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TO THE SAME. - 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 THE SAME.

Bonn, June 24, 1854.

I will not delay longer, my dear M. de Circourt, thanking you for the agreeable and useful acquaintances whom you have given to me in this country. We found, as you told me that we should, the Countess Oriolla very clever, very kind, and altogether charming. Your letters have also procured me the acquaintance of the principal Professors of the University.

We have hired a pleasant apartment by the riverside, just out of the town. We propose to remain here at least during all July.

The instant that I had established myself, I set to work. Up to this time, I have so neglected living Germany for dead Germany, that I know no more of the state of feeling on the banks of the Rhine than if I were on the banks of the Loire. But I plunged headlong into the chaos of ancient Germany: not that I had to learn the old Germanic Constitution, I knew it before. I am engaged in a more arduous task, that of learning what was the ancient social and administrative condition of Germany. I find difficulties which I see not how to conquer; among others, the immense discrepancies between the different portions of this great country. No one general expression can comprehend races so different and often contrasted. The most intelligent men get confused when they attempt to do so, and fail. The only practical course seems to me to be, to examine every informant only as to the country which he knows best. By this process, you get fewer general views, but more details; and from these details you may form tolerably just general opinions. Still, after having thus limited my inquiries, I find a difficulty, arising either from the subject or from the witnesses, in obtaining good information.

The Ancien Régime, at least in this part of Germany, has been so long and so completely destroyed, that few persons can explain precisely what it was. I hope that by perseverance I may learn this; but the neighbourhood of Bonn is a very small bit of Germany, and as far as I can judge, not the most interesting to me, for, except as to its political institutions, the Ancien Régime in the valley of the Rhine resembles strikingly the Ancien Régime in France. What interests me is to know what was the Ancien Régime in those portions of Germany which retained most of the civil and administrative character of the middle ages. I am told that such was the case in Westphalia, to which I am near, and in Hamburg, in Brandenburg, and, above all, in Mecklenburgh. If you can tell me of persons in those countries who can explain best to me the ancient state of things, you will do me a great service.

For the information which I want, what would be most useful would be letters of introduction to members of the old German aristocracy, to persons with the tastes and the traditions of the old institutions; to those who still live among the ruins of that antediluvian world—tell me on these subjects your opinions. I have always found them most useful.