Tocqueville's Mirage or Reality? Political Freedom from Old Regime to Revolution

Abstract

When Alexis de Tocqueville was formally invested with membership in the Academie FranWaise on April 21, 1842, he delivered a speech in which he recalled the subtle threats to freedom that he had envisioned in Democracy in America. The paradoxical and abstract mode that he adopted midway in his address may have created a tiny frisson of dread among a handful of the academicians although, after more than a dozen years of cynical Orleanist rule, most of the immortals probably shrugged off Tocqueville's allusion as a breach of good taste. Freedom, he said, depended on no one [and hence] could no longer count on anyone,''l because, with the destruction in 1789 of the old social hierarchy, the natural links between Frenchmen had been shattered and common action in defence of freedom was sacrificed. He went on to mention what would turn out to be a principal theme in his future work on the weaknesses and the end of the Old Regime. Abuses of freedom during the Revolution were committed primarily by two groups: those who naively thought that everyone could know what freedom was without either effort or restraint and those who expressed few doubts that they in fact did know and who therefore thought that they were justified in imposing their own concept of freedom on others. Tocqueville argued that the growth of unlimited confidence in the self's capacity to discover the absolute truth proved fatal to freedom. Fourteen years later, with the publication of L'Ancien Regime et la Relolution franfaise, Tocqueville confronted his countrymen with an apparently firm, but in fact deeply ambivalent, interpretation of the roles of the physiocrats and the men of letters, two of the more important groups that contributed to shaping the ideas and practices