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Tocqueville's Unfinished Manuscript on Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2012
Abstract
In the summer of 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville visited Ireland. Within the travelogue that he kept while on his journey, there exists an incomplete manuscript in which Tocqueville uses the literary device of the tableau to attempt a general explanation of Ireland's political and religious problems. The present essay explains why this manuscript, whose uniqueness has not previously been recognized fully, must be separated from the rest of the Irish journals, studied in relation to other Tocquevillian tableaux, and scrutinized carefully for its teaching on religion and politics. The essay then attempts an interpretation of the manuscript, which Tocqueville titled A Catholic Priest and a Protestant Minister in Ireland, especially as it bears on the question of Christianity and politics in Democracy in America. It concludes by considering whether Tocqueville once considered revising A Catholic Priest for possible inclusion in Democracy in America and why Tocqueville eventually abandoned the manuscript.
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References
1 Larkin, Emmet, Alexis de Tocqueville's Journey in Ireland, July–August 1835 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Throughout the present essay, references to Larkin's volume will be given in parentheses in the text and will refer to page numbers.
2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Œuvres complètes, vol. 5.2, Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie, ed. Mayer, J.-P. and Jardin, A. (Paris: Gallimard, 1958)Google Scholar; Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. Mayer, J.-P. and trans. Lawrence, G. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958)Google Scholar. Throughout the present essay, quotations of the French from the Irish journals will be taken from the Œuvres complètes edition of Mayer and Jardin.
3 Mayer, Journeys, 18–19; see also Mayer, J.-P., “Tocqueville's Travel Diaries,” Encounter 10, no. 3 (1958): 54–60Google Scholar. This pattern of reading Tocqueville on England but not Ireland began at least as early as Zemach, Ada, “Alexis de Tocqueville on England,” Review of Politics 13, no. 3 (1951): 329–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Mayer, Journeys, 11.
5 Drescher, Seymour, “Tocqueville's Two Démocraties,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 2 (1964): 201–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Drescher, Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964)Google Scholar.
6 Jardin, André, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Davis, Lydia with Robert Hemenway (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), 238Google Scholar.
7 Drescher, Tocqueville and England, 73.
8 Schleifer, James T. offers a helpful summary of the debate in “How Many Democracies?,” in Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville's “Democracy in America,” 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000), 354–68Google Scholar. On the question of differences in Tocqueville's thought on religion in the two volumes, very helpful are Zuckert, Catherine, “Not by Preaching: Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in American Democracy,” Review of Politics 43, no. 2 (1981): 259–280CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “The Role of Religion in Preserving American Liberty—Tocqueville's Analysis 150 Years Later,” in Tocqueville's Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays, ed. Lawler, Peter Augustine and Alulis, Joseph (New York: Garland, 1993), 224–33Google Scholar.
9 Drescher, Seymour, “Tocqueville's Comparative Perspectives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Welch, Cheryl B. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27–29, 31Google Scholar.
10 Thus Mayer, Journeys, 18–19, and “Tocqueville's Travel Diaries,” 60; Drescher, Tocqueville and England, 108; Goldstein, Doris S., Trial of Faith: Religion and Politics in Tocqueville's Thought (New York: Elsevier, 1975), 103Google Scholar.
11 The journal entry does not record Tocqueville's visit to the schools in Newport-Pratt. A Catholic Priest, however, does include a passage in which the priest takes Tocqueville to visit the school in the village of X. In a marginal note to that passage, Tocqueville says, “Un asile. Fait venir des livres,” which Larkin translates “A sanctuary. Send some money” (119). Since Tocqueville seems to have been genuinely moved by the depth of the poverty in Newport-Pratt, it seems entirely possible that the marginal note in A Catholic Priest is actually a reminder to himself to send some money (or books) to the school at Newport-Pratt (rather than to an imaginary school in the contrived village of X).
12 For example, the portrait of the Protestant minister was to be based at least in part on a journal entry from August 2 recording a visit by Tocqueville to a Protestant church in Galway (cf. 128 with 100; even the English word “pews” is preserved in both accounts); also, the beginning of A Catholic Priest is clearly based in part on a letter of July 26 from Tocqueville to his cousin, the Countess Grancey (cf. 111–12 with 7–8, 11).
13 See the chronological information for the writing of Democracy in America offered by Schleifer in The Making, 17–21; also 515 note a.
14 Democracy in America 1.2.10, trans. Harvey, C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 307Google Scholar. All further quotations of Democracy in America used in the present essay will be taken from this translation. References will be given in parentheses in the text itself and will be to volume, part, and chapter, followed by the page number in the Mansfield and Winthrop translation.
15 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Journey to America, ed. Mayer, J.-P. and trans. Lawrence, George (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 169Google Scholar.
16 Ibid., 97–98.
17 Tocqueville, Alexis de, A Fortnight in the Wilderness, trans. Schleifer, James T., in Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of “De la démocratie en Amérique,” ed. Nolla, Eduardo (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), 4:1315CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Ibid., 4:1318–19.
19 Ibid., 4:1350.
20 Ibid. Tocqueville makes the mother smile when asked if she is French but not when asked if she is English.
21 Ibid., 4:1351.
22 The priest in A Catholic Priest makes a similar comment about Gen. 3:19 a few pages later in the narrative (116); this reduplicated reference is presumably a sign of the unrevised nature of the manuscript.
23 Perhaps Tocqueville intends nothing by it, but eight is the number common to both age ranges. If he had proceeded to publish A Catholic Priest by, say, early 1836, such an eight-year-old girl would have been born in 1828—the year Daniel O'Connell managed to win election to the Westminster parliament from Clare. From that position, O'Connell was able to win passage of Catholic Emancipation the next year. Beaumont lionized O'Connell in his Ireland, and uses O'Connell's election and the passage of the Emancipation Act as the events separating Ireland's past history from her present era; see Beaumont, Gustave de, Ireland: Social, Political, and Religious, ed. and trans. Taylor, W. C. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 116–17, 223–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 T. Schleifer, James, “Tocqueville's Democracy in America Reconsidered,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, 122–25Google Scholar.
25 Translated by Schleifer in Historical-Critical Edition, 3:810–12 note r. This letter to Stoffels is dated almost exactly one year before Tocqueville drafted A Catholic Priest and almost at the same time as he was writing the final chapter of the first Democracy.
26 Two sketches treating religion but bearing only a few of the features of tableaux may be found in Historical-Critical Edition; see “Sects in America” at 4:1360–67 and the fragment at 3:859–60 note m.
27 For a fuller treatment of the topic of this paragraph, see my “Alexis de Tocqueville on ‘Civil Religion’ and the Catholic Faith,” in Civil Religion in Political Thought: Its Perennial Questions and Enduring Relevance in North America, ed. Weed, Ronald and Heyking, John von (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 170–78Google Scholar.
28 This is the only explicit reference to Ireland I have been able to unearth in any of the works Tocqueville himself published. The first volume of Democracy was published in 1835, so the phrase “around fifty years ago” would mean “about 1785.” In 1784, responsibility for the Catholics in the fledgling United States was transferred from the apostolic vicar of the London district to the American Irishman John Carroll, who in 1790 became the first bishop of the new nation.
29 In 1863, Beaumont published a new preface for his Ireland, which was appearing in its 7th edition. The new preface comments especially on the disaster of the Great Famine. The population figures he uses are 8 million Irish at the beginning of the crisis, of whom 1 million died and 2 million emigrated; see “Preface, 1863: A Report on the Present State of Ireland (1862–1863),” trans. Tom Garvin, in Ireland, 386. A recent treatment of the demographic estimates, and indeed the whole history of the Famine, is offered by Nally, David P., Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great Irish Famine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), esp. 2, 159, 204Google Scholar.
30 McCaffrey, Lawrence J., The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 71–72Google Scholar.
31 Journey to America, 33.
32 Another marginal note referring to Séparation de l'Eglise et de l'Etat appears earlier in the conversation between Tocqueville and the priest (118). Larkin reports a third marginal reference to church and state at the end of the passage in which Tocqueville and the priest visit the new but crude chapel (123).
33 For a fuller treatment of the topic of this paragraph, see my “Alexis de Tocqueville on ‘Civil Religion’ and the Catholic Faith,” 182–194.
34 André Jardin, Tocqueville, 238.
35 Eduardo Nolla, introduction to Historical-Critical Edition, xcviii; Jardin, Tocqueville, 469.
36 Pierson, George Wilson, Tocqueville in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 231n; originally published as Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (Oxford University Press, 1938)Google Scholar.
37 Jardin, Tocqueville, 239.
38 Ibid., 238.
39 Historical-Critical Edition, 3:755 note c, trans. Schleifer; the sic is Nolla's.
40 It is also relevant that Nolla's fragment on conversations with a priest and a minister belongs to the same file or bundle of Tocqueville's notes that contains “Sects in America,” which bears a note by Tocqueville to himself clearly indicating that he was considering revising it for inclusion in the chapters of the second Democracy on religion; see Historical-Critical Edition, 4:1360.
41 It is curious that both Larkin (128) and Mayer and Jardin in the Œuvres complètes (150) report that the date for St. Bartholomew's Day that Tocqueville gives in the manuscript is August 29, whereas the date generally established for that event is August 24.