Metahistory by Hayden White

Author:Hayden White [White, Hayden]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

The Fall into Irony

In his Souvenirs, written in 1850, Tocqueville looked back upon the history of his country from 1789 to 1830. This history appeared to him, he said, “comme le tableau d’une lutte acharnée qui s’était livrée pendant quarante et un ans entre l’ancien régime, les traditions, ses souvenirs, ses espérances et ses hommes représentés par l’aristocratie, et la France nouvelle conduite par la classe moyenne.” By 1830, Tocqueville remarked, the triumph of the “classe moyenne” over the “aristocratie” was “definitive.” All that had remained of the ancien régime, of both its vices and its virtues, had been dissolved. Such was the “physionomie générale de cette époque” (30).

The mood of Souvenirs is different from that which pervades Democracy in America, published some fifteen years earlier. And it is different from that which pervades the correspondence with Gobineau. For, in Souvenirs, the Ironic perspective replaced the Tragic standpoint from which Democracy in America was composed. In Souvenirs Tocqueville gave full vent to the despair which he forbade himself to show to Gobineau and to which he refused to give full expression in his public reflections on French history. His Souvenirs, Tocqueville noted, were not meant to be “une peinture que je destine au public,” but rather “un délassement de mon esprit et non point une oeuvre de littérature.” The work on the Revolution which the historian planned to put before the public had to assay “objectively” what had been gained and what had been lost by the Revolution itself.

In Democracy in America (1835–40), Tocqueville had insisted that though much had been lost by the growth of “the democratic principle” in both Europe and America, much had been gained also; and, on balance, he argued, the gain had been worth the loss. Thus, the turmoil of the years 1789–1830 in Europe might be seen as bringing into being not only a new social order but also a kind of social wisdom capable of guiding men to the realization of a new and better life. But, by the time Tocqueville had begun plans for the second volume of his history of the fall of the ancien régime and the advent of the Revolution, his earlier hope and the Stoic resignation which had succeeded it had given place to a despair not unlike that which pervades Gobineau’s reflections on history in general.

By 1856, the year of the publication of the first volume of The Old Regime and the Revolution, the mediative tone had been diminished considerably. The stated purpose of this work was “to make clear in what respects [the present social system] resembles and in what it differs from the social system that preceded it; and to determine what was lost and what was gained by that vast upheaval” (xi). The social context that had seemed to justify the qualified optimism of the 1830s had by the 1850s changed so much, in Tocqueville’s view, that he now had difficulty justifying little more than a cautious pessimism. Yet the faith of the Tragic writer was still alive.

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