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EXTRACT FROM MR. SENIOR’S JOURNAL. - 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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EXTRACT FROM MR. SENIOR’S JOURNAL.

St. Cyr, Saturday, April 8, 1854.

We ended our walk with Plessis les Tours, Louis XI.’s castle, which stands on a flat, somewhat marshy tongue of land, stretching between the Loire and the Cher. All that remains is a small portion of one of the inner courts, probably a guard-room, and a cellar, pointed out to us as the prison in which Louis XI. kept Cardinal de la Balue for several years. The cellar itself is not bad for a prison of those days; but he is said to have passed his first year or two in a grated vault under the staircase, in which he could neither stand up nor lie at full length.

“It is remarkable,” said Tocqueville, “that the glorious reigns in French history, such as those of Louis XI., Louis XIV. and Napoleon, ended in the utmost misery and exhaustion; while the periods to which we are accustomed to look as those of disturbance and insecurity were those of comparative prosperity and progress. It seems as if tyranny were worse than civil war.”

“And yet,” I said, “the amount of revenue which the despots managed to squeeze out of France was never large. The taxation under Napoleon was much less than that under Louis Philippe.”

“Yes,” said Tocqueville; “but it was the want of power to tax avowedly that led them into indirect modes of raising money, which were far more mischievous; just as our servants put us to much more expense by their jobs than they would do if they simply robbed us to twice the amount of their indirect gains.

“Louis XIV. destroyed all the municipal franchises of France, and paved the way for this centralized tyranny, not from any dislike of municipal elections, but merely in order to be able himself to sell the places which the citizens had been accustomed to give.”

The conversation turned on our new system of throwing open the service of India and of the public offices to public competition.

“We have followed,” said Tocqueville, “that system, to a great extent, for many years. Our object was twofold. One was to depress the aristocracy of wealth, birth, and connexions. In that we have succeeded. The école polytechnique and the other schools, in which the vacancies are given to those who pass the best examinations, are filled by youths belonging to the middle and lower classes, who, undistracted by society or amusement, or by any literary or scientific pursuits except those immediately bearing on their examinations, beat their better-born competitors, who will not degrade themselves into the mere slaves of success in the concours.

“Our other object was to obtain the best public servants. In that we have failed. We have brought knowledge and ability to an average, diminished the number of incompetent employés, and reduced almost to nothing the number of distinguished ones. Continued application to a small number of subjects, and those always the same, not selected by the student, but imposed on him by the inflexible rule of the establishment, without reference to his tastes or to his powers, is as bad for the mind as the constant exercise of one set of muscles would be for the body.

“We have a name for those who have been thus educated. They are called ‘Polytechnisés.’ If you follow our example, you will increase your second-rates, and extinguish your first-rates; and what is, perhaps, a more important result, whether you consider it a good or an evil, you will make a large stride in the direction in which you have lately made so many, the removing the government and the administration of England from the hands of the higher classes into those of the middle and lower ones.”