PART TWO
TOCQUEVILLE IN AMERICA

7
Democracy in America

When Alexis de Tocqueville went to America—in 1831—he was twenty-five years old. A disenchanted jurist, he embarked on a journey to study the characteristics of the American penitentiary system. In reality, however, he was interested in the functioning of democracy. Later, he wrote about many other things—about the French prison system, the political dangers of equality, the French Revolution, colonial expansion, and the revolution of 1848—but he is known today mostly for his first book, Democracy in America . Read and reread by countless students of the American system, Democracy is a model of political writing and makes part of a canon. Tocqueville's intellectual alertness, as if in imitation of the American "free circulation of things and ideas" (1: 167), makes his analysis active, mobile, and undogmatic, always following new openings and probing the limits of the visible. There is nothing capricious about it, however: he operates through "pairs in tension" (to use James Schleifer's formulation), and his analysis is held within the boundaries of binary divisions leading to further division, comparisons, and definitions.^[1] The aristocratic system of government is opposed to the democratic; within the latter, the possibilities of freedom are measured against the dangers of tyranny; the relationship of equality to freedom is then debated; an appraisal of the workings of American democracy

[1] "It was the idea of right that enabled men to define anarchy and tyranny," he writes in one typical instance. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, the Henry Reeve text rev. by Francis Bowen (New York: Knopf, 1945), 1: 244. Translations are sometimes made more literal.

shows the working of the safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. Each of the divisions is pursued as long as is necessary to exhaust its ramifications; all lead back to the New World. This movement reflects the major image that Tocqueville sees before his eyes: that of the unstoppable march of equality. His thought attempts to follow that march with matching energy and determination.

In describing Tocqueville's method, I use the words "visible" and "sees" very deliberately: to see, to look, and to perceive are Tocqueville's three most common verbs in describing his cognitive attitude to America. He uses them extremely frequently both in their literal and metaphorical sense. "Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly [frappé mes regards] than the general equality of the condition of the people," he wrote in the first sentence of the introduction.^[2] "However sudden and momentous the events which have just been accomplished before our very eyes [viennent de s'accomplir sous nos yeux], the author of this book has a right to say that they have not taken him by surprise," he writes in the famous 1848 introduction to the twelfth edition (1: cx). And the text proper opens with a sweeping first sentence also alluding to eyes and to visual perception: "North America presents in its external form certain general features which it is easy to distinguish at the first glance [au premier coup d'oeil]" (1: 17). These first sentences are not casual: verbs denoting seeing are Tocqueville's way of writing about his intellectual discovery of the American system of government.

What he sees in Democracy in America —"homme de tête" that he was—he sees with "les yeux de la tête" (to use Stendhal's phrase).^[3] America presents herself to him as a "spectacle" that attracts his attention ("attire, frappe ses regards"). In his description of the exterior form of North America, he sees her beauty in symmetry, in "a sort of methodical order [that] seems to have regulated the separation of land and water, mountains and valleys" (1: 17). Symmetry, then, is not only a characteristic of his thinking, it also characterizes the beauty to which he aspires. The beautiful objects he sees in America are of the ideal order, and the most beautiful among them is the Constitution—that "fine creation of human industry" (1: 167). The consistent use of "voir" and of its many synonyms in Democracy in America ("percevoir," "aperce-

[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1: 3.

[3] He wrote the first two volumes sustaining, as he said in a letter, an "existence toute de tête" for very long periods of time. See James Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 17).

voir," "reconnaître," "jetter un coup d'oeil") expresses the empirical nature of his thinking—the fact that it is a reaction and response to reality rather than a purely intellectual enterprise. Yet, his intense and open reaction to America was singularly predetermined, and he looked for answers to the questions he brought with himself from France.

Tocqueville displayed extraordinary energy during his American trip: he was working intensely, thinking, talking, and writing about what he saw. His notebooks show that many of the ideas in Democracy in America were conceived en route there, and some of them may have been brought to America ready-made. "Tocqueville is an extreme example of an intellectual who never 'learned' anything outside of the conceptual framework that he had developed beforehand."^[4] It was his "feeling of the irreversible march of history," shared with the generations marked by the French Revolution, that made his encounter with the "New World" so astonishingly fruitful.

For the French historian François Furet, Tocqueville's thought is one long meditation on the nobility. "Tocqueville posited as an axiom, or a self-evident truth, that mankind was moving in great strides toward the age of democracy. This conclusion was not the outcome of a systematic inquiry; it was merely the abstract expression—in keeping with the nature of Tocqueville's genius—of the actual experience of Tocqueville and his milieu" (Furet 1984, 17).^[5] In fact, Tocqueville saw the democracy of America as a negation of France—France was the underlying measure for all his comparisons. Although equality was marching forward in both countries, in France it was hampered by old and degenerate institutions, whereas America faced no such obstacles. America was first described—and this is particularly noticeable in his travel notes—in terms of absence. There was no bureaucratic government there, no capital like Paris; power was not embodied in a king or in a "prefect"; the class structure was different: there was no aristocracy and no peasantry, and therefore no violent resentments that characterized France during the late "Old Régime." Politics as understood in France was absent in America: there were no parties, no ideologues, no revolutionary spirit. America's positive aspects were also a negation of France: unlike diversified France, America was a country of uniformity, of the

[4] François Furet, "The Conceptual System of Democracy in America, " in In the Workshop of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 167–196; 169.

[5] See also the chapter "Tocqueville's Aristocratic Heritage" in Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 169–172.

widespread education so necessary for democracy, of widespread participation in social life. France was an aristocratic society, and America was not.

Tocqueville circumvented the rigidity of the binary system by continuously introducing third elements. England was also an aristocratic society, but very much unlike France; Tocqueville often compared America to England and other societies. The comparisons were never final, and the "destabilization" of the "pairs" saved Democracy in America from becoming a system, which Tocqueville would have abhorred. Unlike many of his contemporaries—Marx, Proudhon, Fourier, Saint-Simon—he escaped the temptation to encapsulate human history in a formula.^[6] The march of equality is irresistible, but the shape it takes in practice depends on human effort. He was deeply pessimistic and thought that the human mind and understanding are limited; but there was always a margin for the inexplicable in human life and activity, and human free will permitted history to rebel against systems. This is why he insisted that what he wrote was the result of observation, and the verb "to see" allowed him to express this particularity of his position. He was "essentially practical in all his intellectual meditations," Beaumont wrote about him (as always, very perceptively), "he thought of the past only from the perspective of the present, and of foreign peoples only with his own country in mind" (Beaumont 1897, 13). Being capable of sight, he was also capable of foresight.

Democracy in America, as its title indicates, is a book about the workings of democracy in general and about the democratic system of government in the United States of America in particular. The first two volumes (1835) stay close to the American experience. In these, Tocqueville discusses various aspects of the social condition of the Americans, including the Constitution, associations, newspapers, geography, government, and the parties. He pays attention to the role of religion and the family, to "manners," and to the relationship between the races. (These last subjects were also treated by Beaumont in his companion text to Democracy in America, the novel Marie or Slavery in the United States, published also in 1835.) In the following two volumes, finished eight years after the American voyage, he felt free to detach himself

[6] "I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations" (Democracy, 2: 334).

more from the particularities of American society. Democracy was not a uniquely American system, and its shape had to be different in other countries; in the second part, therefore, the comparison of various countries and systems is wider and more general, with long reflections on democracy in France and the aristocratic system in England. This volume is "more about democracy, and less about America," Tocqueville wrote in a letter. It ends, as it began, with Tocqueville seeing a great panorama, but this time it is not a panorama of America but of humanity itself:

For myself, who now look back from this extreme limit of my task and discover from afar, but at once, the various objects which have attracted my more attentive investigation upon my way, I am full of apprehensions and of hopes. I perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off, mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and I cling with a firmer hold to the belief that for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous, they require but to will it. . . . Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities. The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness. (2: 334)

This soaring ending does not come unexpectedly. It is the result of a long and strenuous climb, a march or a race (course ), to use Tocqueville's terms. In the last part of his work, he reiterates many of the images and metaphors that reappear consistently throughout his work and reflect his emotional vision of America. As he attempted to see the general image of the society he described in four volumes, he was "stopped by the difficulty of the task" which caused his "sight" to be "troubled" and his "reason" to "fail." What he sees in front of his eyes is chaos: "The world that is rising into existence is still half encumbered by the remains of the world that is waning into decay" (1: 331). It is striking to find this image at the very end of what for the most part has been a sustained and rigorous analysis. And yet this image of America predated Tocqueville's analysis and, as I will show, even his visit. It was an image that the analysis lacked the power to dispel. It is an America of chaos, of debris, of life-in-death which haunts Tocqueville's book—an America of exile, of forests, America as a forest; prerational, nonrational, and yet present throughout his work. To discover its origins, we must return to Chateaubriand.

8
Journey to Lake Oneida

The Empty Place

Describing the preparations by the young Tocqueville and Beaumont for the American voyage, the contemporary biographer of Tocqueville, André Jardin, devotes a page to Chateaubriand, who had gone to America forty years before. In 1792 the French Revolution was threatening young Chateaubriand's life, and he was prompted to go to America by Tocqueville's great-grandfather Malesherbes. In the Preface to the first edition of René (1802), Chateaubriand linked his American journey to the Revolution and described, as Custine did later in his memoir, the massacre of his family during the Terror. The success of this short novel established a certain vision of America—a place of exile for victims of the Revolution. But it was a strangely Romantic and impractical vision.

Chateaubriand wrote about America frequently. "America was to be one of the great themes of his work, a theme that would keep reappearing from Atala to the Mémoires d'outre-tombe [from his first to his last work]. Combining what he had seen, what he had read, what he imagined, he recreated an America in unforgettable colors," wrote Jardin. Chateaubriand, too, thought that democracy might flourish in the future of humanity, or at least so he said in his Travels in America (1827). "How could the two young travellers," asks Jardin, "close to Chateaubriand as they were, not have been aware of this, the great man's verdict on the future of democracy?" (pp. 104–105).

Chateaubriand declared that democracy was general in nature and not particular to any country. The twenty-year-old Tocqueville rejected this idea with fury,^[1] only to embrace it wholeheartedly a few years later. But it was an idea that could be found in many authors of the period.^[2] The influence of Chateaubriand's strictly political ideas on Tocqueville's generation was probably only secondary; in Tocqueville's case, Montesquieu was the most important political influence.^[3] Chateaubriand was, however, of utmost importance in what Pierre Michel has called the joining of the poetic and the political.^[4] The poetic vision of "American desert," the vision of the Indian as a symbol of individual independence, and the vision of the exiled Frenchman are the three key images in which the political problems of the times were expressed. All three were imposed on the imagination of the French by Chateaubriand's early American novels, René, Atala, and Les Natchez .

The truly Chateaubriandesque element in Tocqueville's writings is his vision of America as a symbolic, desolate landscape of the postrevolutionary world. Democracy in America, the work of a lucid mind, is built on and against this landscape, as are other works by Tocqueville. Take, for example, Tocqueville's description in his Recollections (Souvenirs ) of his visit, in 1848, to the family château. It is an echo, almost a repetition, of another visit fifty years earlier to a family château—that of young René in Chateaubriand's famous novel. On the way to see his sister, René arrives at the forest where he had spent the only happy years of his life; the château, sold by his older brother, is empty:

Walking across the deserted courtyard, I stopped to gaze at the closed and partly broken windows, the thistle growing at the foot of the walls, the leaves strewn over the threshold of the doors. . . . I entered the dwelling of my ancestors. I paced through the resounding halls where nothing could be heard but the sound of my footsteps. The chambers were barely lit by a faint glimmer filtering

[1] In an unpublished article written in 1825 in answer to an article by Chateaubriand from Journal des Débats . Quoted by E. Doran after A. Rédier, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville (Paris: Perrin, 1925), 92. See Eva Doran, "Two Men and a Forest: Chateaubriand, Tocqueville, and the American Wilderness," Essays in French Studies, 13 (Nov. 1976): 44–61; 59.

[2] François Furet, "The Conceptual System of Democracy in America, " 171.

[3] James Schleifer called Democracy in America "a wonderful dialogue between Tocqueville and Montesquieu. As he composed, Tocqueville repeated, revised, and reversed the observations of his great predecessor." In James T. Schleifer, "Tocqueville as Historian," Reconsidering Tocqueville's "Democracy in America, " ed. Abraham S. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 146–167; 161.

[4] Pierre Michel, Un mythe Romantique: Les Barbares, 1789–1848 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1981), 83.

in through the closed shutters. . . . Everywhere the rooms were neglected, and spiders spun their webs in the abandoned beds.

He leaves precipitously, without looking back. How sweet but short are the moments of family happiness, he reflects; God scatters the family's children like smoke. "The oak sees its acorns take root all around it; it is not so with the children of men!"^[5]

Tocqueville's description is, if this is possible, even more Chateaubriandesque than that of Chateaubriand. Like René, he came to the château unexpectedly and unexpected.

On entering the house I was flooded with such an intense and peculiar sadness that the memory of it still remains firmly engraved on my mind, although much else happened to remember then.

The empty rooms—only his dog to greet him—

the uncurtained windows, the piles of dusty furniture, fires gone out, clocks run down, the mournful look of the place, the damp walls—all these things seemed witnesses of neglect and prophets of doom. This little isolated corner of the world . . . which had often been the most delightful retreat [la plus charmante solitude] for me, now seemed a deserted wilderness. But through the desolation of the present I could see, as if looking out from the bottom of a tomb, the tenderest and gayest memories of my life.

It was at that moment that, thanks to his imagination,^[6] he understood better than ever "the utter bitterness of revolutions."^[7] This image has an extraordinary resonance: there can be no doubt that the wanderer, catching a glimpse of the ruined ancestral home—looking from the tomb at his early happiness—is a younger brother of René. The vocabulary is strikingly Romantic: berceau, trace, vestige, tombeau, ruine —favorite

[5] Francois-René de Chateaubriand, René, in Atala, René, trans. Irving Putter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952), 104–105.

[6] "It is wonderful how much brighter and more vivid than reality are the colours of a man's imagination." Tocqueville, Recollections, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 94.

[7] Tocqueville, Recollections, 94–95. This is how it sounds in the original: "Je fus saisi, en y entrant, d'une tristesse si grande et si particulière, qu'elle a laissé clans mon souvenir des traces qu'aujourd'hui encore je retrouve marquées et visibles, parmi tous les vestiges des événements de ce temps-là. Ces chambres vides, ces fenêtres détendues, ces meubles entassés et poudreux, ces foyers éteins, ces horloges arrêtées, l'air morne du lieu, l'humidité des murs, tout me parut annoncer l'abandon et présager la ruine. Ce petit coin de terre isolé . . . qui m'avalt paru tant de fois la plus charmante solitude, me sembla dans l'état actuel de mes pensées, un désert désolé; mais, à travers la désolation de l'aspect présent, j'aperccvais, comme du fond d'un tombeau, les images les plus douces et les plus riantes de ma vie." Tocqueville, Souvenirs, in Oeuvres Complètes (1964), 12: 112–113.

words of Chateaubriand—suggest the passage of time; solitude, désert denote the spiritual space in which René wandered. The family, for Tocqueville one of the two sacred links of society (the other being private property), belongs to the past, scattered like smoke by the winds of history. The description is of a state of mind as well as of a château. The building itself becomes a sign of physical and spiritual destruction, of the end of a certain world seen by a remnant of that world, a ruin seen by walking débris. Le Château de Tocqueville, just like René's château and Chateaubriand's own Combourg, is, par excellence, an empty place .^[8]

There are in Tocqueville's writings other descriptions of his château. In a letter to his fiancée (later his wife) Mary Mottley, written some eighteen years before, Tocqueville described it as a cumbersome, impractical place "where nothing seems made for comfort and even less for the pleasure of the eye: dark rooms, large chimneys that offer more cold than heat, armchairs in which three would easily fit, humid walls and corridors in which the wind whistles. . . ." The emptiness and humidity are here devoid of any tragic meaning. It is a place of calm, of "profound tranquility," and of recollections.^[9] Although devoid of people, it is not an empty place (le lieu vide), a metaphorical ruin, a place of past human actions and feelings, the symbol of the unavoidable end of human time. In fact, the feeling of emptiness and ruin was not necessarily linked to the ancestral site and was not limited to a concrete place: Chateaubriand had a similar reaction on the site of Carthage, while looking at the countryside around the city of Rome, facing ruins, a small city, or a forest. And since he travels continuously, and his protagonists travel as well,^[10] he looks for and finds empty places everywhere.

In his continuous displacements, Chateaubriand's René always met the same site. In a kind of Grand Tour manqué, he first goes to sit on the debris of Rome and Greece, where he can see "power of nature and weakness of man: a blade of grass will pierce through the hardest marble of these tombs, while their weight can never be lifted by all these mighty dead!" (René, 90). Seated at the top of Mount Etna, he cried over the fate of "mortal men whose dwellings he could barely distin-

[8] For an excellent discussion of the lieu vide motif in Chateaubriand's writings, see Michael Riffaterre, "Chateaubriand et le monument imaginaire," in Chateaubriand Today, ed. Richard Switzer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 63–81; 72–76.

[9] Quoted in Xavier de la Fournière, Alexis de Tocqueville: Un monarchiste indépendant (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 1981), 17.

[10] Michael Riffaterre said that Chateaubriand's works of fiction take the form of an itinerary. See his "Chateaubriand et le monument imaginaire,"67.

guish far off below him" (p. 92). "In the schematic recounting of his travels," writes Margaret Waller, ". . . René makes little pretense of 'realistic' exposition. Each stage of his journey serves instead as an occasion for lyrical apostrophes and philosophical speculations on mortality."^[11] Instead of integrating him into the culture he was born to continue, his "Grand Tour" showed him his social uselessness and plunged him into even greater isolation. Sclf-exiled, first to the "desert" at the outskirts of the city and then to a chaumière in the countryside, he finally decides to depart for America. There he finds the most deserted of deserts, nature showing fallen trees as monuments of the past and the doomed Indian race as a sort of walking ruin. "They still point out a rock where he would go off and sit in the setting sun" runs the last sentence of René (p. 114). Nature was also le lieu vide if the hero's life was empty.

There is a text among Tocqueville's papers in which we find a quintes-sential America-as-an-empty-place and a René contemplating "the force of nature and the weakness of man." It is a short travel account called "Journey to Lake Oneida." Written right after his American trip, it was first published by Beaumont in 1866, together with another travel story, "A Fortnight in the Wilds." Beaumont attached great importance to these two travel accounts: these were the texts, he thought, in which Alexis de Tocqueville "let himself go with the flow of impressions [produced by] the irresistible charm of these great solitudes of America, where everything united to intoxicate the senses and put the mind to sleep" (Beaumont 1897, 25).^[12] His mind asleep, Tocqueville did describe the America of his dreams, or of his unconscious—the America of Chateaubriand.

The six-page story describes an episode in the westward travel of Tocquevillc and Beaumont, an episode that both writers remembered as particularly moving. On no other journey were their impressions equally "vivid and lasting," wrote Beaumont, quoting Tocquevillc's opinion (Beaumont 1897, 24). This was an expedition that brought

[11] Margaret Waller, "Cherchez la Femme: Male Malady and Narrative Politics in the French Romantic Novel," PMLA 104, 2 (March 1989): 141–151; 145.

[12] This quotation is reminiscent of the sentence from Chateaubriand's Travels in America: "The traveler's reverie is a sort of plenitude of the heart and emptiness of the mind which allows one to enjoy his existence in repose." This thought is expressed while the traveler is seated on the banks of an island in the middle of a lake in exotic Florida. See Chateaubriand, Travels in America, trans. Richard Schwitzcr (Lexington: University, of Kentucky Press, 1969), 65. As for travelers by the side of lakes, Custine was drawn "Au bord du lac" by Edward de Sainte-Barbe in Scotland, in 1822.

Tocqueville and Beaumont from Syracuse to Fort Brewerton in New York, and then to an island on Lake Oneida where they went to search for traces of a Frenchman who had lived there right after the Revolution. The first three pages of the account show the travelers in the American forest; then we are told the story of the Frenchman. The second half describes the travelers' arrival on the island, their search for traces of their compatriot, and their melancholy retreat. Sadder and wiser, the two young Frenchmen go back to the mainland.^[13]

The opening of the story is truly majestic. After the readers are provided with initial information, the story plunges into the forest, to leave it only three pages later. The forest inspires in Tocqueville "a sort of religious terror" and is described as if it were a cathedral. The travelers move under a dome of tree branches, in a majestic half-shadow, with sunrays piercing through the branches—they remain silent for hours, their "souls filled with the grandeur and novelty of the sight." The forest described in these terms becomes sublime, religious, monumental, a moral as well as a natural structure. But this is only half the image. Below the

vast dome of vegetation, below the thick veil . . . the eye perceived immense confusion, a sort of chaos. . . . Trees of all ages, foliage of all colors, plants, fruits and flowers of a thousand species, entangled and intertwined. Generations of trees have succeeded one another there through uninterrupted centuries and the ground is covered with their debris. . . . Sometimes we happened to come on an immense tree that the wind had torn up by the roots, but the ranks are so crowded in the forest that often despite its weight it had not been able to make its way right down to the ground.^[14] Its withered branches still balanced in the air. (Pp. 343–344)

In this last image, the travelers again raise their eyes up, the forest becomes again a cathedral, and, out of the chaos, a tree-symbol of Christ emerges.

There was no man in this forest, yet it was not a desert: "On the contrary, everything in nature showed a creative force unknown elsewhere; everything was in movement. . . . It was as if one heard an inner sound that betrayed the work of creation." After several hours of walk-

[13] Alexis de Tocqueville, "Journey to Lake Oneida" (Voyage au lac Onéida), in vol. 5 of the Oeuvres Complètes (1957), pp. 336–341. English translation (often made more literal by me) in Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 343–349.

[14] In the original, a surprising expression attracts the reader's attention here: "il n'avait pu se faire jour jusqu'à la terre" (p. 337). "Se faire jour" indicates movement in the opposite direction, toward the light.

ing through the forest, the two travelers come upon a settler's cabin, surrounded by the signs of his efforts, "some trees cut down, trunks burnt and charred, and a few plants useful to the life of man." This is how "a European" tried to establish his residence in the midst of a "desert."^[15] This little scene is a preparation—a mise-en-abîme —of what awaited the travelers on the island.

Finally, the travelers arrived at the edge of the lake from which they could admire its calm and isolation, with two little islands completely covered by trees and peacefully floating on its surface. They did not come here by accident. Many years before, Tocqueville had read a book called Journey to Lake Oneida, about a French exile who, after the Revolution, came with his wife to live on this island. The book left such a lasting impression on him that the two travelers "often talked about it, and always ended by saying . . . `the only happiness in the world is on the shores of Lake Oneida.' " It is an important sentence because it reveals the "unofficial" motive for Tocquevilie's trip to America. When finally they reached the shores of the lake, the place did not strike them as new; "on the contrary, we seemed to be revisiting a place in which we had passed part of our youth."^[16]

The second part of the story opens with the travelers stopping at a fisherman's hut, the only one on the lakeshore. The fisherman's wife tells them that the Frenchman is no longer there: the woman died and the man left the island without anyone knowing where he went. When she settled on the shore, twenty-one years earlier, the Frenchman was already a legend; she has visited the already abandoned but still lovely island. She lends them a boat, expressing her surprise at their going there, and they set off, their "hearts filled with gentle and sad emotions." The island seems totally wild but, once they make their way inside, they perceive "a spectacle" that is the opposite of what they had noticed in the clearing of the European pioneer: 'We had often seen man struggling with nature hand to hand. . . . Here, by contrast, we saw the forest regaining its empire, marching out again to conquer the

[15] In Democracy in America Tocqueville observes that there are no Europeans among the pioneers. Europeans establish themselves in cities after their arrival. One needs to be born an American to have the necessary determination to go into the forest. (Often, though, he said that Americans are Europeans, that he considers them offspring within the European family.)

[16] The idea of revisiting is introduced by a sentence that is almost identical to the sentence I quoted in the description of the Château Tocqueville: "Consider how strange is the power of imagination over the human mind." In fact, these sentences come in "clusters": linked to a repeated image or situation, they "belong" together.

desert, defying man and quickly making the traces of his passing victory disappear."

Although the forest covering the island was young, it was impossible to find the "abandoned dwellings." For over an hour the travelers looked for them but were able to find only a half-dead apple tree and a climbing vine. They looked on the ground, under the debris, for "the remains of her who was not afraid to exchange the delights of a civilized life for a tomb on a deserted island in the New World," but they found nothing. It was with "hearts full of emotion" and inspired by some sort of "religious feeling" that they devoted themselves to their search: they could not imagine a more wretched man than that Frenchman. Rejected by society, he flees into the wild with the only being that loves him. He starts his life anew, but his wife dies. "What can become of him?. . .He is no longer adapted either for solitude or for the world; he does not know how to live either with men or without them; he is neither a savage nor a civilized man: he is nothing but a piece of debris, like those trees in the American forest which the wind has had the power to uproot, but not to blow down. He stands erect, but he lives no more." After seeing the island's "every debris," the two travelers set off on their way, leaving behind "this vast rampart of greenery" that could defend the chaumière of the exiles from everything but death. It is the words "la mort" that end the story.

Let us reconsider what has happened. Tocqueville, having read a book about the Frenchman's island, sets off with Beaumont to visit it. They go through the forest, meet a settler, talk to a fisherman's wife, go to the island, find an old apple tree, and go off. The island is a perfect, complete lieu vide —it is covered with nothing but disappearing traces. Everything in the story is said twice in absolute symmetry. We have two islands, two forests—old and new; two settlers—one establishing his residence in the forest, the other gone already; we have two visits to the island—the fisherman's wife's and our travelers', for whom it feels like a second visit. The excursion is the result of reading, so the story is a repetition of another story; the title of the first book is given in the text—it is Journey to Lake Oneida —and repeated as the title of Tocqueville's episode, as if reflecting on the surface its very origin, just as the surface of Lake Oneida reflects the surrounding, ever-present forest. On the island, we have a half-dead apple tree and the vanished Frenchman metaphorically turning into a half-dead tree, still standing but already "deraciné." The same tree was standing over the travelers' heads at the beginning of the story, when they were contemplating the cathedral of

the forest. The general organization of the story is also double: the narrator follows the traces of the Frenchman, and the two subplots meet on the island in a climatic nonevent—a vain search for the Frenchman's house. The last page repeats the Frenchman's story rephrased in moral and emotional terms. And at the end, the two travelers return to their voyages.

The parallelism and repetition is also visible on the level of the sentence. A certain number of words—words that we know already: désert, solitude, trace, vestige, mort —are repeated over and over; solitude and désert run through the story together, setting an echo, a resonance between similar but slightly different elements. The nouns are often described by couples of adjectives ("une trace profonde et durable") or are themselves coupled (the island is "le but et le terme" of their voyage); verbs are doubled, sentences introduced by parallel structures, while paragraphs repeat and echo the previous ones. Symmetry, doubling, synonymy are the way the story is organized, showing its style and literary character, since what is worth repeating must be literary. Repetition and parallelism are here fundamental: the apple tree and the vine are signs of Eden, and the island—"the only possibility of happiness"—is the lieu vide par excellence, the place from which the couple has been exiled, leaving behind the memory of their happiness. That memory is what is repeated in the story.

A Tangled Story

In fact, this was a second visit. Everything was recognizable. The forest was the forest of Chateaubriand, with its architectural grandeur—the scene of God's creation, of death and life in perpetual embrace. The tree symbolized man, as it did in René . The Frenchman was a brother of René, and his story was a well-known one. The island was a paradise but also a château, or one's own country—the place from which one was exiled. Even the American continent was by then exotic in a familiar way. The reader, too, had a sense of having been taken there before.

The two forests are not similar, they are identical.

Who can tell the feeling one has on entering these forests as old as the world, which alone give the idea of creation as it left the hands of God? [wrote

Chateaubriand.] The daylight, falling from on high through a veil of foliage, spreads through the depths of the woods a changing and mobile half-light which gives fantastic size to things. Everywhere we must climb over fallen trees, above which rise new generations of trees. In vain I seek some outlet from this solitude. Misled by a brighter light, I advance through the grasses, the nettles, the mosses, the lianas, and the thick humus composed of vegetable debris; but I arrive only at a clearing formed by some fallen pines. Soon the forest becomes somber again; the eye sees only trunks of oaks and walnuts which follow one upon another and seem to come closer together as they recede into distance. I become aware of the idea of infinity.^[17]

The sublime dome and the chaos down below, the religious twilight, the hum of creation uniting life to death—all this was revisited by Tocqueville, seen and heard because remembered. Written many years apart, these images should be different.^[18] And yet, the forest of the "Journey to Lake Oneida" shares light, sounds, solemnity, and meaning with its model, and there are no differences between them.^[19] Indeed, the similarities between the Frenchman and René are no less striking. Young, French, and presumably aristocratic, both men are rejected by society and find themselves in an American exile. They could perhaps continue living but for the terrible loss of the loved one. Without a home, with death in their souls, they wither away, like the tree still standing but already dead.

It is easy to understand why Tocqueville used again Chateaubriand's vision. Although many literary historians have proved Atala and René 's

[17] Chateaubriand, Travels in America, 30.

[18] In the already-quoted article, Eva Doran notes the striking similarities but also finds various differences between the two forests. (For comparison, though, she uses a quotation from Tocqueville's more down-to-earth "A Fortnight in the Wilds.") She repeats the words of Sainte-Beuve and of Chateaubriand himself (in the previously quoted opposition of Tocqueville's Amérique civilisée to his own Amérique des forêts ), pointing to the cerebral tone of Tocqueville as opposed to the poetic vision of the older writer. Many other critics assumed without hesitation that Tocqueville was a cool observer; Eva Doran quotes J. P. Mayer's praise of Tocqueville's "keenness of observation, reminiscent of Alexander von Humboldt's travel papers," and Christian Bazin's juxtaposition of Chateau-briand's romanticism to Tocqueville's classicism (p. 59, fn.). André Jardin, in agreeing with Eva Doran's opinion, quotes Sainte-Beuve's comment upon reading Tocqueville's "Quirize jours dans le désert" (A Fortnight in the Wilds): Tocqueville "gives us in very nice prose what Chateaubriand has already given us in daring and sublime poetry" (Jardin, 127). It is an opinion that is derived from the general reputation of both writers rather than from comparison of their works.

[19] Beaumont called Chateaubriand "the poet of the American forest" and wrote an imitative description that is an homage to the "French Homer." See Gustave de Beaumont, Marie, or Slavery in the United States, 116. Tocqueville and Beaumont shared their models.

dependence on previous models,^[20] the works captured and expressed in a powerful way the fears and conflicts of the moment. Thirty years later these images were just as timely, and, no longer extraordinary, they circulated freely in the cultural bloodstream: they represented an accepted, obvious way of expressing feelings and thoughts. In America, Tocqueville looked through Chatecaubriand's eyes and disputed him quite frequently. In "A Fortnight in the Wilds," Tocqueville starts by denying Chateaubriand's (and James Fenimore Cooper's) descriptions of Indians, another American image that remained firmly in his memory, only to agree with it by the end of the story. But Tocqueville was not aware of following Chateaubriand in any way, nor did he like the man. The forest and the character of the Frenchman were part of Tocqueville's poetic vocabulary, the terms of which were best formulated by Chateaubriand but, in the 1830s, truly belonged to everybody. It was the language of Romanticism.

In "Journey to Lake Oneida" we can see a travel experience that was caused by a Romantic tale and which, in turn, produced one. There are several different testimonies about this episode in Tocqueville's and Beaumont's travels in America, additional information about the Frenchman who lived on the island, and the book, Voyage d'un Allemand au Lac Onéida, that young Tocqueville had read. By comparing these materials we can see the process of distilling or selecting information, to create a meaningful—that is, recognizable—synthesis. The juxtaposition of these writings and testimonies serves to reconstruct a particular moment in history, in an effort analogical to the analysis of the Catholic tradition that Custine revived while writing about Russia. We see a reality, we know the books that were read about it, and we have the final text that resulted from the interaction of the writer, his readings, and his experience. We can thus follow the migration of images and ideas and their repetitions; we are looking at a writer enmeshed in tradition, writing about what he felt and saw, and seeing what he had read.

To show the process of filtration and the passage of actual events into literature, one should start from the beginning, that is from the Frenchman himself. (This is how Tocqueville begins his tale about the Frenchman in the letter to his sister-in-law.) The story of the Frenchman's life

[20] See for example pp. xiii–xx of the preface by Maurice Regard to the Oeuvres romanesques et voyages de Chateaubriand (Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade]), 1: 1969. See also pp. 9–10 and 107 of Oeuvres ("Sources").

is based on an extraordinarily well-researched article by Victor Lange.^[21] The Frenchman's name was Louis Des Watines, and he came to America to make his fortune. The article makes it possible to follow the transformation of the life of Louis Des Watines into the exemplary Romantic biography of "the Frenchman."

A nobleman who came to the United States before the Revolution, Des Watines seems to have stayed on the westernmost island of Lake Oneida for over a year, in 1792–1793. He was not there alone but with his wife and two children; the third child, a girl called Camille, was born during their Oneida stay—not on the island but in an Indian encampment. Two men, "an old Canadian and a savage," helped him to clear the island. He left the island he thought he had discovered (and called by his name) when he was informed that it already belonged to somebody else. The family then bought one hundred acres on the lake's northern shore. They were not successful in their financial dealings and, around 1799, after having sold their land and their small collection of French and Latin books, "our French Robinson"^[22] and his family returned to France. The legend had it that the father of Madame Julie Des Watines made them rich by leaving her his entire fortune. And, as was written some years later by J. V. H. Clark, "Those children, born upon that island (which has ever since been known as 'Frenchman's Island'), are said to be today among the most distinguished personages of France."

Lange starts his article with a portrait of the sentimental German writer Sophie von La Roche (1731–1807) who, in 1798, published the novel Erscheinungen am See Oneida . The impulse for writing the novel came from her son and daughter-in-law: the couple had lived for some time in the United States and moved in the circles of exiled French nobility. There they heard about the Des Watines, who had already left the island. How they told the story to Sophie von La Roche can be gathered from her requests to them, in 1795, to tell her again the life of "this Frenchman and Frenchwoman who lived amongst savages" (she wrote to them in French). Her daughter-in-law, Elsina, obliged her. There is no doubt that the story, although using real names and places, had been "improved" before Sophie von La Roche heard it, with the

[21] Victor Lange, "Visitors to Lake Oneida: An Account of the Background of Sophie von La Roche's Novel Erscheinungen am See Oneida, " in Symposium 2 (1948): 48–78.

[22] As he was referred to in the diary of Desjardins, commissioner of the Castorland Company (Sunday, October 13, 1793). Quoted in Victor Lange, 75.

"low" (economic) reason for Des Watines' emigration turned into a flight from persecution. In her book, she stresses the abyss between the high birth of the couple and the dire need into which they fell. The story ends with the couple moving to a community of settlers, rejoining society. The death of the wife and the disappearance of the Frenchman is Tocqueville's much later contribution to the tale.

But the story was evolving right from the start, and many people had a hand in shaping it. This was not accidental. The fate of exiles whose families suffered during the Revolution was evoking warm interest, and the public was ready to see one of them settle on an island in the New World. Sophie von La Roche's sentimental novel was rather popular, and five years after its appearance a German publisher, Joachim-Heinrich Campe, produced a condensed edition for young readers. He was an author of many instructive books for the young, the most popular of which was his version of Robinson Crusoe . And, in fact, in his version, the life of Des Watines came closer to that of Robinson Crusoe. Entitled Voyage d'un Allemand au Lac Onéida ,^[23] the book reproduced, in simplified form, the story of the original, adding instructive and edifying information about America. The narrator disparagingly mentions Madame von La Roche's book, criticizing its length and florid style; he wrote only for unaffected youth, he said, not for important personages. The story is less of a sentimental antirevolutionary tale than an instructive, though still moving, travel book. Lange thought the change an improvement.^[24] In its French edition the book was published as one volume in a series subscribed to by Hippolyte de Tocqueville (then five years old), the older brother of Alexis, who would be born two years later.^[25] We do not know when Alexis read it, but what he remembered from it was not the "happy ending" with Des Watines settling on the other side of the lake. Tocqueville retained from the story its dark, Romantic side.

The romanticization of the story was not due to the personality of Louis Des Watines. Unlike his wife and children, he did not evoke

[23] Voyage d'un Allemand au Lac Onéida, Rédigé pour l'instruction et l'amusement de la jeunesse, par Campe. Traduit de l'allemand, avec des notes, par J. B. J. Breton . . . (Paris, Amsterdam: J. E. F. Dufour, 1803), in J. H. Campe, Bibliothèque géographique et instructive, ou recueil de voyages intéressants, vol. 10.

[24] Sophie von La Roche used many travel sources for her description of American settings. "But she treated her sources with detached amusement," writes Lange, "and the kind of condescension towards tedious factual accuracy that must have endeared her to many of her female readers" (p. 63; emphasis added).

[25] See Jardin, 123.

sympathy in people who met him. Indeed, Des Watines openly blamed his own character for all his misfortunes.^[26] The contrast between the real events and Tocqueville's version is rather striking, and many critics, in a sort of mise-en-point, are a bit ironic about the whole story. Victor Lange calls the Des Watines "the enterprising family,"^[27] and G. W. Pierson, author of Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (1938), calls them "a jolly couple."^[28] In the biography of Tocqueville, André Jardin described Louis Des Watines as "shallow and greedy."^[29] But the setting itself—an empty island in the middle of a lake lost in the American forest—lent itself very well to being a place of illusion. While working on his Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, G. W. Pierson visited the island and succumbed to the same melancholic influence. Remembering Tocqueville's blisters (mentioned in his letter to his sister-in-law), Pierson rowed with gloves on. Upon his arrival on the island, he, like Beaumont and Tocqueville, could hardly step ashore, so dense and wild was the vegetation. After finally penetrating her shores, he found the island abandoned, with traces of an old house and a few illegible names scratched on an old apple tree. He was convinced that the island had witnessed some terrible tragedy, and he was much moved by it. He discovered later, in another mise-en-point, that the old house was an abandoned hotel, and the names were probably those of some of its guests. The fisherman's wife was right—the island was too far from the market and unfit for business.^[30]

Travel Diary and Letter

It was on the island that Tocqueville wrote the first account of the Frenchman's story. In his notebook,^[31] he devoted a separate entry to this episode in his travels. Since the travel notes were destined for himself, they are organized in temporal rather than causal

[26] Jardin, 124.

[27] Lange, 60.

[28] George W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), 203.

[29] Jardin, 124.

[30] As he told me in a conversation in the fall of 1978.

[31] "Cahier portatif nr. l," pp. 161–162 of vol. 5 of his Oeuvres Complètes (1957). "Pocket Notebook Number l" in Alexis de Tocqueville, Journey to America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, 1971), 127–128.

order: he knew the why, he just needed a reminder of what . (Also, the less important things were written down, being more likely to be forgotten.) Yet even in this case we can see his effort to get rid of secondary facts, to purge his experience from interferences, to relate and structure its various elements—to make it stand on its own as a story. The entry is one-page long and, just like "Journey to Lake Oneida," falls into two parts, the first one dealing with the arrival at the lake and the second with the stay on Frenchman's Island. All the basic elements we encountered in "Journey to Lake Oneida" can be found here. Noted in telegraphic style, there is the traveling on horseback from Syracuse, first to Fort Brewerton and then to the lake itself. Two general remarks about the "immense forest" summarize the images developed in "Journey": "The forest in permanent contest with man" and "America in all her glory"; an entire paragraph (one-fourth of the entry) is devoted to impressions of the forest. The Frenchman is mentioned for the first time in the sentence opening the second part of the entry; Tocqueville jots down some information about him taken from his conversation with the fisherman's wife (here referred to only as "she"). Upon setting foot on the island, he and Beaumont experience deep emotion. The image of a paradise is there: in a clearing, in the center of the island, they find the apple tree and the by-now wild vine.^[32] "The house was there." They leave their names on a tree, a trace added to other traces. The last two sentences are the fullest: "We traversed the whole island without finding any trace of the two beings who had made it their universe. This expedition is what has most vividly interested and moved me, not only since I have been in America, but since I have been travelling."

When one compares Tocqueville's American travel notes with the text of Democracy in America, one is struck by the frequency with which the first impression, the first idea, is the one that comes up in the final text. Tocqueville was in a state of extreme concentration while in America, and the direct contact with unusual landscapes and people had a profoundly inspiring influence on him. His entire American stay was spent in a state of feverish, excited work.^[33] Before writing the "Journey to Lake Oneida," Tocqueville repeated the Frenchman's story in a letter to his sister-in-law. Yet the notebook entry is closer to the version

[32] In his summary of "Journey to Lake Oneida," Jardin points out that the vine was already present in the Campe version. The vine plays multiple roles in the story; it is a sign of the Frenchness of the Frenchman, of his unsuccessful attempt at transplanting his civilization; looking like a liana, it is a sign of the exotic; "entrelacée" [twining] right up to the top of the apple tree, it is an image of the serpent, and therefore a symbol of Eden.

[33] See Beaumont, Notice, 20–21.

related in the "Journey." Although the text is fragmented and sketchy, it contains several elliptic sentences that later will be developed into the core of the Frenchman's story. The structure that will underlie the story is provided already in the notes; "Journey" will rewrite it for the general audience. Words like "forest in permanent contest with man," here separated from other phrases by its different tone, will suffuse the entire text.

The text of the entry starts by being extremely choppy; but the second part acquires a flow and ends with a rather literary finale. The reportorial "we" of the first part also is gradually abandoned, and by the end, the voice of the narrator emerges in its full individuality. This reader had the impression that the writer was sorting out his opinions; he started by being uncertain and, as he wrote, he found out what this experience was all about. His writing becomes more and more focused, smooth, and elaborate. Obviously, the entry was written after the event; the sense of the whole experience, however, does not seem to have been clearly formulated in the writer's mind before being written down. The very process of writing offered an occasion to think things through. The entry is a search, an exploration. The later versions will be but presentations.

In a gesture typical of tourists, Tocqueville and Beaumont leave their names on an old "platane." They were leaving a trace on a site that functioned only as a trace. There are, however, in the "Pocket Notebook" other indications (or traces) of what happened on the island. The entry dated for the day before describes briefly a visit to Mr. Elam Lynds; elsewhere in Tocqueville's papers we find copious notes on Tocqueville's conversation with this man. The entry ends with the following statement: "(This is written on 'the Frenchman's island' in the middle of Lake Oneida)."^[34] Not only had Tocqueville looked for traces of the two unhappy beings, but he had also done a bit of work. The report of such diligence had no place in a Romantic story, so he divided the stay on the island into two separate entries. I point this out to indicate that even while tentatively jotting in his notebook, Tocqueville was already creating a story he liked more and more as he went along. He came to the island, he did not find the Frenchman, and out of this "visite manquée," he spun a wonderful tale.

Three weeks later, a very social version of the story appeared in a letter written by Tocqueville. The letters the two travelers wrote from America were not merely personal communications to their relatives

[34] See p. 161 of "Cahier portatif nr. 1," in vol. 5 of Oeuvres, and, in the same volume, "Cahier non-alphabétique nr.1," pp. 63–67. English edition, pp. 126–127.

and friends. Together with the copious notes both of them were taking, the letters were to serve as a basis for their future book or books on America.^[35] Thus their function was to preserve the wealth of information and thoughts inspired by the American journey. They strove also to satisfy their friends' and families' justifiable curiosity: they gathered to read them aloud and share them with other people.^[36] The substantial length of the letters was also due to the high price of postage.^[37]

The Oneida episode was not the only subject of the letter written by Tocqueville to his sister-in-law on July 25, 1831. Tocqueville did not use his notes while writing it and displayed a sort of disdain for detail, not unlike Sophie von La Roche (perhaps because it was addressed to a lady?). In fact, the letter has a very different tone than both the notes and the final version. It is light, conversational, nonpedantic; Tocqueville puts himself forward here and teases his "little sister" a bit. The letter is personal but not intimate: both Tocqueville and Beaumont conform in their correspondence to the literary standards of "familiar" letter-writing. (The model for such letters was established by Charles de Brosses's Letters from Italy .) The letters were full of literary allusions, quoted conversations (in the convention of "perfect memory"), with people described as if they were literary characters. The literariness and the ornamental style were not related to the factual or fictional nature of the letter.^[38] Yet there were other characteristics of the letter that are linked to the transformation of the story. "The epistolary form," writes Bakhtin, "is most favorable. . .for the reflected word of another person," and it is characterized by "the writer's acute awareness of his interlocutor."^[39] Tocqueville shaped his story so that it would interest his readers.

The letter opens with a presentation of the Frenchman, and the narra-

[35] This is why Beaumont's letters were later copied by himself or by his brother Jules. His notes have been lost, but Tocqueville's were kept by his family and have been published.

[36] In the nineteenth century, correspondence did not have the private character we grant it today. See J.-F. Tarn, Marquis de Custine, 121.

[37] Beaumont's letter mentioning (in one paragraph) the episode of Lake Oneida occupies eleven pages of print in the volume of his letters. It is one of the longest letters written by Beaumont in America, but not unusually so. See Gustave de Beaumont, Lettres d'Améique (1831–1832), ed. André Jardin and G. W. Pierson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973).

[38] Analysis of letters of Pushkin, Tocqueville's contemporary, shows more figures of speech and tropes than are found in Pushkin's strictly literary prose. A. Z. Lezhnev, Proza Pushkina (1937). Quoted in William M. Todd, The Familiar Letter as a Literary Genre in the Age of Pushkin (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 13.

[39] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1973), 170.

tion, again similarly to that of Sophie von La Roche, stresses the contrast between his birthright and the lowly conditions of his exile. Many details are furnished about his station and excellent health. The forest part is abandoned, to be described, perhaps, "one day" for the "dear sister." A short description of Lake Oneida follows, presented in the paradisiacal terms of "a tranquillity as complete as it must have been at the beginnings of the world." He started to worry, Tocqueville writes, that the traveler who preceded him invented the story, but the conversation with the fisherman's wife dissipated his doubts. The fisherman's wife here had little eyes ("little watering [chassieux] eyes," in the copy of the letter held in the Beinecke Library of Yale University), but in the final version she will be limping instead. From her we learn that the wife had died and her husband "disappeared and nobody knows how he crossed the lake and where he went." She is presented as a very prosaic character, so that the reader will not suspect her of Romantic invention—she being the source of the most important part of the story. Tocqueville remembered correctly that in the book he had read the couple was still alive. (He did forget, though, that they had left the island for the mainland.) She then describes her only visit to the island, apple tree and vine included, and lends them a little boat. The narrator and his fellow-traveler begin to "row madly" (and they end up with callouses); they have difficulty in penetrating the dense bushes that cover the island; once arrived, they see "an interesting but sad spectacle." Nature had covered the traces of human work, and it took them two hours to find the apple tree, the wild vine, and some vestiges of the house. The travelers are very moved, and when they leave the island, they discuss the fate of this man "equally incapable of living the life of a savage and the one of a civilized man." Alas, one needs to have an iron constitution to live in the forest.

Twice, Tocqueville mentions his ignorance of the Frenchman's name. He seems to be asking to be excused for being unable to "introduce" the Frenchman, whom, otherwise, both he and the "sister" could perhaps have met in their social circle. His place of exile is of obvious interest to them: it is evident in the letter that "the Frenchman" is, for Tocqueville, an occasion to talk, with self-ironic reserve, about the possibility or danger of exile. The tone of conversation "socializes" the Frenchman and lowers the pitch of the story. The expression of the writer's emotion is toned down to the exigencies of "drawing room" behavior, and the story remains within the limits of social conversation: it is interesting, sentimental, and rather moving. And it entertains.

The same can be said about Beaumont's version of the story. In his letter to his sister Eugénie, written just six days after the visit (on July 14, 1831), he described the entire adventure in one paragraph. Local tradition (no mention of a book) had it that a Frenchman came to the island at the time of the Revolution. They were curious to see "the solitary retreat of our countryman; who knows, perhaps one day we will be happy to find there a place of exile. We went, then, to inspect the house." Unfortunately, no trace of habitation remains. They find an apple tree and the vine; "it is impossible to imagine a more joyous place which would appeal more to imagination. We have spent there two hours in a state of true ecstasies." Although the story remains the same, the tone is ironic, because it is about himself that Beaumont is writing. The Frenchman of the letters of Tocqueville and Beaumont is the same one we met in "Journey to Lake Oneida," but without his resonance and tragic depth.

However, there are in Beaumont's work other versions of the story that are more pathetic. One can even argue that the entire novel Beaumont wrote about his American stay is an echo of the Frenchman's story. The Frenchman was an expression of existential anguish, and he "traveled" with them wherever they went.

9
A Seated Man

Beaumont's Frenchman

I have often quoted here opinions expressed by Beaumont on Tocqueville's character, on his way of working, and on their American journey. Beaumont was a very close friend of Tocqueville's, his collaborator and, finally, after Tocqueville's death, the editor of his collected works. Unlike Tocqueville, Beaumont was warm and outgoing—Heine described them as "oil and ice." He was also a talented writer, although perhaps not as talented as he wished to be. Beaumont came from an aristocratic family (and married Lafayette's granddaughter), and his education and background were similar to his friend's. He agreed with Tocqueville on most subjects, and in. Beaumont's writings many of the same opinions and images can be found, often pushed one step further toward explicitness. The influence was not one-sided; the two friends prepared together for their journey, discussed everything while visiting America, and, later, often worked together on various projects. Beaumont offered Tocqueville an intellectual friendship that lasted all their lives. Together they wrote On the Penitentiary System in the United States (Beaumont doing most of the work), but another book they planned to write together about America was never written. Instead, Tocqueville wrote his Democracy, and Beaumont wrote a much less well-known novel called Marie, or Slavery in the United States . Although not the title character, the "Frenchman" is the real protagonist of the novel.

Marie appeared in 1835, the same year as the first volume of Democracy in America . It was a two-volume novel devoted to a description of American manners and meant to complement Democracy 's presentation of American political institutions. Marie 's central problem was that of racism in the United States: it spoke not only about slavery but also about the plight of liberated blacks and the persecution of Indians. Both Tocqueville and Beaumont rightly predicted that the abolition of slavery would not stop the persecution of blacks and that the consequences of this terrible original sin of the American republic would last into the far future. Beaumont was so shocked by what he saw in America that he decided to devote his entire book to the problem.

But the author had broader ambitions for Marie . Beaumont wanted his work to be an encyclopedia of knowledge about the United States and, at the same time, an appealing and moving Romantic tale of—as its first-name title indicates—the same kind as René, Aloys, Armance, Ourika, and many others. In his introduction, Beaumont explained that he wanted to lighten the seriousness of his observations by using a more entertaining form, in order to attract the reader who "seeks in a book ideas for the intellect and emotions for the heart."^[1] Although the book went through seven printings and received a prestigious literary prize, it was soon forgotten. Its first American translation appeared only in 1958 as an offshoot of the still-growing popularity of Tocqueville's Democracy .

One reason for the demise of the book was that it was a mixture of unintegrated elements. Short essays, notes, footnotes, and appendices burst open the narrative frame of the story. The characters would pause to discuss numerous topics, ranging from slavery to the beauty of American women; the story was interrupted by full descriptions and explanations, supplemented by bibliographic references. The main protagonists travel across the United States and, although in a terrible plight, stop to inform the readers about the places they go through. Their itinerary repeats that of Tocqueville and Beaumont; and twice there is mention of Frenchman's Island. This is not the only thing recognizable to the reader of Tocqueville's work. As Pierson has rightly said, Marie seems "strangely and wonderfully familiar. . .[it is] a book of echoes."^[2] Everything here, too, is a repetition.

Beaumont attempted to reconcile the two aspects of the attitude he

[1] Marie (1835), 1: ii; American edition, p. 3.

[2] Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, 523.

and his companion had toward America: the rational and the emotional. Whereas Tocqueville exiled the Frenchman from his masterwork to a short and secondary story, Beaumont placed him at the center of his novel but without relinquishing his other urge: to understand the New World. The knowledge he transmitted obscured the plight of the Frenchman, and the Frenchman's suffering rendered the knowledge superfluous. For the Frenchman's story is fundamentally antisocial and irreconcilable with an encyclopedic interest in manners and institutions.

The book is introduced to the reader by the narrator who interferes in the story through footnotes and appendices. The story itself is told as the confession of "un solitaire" to a traveler, both of them Frenchmen. We are, of course, in America, the traveler having left France frustrated in his effort to live a dignified life. Now he wants to settle on the border between the forest and civilization to enjoy solitude but, at the same time, to participate in the American politics of self-government. The traveler, whose first name, Gaston, is revealed only in the last pages of the book (as if to keep the reader wondering if it was not Gustave, Beaumont's first name), is twenty-five years old, just like Beaumont and Tocqueville. The year is 1831, the year of their visit. Ludovic, because such is the name of the hermit, is ten years older than Tocqueville and Beaumont, and five years younger than Custine's Aloys; he therefore fills the generational gap between René and Gaston: as in the forest, where there were the trees of all ages, we have "Renés" of all generations. The traveler meets Ludovic in the place where he would like to settle: the place, wonderfully familiar, is a repetition of the scenery of Lake Oneida. A peaceful surface of water, reflecting, like a mirror, the surrounding trees, emanates sweet tranquility. As we learn later, the lake is the place of the suicide of an Indian woman called, in a sort of echo, Onéda. The two Frenchmen, the hermit, and the traveler, sit down under an old tree at the bottom of a rock. Contemplating the lake, one tells his story, the other listens.

This familiar scene—René told his story in exactly the same position at a similar spot—is the frame of the entire book. Throughout the narrative the men sit, telling and listening to the tale. Ludovic is seated because he is at the end of his life, surviving only to tell his story.^[3] He decides to tell his past so that it does not become Gaston's future. His life, and the one that may await Gaston, is the Frenchman's, René's life.

[3] This is another of the characteristics of the "mal du siècle" novel. See Margaret Waller, 148.

The details are an amplification of the life of René: restless, he travels, comes to America, falls in love with a girl who, Atala-like, has a terrible secret; they escape into the forest, where their happiness is cut short by her death. They were chased to death by racial prejudice: Marie looks white, she even is white, but one of her ancestors had a drop of colored blood—this is the secret, and, according to implacable local custom, she is considered black. In their escape, the pair pass close to Frenchman's Island (which is described in the text and in the footnote) but cannot settle there because the lake's shores are already "invaded" by people. The island is (now) in the middle of this wonderfully peaceful lake that, like a mirror, reflects the surrounding trees and the sky. In itself, the island does not interest the narrator, but "a man lived there, and this man was French, unhappy and banished." This is another mise-en-abîme, an echo of the main story. The details are not mentioned, yet they constitute, nevertheless, the content of the main plot. It is still another lake, the same privileged place, reflecting the previous lakes and, in them, the face of the writer. As the couple travels in search of "asylum," the plot takes some of the obligatory steps. The love is unconsummated, the woman dies—all the women in René-like stories do—and the last word belongs to the priest, whose consolation leaves Ludovic still unhappy but no longer impious. He survives, un mortvivant, to guard the grave of his beloved and to tell his tale.

Marie falls between the genres; it is a hybrid book. One part travel story, it has an itinerary, descriptions of the sites, and a typical ending: Gaston, having learned that there is no better place than France (as Custine learned in Russia), returns to his homeland, never to leave it again. The encyclopedic content, with its thoroughness and detail, is part of the travel description. The second aspect consists of the Frenchman's story, but here, in contrast to travel descriptions, the detail is blurred and unimportant. The two facets intertwine but are easily separable. Curious and observant when relating American realities, Ludovic becomes singularly vague when talking about himself. What he remembers best are his feelings. The reasons for his emigration to America are stated in general terms: it was his restlessness that pushed him away from a place that was recuperating from great social upheavals. He would have liked to participate in social life there, but he was repelled by people; love was the only way for him, but now it is not possible anymore; once he was alive, now he is sitting motionless, remembering his past happiness.

The contrast between his state of mind and the practical, busy report-

ing about America is what undermined Marie . Beaumont was unsuccessful in reconciling the two sides of America, both equally attractive: "advanced civilization" on the one hand, with "virgin nature" on the other. His alter ego, in fact, wanted to settle in-between. But, as was pointed out to him by the already-defeated Ludovic, these two visions of America were unreconcilable. The division into two Americas was also an idea of Chateaubriand: as was already mentioned, the America of the forests is opposed to the civilized America when he talks about the young Tocqueville. Beaumont believed in this duality and could not decide which America was the one he was truly interested in. The entire novel reflects this ambiguity. The title protagnoist, Marie, is not the novel's main character; she is born between the races—white but considered black, therefore white but black. As a result, she belongs to no group and is placed outside society. Almost married, she remains a virgin; a beautiful woman, she is, like Atala, an angel, a child. In her long, slightly operatic death scene, her saintliness reminds the reader of the other Marie—Virgin Mary. Although persecuted by an unjust society, her drama is presented as one of internal suffering: she is doomed, the short blissful love notwithstanding. As she dies, Ludovic withdraws into this other America, not the country of democracy, not even a society at all, but a shelter that devours its occupants, only to immortalize them in traces and debris to be deciphered from the peaceful face of her lakes by future travelers.

Although Beaumont was a very intelligent and very gifted man, his imagination was limited, and in his attempt at glory (Marie was supposed to be "the great work that should immortalize me")^[4] he reached for ready-made artistic forms. These forms reflected so well his divided state of mind that he felt no need to modify them. Marie followed the tradition of the French anticolonial novel: a protagonist of mixed blood was the perfect device for unmasking the absurdity of racial prejudice. In these novels, the Frenchmen were always the real protagonists—generous rescuers doomed to failure.^[5] The travel narrative and explanatory treatise were also well-known forms of writing and needed no apologies: Corinne, the famous novel by Madame de Staël, had united these elements in 1805. Each of these genres had its own logic and pulled the text in its own direction. But the overriding form and the

[4] He wrote this in a letter to his brother Achille; cf. Beaumont, Lettres d'Amérique, 176.

[5] See Léon-François Hoffman, Le nègre romantique; personnage littéraire et obsession collective (Paris: Payot, 1973).

central image of the book did not belong to any single genre: it was that of Ludovic telling his story to Gaston—the image of the seated man.

In fact, the real protagonist of Marie is Gaston—the seated man, who tells his story to the other seated man—the traveler. They were both literary descendants of René. Although few Renés went to America, the New World made a good setting for their suffering. America, as "discovered" by Chateaubriand, was a country of duality and nostalgia. As René looked at it, the country was a lost opportunity: it might have been a French colony. He recalled the colonial competition between France and England that ended in 1763, with the Paris Treaty, in which France left Canada to Britain and Louisiana to Spain. In the war with the English, the French were allied with the Indian nations (except the Iroquois). It is this memory that Chateaubriand and Tocqueville invoke in their nostalgia for the Empire. This is also the basis for what Lafitau, then Chateaubriand, and then Tocqueville perceived as the natural affinity between the French and the Indians. Hence the search for the traces of the Frenchman concentrated not only on his sorrowful individual fate or one's own possible future exile but on nostalgia for past or potential French imperial greatness.

As Chateaubriand (and later Tocqueville) looked at Protestant America, they saw a possible Catholic "New France." It was not only this matter that made the writer see one thing and envision another. He suffered an interior discontinuity that made him reject what he saw: he was "here" but, as he looked around, he thought only about "there"—the homeland he had left, the château of his childhood. His present consisted of contemplating the traces of his past. Life reminded him of death, and death was a sign of the life that passed. The freedom of today was a result of yesterday's prisons, but it was an aimless, useless freedom, unlike the freedom one used to dream about. Everything was in a state of change: the forest still stood erect but was being destroyed by the encroachment of "civilization"; civilization, though, was fragile and easily covered by the forest. Nature set the model for life—creation was identical with destruction, and death coexisted with life. Nature's immensity, its infinity, reduced man to the dimension of a tree in the forest but simultaneously made him part of an endless life cycle. The fallen trees were monuments, then ruins, only to continue nature's cycle and regrow as new offspring. The tree, just like the Frenchman, was taken out of time's frame; neither alive nor dead, they keep recurring in a continuous cycle, their existence both general and individual. Nostalgia

is explained: time is used here as if it were space—it can be revisited. The half-dead tree stands, Christ-like, over the forest.

The many people who populated that landscape had similarly in-between natures. Of mixed race or racially mixed upbringing, civilized savages and savage Frenchmen—"faux Indiens," travelers, exiles, they were, together with the landscapes, expressions of a malaise, of a "mal du siècle." Chactas was a half-civilized Indian chief—he had even met Louis XIV in Paris; René tried to become "savage"; Atala was of Spanish lineage and Christian but of Indian upbringing; Beaumont's Ludovic is called a "civilized savage"; and the Frenchman is characterized as "no longer adapted either for solitude or for the world . . . neither a savage nor a civilized man: nothing but a piece of debris" (p. 349). All these characters belong to two social orders at the same time and are the embodiment of contradictions. America was for them not a place of social integration but an empty space to wander in. They came there not because they wanted to but because they were dissatisfied with the place they had been in before. Even those who were born there, like Chactas or Atala, were displaced and homeless. In this empty, asocial space, they sit, looking not at landscapes but within themselves. What they see is ruin.

Beaumont wrote about the seated man and also drew him. During his American travel Beaumont carried with him two sketching albums, one for his rough on-the-spot sketches, the second for final and more ambitious drawings. Both albums survived and, although the authenticity of the second one may be doubted, it at least contains "extraordinarily careful copies" of the supposed originals.^[6] The chapter on the excursion to Lake Oneida in Pierson's book is illustrated with a reproduction of The View of Lake Oneida from Frenchman's Island from the second album. In the foreground, in the left corner of the sketch, we see a fragment of a rocky island. Under a tall tree, full of leaves but with a withered top, there are two small male figures: one standing with a gun in his hand, turned toward the second, who is sitting and looking sadly into the surrounding water. The horizon is delineated by the forest on the opposite shore. There are some boats on the water. The date July 8, 1831, is written in the right lower corner, and it coincides with the date of the excursion.

This drawing is the second version of the original, which contained

[6] Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, xi.

only one figure and no boats. It is very likely that this was the figure of the sitting man. A second figure and boats were added later in the process of transferring, "rewriting" the first rough sketch into the final pen-and-ink version. The difference of meaning between the two sketches is analogical to the difference between Marie as a travel story and Marie as a "mal du siècle" novel. The boats and the second man (holding a gun, the very symbol of action) suggest some sort of story; the boats tell how the two figures arrived on the island, also the way they may depart. The second male figure gives the scene a social dimension; it is a travel scene, a moment of rest during a journey, the travelers or the explorers sadly contemplating the place. The title, The View of Lake Oneida from Frenchman's Island, is very appropriate for this scene; it is one view among many from a journey.

Nothing of that sort in the first sketch. No boats; a lonely European male figure in a deserted setting, seated, with sad, melancholy resignation, under a half-dead tree. No movement, no past or future, no life; the figure is still another version of the mort-vivant . Perhaps it was to be Tocqueville's silhouette; Beaumont often drew him in his American sketches. The fact that the sketch featured only one person might be a sign of its realism. But would Tocqueville not have looked from the lake to the island, not vice-versa? He was, after all, a traveler, an explorer. Also, access to the island was, in reality, very difficult: Tocqueville complained in his letter and in the "Journey" how difficult it had been to set foot on it. So the lonely figure seated under a half-dead tree is not a realistic rendering of a scene, it is the projection of a mood. To convey this mood, Beaumont cleared the shore, placed on it a withered tree, and sat under it a young man. In this way, he instantly entered a convention, a cliché, without altogether abandoning representation.

This drawing and its metamorphosis is an excellent illustration of the double function of Beaumont's American writings and drawings. With a couple of boats, or two travelers, it was an exploration. With one man, it was a Romantic reverie. The young seated man is not different from the Frenchman and is similar to many other young men: to the one gazing at the moon in the Le Barbier illustration to the first edition of Génie du Christianisme (René and Atala were parts of this work by Chateaubriand); to the grieving figure of Chactas sitting in a Christ Man of Sorrows posture in the 1836 sculpture by François-Joseph Duret; to Caius Marius looking at the ruins of Carthage in John Vanderlyn's 1807 painting; to the bitterly sad Napoleon sitting on a rock in the Delaroche painting and in many popular lithographs; to

young Lamartine in the first "Méditation"; to Giacomo Leopardi in his "idyll" L'infinito; and to Ugo Foscolo's Jacopo Ortis writing his Ultime lettere on the mountainous border of Northern Italy. They are brothers, members of the same family, sharing the same biography: they survived defeat. The surroundings were changeable—sea, mountain, lake, forest, or ruins; the young man was always the same, meditating on the debris of a civilization, of a life, of a love.

A Seated Man

The Romantic sitting man was a traveler contemplating the terrifying grandeur of nature. "The sight of unlimited distances," wrote Friedrich von Schiller in his On the Sublime,

and heights lost to view, the vast ocean at his feet and the vaster ocean above him, pluck his spirit out of the narrow sphere of the actual and out of the oppressive bondage of physical life. A mightier measure of esteem is exemplified for him by the simple majesty of nature, and surrounded by her massive forms he can no longer tolerate pettiness in his mode of thought. Who knows how many illumined thoughts or heroic decisions that could never have been born in a cell-like study or a society salon have been produced out of this bold struggle of the mind with the great spirit of nature while wandering abroad . . . the mind of the nomad remains as open and free as the firmament beneath which he camps.^[7]

The trajectory of this wandering nomad is well known to us from later Romantic literature: in the plains of Sicily he would (writes Schiller) "marvel at the wonderful battle between fecundity and destruction," on the "treacherous crater of Vesuvius . . . and in the ruins of Syracuse and Carthage," he will observe "the terrifying and magnificent spectacle of change which destroys everything and creates it anew, and destroys again. . . ." (pp. 205, 210).

It was this young wanderer that was waiting for Beaumont and Tocqueville in the depths of the American forest. Their reactions to the forest—finding there the spectacle of death and life, the Frenchman's death, religious awe—were the product of the literary, visual, and emotional vocabulary that was current in their milieu. The appeal of the

[7] Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. with Introduction and Notes by Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966), 204.

sublime was strong because it promised to set them free, to "transform actual suffering [which they were right to expect] into sublime emotion."^[8] The story of the Frenchman allowed them to live through, master, and finally overcome fear of their own exile, abandonment, and death. This is why this unusual landscape was so easy for them to understand.

In the iconography of the end of the eighteenth century, only kings and the bourgeoisie could remain seated. When Revolution arrived, its attributes—Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity—were presented as women.^[9] And then the seated man appeared. In literature he could be traced to Goethe's Werther (1774); also in the visual realm, one of the precursors of the seated man may have been the famous painting by Wilhelm Tischbein, Goethe in the Campagna (1787). Here Goethe, wearing his hat, is reclining on a stone with the ruins and hills of the Roman countryside behind him. The seated man was also preceded by the Melancholy figures, because he is certainly an artist. Neither a statesman on horseback nor a bourgeois in his royal-looking armchair, he was a young man in nature, sitting on a volcano, on a rock, or under a tree, outside of his social environment, away from human artifacts, except for those in ruin before his eyes. He was delicate, uncomfortable, unhappy, and often wept (although only in literature, never in pictures). Young, he was at the end of something; he had nowhere to go, no will to survive. But he was a man of genius, or at least of talent, and of enormous sensitivity. His immobility belied the intensity of his suffering.

This image had a certain repetitive style: it was very scrupulously realistic but not very concrete. It reflected perfectly a certain state of mind without concerning itself with the accuracy of surrounding detail. In the famous 1809 portrait of Chateaubriand by A.-L. Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, the French Homer is standing leaning on a rock with the ruins of Rome behind him, looking very sad. (His hair was "wind-swept," which provoked Napoleon to say that he looked "like a conspirator who had come down the chimney.")^[10] In another painting of Chateaubriand, entitled "Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël among the

[8] Schiller, 209.

[9] In the European allegories, America was presented as a seated young woman. See Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 85–90. (The bronze sculpture of Chactas in the same volume, p. 223.)

[10] Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 249.

Greeks," the artist, H.L.V.J.B. Aubry-Lecomte, showed the two Romantic writers as muses of the Greek war of liberation. Although Madame de Staël was already dead (she died in 1817, and the painting is dated 1827, which is when the war was going on), she is nevertheless shown as vividly alive. Both protagonists are seated mournfully, almost languidly, Chateaubriand looking at the horizon, and Madame de Staël, with a lyre in her hand, to the sky. Although she is sitting in a contorted position and in antique clothes, he is dressed in a dark cape, his distress expressed only in his eyes. Their faces are full of sorrow—not a very belligerent attitude. In the background there are mountains and the sea; behind Chateaubriand, there is a group of men at the left (none of them looking ready to fight), and, on his right, a group of women looking up at the sky; both groups, one supposes, inspired by the two writers.

It is not common to find a man seated in company; he is usually all by himself. Also, the context of the fight for national liberation is too active for a seated man. There is a substantial difference between a standing and a sitting man. (Napoleon is said never to have sat down when he planned to refuse a request.) The standing man is ready for action—not so the sitting man. His "sitting down" is an attempt at reformulating the terms of his participation in social life. The war of liberation was not so much an action as a "just cause," and the young man (or the poet) would share its griefs and defeats. Helping the weak was his way of participating in the world, and the Greek cause became a commonplace of Romantic art. The seated man of Beaumont's Marie, Ludovic, lists the Greek war together with his other mournful wanderings:

An unexpected event suddenly reanimated my languishing energy and smiled on my imagination. It was the year 1825; liberty was astir in enslaved Greece—here was the cause of civilization against barbarism! Filled with pious enthusiasm, I rushed to the fatherland of Homer. Poetic stirrings of a young soul! How noble and impetuous! Alas! why is it that these sublime aspirations meet only deception and lies? I shed my blood in the cause of liberty. I saw the Greeks triumphant, and to this day I know not which is baser, the victors or the vanquished. The Greeks are no longer slaves to the Moslems, but, still doomed to servitude, they have gained only the sad privilege of choosing their own masters and tyrants.

"What could I do in that land of memories and tombs?" he asks, reverting again to his role of traveler. ". . . Indifferent, without thought or aim, I directed my steps at random" (pp. 28–29).

This episode expresses well, as all of Marie does, the central problem of the seated man: withdrawal is his form of action. The popularity, the

explosive multiplication of this image in French culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was due to the fact that it embodied an anxiety, that was common to many. In contemporary soclopsychological language it can be said to express a profound identity crisis.

Many critics have pointed out the feminization of the Romantic protagonist, his sensitivity, his refusal to act.^[11] René was seated because he did not want to submerge himself in the bustle of bureaucracy or commerce, or even in "the oppressive bondage of physical life." Yet he had to do something, not only because he needed money but also in order to know who he was. His château was empty; there was nothing about his father he was proud of; or, if he was, there was nothing he could do as a son of his father. His identity used to come from a hierarchical order attached to a geographic place; this order did not exist anymore, and the place was empty. He had no last name, nothing to live on, nothing to do. He therefore goes to America where he is forcibly socialized by marrying (against his will!) into an Indian tribe. This traditionally feminine way of gaining name, income, and social identity does not work in René's case. He refuses, or is unable, to consummate his marriage. In order to fulfill it social role, marriage requires more than passive consent. René sadly withdraws.^[12]

There is no doubt that René was an aristocrat, but the appeal of his story went far beyond his class. Chateaubriand did not insist on details of René's lineage or finances and even went so far in his blurring of the historical details as to move the action into the prerevolutionary world. The old France that stirs René's nostalgia is the France of Louis XIV. Barbéris interpreted this choice as Chateaubriand's political attempt at obscuring, for "complex [political] reasons," his antirevolutionary stance; but it also serves as a very effective introduction of the sense of historical crisis into the novel as a genre (pp. 157–161). This act of generalizing, "spreading" of the crisis into other historical areas, was a result of the conviction Chateaubriand shared with many of his aristocratic contemporaries that the Revolution was only the end of a long process of change and decline. The aristocracy did not resist the Revolution at the start and was unable and unwilling to defend its own rights. The state, to use Tocqueville's interpretation from The Old Régime and the Revolution, through centralization took

[11] See especially the analysis of René by Pierre Barbéris ("René" de Chateaubriand [Paris: Larousse, 1973]), and the already-quoted article by Margaret Waller.

[12] Only partially, since we learn elsewhere in Génie du Christianisme that he had a daughter of mixed blood.

away the aristocracy's social functions. They were left with only external marks of distinction that had no political significance. These empty signs of former usefulness could be obtained for money by nonaristocrats, breeding a fierce internal hierarchy of imagined superiorities. Arrogance was joined to powerlessness, and this combination caused violent social resentment against the aristocracy. It was the Old Régime itself, then, that destroyed the aristocracy and provoked the Revolution.^[13]

Before the Revolution, the French aristocracy counted approximately 200,000 people; of these, 40,000 were men capable of holding a job. Only a small percentage of them were landowners; most were in the professions, the army, and the bureaucracy. They shared with the other classes the belief that a useful life is a life of work, and their identity was more and more linked to what they did.^[14] "The true aim of existence," wrote Custine, "appears to a man only within social life. It is in participating in public endeavors that he becomes something for everybody and his right to exist is recognized" (Aloys, 29). Even before the Revolution, René could be integrated into society only through the bureaucracy, army, or the professions, and his château had already been empty for quite some time. All of this, however, was hidden from him. The Revolution abolished the ranks of nobility and therefore made clear and irrevocable what before could have remained unsaid—the Revolution made René's situation clear. (In this respect Karamzin was right, the Revolution did clarify "our ideas.")

The knowledge that the decline had started long before the Revolution brought no relief and did not dispel the feeling of radical change. "Chateaubriand tries to reconcile the old royalty with the new democracy," wrote François Furet, "but he nourishes his books with the irrepressible sentiment of the end of a world and the beginning of a new age."^[15] René's main characteristic was that he was a survivor of a catastrophe. The attractiveness of his image was due in large part to its vagueness and generality. Later incarnations were often more concrete. Beaumont presents his alter ego Gaston in a clear way: there were political reasons for his maladjustment and emigration: "[after the revo-

[13] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday, 1955). See especially pt. 2.

[14] See David D. Bien, "Aristocratie," in Dictionnaire Critique de la Révolution Françaisc, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 647–651.

[15] François Furet, "L'Ancient Régime," Dictionnaire Critique de la Révolution Française, 627–637; 627.

lution of 1830] his sympathies and convictions drew him to one party; his family ties held him in another." Then, there were financial reasons. "Hoping to escape from the vexations of political life, he tried to go into business, but fortune was against him. At the age of twenty-five, he found himself without a career, having nothing to look forward to but a share in a modest patrimony" (Beaumont, 9–10). Nothing of the sort in René. He has a secret—his incestuous desire for his sister—and the rest is more or less vague. But on reading the text attentively, as Pierre Barbéris did, one can discover that money was a problem. René did not have enough money, did not want to "prendre un état" (as his sister advised him to do), that is, to work in order to earn his living. His refusal to work is not perceived as a sign of laziness (which is a characteristic of colonial populations, children, and women) but of purity.^[16] He is withdrawing, refusing to participate in a situation in which his uniqueness is negated and his identity derived from outside criteria—decreed by the state or drawn from his profession. René sat in defense of his unique self, of his irreducible difference that he believed independent of his social situation. He was the first in a long line of poor young men who in this way stood up against society.

René (and the Frenchman, and Gaston, and Ludovic, and, let us not forget, Aloys) were the characters who translated a social aristocracy into a spiritual aristocracy. This is why their ranks are not limited to the aristocracy of blood, and their most accomplished brothers—for example Julien Sorel—are commoners. Withdrawal had the positive function of reintegrating what Stendhal called "la classe pensante" into society. Refusal to compromise and the figure of the individual in conflict with society are the legacy of this transformation. That individual became today's intellectual. Chateaubriand, Tocqucville, Beaumont, Custine (and many others) were trying to find a place of usefulness for the elite—to create and become part of the aristocracy of spirit. Today the image is only slightly modified: the man still sits but in a prison cell.

The Seated Man and His Politics

But one does not need to pity the seated man. Chateaubriand, Tocqueville, Beaumont, Custine, and other authors who wrote

[16] P. Barbéris, 163–165.

about him were energetic and even inflexible when they felt his existence endangered. This determination was encoded in their language and is quite clearly visible in Tocqueville's writings. The image of the seated man is emphatically present in Tocqueville's works, especially in the early ones. In his Voyage en Sicile, written when he was twenty-two years old,^[17] he described himself sitting in a boat cabin during a terrible storm, "[his] head resting against his hand, [his] eyes searching the horizon" (p. 38). A little later, he goes to see Etna—volcanoes being the privileged place for the seated man^[18] —to sit down and contemplate the historical sublime, the change that destroys everything (p. 46). Next, he sits down "in the sand, [his] head pressing against [his] hands, [his] eyes turned towards open sea, thinking and rethinking at leisure about the saddest things" (p. 48). But his worries and sad contemplations were only one aspect of the text; his political interests were asserting themselves very strongly already. As he looks at Sicily at his feet, he contemplates the sublime, but he also tries to observe the workings of human society. "If I were a king of England," he writes after having seen and interpreted the size of land property in Sicily, "and had to make a decision, I would favor big property; if I were master of Sicily, I would encourage small ones."^[19] He did feel called on to think about and influence the world, and the sense of political responsibility coincided in him with the pensive withdrawal of the seated man.

The Sicilian journey, which he made with his brother Edouard, remained memorable because of its emphasis on the historical sublime, and even in his American writings Tocqueville returns to it. In "A Fortnight in the Wilds" he recalls, in a typically Chateaubriandesque pose, how

one evening in Sicily we happened to get lost in a vast marsh that now occupies the place where once was the city of Himera; the sight of that once famous city turned back to savage wilds made a great and deep impression on us. Never had we seen beneath our feet more magnificent witness to the instability of human things and the wretchedness of our nature.^[20]

[17] But published posthumously, and in excerpts only, by Beaumont. The original manuscript was lost and the excerpts are all that remain. See vol. 5 of his Oeuvres Complètes (1957), 33–54.

[18] Chateaubriand was called, among other names, "le Solitaire de Vésuve."

[19] "But being neither one nor the other, I return to my diary," he concludes (p. 45).

[20] In Journey to America, 350–403, esp. 399. Beamont, in an attempt to unite the sublime of history with the sublime of nature, had his Ludovic imagine Rome's Saint Peter's Cathedral on top of Mont Blanc. "Oh, what a magnificent altar to Divinity it would make!" he exclaimed. This passage has been cut out in the only American edition of Marie (p. 30). In general, almost all of the books that are discussed here have been republished with cuts. Their integrity is obviously not recognized any longer. It makes one think of Tocqueville and Beaumont's complaints about the commercialization of life. Books, these industrial products par excellence (reproduced, identical, in large quantities), can also be trimmed to more comfortable size or enlarged with commentaries and footnotes. See L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, L'Apparition du livre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1958).

But Italy was not the only place where contemplation was possible, or its only subject. In his biography of Tocqueville, André Jardin quotes one of his letters to Mary Mottley, written from England while Tocqueville was preparing to start working on Democracy . He visited by night the ruins of Kenilworth Castle—an empty château—and found it

truly a great and solemn spectacle: in the middle of this solitary place there reigned a silence and an air of inexpressible desolation. I went into the halls of this magnificent manor; the upper stories were destroyed, I could see the sky above my head, but the walls still stood, and the moon, penetrating every part through the Gothic windows, cast a sepulchral light that was in harmony with all these things. Was I not truly in the realm of the dead there? After exploring the ruins in every direction and with my footsteps awakening echoes that had probably been mute for many years, I came back to the center. Here, I sat down on a rock and fell in to a sort of somnambulism during which it seemed to me that my soul was pulled into the past with an inexpressible force. (P. 198)

As the letter continues, we can clearly see that the rock he is sitting on is within the walls of the castle. The empty château became part of nature. The letter shows Tocqueville's literary taste, and his attachment, if one may call it so, to the seated man. The old castle, a ruin, moonlight, echoes, spirits of the dead, and a seated man—there could be nothing more Romantic.

This visit is analogical to the visit to Lake Oneida: an empty place, an exploration "in every direction," return to the center, sitting down to dream, to think, and . . . to write. Here, in the castle, Tocqucville does not look for the Frenchman, he himself is the Frenchman. The image of the man seated on a rock inside a ruined château is a (slightly funny) vision of withdrawal that expressed a deeply felt dissatisfaction with the present times. Tocqueville shared the convictions and feelings of his contemporaries, who saw the individual as powerless, isolated, and rejected. The past was thought to have contained all greatness, and there was no possibility of glory in the present time. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville invoked the names of René, Childe Harold, and Lamartine's Jocelyn as symbols of the age (2: 81). These convictions

accompanied depressions and despondence that pursued him through most of his life.^[21]

And yet while he was in England Tocqueville was also much occupied with inquiries into British political life. His working habits were very similar to those he had in America, and he came back with copious notes from meetings, conversations, parliamentary sessions, and other political events. He understood England very well and was able to predict the course of events accurately. But throughout his life his Romantic side was just beneath the analytical surface of his writings, as the example of the empty château from his Recollections shows. Tocqueville was a Romantic with a very lucid mind.

There was a certain contradiction in this combination: the Romantic's contemplation of the sublime should have rendered him averse to analyzing what in the words of Schiller was the "spiritless regularity" of everyday life. "Man has a need beyond living and securing his welfare," Schiller thought, "and quite another destiny than to comprehend the phenomena that surround him."^[22] Schiller's man was a traveler: he rejected human company, looked at cities only when they were in ruins, and found the sublime in nature. This was also one of the ways in which Tocqueville—especially young Tocqueville—"traveled."^[23]

Sublime in nature was associated with certain well-known places: volcanoes, the Alps, and the Niagara Falls. These were the gigantic spectacles that showed man the real scale of things and his own insignificance. Tocqueville, however, denied that the sublime was to be found in the United States. He associated it only with Europe.

I have been through terrifying solitudes in the Alps where nature rejects the work of man, and where even in its very horror the sheer grandeur of the scene has something that transports one's soul with excitement.^[24] Here [in America] the solitude is as profound but does not bring the same sensations to birth. All that one feels in passing through these flowery, wildernesses where everything,

[21] See Roger Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville . Pt. 1 of this book analyzes the cultural context of some of the ideas of Tocqueville's theories. Boesche shows very convincingly "the ways and extent to which Tocqueville's ideas emerged from the aspirations and anxieties of his generation" (p. 23). It is also Boesche who points out Tocqueville's depressions.

[22] Schiller, 204–205.

[23] Tocqueville did not have to read Schiller's essay to use his categories, which were later repeated in many other works. He certainly knew and admired Schiller's dramas. See Reino Virtanen, "Tocqueville and the Romantics," Symposium 13 (1959): 167–185, esp. 170. Custine, too, admired Schiller very much. See Tarn, 59.

[24] Custine has an analogical description of Alpes. See Aloys, 31. Many such descriptions could be found in the literature of the epoch.

as in Milton's Paradise,^[25] is ready to receive man, is a quiet admiration, a gentle melancholy sense, and a vague distaste for civilized life; a sort of primitive instinct that makes one think with sadness that soon this delightful solitude will have changed its looks.

And he continues with a little reversal of the image of Lake Oneida:

In fact already the white race is advancing across the forest that surrounds it, and in but few years the European will have cut the trees that are now reflected in the limpid waters of the lake."^[26]

Yet, his denials notwithstanding, he does find in the American forest the sublime in both its forms: as a moment of supreme insight (when he enters the American forest-cathedral at the beginning of "Journey to Lake Oneida") and as a sustained tension toward the spiritual. The deepest sense of awe and religious terror comes to him in the United States not from nature but from history. The very essence of America illustrated for him the working of Providence, and the existence of Democracy in America was due to his feeling of the sublime:

The whole book that is here offered to the public has been written under the influence of a kind of religious awe produced in the author's mind by the view of that irresistible revolution [the march of equality] which has advanced for centuries in spite of every obstacle and which is still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has caused. (1: 6–7)

The image of marching equality, or the ruins it leaves in its path, is accompanied by a sense of urgency and despair at the mindlessness of political actors.

A new science of politics is needed for a new world. This, however, is what we think of least; placed in the middle of a rapid river, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins that may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current hurries us away and drags us backward towards the abyss. (1: 7)

Unless we grasp the meaning of the change, the rapid river—Chateaubriand's symbol of time—will drag us to our ruin.

Why, as Tocqueville looks at the march of equality, are his eyes turned toward America? He does see equality's Providential march through Europe, but there it has to demolish many obstacles on its way, causing ruin and despair. Yet Providence also gave to equality an empty

[25] Paradise was known to Tocclueville, most probably, in the translation by Chateaubriand.

[26] "A Fortnight in the Wilds," 347–348.

continent to expand into, and in America its march could unfold in harmony, even, perhaps, reaching its goal and ending peacefully. Therefore, when America herself appears to the eyes of the observer (in the introductory chapter on the "Exterior Form of America"), she presents a magnificent "spectacle." Her shape is marvelously easy to discern at first glance; her rivers and mountains are divided in a way that is both simple and majestic. It is a real gift of God. Everything is symmetrical, and the multitude of waters, the confusion of objects, and the extreme variety of "tableaux" are simplified by this symmetry. The description of the majesty of the "central" forest and of the confusion of rivers is identical to the opening forest scene of the "Journey to Lake Oneida," as are the corresponding feelings of religious awe. The work, disorder, and activity of the down-below is contrasted with the calm and symmetry of the above. This marvelous America—America as a marvel—is a spectacle in motion, but no society is visible in this image, only the dying Indian races that, just as in contemporary museums of natural sciences, belong here among the natural elements. Indians were placed in America "as if waiting" for Europeans to arrive. Only the traces of their past are left; in the mini-America of Frenchman's Island, only their name remains attached to the lake. The Indians' tomb is actually the empty cradle of a new civilization.

Whereas the beginnings of European civilization were buried in early, barbaric times, bearers of civilization arrived in America already mature. They were vital and virile, and nature was virginal—an empty continent given to a race that was ready to take it. As Tocqueville looked at America, he saw that it was made for that purpose, that its shape contained is future.^[27] He therefore interprets America's emptiness as a sign of God's intention. Here the poetic is joined to the political. The (empty) cradle, tomb, trace —the "everyday" words of Romantic poetic language—now are used for political justification. America is likened to René's château: the cradle, where he lay, newborn; the tomb of his mother who died giving birth to him; and an empty place, a trace or ruin of a former life, from which René, like the Indians, was chased away.

Tocqueville felt a profound sympathy with the Indians: he and Beaumont truly identified with this "exiled nation." He included them in the brotherhood of victims by applying to them a Romantic vocabulary. But it was also easy for him to accept their exodus and extinction as

[27] Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 40.

inevitable and logical, a consequence of their nature that prevented them from ever truly possessing their land and therefore doomed them to certain death. Here French Romantic nostalgia used the vocabulary of American practicality; in fact, Tocqueville's ideas about America's emptiness and destiny can be found in many of his American sources.^[28]

The conquest and colonization of the Americas were accompanied by genocide. The enormity of this fact, if one may use such a word to describe it, was known and acknowledged, as we can see from, among other sources, Montaigne's Essays (1588). In two of them, "On the Coaches" and "On the Cannibals," Montaigne expressed the same attitude that was to characterize Democracy in America . He believed Western civilization to be corrupt and decadent; its superiority, however, made its expansion obvious and inevitable. Tocqueville was equally critical of Western culture and equally convinced of the essential link between culture and power, of the relationship between "lumières" and the spread of European dominion.^[29] "Lumières" meant for Tocqueville not only ideas and culture but also material goods and comforts, which resulted from and accompanied these ideas. In a memorandum about the French expansion in Algiers, he expressed this conviction very clearly. After the initial military conquest, the French would be wise to use other forms of persuasion: "It will be easier to win [the colonized] with our riches and our arts than with our cannons."^[30] The sorrow he felt at the extinction of the Indians did not prevent him from actively supporting the politics of French and Western colonization. He is aware that the Indian and the Algerian are corrupted and destroyed by contact with "civilization," but he holds it against them. He thought that contact between superior and inferior races corrupts the inferior not so much because the superior is itself corrupted but because of the inability of the inferior to grow and mature. "Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more, perhaps, their savage virtues consigned them to inevitable destruction."^[31] It is their race that

[28] Especially in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). The image of the Indian as vulnerable to destruction by civilization because of his inability, to possess and cultivate land can be found in C. F. Volney's Observations générales sur les Indiens ou Sauvages de l'Amérique du Nord, published as an appendix to his Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis (1803). It was one of Tocqueville's sources. See E Furet, "From Savage Man to Historical Man," in In the Workshop of History, 153–156, and James Schleifer, The Making of "Democracy in America ," 40, 78.

[29] See Democracy in America, 1: 5.

[30] "Première lettre sur l'Algérie," Oeuvres Complètes, 5: 30. Chateaubriand was convinced that it was Church music that converted Indians, not the dogmas of the faith.

[31] Democracy in America, 1: 7.

makes them unable to adapt to civilization; so it is, in a way, their race that kills them. Civilization had to expand, so Indians had to die. To highlight the inevitability and, so to speak, the involuntary character of this phenomenon, Tocqueville used the image of Indian races "vanishing daily like the snow in sunshine, and disappearing from view over the land."^[32] This sun, "les lumières," was European civilization. "The ruin of these tribes began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing its completion." The Indians were not subjects of history; they have been allowed by Providence to enjoy the riches of the New World "for a season" (1: 7), and now they are being removed. History may begin.

The Frenchman was also an (unsuccessful) explorer and settler whose presence was pushing back the Indians. Chateaubriand, Tocqueville, and Beaumont actively supported French colonial expansion, not only in their writing but also in their political practice. As a political man, Tocqueville supported (one may even say, implemented) French colonial expansion in Algiers, as well as many French government actions directed against the urban lower classes; he also advocated repressive prison methods.^[33] Like Madame de Sévigné, whom he quotes so critically in the second volume of Democracy, he understands human suffering but does not apply this understanding to certain groups of people. He is more able to commiserate with the Indians, "the race that is dying out" and is distant in space, than with Parisian workers whom he meets everyday. His politics are governed by convictions but also by fears.

Paradise

This very active political attitude is expressed in the language of nostalgia for the idyllic past. (Rationally, Tocqueville did not see this past as idyllic.) The "Journey to Lake Oneida" is a text in which

[32] "A Fortnight in the Wilds," 329.

[33] They were repressive in relation to other methods proposed at the same time. He believed in prisoners' continuous isolation in solitary confinement and in strict discipline. It is difficult to detect any pity in his attitude—such was the distance he felt from the criminals. See his summary of his conversations with prisoners in a model Philadelphia prison; the class origin of the prisoner is always noted (Oeuvres Complètes [1984], 4: 329–341). See also Jardin, Tocqueville, 183. Although prison was a place where he thought he was likely to find himself, as his Voyage en Sicile attests, it was a different kind of imprisonment. The criminals were, in his opinion, morally defective, and there was little that could be done but to isolate them.

one can observe the hidden, nonexplicit terms of this nostalgia. Its protagonist is a noble exile, a chivalrous figure from the past. Such a figure, although present already in Sophie von La Roche's novel, was statistically very unlikely.^[34] But the encounter between the exiled aristocrat and the new continent was particularly fertile. In spite of Tocqueville's conviction that because of its empty attachment to forms the French aristocracy was, together with the state, largely responsible for the Revolution, the aristocrat of Lake Oneida was simply a victim. He embodied everything that was noble and pure in France's past. His escape to the United States made his solitude and vulnerability extreme. It was a place in which his aristocracy of spirit could and did come into conflict with fate, the violence of nature, and the strangeness of the new human world. René, the first of these aristocrats, finds in America the ultimate exile, the great Gothic château of the forest; as his château was his cradle and the place of the first exile, so America became his tomb enclosed by the forest and transformed now into a cathedral.

In the "Journey to Lake Oneida," as well as in "A Fortnight in the Wilds" (although to a lesser degree), we can see Tocqucville's "American unconscious." In rewriting René, he expressed this side of himself which he banished from Democracy in America . It was an important part, so important that it steals back into Democracy and can be found in Tocqueville's overwhelming ambiguity toward things American. Beaumont makes his attitude clearer; Marie is, on one of its levels, an appeal against emigration to the United States. The two friends agreed on that matter, but Tocqueville expressed his attitude in a more complicated way, which can be, for the purpose of analysis, divided into two aspects: one rational, another unconscious. The Frenchman belonged to the latter.

The island on Lake Oneida is a little paradise. One arrives at it through the veils and domes of the forest-cathedral, in religious awe and in total silence. On the way, the drama of life and death is played out. Isolated from the world by spotless, innocent, sky-reflecting water, the island has an apple tree in the middle, just like Eden. The first and only couple's place was under that tree. The vine may be an image of the

[34] See Massimo Boffa, "Emigrés," Dictionnaire Critique de la Revolution Française, 346–362. According to the statistical data, the aristocracy constituted only 17 percent of the entire emigration due to the Revolution—approximately 26,000 people. Of these, many were military men residing in Europe. Emigration to America was very small and short-lived, although distinguished. Talleyrand was the best known of the American exiles.

serpent, or quite the opposite, of the Church—God being the Keeper of the Vineyard. The final metamorphosis of the story—the half-dead tree—has powerful religious symbolism.^[35] The Frenchman, like Christ, is dead but alive, a symbol of martyrdom. The meaning of his life is now clear, his death is a sacrifice.

The story of the young exile is purified of all external elements; even his marriage (presumably childless) is terminated by his wife's death. In fact, marriage in the literature of the time had a powerfully socializing meaning,^[36] and the defeat in love which dooms the Romantic hero is a metaphor for his inability to be integrated. Chateaubriand, whose work is the source of this image and who was able, as always, to unite political with poetic,^[37] characterized the Indians as unwed to the land of America: they did not cultivate the land, which therefore bore no fruit.^[38] Tocqueville later called America empty for the very same reason: possession of the land civilized peoples, and uncivilized ones were doomed to perish on contact with civilization. The story of the Frenchman can also be translated into terms of possession: he failed to "marry" the island.

The Christian terminology and allusions were not accidental. They were shared with Chateaubriand, as a way of domesticating a landscape, a continent, and a fate. The seated man was transformed here into the Man of Sorrows, the traditional figure of Jesus sitting in distress, with his head on his hand. The place that was beautiful but otherwise uninteresting, as Beaumont said, became very understandable. The ease with which Tocqueville accepted the news of the Frenchman's disappearance was the result of translating the social situation into a religious framework: the Frenchman was doomed right from the start. His death was not a failure of adjustment to the social world but an act of sacrifice, of martyrdom. In this way the Frenchman was purified and so was America.

Christianizing the island, fitting it into the known categories of low and high, dead and alive, prosaic and noble is a way to attach this new territory to the continent of one's own culture. The tree is one of the main symbols in Western culture, even more, one of the main forms of Western thought. The tree and its roots are the symbols of unity, hierar-

[35] "The tree is a symbol of either life or death, depending upon whether it is healthy and strong, or poorly nourished and withered." George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), 39.

[36] Barbéris, 107.

[37] In the already-quoted words of Pierre Michel, Les Barbares: Un mythe romantique 1789–1848 (Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1981), 83.

[38] François-René de Chateaubriand, Atala, in Atala, René, 55. It was an explanation present as well in the American writings about the origin of American society.

chy, continuity, and transcendence and are found in all branches of Western science, including linguistics and psychology.^[39] The image of a tree that is half-dead and half-alive is particularly dramatic: it is the very symbol of contradiction, of rupture. Tocqueville had this contradiction within himself—hence the final transformation of the Frenchman into the half-dead tree. The tree, planted on the island, made it the center, the capital of this other America. This is the meaning of the tree in Beaumont's drawing: like a flag, it shows what type of territory one is about to enter. It is a real tree but, separated from other trees, it becomes a tree of meaning.

We are not accustomed to looking for an image of purely asocial America in the work of the author of Democracy in America . Tocqueville moved between two Americas: one rational, the other poetic. His "esprit lucide" dwelt in the political institutions, his "âme troublée" in American nature.^[40] These two Americas were in conflict: one, Tocqueville thought, was Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, the other French and Catholic; one was political, the other social; one was the land of freedom, the other of slavery; one was acceptable, the other was not. The island of Lake Oneida was poetic, natural America in miniature, the pure America, the unlivable land of spiritual exile.

Of course, these divisions are neither exclusive nor convincing; they represent, however, the way Tocqueville perceived America. The religious imagery of "Journey to Lake Oneida" makes the island quite Catholic. Chateaubriand expressed surprise that America had no tall, imposing churches, and he explained it as the result of Protestantism. Domes, veils, religious awe, and martyrdom are part of the splendor and mystery of the Catholic rite. Tocqueville makes this side of the island totally unintelligible to the fisherman's wife, who represents social, Protestant America in his text. It is the feeling of the sublime, of tragedy, of high spirituality which characterizes the island in opposition to the Protestant practicality of the mainland. For Tocqueville, it is like being in a church, and this is one of the reasons for his feeling that he has already been there.

Tocqueville associated Catholicism with French character and mores, and with French political influence. The island of Lake Oneida was a

[39] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarii, "Rhizome," in Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie (Paris: Editions Minuit, 1984), 9–29. "The binary logic," they write, "is the spiritual reality of the tree-root" (p. 11).

[40] It is Pierre Michel who said that Tocqueville had "l'esprit lucide, l'âame troublée" (in his Les Barbares: Un mythe romantique, 269).

French island, a symbol of the former French control over the territory. It was also a fantasy of exile—the tentative, imaginary emigration by Tocqueville and Beaumont. "Literary texts play the role of fictive solutions to problems that have been displaced and couldn't find real solution in that moment," P. Barbéris has written (p. 6). The insistent repetition of the image of empty America, of the impossible paradise, of le mort-vivant was an effort on the part of Tocqueville to face the problems he could not quite formulate in the vocabulary of his everyday realities. America was a space in which to experiment, to face the fear of the future, of expansion and exile. It was the place to transport, literally and figuratively, the untenable social tensions of Western Europe. The little paradise on Lake Oneida was a place where Tocqueville tried and failed in his imaginary emigration. (In his "Letter" he openly writes that his health would not permit him to survive on the island; this is only one of the signs of how much he identified with the Frenchman.) Having experimented with that, he was now able to turn toward the America of political institutions. It was a country he had already rejected, that he did not plan to live in, and, in a sense, he had already died in. Now he was able to look at it as a model, to conceptualize it and find out what it meant.

10
Social America

The America of Many Oneidas

Empty, sublime America was devoid not only of Indians; it also had no Europeans. In a striking retelling of the Oneida episode in Democracy in America, the Frenchman loses whatever identity he had before, even his nationality. "Sometimes the progress of man is so rapid that the desert reappears behind him," writes Tocqueville, and he develops this image in a paragraph that ends with nature covering man's ephemeral traces. In the following paragraph he adopts a very personal tone and, as if to illustrate the truth of his observation, tells the story that we know so well.

I remember that in crossing one of the woodland districts which still cover the state of New York, I reached the shores of a lake which was encircled by forests coeval with the world [paradise]. A small island, covered with woods whose thick foliage concealed its banks, rose from the center of the waters. Upon the shores of the lake no object arrested to the presence of man except a column of smoke which might be seen on the horizon, rising from the tops of the trees to the clouds and seeming to hang from heaven rather than to be mounting to it. An Indian canoe was hauled up on the sand, which tempted me to visit the islet that had first attracted my attention, and in a few minutes I set foot upon its banks. The whole island formed one of those delightful solitudes of the New World, which almost led civilized man to long for the haunts [life] of the savage. A luxuriant vegetation bore witness to the incomparable fruitfulness of the soil. The deep silence, which is common to the wilds of North America, was broken

only by the monotonous cooing of the wood-pigeons and the tapping of the woodpecker on the bark of trees. I was far from supposing that this spot had ever been inhabited, so completely did nature seem to be left to herself; but when I reached the center of the isle, I thought that I discovered some traces of man. I then proceeded to examine the surrounding objects with care, and I soon perceived that a European had undoubtedly been led to seek refuge in this place. Yet what changes had taken place in the scene of his labors! The logs that he had hastily hewn to build himself a shelter had sprouted afresh; the very props were intertwined with living verdure, and his cabin was transformed into a bower. In the midst of these shrubs a few stones were to be seen, blackened with fire and sprinkled with thin ashes; here the hearth had no doubt been, and the chimney in falling had covered it with debris. I stood for some time in silent admiration of the resources of Nature and the littleness of man; and when I was obliged to leave that solitude [enchantés lieux], I was still repeating with sadness: "Are ruins, then, already here?" (1: 295–296)

All the basic elements of the story are here. Although we have no revolution to expel the European from his country, he had to seek refuge and was defeated by nature; the island, centered on a surface of water, is a little paradise; the scene is of nature resurrecting the tree-logs and covering man's traces. The traveler passes through the island to contemplate this sublime spectacle of life and death, and of ruin in the midst of an empty continent.

There is, however, a slight shift of accent in this version of the Oneida story. The forest in "Journey" was, in a manner of speaking, baptized, and the Frenchman was made a martyr. Here the forest is exotic, and instead of the Frenchman's story we have a description of luxuriant vegetation and birds. That change shows that the Frenchman is unessential in the "colonization" of the island, that it is enough for Tocqueville to find there a trace of any European. America—a spectacle of human frailty exposed to the saddened eyes of the observer—became part of the new, Romantic "Grand Tour."

The many Oneidas of this tour were all covered with forest. The forest, like the tree, has a special place in Tocqueville's mental geography. In empty America, the tree is a symbol of civilization, of man, and the forest is a cathedral, a tomb, a cradle; but there is still another America, and a different tree. It is the one that is cut out by the pioneer and used by him in his fight against nature. Tocqueville wrote:

In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature and they may be said not to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet. Their eyes are fixed upon

another sight: the American people views its own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. This magnificent image of themselves . . . [is] always flitting before his mind.

This march of a people, as irresistible as the march of equality, has a poetic grandeur to it; but it is contrasted with the everyday life of the United States, which is "Inconceivably petty, insipid, crowded with paltry interests, in a word, anti-poetic" (2: 74). There is a poetic greatness about the tree in the forest but also a practical utilitarian aura.

The same opposition can be found in Beaumont. In writing about Indians, he complains that the forests are taken away from them to be cut down, not made into poetry.

These beautiful forests, magnificent solitudes, splendid palaces of wild nature, need a divine bard! They cannot fall beneath the ax of the industrialist without having been celebrated by the lyre of the poet. That poet is not to be found in America. . . . Atala, René, the Natchez, were born in America, children of the wilderness. The New World inspired them, old Europe alone has understood them. When the Americans read Chateaubriand, as when they see the marvel of Niagara, they say, "And what does that prove?"  (Marie, 116)

The last sentence is the one spoken by the fisherman's wife: she could not comprehend why the travelers wanted to go to an island that was "too far from the market." The tragedy of Lake Oneida consists in the fact that a man who might have been Tocqueville's and Beaumont's equal died there, misunderstood and rejected by the New World as well as the Old. In still another duality, there was the America of poetry and the America of industry, and the forest was where they met.

This symbolic meeting place was of utmost importance for the internal equilibrium of various elements in Democracy in America . America was for Tocqueville like a forest: a confusion, but one that could be mastered. "One could compare America to a great forest," he wrote, "with a myriad of straight roads built through it, all of them leading to the same point. One need only find the crossroads and everything will become visible at a single glance."^[1] The disorder and chaos could be overcome with clear thinking. The division into two Americas (poetic and prosaic) and two systems (aristocratic and democratic) had as its objective the reintegration, the healing, the reunification of Tocqueville's world. This division was an intellectual tool but also a projection,

[1] Quoted from Tocqueville's letter to the Count Molé, Ouevres Complètes vol. 5, pt. 1, 26. See also Furet, "The Conceptual System," 172.

in the intellectual sense of the word, of the rupture in the world Tocqueville inhabited. Impossible to heal at home, it was easier to overcome in a place that was like Europe but was also its negation.

Poetic, empty America contained traces and vestiges of Europe's past but not its feudal social institutions. The past, therefore, was no obstacle in the functioning of the second, "practical" America—the free and prosperous democracy that foretold Europe's future. In this tension between past and future, today's practical America becomes intelligible and, therefore, nonthreatening: a spectacle of continuous activity, of symmetry and meaning, of (relative) freedom. Here equality ends peacefully its march. "Yes, it is certain that in the New World the French traveller found reasons to hope, while in Europe, and especially in France, he found only motives to fear."^[2] Tocqueville took what was best in America and projected it onto Europe's future.

The little world of Lake Oneida, poetic and limited as it was, contained all the elements of the universe called America. Its persistent reappearance in the writings of Tocqueville served a very important function. Tocqueville's acceptance of democracy did not come from his heart. "I have for democratic institutions un goût de tête, " he wrote, "while I am an aristocrat in my instincts and opinions."^[3] In his life, in his friendships, in his writing style, and in his political activity he belonged to the aristocratic milieu and its mores. (The only exception may have been his marriage to a commoner.) The attraction of democracy, strong as it was, had little to do with everyday living. The analysis of the working of democracy was meant to show the way, to indicate the future for the French. Therefore Tocqueville needed only a general view of American society; he was interested in the behavior and peculiarities of Americans only insofar as they had bearing on the future of democracy. Americans as such were of no interest to him; he was not a travel writer. In that sense François Furet's already-quoted remark is strikingly true: Tocqueville did not "learn" anything outside of the framework of his theory. Yet he did notice and interpret many little facts that led him to new ideas.

During his journey, Tocqueville often found Americans difficult to bear. Their manners were coarse; they were too loud; they did not keep

[2] Pierre Manent, "Commentaire," Revue Tocqueville (1981), 23–30, esp. 25.

[3] Quoted in J. P. Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Essay in Political Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 28–29. A similar Tocqueville statement is quoted by Boesche: "I have an intellectual taste for democratic institutions, but I am an aristocrat by instinct. Which means that I scorn and fear the crowd." In Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, 169. The quotation comes from an unpublished fragment and is reported by Boesche after Edward Gargan, Alexis de Tocqueville (1955).

enough physical and social distance between themselves and their guest; their conversations were devoid of charm and were "argumentative"—concentrated uniquely on exhausting whatever topic they discussed; they chewed tobacco and continuously spat it around them, with the more elegant among them using spitoons. (This custom seriously damaged the image of nineteenth-century Americans: no traveler could avoid noticing it.) One of the most irritating customs of the Americans, Tocqueville observed, was that they continuously boasted about their country:

Nothing is more embarrassing . . . than this irritable patriotism of the Americans. . . . America is a free country in which, lest anybody should be hurt by your remarks, you are not allowed to speak freely of private individuals or of the state, of the citizens or of the authorities, of public or of private undertakings, or, in short, of anything at all except, perhaps, the climate and the soil; and even then Americans will be found ready to defend both as if they had cooperated in producing them. (1: 244)

If the foreigner does not respond to the incessant harassment of their efforts to incite praise, they resort to praising themselves.

This peculiarity of American behavior is frequently described in the travel literature of the time. Everybody complained about it, except for travelers who did not know English. British authors were particularly irritated, as they not only understood what was said but also took it personally (as it was certainly meant to be taken). Mrs. Trollope and Charles Dickens ridiculed this habit a great deal. It was variously interpreted as violent republicanism, a sense of national insecurity in a young nation, as tyranny of the majority; but always it was considered a sign of bad manners and abominable taste. Tocqueville's analysis is, as usual, truly original. In the age of democracy, he said, an aristocratic, disinterested love of one's country is dying out; we therefore need to offer people a practical reason to be attached to their fatherland. That can happen only if

everyone takes an active part in the government of society. . . . As the American participates in all that is done in his country, he thinks himself obliged to defend whatever may be censured in it; for it is not only his country that is then attacked, it is himself. The consequence is that his national pride resorts to a thousand artifices and descends to all the petty tricks of personal vanity. (1: 243–244)

This observation is doubly useful. It satisfactorily explains a strange bit of behavior, and, disregarding its unpleasant side-effects, it points to still another reason why democracy is the necessity of the new age.

This intelligent (and valid) explanation was possible because, while writing Democracy in America, Tocqueville was examining social facts only in their relation to problems of equality and the future of France. Mrs. Trollope and Dickens used the criterion of good taste as they considered the United States, and they judged this country by how closely it imitated England, whereas Tocqueville came to it looking for solutions to problems that interested him. Here was a nation of people with no common past, no reason for "Instinctive" love of country, and yet they were truly patriotic. Even if its expression irritated, it was a phenomenon worth drawing lessons from. This cool distance characterizes Tocqueville's way of looking at Americans throughout his book. He disregards what he considers their vulgarity and concentrates on what makes them and their manners useful for democracy.

Tocqueville's attitude toward social America was totally de tête . Facts and observations had meaning only in their relationship to equality, and to social and political democracy. He linked manners to institutions, as he did literature and religion—all constituted separate surfaces of the same crystal at whose heart was the functioning of the democratic system. Each facet offered a different plane, creating a complicated pattern of interdependence. The light these surfaces reflected came from another crystal at whose center was the French aristocratic system. The interaction of these two crystals created this brilliant, mobile spectacle, which could be described with the sentence, quoted earlier, that Heine used to characterize Tocqueville's discours: they have, he said, "a frozen brilliance like cut ice."

The admiration Tocqueville feels is for ideas, for the beauty of the spectacle of the forever changing and moving symmetries of various facets of these ideas. Their complicated relationships were kept in place by the all-embracing vision of the march of equality and by the sense of urgency due to the rapid decline of the old world around him. "Tocqueville's journey was a search for the essence, for the nature of democracy; it is an effort to overcome, by intellectual clarity, the 'religious terror' [he felt]: knowing the nature of democracy, he will know what to hope for and what to fear from it."^[4] The march of history, although it crushes individuals, also enlarges human liberty; the crushed man belonged to the poetic America of the past, whereas the practical American belonged to the America of social relations. In such a way, yesterday's nightmare made way for tomorrow's hope.

[4] Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris: Julliard, 1982), 9.

The Discovery of America

It is paradoxical that Tocqueville found hope in America, which may have been the source of the problems he was seeking the remedy for. Although the history of modern Europe cannot be reduced to a single motif, the discovery—or invention—of America certainly had a formidable influence on Europe's fate. America was a projection and extension of Europe, but its existence radically changed the old continent, so that another voyage of discovery was needed—Tocqueville's.

The fundamental change, the one that underlay all the others, was in the realm of sheer space. America was discovered by a world that had no place in its scheme for such a continent. It is because of this, argues Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman, that America was not in reality discovered but rather "Invented": the stumbling upon the previously unforeseen continent was interpreted by the Western world as a discovery. That term implies a conscious, direct effort rewarded by finding something already "there." Its use had profound consequences for how America was understood.

In his inspiring book, The Invention of America (1961), O'Gorman analyzes the writings of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and other explorers and geographers to show that they had no previous idea of the new land and had not been looking for what they found; quite the opposite: once they found America, they attempted to integrate the new continent into the shape of the world they knew. That world, founded on religion, consisted of the Island of the Earth, composed of three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa—enclosed by the Ocean, which defined the Island's borders. The self-enclosed world was given by God for people to inhabit. The very existence of new inhabited territories undermined the integrity of this image. In O'Gorman's interpretation, Christopher Columbus oscillated between the conviction that the land he came upon was an Asiatic peninsula (the geographic world thus remaining basically the same) and the conviction that it was a Terrestrial Paradise (thus maintaining the world's spiritual integrity). But the facts had to be reinterpreted, and soon a new vision appeared in which the Ocean was no longer seen as a boundary, and the Island of the Earth, through the addition of the "island" of America, now became a globe.

If we designate Columbus's first voyage, which took place in 1492, as the starting moment, the process of reshaping the world took a mere fifteen years. In 1507, the name "America" appeared on the map illus-

trating the first commentary in which the newly discovered island was called the "fourth part" of the world.^[5] The name of the "land of Amerigo" was feminized to show that its nature was identical to that of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The change was not of size but of space. "The moment that the Orbis Terrarum was conceived as transcending its ancient insular bounds," writes O'Gorman, "the archaic notion of the world as a limited space in the universe assigned to man by God wherein he might gratefully dwell lost its raison d'être " (pp. 128–130).

This statement describes well the impact of the discovery of America. To accommodate the existence of the new continent, the world changed its shape, and, since the globe's surface now had no center, Europe lost her geographic supremacy. This meant a psychological decentrement, a process of which 1492 marked only the beginning. As Europe's size diminished, these gigantic American territories opened to her for expansion: they could be annexed, manipulated, or colonized, extending Europe, it seemed, almost endlessly. Unlike Asia or Africa, America was considered empty: the invading Europeans disregarded the civilizations they found there and even denied their existence. America was a space, a gigantic space, that demanded to be settled. The pull of this space, the force of attraction that this "emptiness" exerted, had a profoundly destablizing effect on Europe.

The medieval Europe of the Island of the Earth was a continent in which people's identity depended on the place they were from. Some other cultures named people with the name of their fathers, but in the center of Europe people were identified by geographic names: Leonardo from Vinci, Chrétien from Troyes, Michel Eyquiem from Montaigne. One was born to a place in the same way one was born to a mother: it was a natural occurrence that did not require acceptance. Psychologically and culturally speaking, exile and emigration were not options; only banishment. The attachment to place was so fundamental that banishment threatened one's identity (which was ultimately guaranteed by God). Dante's Divine Comedy was born of this attachment to and identification with the place of birth of the poet.

Of course, there were exceptions, escapes, and movements of popula-

[5] This is the 1507 publication by the Academy of St. Dié of Cosmographiae Introductio, which contained the Lettera by Amerigo Vespucci, the Martin Waldseemüller world map with what is today called South and North America (in distorted shapes), and a commentary. (See Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961], 123.) The same cartographer later reversed himself and reattached the new land to Asia. More time and exploration were clearly needed to complete this process of realization.

tion; medieval Europe had its pilgrims and explorers, and also vagabonds, itinerant scholars, and wandering Jews. In the last thirty years since O'Gorman wrote his book, social and demographic historians have shown that late-medieval and early modern European population was more geographically mobile than previously thought. Still, these movements were enclosed within a clearly delineated, finite, flat world, and for the vast majority of the population the next village was already a new world. The old Greek and Roman dreams of colonization lived only in port-cities, which sent their emissaries to sea until, finally, they found the New World.

Once this world became known, it needed to be conquered—named, partitioned, and then settled. The people of Europe, theoretically all the people of Europe, were no longer locked in their continent but instead had a new, open space to go to. The political and spiritual meaning of that opportunity was parallel to the "spatial unlocking": people did not have to stay still and endure their fate anymore, and even the very concept of fate was put in doubt. The reaction of a young Californian friend of mine, when first hearing the story of King Oedipus, was: "Why didn't he move?"

The discovery or invention of America unlocked also the flow of time: the New World replaced the End of the World. Before the Americas were found, Europe lived in religious, ritualistic time, which had a very clear beginning—the moment of creation—and was running out as the Day of Judgment approached. Dante's way of talking about history was that of prophecy: events were already written down, they just needed to unfold as time was running out. But the encounter with other worlds and other populations which seemed to have been created on the side, so to speak, destabilized this concept of time as well. Here were lands outside history, whose very existence undermined the linearity and purposefulness of time's movement. America was empty both in space and in time.

"The conquest of America heralds and establishes our present identity," wrote Tzvetan Todorov. "Even if every date that permits us to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more suitable, in order to mark the beginning of the modern era, than the year 1492. . . . We are all the direct descendants of Columbus."^[6] Some historians believe that the sixteenth century—the period of expansion into the Americas—was the moment of the creation of modern capitalism. In Karl Marx's fa-

[6] Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, 5.

mous saying, with the appearance of the world market and of worldwide commerce in the sixteenth century commenced the modern biography of Capital. Several phenomena that destabilized the old order and brought forward the world of today were due to readjustments made to swallow the Americas. Whereas Spain projected onto South America her system of hierarchy and privilege—transplanted herself as she was—in North America a new social model was soon created.^[7] Latin America was conceived of as a providential gift to the mother country. North America, though, was to fulfill the "providential opportunity to exercise religious, political, and economic liberty, so hindered and fettered in the Old World," wrote O'Gorman with the optimist's vision of history quite outdated today.

It was the Spanish part of the invention of America that liberated Western man from the fetters of a prison-like conception of his physical world, and it was the English part that liberated him from subordination to a Europe-centered conception of his historical world. In these two great liberations lies the hidden and true significance of American history.^[8]

The unlocking of space and time had a liberating influence on Europe: its hungry and discontented populations had somewhere to go. It also rendered the "old order" liable to questioning if confronted with the society created ex nihilo by human will. The existence of this new society undermined the conviction that the world is as it should be—the best of all possible worlds. It therefore must have been one of the indirect causes of the French Revolution, which itself performed for the French society a similar operation of unlocking the (already weakened) old social hierarchies and political space. The appearance of a country in which "the king" was elected every four years was an expression of the same movement of history that brought Louis XVI's death by guillotine.

Moreover, there was definitely a link between the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution. The images and ideas of the French Revolution are directly traceable to independent America, which offered, for the French,

from La Fayette to Chastellux, from Mirabeau to Brissot, from Malby to Condorcet, from subtle argument to polemic . . . a new discourse on human equal-

[7] The difference in founding principles of the two hemispheres can be seen in their attitude toward nature: North Americans set themselves right from the beginning as pioneers, subjugating the forests and marshes, whereas the South Americans adapted to the land and did not colonize "the immense deserts." For a comparison of these two attitudes, see Jehlen, American Incarnation, 29–40.

[8] O'Gorman, 144–145.

ity and on the right way to govern societies. . . . American independence crystallized the idea of a history-as-origin, by means of which society would once again conform to nature and reason. That is the deep connection between the two revolutions. The idea of revolution in its 1789 sense originated for the French in the birth of the United States . (Italics added)^[9]

It was only one of the ways in which America returned to Europe to shake her very hard.

The link between the two revolutions, intuitively perceived by the Romantics, was openly acknowledged by Tocqueville. In a letter to his brother Hippolyte, he described the circumstances that prevented the French from establishing their control over America. "Had we been successful," he writes, ". . . the Americans of the United States would not have revolted against their mother country. . . . There wouldn't have been any American Revolution, and perhaps no French Revolution—or at least the circumstances would not have been the same."^[10] He did not, however, identify the beginning of the modern era with the discovery of America. The march of equality starts, for him, in the twelfth century, with the growth and establishment of the clergy, with the weakening of the nobility, the acceleration of commerce, and the ripening of civilization. The march of equality was a European phenomenon. Tocqueville goes to America because equality attained there its "extreme limit" (1: 3), the state he expects will soon come to Europe as well. In fact, if he thought in these terms, Tocqueville would think the discovery of America and her Constitution as brought in by equality. For him, to paraphrase the famous Soviet postrevolutionary slogan—Communism equals the power of soviets plus electrification—America equaled equality plus space. His voyage to America is propelled by the worry that equality and freedom may not go together. When he comes back, the two are precariously reconciled.

Tocqueville's America

Tocquevilie's journey was thoroughly prepared, and so was his "second journey," that is, his writing. He had read many travel accounts, and his itinerary was influenced by one of them. He had read

[9] Furet, "From Savage Man to Historical Man," 157, 160.

[10] Letter dated November 26, 1831, quoted in Jardin, Tocqueville, 165.

Volney's Tableau, the Federalist Papers, many histories of American states, books about Indians, and so on.^[11] As we have seen, there was also another source for the images and themes in his perception of America—3Romantic literature. He oscillated between the two sources, which were not complementary: Romanticism interrupted the orderliness of his thought. What is striking and can now be seen is that the themes and terms in which Tocqueville conceived of America were well within the bounds of the tradition that dates from Columbus. America, even before it was found, was a dream of Europeans—a New Eden. It was therefore logical to see America as a paradise (or its opposite: hell). In this sense, too, Tocqueville knew America before he went there.

Unlike Russia, America was in some way considered to be an extension and part of Europe. I would like to remind the reader of the description, quoted in this book's first part, of Custine's arrival in Saint Petersburg. Custine contrasted there the watery surroundings of this city with the Roman countryside. Although the vicinity of Saint Petersburg was a "dull, muddy mirror," a ruinless wasteland that reminded Custine of nothing, the Roman countryside, he said, evoked endless reminiscences. I suggested that difference stemmed from the fact that in Western travel descriptions, among "general views" of cities, there is no scene of arrival in Saint Petersburg and that therefore the "desert" around this city was historical or cultural rather than geographic. But this interpretation does not go far enough.

In the already-quoted version of the Oneida-like episode from Democracy in America itself, Tocqueville-the-narrator, while approaching the island, notices the virginal nature of his surroundings: "Upon the shores of the lake no object attested the presence of man except a column of smoke which might be seen on the horizon rising from the tops of the trees to the clouds and seeming to hang from heaven rather than to be mounting to it." He then goes on to find the traces of the European and ends the episode with the question, "Are ruins, then, already here?" (1: 295–296). The column of smoke reminded this reader of the comment René makes while sitting and gazing at the Roman countryside: "Sometimes a tall column rose up solitary in a wasteland [un désert ], as a great thought may spring from a soul ravaged by time and sorrow" (René, 90). The architectural similarity between the two landscapes indicates that one did not need to find a ruin to

[11] See Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's "Democracy in America, " which refers many of his ideas to their sources, and Jardin, Tocqueville, 95.

"recognize" the new place. Convinced that Russia was (mostly) a part of Asia, Custine made no effort to "civilize" its landscape. Tocqueville's America functioned as the extension of Europe and was, therefore, known to him, or at least adaptable.

Although Tocqueville's political and philosophical analysis was strikingly modern, it was enmeshed in attitudes toward the natives, the land, and the essence of America that stemmed directly from convictions present already when the country was being created, interpreted, and "invented." The belief, expressed by Tocqueville, that the "savages," even if noble, are fundamentally inferior to "civilized" men predated, attended, and was built into the "formation" of America. As O'Gorman has written,

If the new lands were the fourth part of the world, their inhabitants, in spite of their strangeness, shared in the same nature as that of the Europeans, Asians, and Africans . . . they too were descended from Adam and were beneficiaries of Christ's redemption. . . . The consequence was that the native cultures of the newly-found lands could not be recognized and respected in their own right, as an original way of realizing human ideals and values, but only for the meaning they might have in relation to Christian European culture, the self-appointed judge and model of human behavior. (P. 139)

Christopher Columbus, when told by the inhabitants of Cuba that despite his wishes it was an island and not a continent, wrote in his journal:

And since these are bestial men who believe that the whole world is an island and who do not know what the mainland is, and have neither letters nor longstanding memories, and since they take pleasure only in eating and being with their women, they said that this was an island.^[12]

In his analysis of Columbus's writings Todorov establishes this fundamental truth of the conquest: "Columbus has discovered America but not the Americans. The entire history of the discovery of America . . . is marked by this ambiguity: human alterity is at once revealed and rejected" (pp. 49–50).^[13]

[12] In the Bernaldez transcription of the journal of the second voyage. Quoted after T. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 21–22.

[13] The year 1492 also saw the Spanish victory over the Moors in Granada and the expulsion of the Jews. Columbus sees a deep connection between these facts and his "discovery of the Indias," which, for him, means the spread and victory of the Christian faith. "But we can also see," comments Todorov, "[these] actions as directed in opposite, and complementary, directions: one expels heterogeneity from the body of Spain, the other irremediably introduces it there" (p. 50).

Tocqueville's attitude toward the continent of North America also continues the traditional way of looking for meaning in its very shape. His already-quoted description—the "Exterior Form of North America"—is written as if it were a commentary on a map: in a gesture analogical to that of the explorers, Tocqueville bends over the continent he wants to re-discover. With this "bird's-eye view" he is able to perceive the wisdom of God as expressed in the symmetry and providential emptiness of the continent. (We can appreciate now the multiple use Tocqueville makes of the verbs denoting visual assessment of American reality: he is an observer and a visionary at the same time.)

The map he sees contains religious and geographic components, and this combination determines what he will find. Like Columbus, Tocqueville saw America in religious dimensions, and he found many traces of the Terrestrial Paradise on the continent: the Little Island in the middle of the Virginal Forest where time repeats always the same drama. In that way the past is continuously replayed as present. But America was also the land of the future, of destiny. Here, too, the geographic dimension meets the religious. America is a continent—a self-enclosed, self-sufficient entity, with "coasts so admirably adapted for commerce and industry." Tocqueville sees a providential offering of an empty continent to civilized man when he denies the discovery of America: "l'Amérique se découvre"—discovers herself—he writes (1: 239). Discovery is made by itself, almost involuntarily, so ripe and ready is its object. Such an offering of a continent cannot but be meaningful: the land here incorporates the idea of future. Tocqueville is emphatic about this right at the beginning of Democracy in America, establishing the uniqueness of his project. And he finishes the mental map of the continent with this stirring sentence: "In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man; and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past" (1: 25). Here geography becomes an expression of destiny, and from the shape of America one can see that it was predestined to fulfill human fate.^[14]

The establishment, right at the beginning of his book, of the exceptional and, in a way, supernatural character of America has an all-important meaning for the argument of Tocqueville. What he was look-

[14] For the functioning of the idea of incorporation see again Myra Jehlen's American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent .

ing at and describing was not an accidental development in capricious human history but a profound expression of mankind's destiny. The effort of understanding was directed toward the future because only understanding of the future could satisfactorily explain the present. And the future, if one looked at it from the American point of view, could be somewhat reassuring. In France, the future implied final destruction and replacement of aristocratic culture and freedoms. In America, where the forest and the noble Indian race were already almost totally destroyed, the future held in it mostly harmonious social development. Perhaps in this development human freedom could be preserved.

There is still another column of smoke, mentioned earlier: the smoke that symbolized the fate of René's family, blown away by the wind. In that image the oak tree—steady, rooted—was surrounded by its family, while René wandered aimlessly, space his enemy—a void. We have seen that in his American journey Tocqueville often encountered René and these "islands" of void. But as he came across them, he reinterpreted them in religious terms and saw them as surrounded by another kind of space, equally empty but hospitable: into this space human freedom could expand. The tomb could become a cradle.

Empty America was covered by a forest—symbol of freedom—and by the islands the forest was covering. The two traditional ways of seeing America—as Eden or as the land of (religious) freedom—are here precariously united to overcome the void. The European's peeling away of the forest introduces the image of social America with its "continuous activity" that Tocqueville admires de tête . But this other America, the America of personal discovery, cannot be exorcised. Poetic, marginally expressed, even suppressed, it is a mirror image, reflected in the waters of the lake, of this other, social worry that forced Tocqueville to travel. In "Journey to Lake Oneida," René's exile and death are reenacted. In Democracy in America, by a prodigious effort, Tocqueville convinced René that everything would be all right.

11
Conclusions

America, Russia, and Freedom

Tocqueville and the "aging René—Custine—went to two countries on the edges of Europe. Both Russia and the United States were semi-European entities: European forms of social life were used and transformed there. Both were "new" countries. Russia, although present in European life at the beginning of the millennium, disappeared later under the "Tartar yoke"; her reappearance was approximately contemporary with the discovery of America.^[1] Although the "discoverers" of Russia—Herberstein, Olearius, Fletcher—did not find the country "empty," that is, ready for colonization, both America and Russia were characterized by enormous space that was, by European standards, unoccupied. (Siberia was Russia's America.) In the eighteenth century, both countries became gigantic social laboratories: Peter the Great introduced radical reforms in Russia, and the American Revolution marked the beginning of a new political system. These social experiments defied Europe's traditionalist attitude in which historical continuity was preferred to rupture as a matter of course. Europe's reaction to these radical changes was one of interest mixed with disgust, not only because the experiments expressed a lack of respect for tradi-

[1] Depending on the historical school, the end of Mongol rule over Muscovy was in 1452, the year Moscow stopped paying tribute to the Great Horde, or in 1480, with the Great Horde's unsuccessful attempt to invade Muscovy.

tion but, above all, because of the slavery present in both countries. The slavery itself was shocking, but even more shocking was its copresence with the egalitarian ethos. The serfdom of peasants in Russia and the slavery of blacks in the United States were despised by the French as non-European.^[2]

When Tocqueville and Custine were writing their books, comparisons of the two countries were quite new.^[3] For a European, there were striking similarities between the countries. In the travel descriptions of the nineteenth century, for example, American cities were often compared to Russian ones.^[4] Most Russian and American cities were new by European standards, and that made them "modern." They were monotonous, with straight, broad streets; their separation from the countryside was not complete; they were similar to each other, with few distinguishing characteristics. With the exception of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia, the American and Russian cities consisted of people living closer to one another but not living an altogether different type of life. American cities were even less urban than Russian ones, since they often did not even have a central square—only a main street. Yet although Custine, as I have said, was profoundly bored and depressed by Russian cities, Tocqueville often found American cities charming. "Arrival at Utica," he writes cheerfully in his notebook. "Charming city of ten thousand souls. Very pretty shops. Founded since the War of Independence. In the middle of a pretty plain."^[5] In a letter to his mother he described Auburn as a "small city of two thousand people with all the houses and all the shops

[2] Nineteenth-century France and England "banished" slavery to the colonies. In "young" Russia the serfdom was considered an early sign of decay; in "free" America, of hypocrisy. (In a striking coincidence, both slavery and serfdom were abolished at approximately the same time—in the 1860s; Tocqueville and Custine did not live to see this happen.) Both countries were profoundly divided internally by a chasm that was much deeper than the usual class differences.

[3] René Rémond lists five authors who did compare the future of the two countries before Tocqueville, but none of them did it in any extended form. See René Rémond, Les Etats-Unis devant l'opinion française, 1815–1852 (Paris: Colin, 1962), 379, fn. Later on, such comparison was more common; in an 1854 article, "La société russe et la société américaine" (in La Revue des Deux Mondes ), Gustave de Beaumont contrasted the freedom of America to the serfdom and lack of private property in Russia. The article was a review of August von Haxthausen's book about Russia, which was written in a polemic with Custine.

[4] Patricia Herlihy, "Visitors' Perceptions of Urbanization: Travel Literature in Tsarist Russia," 132, 135.

[5] In "Pocket Notebook Number 1,"Journey to America, 126.

very well furnished."^[6] "Pretty shops" and "houses well furnished" are criteria that Tocqueville applied to the American cities: what was likable about them was their spontaneous growth and the useful arrangements put together by their inhabitants. The Russian cities, in contrast, were founded and organized by central authorities, each of them the implementation of a decree, rather than the expression of a free (commercial) will.

But the America that truly interested Tocqueville was neither urban nor rural; the political organization of democracy resided somewhere in between and was personified by the pioneer who, in alliance with others like himself, lived a temporary life in the wilderness, informed by his newspapers about the business of the republic in which he actively participated. For Custine, by contrast, the Russians he met in the provinces were pale copies of the courtiers he met at court, none of them having any say over the governance of their country. Tocqueville found America decentered and decentralized, and therefore vital; Custine discovered that one man held all power in Russia, and that this man's main function was that of a jailer. This is why Custine was despairing over what he saw as the mute tranquility of the Russian people in the face of their suffering. But for Tocqueville, who perceived in each American an expression of democratic power, their imperturbability in facing difficulties was a sign of their sense of responsibility. Where Custine was driven to anguish by what he understood as the acquiescence to enslavement, Tocqueville rejoiced at the spectacle of freedom.

The comparisons made by both men were presented in terms that expressed anxiety: did either country suggest the coming shape of Europe? In his book about Russia, Custine answered this question affirmatively, giving Russia as much or even more influence over Europe's future than America would have (1: 147). In his celebrated ending of the first volume of Democracy, Tocqueville considered both countries to be the ones that represent the future:

All other nations seem to have nearly reached their natural limits, and they have only to maintain their power; but these [Russia and America] are still in the act of growth. All the others have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. (1: 434)

[6] Letter to Madame de Tocqueville, July 17, 1831. In Oeuvres Complètes (B), 7: 32–38; 38.

Although perhaps agreeing with the diagnosis, Custine rejected both "futures." Russia was for him a gigantic Siberia, a concentation camp, if one may borrow this term from the future. America offered no consolation.

Boring America, with its commercial anxieties . . . can she comfort us after the decomposition of Italy? Those who praise incessantly the material prosperity of the United States without indicting the weight of the sacrifices needed to obtain such advantages are people of great theories but very shortsighted.^[7]

America is for Custine an English society, but more mercantile and therefore boring. He feels threatened by the horrors of despotism and uninterested in the prosaic practicalities of democracy.

Tocqueville used different terms in his comparison, and to him there was a gigantic difference between America and Russia. He summarizes this difference in a simple and poignant way:

The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men.

And he goes on to develop this opposition:

The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its arms. The conquests of the American are therefore gained by the plowshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a single man. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the secret will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe. (1: 434)

In this juxtaposition, the terms of comparison are clear; America was a country of freedom (and therefore of peace and labor), whereas Russia was one of enslavement (and war). In America, men fought against nature; in Russia, against other men. And, although Custine did not care much for American freedom, his description of Russia would con-

[7] Letter to Marquis de Dreux-Brézé, May 14, 1831, quoted in Rena Rémond, Les Etats-Unis devant l'opinion française, 1815–1852, 725. The real opposition was, for him, between Italy and England: "It is necessary to study Italy to know humankind; but to know the future, one needs to study England." (Custine, Mémoires et Voyages, 2 vols. [Paris: Vézard, 1830], 2: 453.) Although this comparison served to "round off" the book that placed side-by-side descriptions of a journey to Italy and of a much later trip to England, the opposition is nevertheless consistent in his work.

firm the Russian side of that comparison. The political systems of both countries, different as they were, were based on equality; but whereas in Russia all were slaves of one master, in America nobody had any master at all. (Custine would say that Americans were enslaved by the almighty dollar.) This difference made Tocqueville approve of things that drove Custine to desperation.

The difference between the countries was in part responsible for the difference between La Russie en 1839 and Democracy in America . But not entirely—the authors were different as well. Although the two men shared many emotions, owing to their aristocratic heritage, they used them differently in their work. Custine did not strive to write an orderly treatise; quite the opposite: he looked for telling detail, description, image. He let his emotions flow freely and infused every page of his book with them. Not so Tocqueville. Because of his character and intellectual tastes, but also because America offered a more acceptable face to him, he was able to separate somewhat his emotions from his political thinking. He accepts America, although not for himself. Custine rejects Russia for everybody.

That difference can be seen through the attitude of both men to space. The vocabulary and images they started with were the same: if we compare Custine's description of Siberia with Tocqueville's poetic islands interrupting the monotony of the American wilderness, we can see that both places are, at first, tombs. But whereas in America the tomb changes into a cradle, in Russia there is no transformation, and the tomb is an eternal prison. In the many quotations reproduced here, Custine spoke of Siberia as a gigantic graveyard, where death is, as it were, useless: the graveyard continues to hold people prisoners. In America, the dying out of the Indian race readies the continent for the birth of a new civilization. Even the Frenchman's death—the death of an unsuccessful colonizer—has the effect of a catharsis, as if this human sacrifice compensated for the "melting away" of the Indians. The American tomb is not leaden or silent like the Siberian, it is active, full of trees that are half-dead but also half-alive. The leaden veil of Siberia is juxtaposed to the poetic veil of the American forest, and "cet enfer russe" is the opposite of the little paradise in the middle of the wilderness. In Russia, death does not lead to resurrection. In America, death reintroduces the Frenchman into nature's life cycle, a rebirth is possible, new generations are coming; therefore death is understandable (in religious terms), and life may go on.

Custine, Tocqueville, and René

Before his death in American exile, René wandered the world, gazing at volcanoes, sunsets, and ruins. He was an embodiment of what Bakhtin would call outsideness—.he was uprooted, floating in indefinite social space. His gze, although fixed on the outside world, was in reality turned inward. He was assessing damage, taking stock of the situation. The following generations of Renés turned more to the outside. As Custine and Tocqueville traveled, they looked at themselves but also at the surrounding world. The defeat of their class, the end of their world, was already understood and absorbed. They now tried to figure out the future.

But first, Custine attempted to reaffirm the past, and this is why he went to Russia. There, it seemed, tradition was still intact, and revolution kept in abeyance. Upon closer examination, however, it turned out that the past he found there was not his. As if in a distorted mirror, all social relations and realities were caricatures of what he had dreamed of. The tsar was a tyrant who enslaved everybody; the enslaved nobility was oppressing the rest of society; violent revolt against this state of affairs was just a matter of time. Custine returned to France reconciled with the limitations of his own society. The past he saw in Russia predicted a future he definitely did not want to become part of.

Tocqueville was pushed abroad by the same worries, but in going to America he looked not at the past but at the future. Younger than Custine, he acknowledged that the seeds of the defeat of their class were contained in their past. He therefore tried to keep his thinking separate from his feelings. He did not like America, but he found there a future at the sight of which he did not recoil in horror. America was a privileged place, given to mankind to fulfill its destiny. Since this future did not include him or his class, he, too, returned to France. But he returned reconciled and reassured that the future is not one of unmitigated violence and tyranny.

We can now return to the Bakhtin sentence quoted in the preface at the beginning of this book. "Without one's own questions one cannot creatively understand anything other or foreign (but, of course, the questions must be serious and sincere)." Both Custine and Tocqueville went abroad with their own questions—questions that were certainly as serious and sincere as can be. They tried to understand the future of their world and to find a place in it for themselves. The terms in which

their questions were asked stemmed from the turbulence and violent social change that afflicted their country and shook their class. Since they associated freedom with aristocracy, they feared that the ascendance of equality would render individual freedom impossible. Both men asked how to preserve freedom; both considered it their sacred duty to apply their thinking to the task of finding an answer to this question. "A man is under the same obligation," wrote Tocqueville, "to offer up his mind in the service of society as he is, in time of war, his body."^[8] The two Frenchmen went abroad in the service of their society.

What we are looking at, while observing Custine and Tocqueville, is a transformation of noblemen into intellectuals. The aristocracy of birth had to be replaced by an aristocracy of the spirit. From now on, their identity would not be defined by their origins but by their social responsibilities. Only by fulfilling these responsibilities would they maintain their membership in the group that is defined by merit. They therefore go on to reformulate the concept of individual freedom. The political system of a country was not given once and for all: there was a mutual responsibility of the governing and the governed, and man was a citizen—his freedom depended on his efforts. Limited but protected by his historical circumstances, he should strive to preserve and enlarge his freedom within the framework of family, private property, and his native political system. The scope of the duties and the rights of all individuals is enlarged.

Both Custine and Tocqueville feared violent change, and both found a remedy in social involvement and a sense of responsibility on the part of all citizens. Custine found the nightmare of violence realized in Russia; Tocqueville discovered in America the many new possible shapes of social engagement, with violence deflected toward "nature" (Indians and the forest). This is why Tocqueville saw in America so many lakes reflecting, crystal-like, the sky, trees, and his own face. The crystal reframed many forms in many configurations, each of them new and spontaneous. And this is why the waters on which Custine approached Saint Petersburg seemed to him a dull, muddy mirror. They reflected nothing.

There is a tendency in treating political writings to stick to their declarative side. This approach assumes that what is important is spelled out. But the political ideas I summarize here were conveyed to us in many complex ways. Custine and Tocqueville were immersed in a culture that

[8] Ouevres Complètes, vol. 13, pt. 1, 373, letter no. 117. Quoted in Jardin, 94.

made them express some things but imply others. Certain strong influences were at work on both of them, notably aristocratic origin, Catholicism, and the whole French Romantic sensibility symbolized by Chateaubriand. In my study I looked for the undeclared, the suggested, the implied. The images that both authors used showed their ambivalence, although none was declared, and their nostalgia, which they dismissed because it seemed to lead nowhere. To understand these images, to understand the choices of sources, I looked at the traditions both men came from and continued. Their works, as is obvious, were formed in a cultural context that they reacted to, used, and prolonged. To understand them, we needed to visit the library at which they were the center.

Although their methods and styles are dissimilar, their writings are parallel both in their main topics and in their conclusions. The threat they reacted to was the threat of extinction. Interpreting the French Revolution, they saw the threat as being directed against not only themselves but also the world as they knew it. The apocalyptic terms in which they saw violence came not only from experience but also from the Catholic tradition, which supplied them with the most fundamental terms of their world-view. These terms seemed so obvious as to function unacknowledged, and therefore unquestioned.

In response to the threat of extinction, these aristocratic writers looked for the ways to reassert themselves and the values they believed in. They "sat down" to avoid being swept away, but, as soon as the tempest rolled over, they insisted on the supremacy of the seated man. Equality notwithstanding, la classe pensante was necessary to continue civilization. But the way in which la classe pensante was integrated was paradoxical. Custine, Tocqueville, and René were to remain outsiders. By their common effort they made that position a point of advantage. They convinced themselves and us that only a view from outside can penetrate our world and predict the future. And that, if we let them do this, it might turn out that the future is not going to be bad.

Custine, Tocqueville, and René went abroad to find a place for themselves. They were successful. We can observe in them the creation of modern intellectuals, and the process through which they carved out for themselves a place in their own society. We are painfully interested in that process because we are their descendants, and because the river that is dragging us to our ruin seems swifter than ever. We inherited their responsibilities, uncertainties, and ridiculous poses. But most of all, we inherited their outsideness. And we are still seated at the foot of our volcanoes, and don't know where to go.