The great French chronicler of democracy learned a painful lesson on what happens when principled men try to serve an unprincipled master.
The great French chronicler of democracy learned a painful lesson on what happens when principled men try to serve an unprincipled master.
E dmund Burke wrote that “the politician . . . is the philosopher in action.” A number of the great political philosophers, Burke among them, have had careers of their own in politics. Not all were as effective as Burke was. One who learned a painful lesson about principled men serving an unprincipled master was Alexis de Tocqueville.
The year was 1849. The revolutions that had convulsed Europe the previous year were entering their final, failed act. Tocqueville was 43, a decade into his career as a legislator, but making his first foray into practical political leadership when Louis-Napoléon named him the French foreign minister.
Tocqueville was a slender, inquisitive 25-year-old in 1831 when he wheedled the new French government into sending him across the ocean to study the American prison system. France in 1830 threw off the restored Bourbon monarchy for the last time, and the new king, Louis-Philippe, was initially eager to be perceived as liberal, tolerant, and forward-thinking. Louis-Philippe ruled with an elected legislature, albeit one of very limited powers elected through a very limited suffrage. Tocqueville returned with an enduring, magisterial two-volume portrait of the world’s first major liberal, republican, constitutional democracy in its adolescence. “Democracy in America” had no significant influence on the French system, but it established Tocqueville’s reputation as a liberal democrat. He entered the Assembly in 1839.
The New Bonaparte
France’s romance with Louis-Philippe wore off quickly, but he coasted on an era of great economic progress and rebuilding of French prestige. Louis-Napoléon, Napoléon Bonaparte’s nephew and heir, was jailed in 1840 after successive coup attempts, but the government looked the other way when he slipped on a disguise and walked out the front door of the prison to flee to London in 1846.
The good economic times ran out during 1846 and 1847 with bad potato and grain harvests and a severe industrial contraction. All across Europe, the years 1845–1847 were the last era of famine in the continent’s history. With a widespread economic downturn, a revolution in Switzerland, and a new pope, Pius IX, raising liberal expectations in Italy, the warning signs were flashing. Most observers, however, expected problems only in Italy. The peninsula remained divided into small monarchies and territories ruled by the Austrian empire, with the papal states still under the pope’s rule in the center. The venerable Austrian chancellor, Klemens von Metternich, wrote a “political horoscope” at the start of 1848 predicting radical disruption in Rome that would throw Italy into chaos, but with little concern that it would spread to France, Germany, or Austria.
The 1848 revolutions began with a revolt in Palermo on January 12 against the long-hated Bourbon rule of Naples over Sicily. The signal event that made them a continent-wide phenomena was the February 24 abdication of Louis-Philippe in the face of the Parisian mob. In Metternich’s famous phrase, “When Paris sneezes, Europe catches a cold.” From France, revolution spread across Germany and Austria and back into the rest of Italy.
France plunged into chaos in the spring and summer of 1848. A professedly republican government was formed, as yet without any blessing by the people. The Archbishop of Paris was gunned down by the mob while standing atop a barricade attempting to negotiate peace between the contending sides. In the notorious “June Days,” General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac brought down the full might of the French army on urban rioters, opening up his artillery in the streets and leaving as many as 10,000 Parisians dead. Tocqueville, like Lafayette in 1789, tried to steer an American-style middle course between the monarchist reaction and the left-wing Parisian mob. He ultimately preferred order to anarchy, and for that reason backed Cavaignac and his heavy-handed tactics. By November, the republic’s constitution was pledging not lofty abstractions but “family, work, property and public order.”
The French people desperately wanted both order and change, and they still longed nostalgically for the glory of Napoléon I. Only Louis-Napoléon could promise all three, and he had the virtue of being out of the country during the June Days. His stock with the public soared in absentia. Louis-Napoléon returned in to France in September, defying a law banning the Bonapartes from French soil, after five different constituencies elected him to the Assembly. In December 1848, to the shock of the entire political class (including Louis-Napoléon himself), he was overwhelmingly elected president of the new republic. He drew 74 percent of the vote out of 7.5 million cast, far outdistancing General Cavaignac and the republican and socialist candidates. The margin of victory compelled the National Assembly to overlook the fact that Louis-Napoléon, as a Swiss citizen, was constitutionally ineligible for the office.
The French Go to Rome
In Rome, Pope Pius IX was finding that nothing was more dangerous than dashed hopes. Pius granted some expanded civil liberties and allowed for technological progress barred by his predecessor, but refused any meaningful political reforms. In response, his prime minister was assassinated while entering the Chamber of Deputies building in November 1848, stabbed in the neck in deliberate imitation of the assassination of Julius Caesar. The pope fled to Naples in disguise. In December, 1848, Rome was declared a republic.
The papal states had long been a de facto sphere of influence for Austria, who jockeyed with Spain and smaller Catholic states for the closest relationship with the Vatican. The Bavarian ambassador, for example, won the honor of sneaking Pius out of Rome. France, since the anti-clerical French Revolution, had been estranged. That was about to change.
A revival of Catholic faith was underway in France amidst the turmoil of 1848. General Cavaignac, running the provisional government in the fall and contending for the presidency, offered French assistance to the pope to court the Catholic vote. French Catholics viewed Louis-Napoléon with suspicion for a variety of reasons; for example, he had personally participated in an uprising against the papal states in 1831. But he claimed, with some sincerity, to be a faithful Catholic, and coming to France with broad popular support but no political party or base, he felt impelled to back the pope against the republicans.
Louis-Napoléon pledged to send a French military expedition to restore Pius’s rule, but in the form of a constitutional government that France would protect from Austria. It was a brilliant formulation, perfectly calibrated to the French politics of the moment, with an echo of his uncle’s challenge to Austrian influence in Italy. But it took account of none of the realities on the ground in Rome. Pius did not want a constitution; the Romans did not want Pius; nobody wanted the French.
No French soldier had fought in Europe since the Waterloo campaign. The French expedition was led by General Charles Oudinot, the son of a Napoléonic marshal. Oudinot believed that “Italians do not fight” and made reservations for dinner in Rome. He arrived without scaling ladders or siege cannons to take a city surrounded by 26-foot-high stone walls that had stood for two centuries. A dashing resistance outside the walls led by the revolutionary hero Giuseppe Garibaldi disabused Oudinot of those illusions. Three hundred French prisoners were taken, and a surprised Oudinot beat an embarrassed retreat, only to find his camp beset with malaria as the warm weather arrived.
In May 1849, the French struck a truce with the republican leader Giuseppe Mazzini. Louis-Napoléon sent an envoy to negotiate with Mazzini: a moderate 43-year-old diplomat and former minister to Spain named Ferdinand de Lesseps. Lesseps knew that he had leverage with Mazzini, as he carried a letter from Louis-Napoléon to Oudinot promising reinforcements. What he did not know was that Louis-Napoléon was just playing domestic politics to strengthen his hand in the upcoming French assembly elections.
After extensive negotiations, Lesseps and Mazzini reached an agreement on May 31, under which the French would remain “welcome” outside Rome, but without resolving Rome’s form of government, recognition by France, or the status of the pope. Oudinot was incensed at being told to camp in place during malaria season. The ink was not even dry before word arrived that Lesseps was being recalled, and Louis-Napoléon authorized Oudinot to resume the offensive. Given the French conservatives’ gain in the assembly elections, Louis-Napoléon had fewer reasons to cater to French liberals and more reasons to cater to the French Catholic Right. Lesseps’s agreement was never honored, and Louis-Napoléon and the French press (at his instigation) shamelessly dumped all the blame on Lesseps. For following Louis-Napoléon’s instructions, he was pilloried as a man who sold out his country. His promising diplomatic career was dead.
Tocqueville in the Arena
Lesseps’s fate should have been a warning. Back home, already reshuffling his cabinet, Louis-Napoléon chose Tocqueville to replace his previous foreign minister.
Tocqueville had no illusions about what he was walking into. He understood that Louis-Napoléon openly desired to restore an empire, and had only a limited commitment to republicanism or democracy. He found the new French president impressive in some respects but erratic. “His intelligence,” Tocqueville later reflected, “was incoherent, confused, filled with great thoughts poorly applied.”
But Louis-Napoléon was in power, and Tocqueville equally mistrusted the alternatives: the monarchists, the mob, and Louis-Napoléon’s chief rival, Adolphe Thiers. He believed he could do more good inside the regime than outside, and told Louis-Napoléon, “I will not help you overthrow the Republic but I will help you find an important permanent place in it.” Recognizing what a hash Louis-Napoléon’s double-dealing had already made of the situation in Rome, Tocqueville took the job on condition of not having to defend in the Assembly anything that had been done before his appointment.
In Rome, after a brief warning, Oudinot resumed the offensive, not waiting for the truce to expire before seizing the ground outside the city that Garibaldi had previously defended, while the Italian general was still bedridden with a bullet wound from the prior engagement. From here on, defense of the city was doomed. The French now had 30,000 men (compared with 12,000 in Oudinot’s initial expedition) and a full complement of artillery and siege equipment. The Romans had 18,000 men and were poorly supplied, but they still had the walls and the defensive position to make a French attack costly.
It would be costly in more ways than militarily. France would have to bombard Rome to take it. The British led a multinational protest against shelling the Eternal City, joined by the United States, Prussia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland — a protest with ironic echoes in the next two decades of urban bombardments, culminating in the Prussians shelling Paris itself in 1871. Tocqueville warned that “the noise of our bombs will be heard in all of Europe . . . [Rome] is not like any other city.” International opinion turned on the French, and warmed to the romantic cause of the Romans.
Louis-Napoléon and his ministers had to endure an effort to impeach them when news of the renewed attack on Rome reached Paris, although the liberals and radicals no longer had the votes, and a rumored coup had fizzled. Meanwhile, the French had leaned on Pius to commit to reforms, but he was now in the company of Austrian troops, and calculated that France would fight for its national honor in Rome without any concessions from him to liberal government. Events proved him right.
After final battles in the closing days of June 1849, Rome’s dramatic defense was over, the Roman leaders dying or, in the case of Garibaldi and Mazzini, scattering into years-long exiles. The ripples of Rome’s doomed stand against the French would spread over the next two decades, until a unified Italy finally wrested Rome from the pope in 1870 while Louis-Napoléon (by then, Emperor Napoléon III) was busy at war with Germany. The French military occupation of Rome continued for 21 years, tying down thousands of French soldiers who suffered bitterly from the annual outbreaks of malaria. Occupation was a frequent drag on the ambitions of Napoléon III, who never wanted to be master of Rome but backed himself into that role at the very outset of his rule as a sop to domestic politics.
For the moment, Louis-Napoléon allowed the brunt of the blame for the bloodshed and broken promises to fall on Tocqueville, Oudinot, and Lesseps, the latter of whom would go on to build the Suez Canal to rehabilitate his reputation. In August 1849, Napoleon sent Colonel Edgar Ney — son of his uncle’s most devoted marshal — with a supposedly private letter of protest that Ney was explicitly instructed to ensure would be leaked and published in Rome. In it, Louis-Napoléon asserted: “The French Republic did not send an army to Rome to extinguish Italian freedom . . . I would have the pope’s temporal power resume in this way: general amnesty, secularization of the administration, and a liberal government.” But none of this happened; Pius’s return sent scores of political prisoners to the dungeons and brought back the guillotine and the walled Jewish ghetto, which would soon be the last standing in Europe.
Pius’s intransigence made an open mockery of French pledges of protection of constitutional rule. Tocqueville recalled Oudinot, scapegoating him for allowing the repression. For his part, Tocqueville had to read aloud to the French cabinet a letter from Lord Palmerston, his British counterpart, asking how Britain could trust the government of Louis-Napoléon if its word meant so little. When Tocqueville recited to the Assembly claims that Pius would accept reforms and asked “Can you, messieurs, doubt the word of the Holy Father?,” the assemblage laughed in his face.
Louis-Napoléon sacked Tocqueville in October 1849 — having destroyed Tocqueville’s remaining credibility with French liberals — and replaced him with more pliable men, eventually restoring Tocqueville’s predecessor as foreign minister. The great French chronicler of democracy never held high office again. In 1851, he sided with Louis-Napoléon against Thiers in the former’s effort to legally extend his presidential term, but this did not save Tocqueville from being briefly jailed when Louis-Napoléon launched a coup and dissolved the Assembly in December 1851. Tocqueville retreated to his writings, reflecting on France’s grim cycle of revolutions, until his death from tuberculosis in 1859. He had tried to ride the tiger, and was eaten by it.