Writings on Empire and Slavery

321 Pages·2000·11.48 MB·English

by  Alexis de de Tocqueville

writings on empire and slavery

Writings on
Empire and Slavery
alexis de tocqueville
Edited and Translated by
Jennifer Pitts
the johns hopkins university press
Baltimore & London
This book was brought to publication with the generous assistance of
the Karl and Edith Pribram Fund.
∫ 2001 Jennifer Pitts
All rights reserved. Published 2001
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
www.press.jhu.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data will be found at the end
of this book.
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
isbn 0-8018-6509-3
contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
some ideas about what prevents the french from
having good colonies (1833) 1
first letter on algeria (23 june 1837) 5
second letter on algeria (22 august 1837) 14
notes on the koran (march 1838) 27
notes on the voyage to algeria in 1841 36
essay on algeria (october 1841) 59
intervention in the debate over the appropriation
of special funding (1846) 117
first report on algeria (1847) 129
second report on algeria (1847) 174
the emancipation of slaves (1843) 199
Notes 227
Select Bibliography 263
Index 271

acknowledgments
I am indebted to Gallimard for kind permission to make use of their edi-
tion and editorial notes, and to the editors of the 1962 Gallimard edition of
Tocqueville’s writings on empire (Œuvres complètes, volume 3, part 1), André
Jardin and Jean-Jacques Chevallier, for their thoroughness and care in creating
that excellent volume, without which this translation would not exist. I am
grateful also to J.-P. Mayer, editor of the Gallimard Œuvres complètes, volume 5,
part 2, where Tocqueville’s notes on his 1841 trip to Algeria were first pub-
lished in full.
For many illuminating conversations about Tocqueville and the history of
political thought, and for thoughtful comments on various drafts of this proj-
ect, I am grateful to Stanley Ho√mann (who first suggested that I examine
Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria), Pratap Mehta, Richard Tuck, and Melvin
Richter, whose own learned and creative work on Tocqueville has been an
inspiration for me. I am grateful to Robert and Elborg Forster for their careful
reading of the introduction and the translation. Christopher Brooke, Mi-
chaele Ferguson, Gerard James Livesey, Patchen Markell, Anthony Pagden,
and Karen Shelby o√ered helpful responses to earlier versions of the introduc-
tion. For five years, Sankar Muthu has been my most treasured critic and
companion; he has read countless drafts with sensitivity and keen intelligence
and has been steadfast in his support throughout this project.
I am deeply indebted to Marie-Laure Neulat, who read the entire transla-
tion and, with her fine grasp of nuance in both French and English, suggested
many valuable improvements. I should also like to thank Arthur Goldham-
viii Acknowledgments
mer, Patrice Higgonet, Mary Pitts, and Toni Wagner for help with certain
terms and passages.
The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard Uni-
versity brought together a superb community of scholars in my time there and
provided me with an unparalleled research environment. I am grateful to the
Charlotte Newcombe foundation for a dissertation completion grant that
freed me from teaching duties for a year and enabled me to devote some time
to this translation. I am grateful as well to my editors at the Johns Hopkins
University Press, Douglas Armato, Henry Tom, and especially Peter Dreyer,
whose keen eye and command of French language and history have improved
every page of this book.
Any remaining errors in the translation or the introduction are mine
alone.
introduction
life
Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805 to a noble family badly scarred
by the French Revolution.∞ His mother’s grandfather, Lamoignon de Males-
herbes, had defended Louis XVI before the Convention and was guillotined in
1794. His parents, Hervé de Tocqueville and Louise de Rosanbo, imprisoned
in their early twenties, had escaped execution but emerged weak and anxious.
Alexis, their third son, was educated at home by the abbé Lesueur, a nonjuring
priest who had been Hervé’s tutor and had returned to the family after his
revolutionary exile. At sixteen, Tocqueville entered the collège de Metz, where
he excelled, despite his father’s fears that the abbé’s instruction had been
excessively lax. After studying law in Paris, Tocqueville was appointed to a
prestigious post as a magistrate in Versailles, apparently as a favor to his father.
His colleague there, Gustave Auguste de Beaumont de La Bonninière (1802–
66), a former schoolmate who was also of an aristocratic family, would be-
come his close friend and traveling companion. Their political careers, like so
many, were disrupted by the July Revolution of 1830, when the right-wing
Bourbon monarchy of Charles X was overthrown and replaced by the consti-
tutional ‘‘bourgeois’’ monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Tocqueville reluctantly
swore allegiance to the new regime, although his father, a legitimist, or sup-
porter of the deposed Bourbons, refused to take the oath.≤ Tocqueville himself
would have to fight imputations that he was a legitimist for much of his
political career.
Tocqueville and Beaumont resolved to leave the country for a year to