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TO M. FRESLON. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, vol. 2 [1861]

Edition used:

Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated from the French by the translator of Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph. With large Additions. In Two Volumes (London: Macamillan, 1861). 2 vols.

Part of: Memoir, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville, 2 vols.

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TO M. FRESLON.

St. Cyr, September 23, 1853.

I regret, my dear friend, that you did not receive my last letter. . . .

My work, in which you interest yourself, goes on, but very slowly. . . . When one examines, as I am doing at Tours, the archives of an ancient provincial government, one finds a thousand reasons for hating the Ancien Régime, but few for loving the Revolution; for one sees that the Ancien Régime was rapidly sinking under the weight of years and a gradual change of ideas and of manners, so that with a little patience and good conduct it might have been reformed without destroying indiscriminately all that was good in it with all that was bad. It is curious to see how different was the government of 1780 from that of 1750. The laws are the same, the rules seem to be the same, the same principles are professed, on the surface everything is the same; but at the bottom, the methods, the habits, and the spirit—all are changed. One does not recognise the government or the governed. The Revolution broke out not when evils were at their worst, but when reform was beginning. Half-way down the staircase we threw ourselves out of the window, in order to get sooner to the bottom. Such, in fact, is the common course of events. It is not when a system is at its worst that it is broken up, but when it begins to improve; when it allows men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate with one another, and to measure the extent of their rights and of their grievances by comparing their present with their past state. The weight, though lessened, has become intolerable.

About the fifteenth of October, I propose to be in my winter quarters. Then I hope to be seriously at work. I shall put aside my books, I shall cease to rummage old papers, I shall begin at length to write and to work. Up to the present time I have only made preparations. In this long novitiate I lose patience and nerve. I shall throw upon paper, well or ill, the first chapter; and the result will show me whether what I have in my head is a great work, or merely the conception of one. I must succeed in this first attempt, that I may have courage to go on. There is nothing to be gained by looking at what is passing, it disturbs even my solitary labours.

You tell me to keep up my courage; it is the advice of a brave man, but how can I follow it?