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What does July 4th mean for Alexis de Tocqueville?
Tocqueville arrived on the Atlantic coast of the United States in May 1831, after a long crossing, for a stay of nearly ten months. He therefore could witness firsthand the celebrations of the fifty-fifth anniversary of Independence in Albany, the capital of New York State.
What he takes away from July 4 can be boiled down to two observations: first, a broad consensus among the American people around the memory of the birth of the regime, which contrasts with the French divisions; second, the modesty of the republican celebrations — a procession without pomp, featuring guilds of artisans and veterans of the War of Independence, followed by the public reading of the Declaration of 1776.
One could say that the evolution of debates in the United States does not head toward a peaceful unification of the Nation around its origins…
Indeed. Today, the evolution of debates does not move toward a peaceful gathering of the Nation around its founding values. Uncertainty even touches the founding text itself, the Declaration of Independence — and one can clearly see how History is mobilized, even betrayed, by the Trump administration.
Yet, what astonishes me most, the real rupture, is that the era of republican simplicity in celebrations seems decidedly over.
Would you go so far as to say that the splendor of these celebrations now reflects an astonishing attempt to refresh an Old Regime imaginary?
The debates among the Founding Fathers, notably between Hamilton and Jefferson: Hamilton had wished for a near-royal form of the presidency, one that could be compared to the Old Regime. Jefferson opposed it. The American political tradition subsequently built itself decisively against the figure of the king, hence, even today, the “No Kings” demonstrations that mobilize society against the exercise of Trump’s power.
The current presidency, with its unitary conception of the executive, resembles much more the functions of royalty than a presidency limited in its powers.
An impossible question, but let us try. Which scene from this July 4th of Donald Trump would Tocqueville have noted?
Tocqueville was overwhelmed by the evolution of the United States after the 1850s. He could foresee very clearly the emergence of a violent political class, a consequence of what he called the “incurable wound” of slavery, and the influx of European immigrants who had not received the long education in liberty built up over generations troubled him.
I especially like it when he says that America is the “puer robustus” of Hobbes.
The robust boy?
Yes, the puer robustus in Hobbes has the strength of an adult with the reason of a child. It is a power that grows faster than wisdom. It is not an unfavorable description of the current American president…
Tocqueville nevertheless maintained, even though he held genuine optimism about the United States’ future, an optimism that Americans today no longer share: many, according to the latest surveys, doubt the very survival of their model.
I think he would have watched with astonishment a spectacle that, in its taste for grand display, resembles more European spectacles, those very ones from which America had sought to detach itself.
Does this pursuit of a royal horizon also express itself in the practice of power and its staging, to the point of dislocating the White House’s architectural economy itself, with the first-ever construction of a ballroom in history?
The ballroom is one of the expressions of royal power under the Old Regime, one thinks of Louis XIV and his dancing talents. Trump is, to be sure, a more static dancer, but one should not be mistaken: we are facing an ostentatious display of royal glory.
Ultimately, the absence of a ballroom marked the impossibility for the United States president to receive kings on royal terms, forcing them to submit to republican sobriety…
With this decisive difference that the glory here belongs to a single individual. Even in a monarchy, hereditary transmission of power, under the divine gaze, ensures that not everything rests entirely on the individual.
What would Tocqueville say about this 250th anniversary, where the republic wears an unexpectedly royal face?
I always mistrust historical analogies. Tocqueville himself said that historians are dangerous and too often misread a revolution.
That struck me when rereading Marc Bloch, who accuses the 1940 general staff of having chosen the wrong war, replaying 1914 while failing to grasp the new speed of armies.
Tocqueville is therefore at least as interesting for the distance, for what he could not foresee. For there is, with President Trump, a radical novelty.
Which one?
It is twofold. On one hand, the personalization of power.
On the other hand, the extraordinary speed of decisions, which is a distinctly modern trait, whereas what Tocqueville appreciated in the American Constitution was precisely the slowness of its mechanisms, the time imposed on decision that protects democracy from its own impulses.
Democracy is inseparable from slowness because it is inseparable from collective deliberation. Yet we are in the opposite of that, in the shock induced by the cadences of American power.
This idea of accelerationism, already present in fascism and shaping the American far right, is typical of President Trump: he saturates the media space with a constant aim to surprise.
And the celebrations themselves, starting with the fighting spectacles of his own anniversary, included in the 250-year sequence, bear the mark of this style.
They revolve around a certain form of brutality. MMA fighting is typical: it is not exactly an image of concord. Added to this is a desire for spectacle and uninhibited surprise.
Compared to the East Coast culture inherited from the Founding Fathers, a culture of deliberation and temperance, we are now in the realm of the demand for surprise and rapid action, including in diplomacy: successive announcements whose aim is to create a form of shock.
But would Tocqueville have seen it as a slide out of democracy or, on the contrary, as the consequence of an unleashed democratic dynamic?
There are indeed traits that depart from democracy and are claimed as such by part of the president’s entourage. Yet what is probably profoundly democratic is the desire for embodiment.
This Tocqueville had thought and, above all, had to observe: in the fragmentation that characterizes democratic society, the desire for order is projected onto a single figure. He saw this with Louis-Napoléon who, curiously, did not possess the qualities of such a figure. He did have a historic name, but the gaze was stern, the legs arched: he was far from charismatic.
This desire for embodiment crystallizes today in an indisputable way around Trump. It is the “corps du chef” that Marco Belpoliti talks about regarding Silvio Berlusconi: a body constantly exposed, retouched, staged, which becomes the true medium of power, and in which the people no longer recognize themselves through a program, but through a physiology.
Trump mobilizes a mass that identifies with him, or rejects him, but is, in any case, involved, far more than in any other contemporary representation of political institutions. Hence the question: does democracy enter the twenty-first century and the digital arena with Trump, or are we rather commemorating, on this 250th anniversary, a funeral of American democracy officiated by techno-Caesarist despotism?
This desire exists in democracies, certainly. But when they carry it to this extent, those are democracies that step outside the liberal framework. In this grandiose staging, there is something reminiscent of the grand ceremonies of dictator regimes glorified by cinema… think of the eloquence of the propaganda machine in Leni Riefenstahl’s films. This spectacle centered on a single man evokes many such authoritarian systems. For what remains outside his person? What is seen outside him?
It is a first-person narrative.
Exactly. In the first person, and without real protagonists inside the representation. There are family members, but they are emanations of himself, without independent agency. He has vice presidents, but they are almost condemned to parroting: they must repeat the speech.
This is one of the most striking features: everything is captured by Donald Trump’s “I,” down to the messianic speech at the core of American exceptionalism, yet always articulated in the plural. Is this the ultimate trajectory of individualism Tocqueville observed in America?
This is made possible by individualism, indeed, because we are dealing with an undifferentiated crowd.
I am struck, in these ceremonies, by the fact that the audience is invited to participate, but with a single voice. There is no plurality of voices possible.
We are indeed in a mass society that serves as an audience of approval, but not a true protagonist of the spectacle. Here we find again the old matrix of the “bread and games,” this sort of Colosseum where the spectacle removes precisely all power from those who attend.
And Tocqueville, like other liberals, distrusted these grand manifestations.
Always. This is the case for Benjamin Constant and many others. Precisely because they perceive, in mass festive display, the risk of abolishing individual differences. Similarly, Tocqueville is troubled by large religious manifestations: he is not the man of pilgrimages, nor of collective worship before miracles. He is even fairly harsh about it. And this goes hand in hand with the fear of the dissolution of the individual into the crowd.
Your remarkable biography proposes reading Tocqueville beyond a framing that would make him an “antimodern” and you show in pages of formidable intelligence that he is the man of an interregnum. For Gramsci, it is during a moment of unstable in-betweenness that Caesarism offers itself as a catastrophic balance.
Exactly. And that is why Tocqueville is always “too early and too late.” His whole life hinges on this. Too late for the aristocracy: born in 1805 into a Norman Ancien Régime family, whose relatives were brought to the scaffold, he knows that world is dying and there is no return.
Too early for the peaceful democracy he longs for: it has not yet been born in France, and he will seek it in America. Between the two, he will know only convulsions: 1830, 1848, and the December 2 caesarism that shattered his political career and sent him back to writing.
We sometimes feel, perhaps vaguely, that we are also “too early and too late”… What resources can we find in Tocqueville to guide us through our interregnum?
Two, mainly. The first, absolutely central, is the dispersion of power. Note: we are no longer in Tocqueville’s society, which was a society of face-to-face contact. Tocqueville had 700 electors up to 1848 — 700 electors, you know them all! —, then a few thousand; we remain in societies of mutual acquaintance.
This local life, inherent to a world of limited mobility, cannot be transplanted as is: we must think about new forms that today’s dispersion of power would take.
That the municipal level is essential is shown by surveys: mayors remain among the most popular elected officials. But we must find the right territorial scale, not necessarily our nineteenth-century communes, which are still too numerous, and invent the forms of participation that go with them.
Do you have in mind specific devices?
Tocqueville could have spoken of the referendum, which has existed in Switzerland since 1848; he does not mention it, and I am not sure he would have liked it. However, we can clearly see what citizen conventions share with the learned societies of the nineteenth century: spaces for reflection that do not substitute for national representation, but help to decide. I would add a tool today neglected: the petition.
The individual petition under the Restoration, collective under the July Monarchy. Tocqueville submitted petitions, as did all his colleagues. Under the Restoration, the Chamber’s sessions began with the examination of petitions, a way, for the opposition, to return to all questions. After 1830 the petition allowed challenging the Chamber’s or the administration’s action. Today, petitions struggle to be heard by assemblies and polls do not favor collective deliberation. We have lost there a powerful means of civic intervention.
And the second resource?
It is the reflection on the necessary slowness. I am struck by the scant attention given to long-term thinking. There is a sense of constantly rediscovering the same debates, such as the public debt, starting from scratch each time, without the accumulation process that would lead to decisions, if not to consensus, at least to majorities.
The time compression owes much to the emergence of these astonishing figures in American tech, who seem to view their rank as the grandees of the Old Regime. Could Tocqueville have imagined an acceleration that would be reactionary?
No, he had not imagined it, because he thought of progress toward equality of condition. And equality of condition, it is not wealth first and foremost: as one understands from eighteenth-century theater, what constitutes a “man of condition.” It is an equality of respect, as we would say today.
Yet what strikes in the contemporary world is that I am not sure we are witnessing the deepening of the equality he envisaged.
In many respects, we see, on the contrary, groups emerging that consider themselves outside equality of condition, as belonging to a superior status. This is very clear on a part of the American right, with a claimed right to difference that is really a right to superiority.
This is something Tocqueville could not have imagined: he lived in a society still markedly unequal, with visible inequality — in dress, in health — and he was especially sensitive to what, in his time, had already begun to change.
With a major difference from the Old Regime’s grandees: geographic proximity imposed spatial ties.
This is an essential difference. The Old Regime grandees, even hypocritically, felt a sense of responsibility toward those who depended on them.
This patronage link between classes, asserted if not practiced, is what Tocqueville describes about feudalism, partly mythified by him, and whose decline he shows in the eighteenth century. Yet today we are dealing with people who consider themselves superior without imagining any responsibility toward the rest of the population.
No proximity, no face-to-face encounter, no rooted geography, no long duration. A group of privileged individuals hovers above society, without feeling any connection.
How to reinsert, in face-to-face engagement, in a dispersed power, these trajectories of increasing power that seek to escape any constraint?
There are resources. Legal resources, first: antitrust laws, an entire arsenal inherited from the moment when America already faced its barons — Rockefeller, the trusts broken up at the start of the twentieth century. In the United States, this is, in part, what still holds — not completely, certainly, but it is a note of optimism that must be maintained, because it is one of the points of resistance: the courts remain one of the few places where these powers are summoned to appear, to answer, to submit to a procedure.
Then there is the question of scale. Decisions taken at the local level, with participation, impose a minimum of transactions between people: they must talk to each other, compromise, concede on one point to obtain another. Without going as far as the 1848 optimism — the ballot replacing the rifle — there is here a habit of shared discussion that prevents too many people from seceding, in one direction or another: secession of the powerful who exempt themselves, secession of citizens who desert.
Tocqueville would have added a very concrete argument: broad and local suffrage generally leads to higher taxes at the expense of the wealthiest, since a majority decides — this is even one of his concerns in the Democracy. But what he feared as a risk, we can view as a corrective: it limits the extraordinary disparity of fortunes, and reintegrates the wealthiest, whether they like it or not, into the community of taxpayers.
This touches the contradiction of the techno-Caesarist project: it is not possible to exit democracy in a linear fashion without addressing every possibility of resistance.
Yes, and what currently prevents the United States from turning into a dictatorship — as other regimes have — are, besides resistance from part of civil society, the magistrates, federalism — hence a certain dispersion of power — and the autonomy of big cities.
That is what concerns me for Europe.
In what sense?
We are less threatened, but at the moment we do not possess the resource of federalism, which is a protective form of liberties, nor in France an attachment to the “self-government” of local authorities.
Do you think we should work toward a Tocquevillian subsidiarity?
Tocqueville never uses this word, but the matter is absolutely fundamental to him. I am struck by how decentralization reforms come in succession without subsidiarity really advancing; this is one of the great unresolved debates. And I am not sure we are doing what is needed, educationally, to spread its culture. I observe, with my students, that they are trained a lot in ONU-type debating, while their geographical knowledge is often limited. True civic education would be better served by youth municipal councils: taking things at comprehensible scales, having them discuss what they can control. There is a whole transformation to undertake here.
Which pages of Tocqueville will you reread, this July 4th, to console or enlighten yourself?
I am thinking of the pages on the town in New England in the first volume of De la démocratie en Amérique.
There he describes American communal life in contrast with France: “The towns of New England generally have a happy existence. Their government is to their liking as well as to their choice. Within the deep peace and material prosperity that prevail in America, the storms of municipal life are few…”
And he adds that if this government has faults, they “do not strike the eye, because the government truly emanates from those governed.”
It’s almost utopian.
Totally utopian, in my view, but it tells what the dream was. The contrast with France is illuminating: here, writes Tocqueville, the inhabitant “considers himself as a kind of colonist indifferent to the destiny of the place he lives in,” the greatest changes occur “without his participation,” he enjoys these goods “as a usufructuary, without a sense of ownership.” This indifference goes so far that, even if his own safety were at stake, he folds his arms waiting for the nation to come to his rescue “so it is seen oscillating between servitude and license.”
His political ideal, Tocqueville expressed in a letter to Eugène Stoffels, in 1836: a central power energetic in its domain, but with a clearly defined sphere, subordinated to opinion and the legislative, compatible with very broad provincial liberties. He described himself as “deeply convinced that there will never be order and tranquility unless we manage to combine them.”
And that optimism, at bottom, belongs to a thinker who has always believed that politics must be practiced.
Absolutely. The fact that so many people want to engage in politics already carries a dimension of optimism. One does not go into politics if one is already despondent.
One last word. What strikes, when speaking with Trump supporters, even radical ones, is their conviction that the Chinese model will win. With Trump, do we not lose the liberal heterotopia — that place in the world where another model remained possible? Is that not what makes us quake: the obligation, now, to keep this model alive ourselves if we want it to endure?
That is exactly it. I often think, at the moment, of Tocqueville’s lines to a former U.S. president, John Quincy Adams: “Americans do not sufficiently know the resonance their faults have around the world and the party that, on every point on the globe, the enemies of freedom draw from them. If they knew this, I think, they would show more self-control.”
That was the dream of a great peaceful democracy — a powerful dream, right or wrong, to which one must not renounce despite the circumstances.
But there is another consoling dream: that of Victor Hugo imagining the United States of Europe, and of Kant thinking about perpetual peace. Perhaps now is the moment to see that there is also a utopian dimension in Europe.
And that we are now, without a doubt, the only ones who must bear the Tocquevillian hope of a society that is both free and equal.