Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 30, 2005|Volume 34, Number 5

Alexis de Tocqueville

Conference, exhibit celebrate
bicentennial of Tocqueville's birth

An international symposium and exhibit at Yale will mark the bicentennial of the birth of Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835 book "Democracy in America" is widely regarded as the greatest work on the United States ever written by a foreign observer.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library will hold a conference devoted to the French author Friday and Saturday, Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. The Beinecke's exhibition "Tocqueville and Beaumont and the Challenge of Democracy" will remain on display at the library through October 24.

International conference

Scholars from the United States, Canada and France will discuss various aspects of Tocqueville's life and work at conference sessions to be held 9 a.m.-3:30 p.m. on Friday and 9:15 a.m.-12:45 p.m. on Saturday.

Robert Dahl, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, will give the conference keynote address, "Political Equality in America: Tocqueville and Today," at 4 p.m. on Friday.

For a detailed program, visit the Beinecke Library website at www.library.yale.edu/
beinecke and click on "Lectures and Conferences" in the right column.

The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is required for planning purposes.

Beinecke exhibition

The exhibition "Tocqueville and Beaumont and the Challenge of Democracy" explores why a young Frenchman of the early 19th century wrote one of the most penetrating analyses of Jacksonian America and the phenomenon of modern democracy.

The items on display range from Tocqueville's original working draft of "Democracy in America" to the political and literary sources he studied as a young man -- such as Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws" (1748) and Rousseau's "Social Contract" (1792) -- as well as contemporary works about America that served as supplementary sources to his own observations, such as Joseph Story's commentary on the United States Constitution (1833).

Pivotal to the story of Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont are two handwritten letters in the exhibition, dated January 27, 1831, from the French Ministry of Justice, giving the men leave to travel to the United States, with the assignment to conduct research into American prisons. Having landed at Newport, Rhode Island, they visited New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Kentucky, before sailing down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where Tocqueville noted the same diversity seen today: "Faces of all shades of colour. Language French, English, Spanish, Creole. General appearance French; and yet signs, commercial posters usually in English... ." Along the way, both men made notes about prisons; among those selected for the exhibition are comments on the prison in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Upon their return to France, it was Beaumont who completed most of the prison report while Tocqueville pondered the greater meaning of democracy in its New World setting.

"I admit that I saw in America more than America," Tocqueville wrote. "It was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom."

Professor Frank Turner, who arranged the exhibition, points out that Tocqueville's experience in America was informed not only by his extensive reading but also by a tradition of French-American relations going back to the American Revolution, and particularly by the history of the democratic experiment in France. "The excesses of the French Revolution had confirmed in modern times the dangers and tumult of democracy," writes Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History, director of the Beinecke Library and associate University librarian.

"America," he continues, "provided Tocqueville with the opportunity to examine democratic structures outside the context of either the ancient republics or the ongoing trauma of French political life."

Other highlights of the Tocqueville exhibition include Beaumont's sketchbook of the American journey; Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia," 1794; a long autograph letter from John Quincy Adams to Tocqueville, dated June 12, 1837, in which the former president corrects some of Tocqueville's statements about his presidency and offers comments on the French Revolution; a Daumier caricature of Tocqueville from 1849, when the author served briefly as French minister of foreign affairs; Beaumont's sketches of the house in Cannes where Tocqueville died in 1859; and Beaumont's manuscripts for his book on Ireland (1839) and for his novel "Marie, ou l'esclavage aux États-Unis" (1835), which addresses the problem of slavery in the United States.

The exhibition brochure "Tocqueville and Beaumont and the Experience of Early Nineteenth-Century Democracy," by Turner, is available free to visitors.

Yale-Tocqueville connections

It is no coincidence that this is the third Tocqueville exhibition to be held at the Beinecke Library in the last 30 years, as Yale scholars in the 20th century have played a major role in a revitalized appreciation of Tocqueville and his writings.

It began when a young history instructor named Paul Lambert White (1890-1922) visited the Tocqueville family château in Normandy after World War I. After White's untimely death, two other Yale scholars, John Allison (1884-1944) and George W. Pierson (1904-93), took up the Tocqueville connection. Pierson's book "Beaumont and Tocqueville in America" (1938), based on his Yale dissertation, marked the beginning of the modern study of Tocqueville. It was Pierson who arranged Yale's acquisition of the manuscript of "Democracy in America."

The Tocqueville/Beaumont collection now housed in the Beinecke Library is the largest publicly available assemblage of such material in the world.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St., is open for exhibition viewing Monday-Thursday, 8:30 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; and Saturday, 10 a.m-5 p.m.

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