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Subject Area: Political Theory

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.

I was, indeed, rather uneasy about you, my dear friend, when I received your last letter.

Next week, I at length shall give up poring over books and old papers, and begin to write. I assure you that I anticipate this moment with anxiety and even dread. Shall I find what I seek? Can the subject which I have chosen yield the book that I dream of? and am I capable of realizing this dream? What should I do if I found that I had mistaken vague ideas for definite thoughts; true, but commonplace notions, for new and original discoveries? If I failed in this attempt, it would upset all my plans for the future; I should not know what to be at, for I have never been able to live for living’s sake. I have always felt compelled to do something, or at least to fancy that I am doing something.

It is very kind of you to tell me that the public taste for books is returning; that they are again beginning to exercise some influence. I own that I like to hear you say this, though I do not believe it. My impression is, that as yet authors have no public in France. Our present state in this respect is unlike anything one finds in the history of the last 200 years; and of all the changes that time has effected in our habits and character, this is one of the most extraordinary. In the most literary nation in Europe, in that which has convulsed ideas and convulsed the world by means of abstract ideas taken from books, a generation has risen up, taking absolutely no interest in anything which is written, attaching no importance to anything but events, and only to a few facts—those which are evidently, directly, and immediately connected with physical well-being. Of all the aristocracies, that which has been most utterly destroyed by the Revolution is the aristocracy of literature.