but a European population, in the midst of the imperfectly civilised populations of the rest of the world, the real and pretended superiority of the former over the latter has accustomed them to feeling in a way so harmful to individual interests and so mortifying to the self-respect of the indigenous people that more anger resulted from that than from any political oppression” (Tocqueville 1985: 363).
References
Primary Sources
de Beaumont, Gustave. 2006 [1839]. Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
de Beaumont, Gustave, and Alexis de Tocqueville. 1964 [1833]. On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France. Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1985. In Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2001. In Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2003. Lettres choisies. Souvenirs. Paris: Quarto Gallimard.
de Tocqueville, Alexis, and Gustave de Beaumont. 1968. In On Social Reform, ed. Seymour Drescher. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
de Tocqueville, Alexis, and William Senior Nassau. 2009. Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior, 2 vols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
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De Dijn, Annelien. 2008. French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drescher, Seymour. 1964. Tocqueville and England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Furet, François. 1981. Interpreting the French Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1995. Revolutionary France 1770–1880. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1968. Industry and Empire. London: Penguin.
Mokyr, Joel. 2012. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Hess, A. (2018). In Search of New Liberal Politics: Reconciling Equality with Liberty. In: Tocqueville and Beaumont. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69667-6_3
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