7 - The Writer Engagé: Tocqueville and Political Rhetoric

Summary

[Translated By Arthur Goldhammer] ''The overwhelming fact of our time - the advent of democracy - changes the conditions of the revelation of ideas.'' So said Victor de Laprade, a poet, critic, and admirer of Lamartine whose name has passed into oblivion. Nevertheless, his 1843 formulation precisely captures the question that Tocqueville faced in Democracy in America, and which he answered in a style different from that of both the great ''romantic magi'' and ''the school of disenchantment,'' to use Paul Bénichou's categories. His style differed as well from that of his colleagues in liberalism: Guizot, Cousin, and, from an earlier time, the liberals of Coppet, even though he aspired as they did to a role as enlightened guide of public opinion. With the July Revolution - after which the waggish Jules Janin described a scene in which Lamartine had ''retired from the world of poetics'' to become a deputy; Carrel, ''the finest pupil of Tacitus,'' had moved into journalism after renouncing history; and Guizot and Villemain wielded power as ministers - the liberal illusion of a harmonious union of ''literature'' (or ''science'') with political institutions and a revolutionized society faced a crisis brought on by the test of power. Democracy in America echoed these doubts: indeed, the treatise pondered the implosion in France of the liberal philosophy that called itself, in the words of Victor Cousin, a philosophy of ''the true, the beautiful, and the good'' and that had been elaborated with unwavering concern for the benefits it might yield for society.