Chapter 7

I hope that we shall be in Paris when you pass through. We put off our departure from day to day; not that we are kept by the charms of our present abode; the house is too small for us and scantily furnished, but I find it such a favourable retreat for study, that I have great difficulty in tearing myself away from it.

I hear, as you do, with great satisfaction of the mutual good feeling of our armies in the Crimea. It far exceeds my expectations.

But I am not equally pleased with your management of the war. The English ought to know that what has passed and is passing there has sensibly diminished their moral force in Europe. It is an unpleasant truth, but I ought not to conceal it from you. I see proofs of it every day, and I have been struck by it peculiarly in a late visit to Paris, where I saw persons of every rank and of every shade of political opinion. The heroic courage of your soldiers was everywhere and unreservedly praised, but I found also a general belief that the importance of England as a military Power had been greatly exaggerated; that she is utterly devoid of military talent, which is shown as much in administration as in fighting; and that even in the most pressing circumstances she cannot raise a large army.

Since I was a child I never heard such language. You are believed to be absolutely dependent on us; and in the midst of our intimacy I see rising a friendly contempt for you, which if our Governments quarrel, will make a war with you much easier than it has been since the fall of Napoleon.

I grieve at all this, not only as endangering the English alliance, which, as you well know, I cherish, but as injuring the cause of liberty.

I can pardon you for discrediting it by your adulation of our despotism, but I wish that you would not serve despotism more efficaciously by your own faults, and by the comparisons which they suggest.

It seems also difficult to say what may not be the results of your long intimacy with such a Government as ours, and of the contact of the two armies. I doubt whether they will be useful to your aristocracy.

Remember me to Lord Lansdowne and to the Lewises, who added such pleasure to our German tour.

Compiègne, February 15, 1855.

I conclude that this frightful weather is still keeping you in London, my dear Senior. I am comforted by the fact that I myself shall not reach Paris before the 28th.

I do not wish to act the part of the pedagogue in the fable who preaches to people when his sermon can no longer be of any possible use, but I cannot help telling you that it is a great imprudence on your part to allow yourself to be caught in this way by the winter in England. What you now suffer from is only a trifling malady, but it may become a real illness if you persist in preferring pleasure to health. Pray think of this in the future and do not tempt the devil.

I have not read the article to which you refer.[1]

I can perfectly understand the reserve which was imposed upon you, and which you were forced to impose on yourself.

I confess that I saw with great grief the sudden change in the expressions of the majority of the English, a year ago, respecting our Government. It was then ill consolidated, and in want of the splendid alliance which you offered to it. It was unnecessary that you should praise it, in order to keep it your friend. By doing so you sacrificed honourable opinions and tastes without a motive.

Now things are changed. After you have lost your only army, and our master has made an alliance with Austria, which suits his feelings much better than yours did, he does not depend on you; you, to a certain extent, depend on him. Such being now the case, I can understand the English thinking it their duty to their country to say nothing that can offend the master of France. I can understand even their praising him; I reproach them only for having done so too soon, before it was necessary.

I agree with you that England ought to be satisfied with being the greatest maritime Power, and ought not to aim at being also one of the greatest military Powers.

But the feelings which I described to you as prevalent in France and in Germany, arose not from your want of an army of 500,000 men. They were excited by these two facts.

First, by what was supposed (perhaps falsely) to be the bad military administration of your only army. Secondly, and much more, by your apparent inability to raise another army.

According to continental notions, a nation which cannot raise as many troops as its wants require, loses our respect. It ceases, according to our notions, to be great or even to be patriotic. And I must confess that, considering how difficult it is to procure soldiers by voluntary enlistment, and how easily every nation can obtain them by other means, I do not see how you will be able to hold your high rank, unless your people will consent to something resembling a conscription.

Dangerous as it is to speak of a foreign country, I venture to say that England is mistaken if she thinks that she can continue separated from the rest of the world, and preserve all her peculiar institutions uninfluenced by those which prevail over the whole of the Continent.

In the period in which we live, and, still more, in the period which is approaching, no European nation can long remain absolutely dissimilar to all the others. I believe that a law existing over the whole Continent must in time influence the laws of Great Britain, notwithstanding the sea, and notwithstanding the habits and institutions, which, still more than the sea, have separated you from us, up to the present time.

My prophecies may not be accomplished in our time; but I should not be sorry to deposit this letter with a notary, to be opened, and their truth or falsehood proved, fifty years hence.

Compiègne, February 23, 1855.

... My object in my last letter was not by any means, as you seem to think, to accuse _your aristocracy_ of having mismanaged the Crimean war. It has certainly been mismanaged, but who has been in fault?

Indeed I know not, and if I did I should think at the same time that it would not be becoming in a foreigner to set himself up as a judge of the blunders of any other Government than his own.

I thought that I had expressed myself clearly. At any rate what I wanted to say, if I did not say it, is, that the present events created in my opinion a new and great danger for your aristocracy, and that it will suffer severely from the rebound, if it does not make enormous efforts to show itself capable of repairing the past; and that it would be wrong to suppose that by fighting bravely on the field of battle it could retain the direction of the Government.

I did not intend to say more than this.

I will now add that if it persuades itself that it will easily get out of the difficulty by making peace, I think that it will find itself mistaken.

Peace, after what has happened, may be a good thing for England in general, and useful to us, but I doubt whether it will be a gain for your aristocracy. I think that if Chatham could return to life he would agree with me, and would say that under the circumstances the remedy would not be peace but a more successful war.

Kind regards, &c.

A. DE TOCQUEVILLE.

[Footnote 1: An article in the _North British Review_, see p. 107.--ED.]

CONVERSATIONS.

_Paris, Hôtel Bedford.--Friday, March_ 2, 1855.--We slept on the 27th at Calais, on the 28th at Amiens, and reached this place last night.

Tocqueville called on us this morning. We talked of the probability of Louis Napoleon's going to the Crimea.

I said, 'that the report made by Lord John Russell, who talked the matter over with him, was, that he certainly had once intended to go, and had not given it up.'

'I do not value,' said Tocqueville, 'Lord John's inferences from anything that he heard or saw in his audiences. All Louis Napoleon's words and looks, are, whether intentionally or not, misleading. Now that his having direct issue seems out of the question, and that the deeper and deeper discredit into which the heir presumptive is falling, seems to put _him_ out of the question too, we are looking to this journey with great alarm. We feel that, for the present, his life is necessary to us, and we feel that it would be exposed to many hazards. He ought to incur some military risks, if he is present at a battle or an assault, and his courage and his fatalism, will lead him to many which he ought to avoid. But it is disease rather than bullets that we fear. He will have to travel hard, and to be exposed, under exciting circumstances, to a climate which is not a safe one even to the strong.'

'But,' I said, 'he will not be exposed to it long. I have heard thirty, or at most forty, days proposed as the length of his absence.'

'Who can say that?' answered Tocqueville. 'If he goes there, he must stay there until Sebastopol falls. It will not do for him to leave Paris in order merely to look at the works, pat the generals on the back, compliment the army, and leave it in the trenches. Unless his journey produces some great success--in short, unless it gives us Sebastopol--it will be considered a failure; and a failure he cannot afford. I repeat that he must stay there till Sebastopol falls. But that may be months. And what may months bring forth in such a country as France? In such a city as Paris? In such times as these? Then he cannot safely leave his cousin--Jérôme Plon swears that he will not go, and I do not see how he can be taken by force.'

'I do not understand,' I said, 'Jerôme's conduct. It seemed as if he had the ball at his feet. The _rôle_ of an heir is the easiest in the world. He has only to behave decently in order to be popular.'

'Jérôme's chances,' answered Tocqueville, 'of the popularity which is to be obtained by decent behaviour were over long before he became an heir. His talents are considerable, but he has no principles, and no good sense. He is Corsican to the bone. I watched him among his Montagnards in the Constituent.

'Nothing could be more perverse than his votes, nor more offensive than his speeches. He is unfit to conciliate the sensible portion of society, and naturally throws himself into the arms of those who are waiting to receive him--the violent, the rapacious, and the anarchical: this gives him at least some adherents.'

'What do you hear,' I asked, 'of his conduct in the East?'

'I hear,' said Tocqueville, 'that he showed want, not so much of courage, as of temper and of subordination. He would not obey orders; he would not even transmit them, so that Canrobert was forced to communicate directly with the officers of Napoleon's division, and at last required him to take sick leave, or to submit to a court-martial.'

'I thought,' I said, 'that he was really ill.'

'That is not the general opinion,' said Tocqueville. 'He showed himself at a ball directly after his return, with no outward symptoms of ill health.'

The conversation turned on English politics.

'So many of my friendships,' said Tocqueville, 'and so many of my sympathies, are English, that what is passing _in_ your country, and _respecting_ your country, gives me great pain, and greater anxiety. To us, whom unhappily experience has rendered sensitive of approaching storms, your last six months have a frightfully revolutionary appearance.

'There is with you, as there was with us in 1847, a general _malaise_ in the midst of general prosperity. Your people seem, as was the case with ours, to have become tired of their public men, and to be losing faith in their institutions. What else do these complaints of what is called "the system" mean? When you complain that the Government patronage is bartered for political support, that the dunces of a family are selected for the public service, and selected expressly because they could not get on in an open profession; that as their places are a sort of property, they are promoted only by seniority, and never dismissed for any, except for some moral, delinquency; that therefore the seniors in all your departments are old men, whose original dulness has been cherished by a life without the stimulus of hope or fear, you describe a vessel which seems to have become too crazy to endure anything but the calmest sea and the most favourable winds. You have tried its sea-worthiness in one department, your military organisation, and you find that it literally falls to pieces. You are incapable of managing a line of operations extending only seven miles from its base. The next storm may attack your Colonial Administration. Will that stand any better? Altogether your machinery seems throughout out of gear. If you set to work actively and fearlessly, without reference to private interests, or to private expectations, or to private feelings, to repair, remove and replace, you may escape our misfortunes; but I see no proofs that you are sufficiently bold, or indeed that you are sufficiently alarmed. Then as to what is passing here. A year ago we probably overrated your military power. I believe that now we most mischievously underrate it. A year ago nothing alarmed us more than a whisper of the chance of a war with England. We talk of one now with great composure. We believe that it would not be difficult to throw 100,000 men upon your shores, and we believe that half that number would walk over England or Ireland. You are mistaken if you think that these opinions will die away of themselves, or will be eradicated by anything but some decisive military success. I do not agree with those who think that it is your interest that Russia should submit while Sebastopol stands. You might save money and men by a speedy peace, but you would not regain your reputation. If you are caught by a peace before you have an opportunity of doing so, I advise you to let it be on your part an armed peace. Prepare yourselves for a new struggle with a new enemy, and let your preparations be, not only as effective as you can make them, but also as notorious.'[1]

[Footnote 1: Note inserted by M de Tocqueville in my Journal, after reading the preceding conversation.

'J'ai entendu universellement louer sans restriction le courage héroïque de vos soldats, mais en même temps j'ai trouvé répandu cette croyance, qu'on s'était trompé de l'importance de l'Angleterre dans le monde, comme puissance militaire proprement dite, qui consiste autant à _administrer_ la guerre qu'à combattre, et surtout qu'il lui était impossible, ce qu'on ne croyait pas jusque là, d'élever de grandes armées, même dans les cas les plus pressants. Je n'avais rien entendu de pareil depuis mon enfance. On vous croit absolument dans notre dépendance, et du sein de la grande inimité qui règne entre les deux peuples, je vois naître des idées qui, le jour où nos deux gouvernements cesseront d'être d'accord, nous précipiteront dans la guerre contre vous, beaucoup plus facilement que cela n'eut pu avoir lieu depuis la chute du premier Empire. Cela m'afflige, et pour l'avenir de Alliance anglaise (dont vous savez que j'ai toujours été un grand partisan), et non moins aussi, je l'avoue, pour la cause de vos institutions libres. Ce qui se passe n'est pas de nature à la relever dans notre esprit. Je vous pardonnerais de déconsidérer vos principes par les louanges dont vous accablez le gouvernement absolu qui règne en France, mais je voudrais du moins que vous ne le fissiez pas d'une manière encore plus efficace par vos propres fautes, et par la comparaison qu'elles suggèrent. Il me semble, du reste, bien difficile de dire ce qui résultera pour vous même du contact intime et prolongé avec notre gouvernement, et surtout de l'action commune et du mélange des deux armées. J'en doute, je vous l'avouerai, que l'aristocratie anglaise s'en trouve bien, et quoique A B ait entonné l'autre jour une véritable hymne en l'honneur de celle ci, je ne crois pas que ce qui passe soit de nature à rendre ces chances plus grandes dans l'avenir'--_A de Tocqueville_.

'I heard universal and unqualified praise of the heroic courage of your soldiers, but at the same time I found spread abroad the persuasion that the importance of England had been overrated as a military Power properly so called--a Power which consists in administering as much as in fighting; and above all, that it was impossible (and this had never before been believed), for her to raise large armies, even under the most pressing circumstances. I never heard anything like it since my childhood. You are supposed to be entirely dependent upon us, and from the midst of the great intimacy which subsists between the two countries, I see springing up ideas which, on the day when our two Governments cease to be of one mind, will precipitate our country into a war against you, much more easily than has been possible since the fall of the first Empire. This grieves me, both on account of the duration of the English Alliance (of which you know that I have always been a great partisan), and no less, I own, for the sake of your free institutions. Passing events are not calculated to raise them in our estimation. I forgive you for discrediting your principles by the praise which you lavish on the absolute government which reigns in France, but I would have you at least not to do so in a still more efficacious manner by your own blunders and by the comparisons which they suggest. It seems to me, however, very difficult to predict the result to yourselves of the long and intimate contact with, our Government, and, above all, of the united action and amalgamation of the two armies. I own that I doubt its having a good effect on the future of the English aristocracy, and although A.B. struck up the other day a real hymn in its praise, I do not think that present events are of a nature to increase its chance in the future.']

_Paris, Saturday, March_ 3.--Tocqueville called on us soon after breakfast.

We talked of the loss and gain of Europe by the war. We agreed that Russia and England have both lost by it. Russia probably the most in power, England in reputation. That Prussia, though commercially a gainer, is humiliated and irritated by the superiority claimed by Austria and conceded to her.

'You cannot,' said Tocqueville, 'estimate the opinions of Germany without going there. There is a general feeling among the smaller Powers of internal insecurity and external weakness, and Austria is looked up to as the supporter of order against the revolutionists, and of Germany against Russia. Austria alone has profited by the general calamities. Without actually drawing the sword she has possession of the Principalities, she has thrust down Prussia into the second rank, she has emancipated herself from Russia, she has become the ally of France and of England, and even of her old enemy Piedmont, she is safe in Italy. Poland and Hungary are still her difficulties, and very great ones, but as her general strength increases, she can better deal with them.'

'Has not France, I said, 'been also a gainer, by becoming head of the coalition against Russia?'

'Whatever we have gained,' answered Tocqueville, 'has been dearly purchased, so far as it has consolidated this despotism. For a whole year we have felt that the life, and even the reign, of Louis Napoleon was necessary to us. They will continue necessary to us during the remainder of the war. We are acquiring habits of obedience, almost of resignation. His popularity has not increased. He and his court are as much shunned by the educated classes as they were three years ago; we still repeat "que ça ne peut pas durer," but we repeat it with less conviction.'

We passed the spring in Algeria, and returned to Paris the latter part of May.

_Paris, May 26,_1855.--After breakfast I went to the Institut.

M. Passy read to us a long paper on the Art of Government. He spoke so low and so monotonously that no one attended. I sat next to Tocqueville, and, as it was not decent to talk, we conversed a little in writing. He had been reading my Algiers Journal, and thus commented upon it:--

'Il y a tout un côté, particulièrement curieux, de l'Algérie, qui vous a échappé parce que vous n'avez pu ou voulu vous imposer l'ennui de causer souvent avec les colons, et que ce côté-là ne se voit pas en parlant avec les gouvernants; c'est l'abus de la centralisation. L'Afrique peut être considérée comme le tableau le plus complet et le plus extraordinaire des vices de ce système.

'Je suis convaincu que seul, sans les Arabes, le soleil, le désert, et la fièvre, il suffirait pour nous empêcher de coloniser. Tout ce que la centralisation laisse entrevoir de défauts, de ridicules et absurdités, d'oppression, de paperasseries en France, est grossi en Afrique au centuple. C'est comme un pou vu dans un microscope.'

'J'ai causé,' I answered, 'avec Vialar et avec mon hôte aux eaux ferrugineuses. Mais ils ne se sont pas plaints de la centralisation.'

'Ils ne se sont pas plaints,' he answered, 'du mot que, peut-être, ils ne connaissaient pas. Mais si vous les aviez fait entrer dans les détails de l'administration publique, ou même de leurs affaires privées, vous auriez vu que le colon est plus gêné dans tous ses mouvements, et plus _gouverné pour son plus grand bien_ que vous ne l'avez été quand il s'est agi de votre passeport.

'Violar faisait allusion à cela quand il vous a dit que les chemins manquaient parce que le Gouvernement ne voulait pas laisser les gouvernés s'en mêler.'[1]

[Footnote 1: 'One whole side, and that a very curious one, of Algeria, has escaped you, because you could not, or would not, inflict on yourself the bore of talking frequently with the colonists, and this side cannot be seen in conversing with officials--it is the abuse of centralisation. Africa may be considered as the most complete and most extraordinary picture of the vices of this system. I am convinced that it alone, without the Arabs, the sun, the desert and the fever, would be enough to prevent us from colonising. All the defects of centralisation, its oppressions, its faults, its absurdities, its endless documents, which are dimly perceived in France, become one hundred times bigger in Africa. It is like a louse in a microscope.'

'I conversed,' I answered, 'with Violar and with my landlord at the mineral waters, and they did not complain of centralisation.' 'They did not complain,' he answered, 'of the word, which perhaps is unknown to them. But if you had made them enter into the details of the public administration, or even of their own private affairs, you would have seen that the colonist is more confined in all his movements, and more _governed, for his good_, than you were with regard to your passport.

'This is what Violar meant when he told you that roads were wanting, because the Government would not permit its subjects to interfere in making them.']

_Monday, May_ 28.--Tocqueville called on me.

I asked him for criticisms on my article on the State of the Continent in the 'North British Review' of February 1855.[1]

[Footnote 1: See p. 107.]

'Of course,' I said, 'it must be full of blunders. No one who writes on the politics of a foreign country can avoid them. I want your help to correct a few of them.'

'Since you ask me,' he answered, 'for a candid criticism, I will give you one. I accuse you rather of misappreciation than of misstatement. First with respect to Louis Napoleon. After having described accurately, in the beginning of your paper, his unscrupulous, systematic oppression, you end by saying that, after all, you place him high among our sovereigns.'