Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America by Jeremy Jennings

Author:Jeremy Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

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Shortly after the publication of L’ancien régime et la révolution in 1856 Tocqueville sent a letter to Charles de Grandmaison. “Without you and your archives,” he wrote, “I would not have been able to write the book that I have just published.”94 No doubt Grandmaison felt a good deal of legitimate pride in reading these kind and generous words from a man he so greatly admired. Still, Grandmaison, as much as anyone else, knew that if the book proved to be a success, it owed much not only to Tocqueville’s intelligence and clarity of thought but also to his determination, despite illness and often plagued by self-doubt, to work meticulously through the archives and to grind out his text page by page, often painfully slowly. The latter was what Tocqueville did in his house just down the river from Tours and the archives.

In early September 1853 Tocqueville told Kergorlay that he had not worked much, in part because of the many visitors he had received, but also because his stomach was once again causing him problems. Only a week or so later, when excusing himself for not writing to Corcelle, he explained his silence by referring to the life he was leading as a kind of “voluntary tread mill” where he could only “think of raising one foot after another until the wheel stops.”95 Yet on 23 September he told Pierre Freslon that he was putting his books and his old papers aside and starting finally to write his own volume. “Up to the present,” he wrote, “I have only been preparing myself and I am beginning to get both annoyed and to be bored by this lengthy noviciate.” His plan was to throw out the words of the first chapter “somehow or other” and then see if he had the makings of a “great book.” “I need,” Tocqueville continued, “to make a success of this first effort in order to have the courage to continue to move forward.” To this he added that his work in the archives at Tours had shown him that “one finds a thousand new incentives to hate the Ancien Régime but few new reasons to like the revolution.” One can see, he told Freslon, that “the Ancien Régime was weakening rapidly and of its own accord under the weight of the passing of time and as a consequence of the imperceptible change in ideas and in mores.” With a little more patience, it would have been possible to transform rather than destroy it.96

In early October Tocqueville told Ampère that he was now “firmly resolved” to put pen to paper, although ominously he added that what he had previously seen clearly about his book was now “surrounded by a cloud that gets ever thicker.”97 A couple of weeks later a similar message was received by Kergorlay. He had nothing of interest to report, Tocqueville told Kergorlay, but preparatory work on his book would finish at the end of the month and then the real work would begin.

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