■ no literature but that of the daily press. In any case, it was the first time'since the commencement of the Revolution that this type made any display in ALEXIS DE TOCQUEFILLE 139 one of our Assemblies; until then it had only been represented by sporadic and unnoticed individuals, who were more occupied in concealing than in showing themselves.
The Constituent Assembly had two other peculi- arities which struck me as quite as novel as this, although very different from it. It contained an / infinitely greater number of landlords and even of j noblemen than any of the Chambers elected in the r~ days when it was a necessary condition, in order to be an elector or elected, that you should have money. And also there was a more numerous and more powerful religious party than even under the Restoration: I counted three bishops, several vicars- general, and a Dominican monk, whereas Louis XVIII. and Charles X. had never succeeded in securing the election of more than one single abb6.
The abolition of all quit-rents, which made part. of the electors dependent upon the rich, and the danger threatening property, which led the people -^ to choose for their representatives those who were most interested in defending it, are the principal reasons which explain the presence of so great a number of landlords. The election of the ecclesi- astics arose from similar causes, and also from a different cause still worthier of consideration, j This cause was the almost general and very un- 1 expected return of a great part of the nation towards ' the concerns of religion.
The Revolution of 1 792, when striking the upper 14© RECOLLECTIONS OF classes, had cured them of their irreliglousness; it had taught them, if not the truth, at least the social uses of belief. This lesson was lost upon the middle class, which remained their political heir and their jealous rival; and the latter had even become more sceptical in proportion as the former seemed I to become more religious. The Revolution of 1 848 had just done on a small scale for our tradesmen what that of 1 792 had done for the nobility: the same reverses, the same terrors, the same con- version; it was the same picture, only painted smaller and in less bright and, no doubt, less lasting colours. The clergy had facilitated this conversion by separating itself from all the old political parties, and entering into the old, true spirit of the Catholic clergy, which is that it should belong only to the Church. It readily, therefore, professed republican opinions, while at the same time it gave to long- established interests the guarantee of its traditions, its customs and its hierarchy. It was accepted and made much of by all. The priests sent to the Assembly were treated with very great considera- tion, and they deserved it through their good sense, their moderation and their modesty. Some of them endeavoured to speak from the tribune, but they were never able to learn the language of politics. They had forgotten it too long ago, and all their speeches turned imperceptibly into homilies.
For the rest, the universal voting had shaken the I i JLEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 14, country from top to bottom without bringing to light a single new man worthy of coming to the front. I have always held that, whatever method be fol- lowed in a general election, the great majority of the exceptional men whom the nation possesses definitively succeed in getting elected. The system of election adopted exercises a great influence only upon the class of ordinary individuals in the Assembly, who form the ground-work of every political body. These belong to very different orders and are of very diverse natures, according to the system upon which the election has been conducted. Nothing confirmed me in this belief more than did the sight of the Constituent As- sembly. Almost all the men who played the first part in it were already known to me, but the bulk of the rest resembled nothing that I had seen before. They were imbued with a new spirit and displayed a new character and new manners.
I will say that, in my opinion, and taken all round, this Assembly compared favourably with those which I had seen. One met in it more men who were sincere, disinterested, honest and, above all, courageous than In the Chambers of Deputies among which I had spent my life.
The Constituent Assembly had been elected to ♦ make a stand against civil war. This was its principal merit; and, in fact, so long as It was necessary to fight, it was great, and only became contemptible after the victory, and when It felt that ,42 RECOLLECTIONS OF it was breaking up in consequence of this very victory and under the weight of it.
I selected my seat on the left side of the House, on a bench from which it was easy for me to hear the speakers and to reach the tribune when I wished to speak myself. A large number of my old friends joined me there; Lanjuinais, Dufaure, Corcelles, Beaumont and several others sat near me.
Let me say a word concerning the House itself, although everybody knows it. This is necessary in order to understand the narrative; and, moreover, although this monument of wood and plaster is prob- ably destined to last longer than the Republic of which it was the cradle, I do not think it will enjoy a very long existence; and when it is destroyed, many of the events that took place in it will be difficult to understand.
The house formed an oblong of great size. At one end, against the wall, was the President's platform and the tribune; nine rows of benches rose gradually along the three other walls. In the middle, facing the tribune, spread a huge, empty space, like the arena of an amphitheatre, with this difference, that this arena was square, not round. The consequence was that most of the listeners only caught a side glimpse of the speaker, and the only ones who saw him full face were very far away: an arrangement curiously calculated to promote inattention and disorder. For the first, who saw the speaker badly, and ALEXIS DE TOCQUEFILLE 143 were continually looking at one another, were more engaged in threatening and apostrophizing each other; and the others did not listen any better, because, although able to see the occupant of the tribune, they heard him badly.
Large windows, placed high up in the walls, opened straight outside, and admitted air and light; the walls were decorated only with a few flags; time had, luckily, been wanting in which to add to them all those spiritless allegories on canvas or pasteboard with which the French love to adorn their monu- ments, in spite of their being insipid to those who can understand them and utterly incomprehensible to the mass of the people. The whole bore an aspect of immensity, together with an air that was cold, solemn, and almost melancholy. There were seats for nine hundred members, a larger number than that of any of the assemblies that had sat in France for sixty years.
I felt at once that the atmosphere of this assembly suited me. Notwithstanding the gravity of events, I experienced there a sense of well-being that was new to me. For the first time since I had entered public life, I felt myself caught in the current of a majority, and following in its company the only road which my tastes, my reason and my con- science pointed out to me: a new and very wel- come sensation. I gathered that this majority would disown the Socialists and the Montagnards, but was sincere in its desire to maintain and organize ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE the Republic. I was with it on these two leading points: I had no monarchic faith, no affection nor regrets for any prince; I felt called upon to defend no cause save that of liberty and the dignity of man- kind. To protect the ancient laws of Society against [the innovators with the help of the new force which the republican principle might lend to the govern- ment; to cause the evident will of the French people to triumph over the passions and desires of the Paris workmen; to conquer demagogism by democracy — that was my only aim. I am not sure that the dangers to be passed through before it could be attained did not make it still more attrac- tive to me; for I have a natural inclination for adventure, and a spice of danger has always seemed to me the best seasoning that can be given to most of the actions of life.
CHAPTER VI MY RELATIONS WITH LAMARTINE — HIS SUBTERFUGES Lamartine was now at the climax of his fame: to all those whom the Revolution had injured or alarmed, that is to say, to the great majority of the nation, he appeared in the light of a saviour. He had been elected to the Assembly by the city of Paris and no fewer than eleven departments; I do not believe that ever anybody inspired such keen transports as those to which he was then giving rise; one must have seen love thus stimulated by fear to know with what excess of idolatry men are capable of loving. The transcendental favour which was shown him at this time was not to be com- pared with anything except, perhaps, the excessive injustice which he shortly afterwards received. All the deputies who came to Paris with the desire to put down the excesses of the Revolution and to combat the demagogic party regarded him before- hand as their only possible leader, and looked to him unhesitatingly to place himself at their head to attack and overthrow the Socialists and de- magogues. They soon discovered that they were deceived, and that Lamartine did not see the part ,46 RECOLLECTIONS OF he was called upon to play in so simple a light. It must be confessed that his was a very complex and difficult position. It was forgotten at the time, but he could not himself forget, that he had contributed more than any other to the success of the Revolu- tion of February. Terror effaced this remembrance for the moment from the public mind; but a general feeling of security could not fail soon to restore it It was easy to foresee that, so soon as the current which had brought affairs to their present pitch was arrested, a contrary current would set in, which would impel the nation in the opposite direc- tion, and drive it faster and further than Lamartine could or would go. The success of the Mon- tagnards would involve his immediate ruin; but their complete defeat would render him useless and must, sooner or later, remove the government from his hands. He saw, therefore, that for him there was almost as much danger and loss in triumph as in defeat.
As a matter of fact, I believe that, if Lamartine had resolutely, from the first, placed himself at the head of the immense party which desired to moderate and regulate the course of the Revolution, and had succeeded in leading it to victory, he would before long have been buried beneath his own triumph; he would not have been able to stop his army in time, and it would have left him behind and chosen other leaders.
I doubt whether, whatever line of conduct he had ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 147 adopted, he could have retained his power for long. I believe his only remaining chance was to be gloriously defeated while saving his country. But Lamartine was the last man to sacrifice himself in this way. I do not know that I have ever, in this world of selfishness and ambition in which I lived, met a mind so void of any thought of the public welfare as his. I have seen a crowd of men disturb- ing the country in order to raise themselves: that is an everyday perversity; but he is the only one who seemed to me always ready to turn the world upside down in order to divert himself. Neither have I ever known a mind less sincere, nor one that had a more thorough contempt for the truth. When I say he despised it, I am wrong: he did not honour it enough to heed it in any way whatever. When speaking or writing, he spoke the truth or lied, with- out caring which he did, occupied only with the effect he wished to produce at the moment.
I had not seen Lamartine since the 24th of February. I saw him the first time on the day before the opening of the Assembly in the new house, where 1 had gone to choose my seat, but I did not speak to him; he was surrounded by some of his new friends. The instant he saw me, he pretended some business at the other end of the house, and hurried away as fast as he could. He sent me word afterwards by Champeaux (who be- longed to him, half as a friend and half as a servant) that I must not take it ill of him that he avoided ,^8 RECOLLECTIONS OF me; that his position obliged him to act in this way towards the members of the late parliament; that my place was, of course, marked out among the future leaders of the Republic; but that we must wait till the first temporary difficulties were surmounted before coming to an agreement. Champeaux also declared that he was instructed to ask my opinion on the state of business; I gave it him very readily, but to very little purpose. This established certain indirect relations between Lamartine and myself through the intermediary of Champeaux. The latter often came to see me, to inform me, on behalf of his patron, of the arrangements that were being pre- pared; and I sometimes went to see him in a little room he had hired on the top floor of a house in the Rue Saint- Honors, where he used to receive suspicious visitors, although he had a complete set of rooms at the Foreign Office.
I usually found him overwhelmed with place- hunters; for in France political mendicancy exists under every form of government. It even increases through the very revolutions that are directed against it, because all revolutions ruin a certain number of men, and with us a ruined man always looks to the State to repair his fortunes. They were of all kinds, all attracted by the reflection of power which Lamartine's friendship very transiently cast over Champeaux. I remember among others a certain cook, not particularly distinguished in his calling, as far as I could see, who insisted upon entering the ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 149 service of Lamartine, who had, he said, become President of the Republic.
" But he's not President yet! " cried Champeaux.
"If he's not so yet, as you say," said the man, "' he's going to be, and he must already be thinking of his kitchen."
In order to rid himself of this scullion's obstinate ambition, Champeaux promised to bring his name before Lamartine so soon as the latter should be President of the Republic. The poor man went away quite satisfied, dreaming no doubt of the very imaginary splendours of his approaching condition.
I frequented Champeaux pretty assiduously during that time, although he was exceedingly vain, loqua- cious, and tedious, because, in talking with him, I became better acquainted with Lamartine's thoughts and projects than if 1 had been talking to the great man himself. Lamartine's intelligence was seen through Champeaux' folly as you see the sun through a smoked glass, which shows you the luminary deprived of its heat-rays, but less daz- zling to the eye. I easily gathered that in this world every one was feeding on pretty well the same chimeras as the cook of whom I have just spoken, and that Lamartine already tasted at the bottom of his heart the sweets of that sovereign power which was nevertheless at that very moment escaping from his hands. He was then following the tortuous road that was so soon to lead him I- to his ruin, struggling to dominate the Mountain ISO RECOLLECTIONS OF without overthrowing it, and to slacken the re- volutionary fire without extinguishing it, so as to give the country a feeling of security strong enough for it to bless him, not strong enough to cause it to forget him. What he dreaded above all was that the conduct of the Assembly should be allowed to fall into the hands of the former parliamentary leaders. This was, I believe, at the time his dominant passion. One could see this during the great dis- cussion on the constitution of the Executive Power; never did the different parties display more visibly the pedantic hypocrisy which induces them to con- ceal their interests beneath their ideas: an ordinary spectacle enough, but more striking at this time than usual, because the needs of the moment compelled each party to shelter itself behind theories which were foreign or even opposed to it. The old royalist party maintained that the Assembly itself should govern and choose its ministers: a theory that was almost demagogic; and the demagogues declared that the Executive Power should be entrusted to a permanent commission, which should govern and select all the agents of the government: a system that approached the monarchic idea. All this verbiage only meant that one side wished to remove Ledru-Rollin from power, and the other to keep him there.
The nation saw in Ledru-Rollin the bloody image of the Terror; it beheld in him the genius of evil as in Lamartine the genius of good, and it was mis- ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 151 taken in both cases. Ledru-RolHn was nothlnof more than a very sensual and sanguine heavy fellow, quite without principles and almost without brains, possessing no real courage of mind or heart, and even free from malice: for he naturally wished well to all the world, and was incapable of cutting the throats of any one of his adversaries, except, per- haps, for the sake of historical reminiscences, or to accommodate his friends.
The result of the debate remained long doubtful: Barrot turned it against us by making a very fine speech in our favour. I have witnessed many of these unforeseen incidents in parliamentary life, and have seen parties constantly deceived in the same way, because they always think only of the pleasure they themselves derive from their great orator's words, and never of the dangerous excitement he promotes in their opponents.
When Lamartine, who till then had kept silent and remained, I believe, in indecision, heard, for the first time since February, the voice of the ex-leader of the Left resounding with brilliancy and success, he suddenly made up his mind, and spoke. " You understand," said Champeaux to me the next day, " that before all it was necessary to prevent the Assembly from coming to a resolution upon Barrot's advice." So Lamartine spoke, and, according to his custom, spoke in brilliant fashion.
The majority, who had already adopted the course that Barrot had urged upon them, wheeled round as ,52 RECOLLECTIONS OF they listened to him (for this Assembly was more credulous and more submissive than any that I had ever seen to the wiles of eloquence: it was novice and innocent enough to seek for reasons for their decisions in the speeches of the orators). Thus Lamartine won his cause, but missed his fortune; ' for he that day gave rise to the mistrust which soon arose and hurled him from his pinnacle of popu- larity more quickly than he had mounted it. Sus- picion took a definite form the very next day, when he was seen to patronize Ledru-Rollin and force the hand of his own friends in order to induce them to appoint the latter as his colleague on the Executive Commission. At this sight there arose in the Assembly and in the nation inexpres- sible disappointment, terror and rage. For my part, I experienced these two last emotions in the highest degree; I clearly perceived that Lamartine was turning out of the high-road that led us away from anarchy, and I could not guess into what abyss he might lead us if we followed the byways which he was treading. How was it possible, indeed, to foresee how far an always exuberant imagination might go, unrestrained by reason or virtue } Lamartine's common-sense impressed me no more than did his disinterestedness; and, in fact, I believed him capable of everything except cowardly behaviour or vulgar oratory.
I confess that the events of June to a certain extent modified the opinion I had formed of ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 153 his manner of proceeding. They showed that our adversaries were more numerous, better organ- ized and, above all, more determined than I had thought.
Lamartine, who had seen nothing but Paris during the last two months, and who had there, so to speak, lived in the very heart of the revolutionary party, exaggerated the power of the Capital and the in- activity of the rest of France. He over-estimated both. But I am not sure that I, on my side, did not strain a point on the other side. The road we ought to follow seemed to me so clearly and visibly traced that I would not admit the possibility of deviating from it by mistake; it seemed obvious to me that we should hasten to profit by the moral force possessed by the Assembly in order to escape from the hands of the people, seize upon the govern- ment, and by a great effort establish it upon a solid basis. Every delay seemed to me calculated to diminish our power, and to strengthen the hand of our adversaries.
It was, in fact, during the six months that elapsed | between the opening of the Assembly and the events [ of June that the Paris workmen grew bold, and took I courage to resist, organized themselves, procured ^ both arms and ammunition, and made their final preparations for the struggle. In any case, I am led to believe that it was Lamartine's tergiversations and his semi-connivance with the enemy that saved us, while it ruined him. Their effect was to amuse RECOLLECTIONS OF the leaders of the Mountain, and to divide them. The Montagnards of. the old school, who were re- tained in the Government, separated themselves from the Socialists, who were excluded from it. Had all been united by a common interest, and impelled by common despair before our victory, as they became since, it is doubtful whether that victory would have been won. When I con- sider that we were almost effaced, although we were opposed only by the revolutionary party without its leaders, I ask myself what the result of the contest would have been if those leaders had come forward, and if the insurrection had been supported by a third of the National As- sembly.
Lamartine saw these dangers more closely and clearly than I, and I believe to-day that the fear of arousing a mortal conflict influenced his conduct as much as did his ambition. I might have formed this opinion at the time had I listened to Madame de Lamartine, whose alarm for the safety of her husband, and even of the Assembly, amounted to extravagance. " Beware," she said to me, each time she met me, " beware of pushing things to extremes; you do not know the strength of the revolutionary party. If we enter into conflict with it, we shall perish." I have often reproached myself for not cultivating Madame de Lamartine's acquaintance, for I have always found her to possess real virtue, although she added to it almost all the faults ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 155 which can cHng to virtue, and which, without im- pairing it, render it less lovable: an imperious temper, great personal pride, an upright but un- yielding, and sometimes bitter, spirit; so much so that it was impossible not to respect her, and impossible to like her CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VII The revolutionary party had not dared to oppose I the meeting of the Assembly, but it refused to be f dominated by it. On the contrary, it well under- ^ stood how to keep the Assembly in subjection, and to obtain from it by constraint what it refused to grant from sympathy. Already the clubs rang with threats and insults against the deputies. And as the French, in their political passions, are as argu- mentative as they are insensible to argument, these popular meeting-places were incessantly occupied in manufacturing theories that formed the ground- work of subsequent acts of violence. It was held that the people always remained superior to its representatives, and never completely surrendered its will into their hands: a true principle from which the false conclusion was drawn that the Paris work- men were the French people. Since our first sitting, a vague and widespread agitation had never ceased to reign in the town. The mob met every day in the streets and squares; it spread aimlessly, like the swell of the waves. The approaches to the Assembly were always filled with a gathering of these redoubtable idlers. A demagogic party ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE 157 has so many heads, chance always plays so great, and reason so small, a part in its actions that it is almost impossible to say, either before or after the event, what it wants or what it wanted. Nevertheless, my opinion then was, and has since remained, that the leading demagogues did not aim at destroying the Assembly, and that, as yet, they only sought to make use of it by mastering it. The attack directed against it on the 15th of May seemed intended rather to frighten than to overthrow it; it was at least one of those equivocal enterprises which so frequently occur in times of popular excitement, in which the promoters themselves are careful not to trace or define precisely their plan or their aim, so as to remain free to limit themselves to a peaceful demonstration or force on a revolution, according to the incidents of the day.