Eric will introduce our speakers and moderators to the discussion. Washington history seminar is a collaborative effort of two organizations, the national association, and the Wilson Centers heritage and Public Policy program. We have served as a Nonpartisan Forum to discuss New Historical findings, insights and publications central to the missions of our organization. Behind the scenes, two individuals helped produce this event, rachel weekly for the National History center and peter , from the Wilson Center. Our thanks to both of them. We would like to acknowledge our supporters and welcome your support. Details on how to support the seminar are in the chat right now, or simply go to our institutional websites. We welcome your support. Finally, please join us next week, may 16 for a conversation about kelly hernandezs new book , mad mexicans, race, empire, and resolution of the borderland. Thats at 4 00 p. M. Eastern daylight time. A quick couple of technical notes. Todays session will be recorded and soon appear on our respective organization websites. For the q a part of this seminar, you have two ways to participate. Our preferred way for you, the audience, to chime in is to use the right hand function in the zoom functionality. Once you press the button, you will be entered into a queue and with the moderator calls you, you will see a prompt to ask you to mute your screen. Press yes, or you will not be able to talk. You can start getting into the queue even before the discussion begins. You can do so as soon as right now. You can also use the q a function in the zoom menu please do not use the chat function. With that, i will turn it over to eric. The zoom room is all yours. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, everyone. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker today, the James MadisonProfessor Emeritus at the university of virginia. He has been a recipient of fellowships and Research Grants from the ford foundation, the Japan Foundation center for global partnership, the guggenheim memorial foundation, the National Endowment for humanities and the National Science foundation, amongst others. He is the author of numerous books, the changing face of inequality, 1980 two, making america corporate, 1990, and philanthropy in america, a history published by Princeton University press in 2012. Today he will speak on his new book, the man who understood democracy, the life of alexis to toe detofil, published by Princeton University. Thank you so much, and thank you to agreeing to be a commentator. Thank you, christian, for your kind introduction. I am delighted to be here. I know we are going to get into the nittygritty of what is significant in the book. I would like to make a few professional remarks about this biography it is more personal than academic. I have had a long friendship with dash. I met him as a young man. I was fortunate when i was still a graduate student in french history, board shifting to u. S. History, to meet scholars of the french revolution we all know his work. He is the first one in 1968 that i remember, in the 1968, the colonial years here in paris, introduced me to the writings on the french revolution. That was my First Encounter with the work. The work and how he spent his life on the french revolution is really kind of a second masterpiece. By accidents, really, when i joined the university of virginia faculty as an assistant professor in 1978, i had a chance to help launch a review and to create a society with a sociologist by the name of cap low, who wanted to create a society for the comparative study of social change. I thought it was a very worthy enterprise and i also felt that this Small Society needed not only to study social change, but to get involved in dash. I brought it up to some others, and this small group grew and is now in its 44th year of publication, shared with one of the editors, actually. That has been a real success worry in a way. Then by accidents, some 20 years ago, i met an extraordinary translator, and has translated a lot of important work. It was now finished and comprised two volumes of matters , speeches, parliamentary speeches and documents. But he asked me to a prove his translations of democracy in america. I have to tell you, reading a book carefully, taking notes, thinking about the argument, reading the book and thinking about how to render it in a different language is a whole different ballgame. So all of a sudden, i found myself needing to think quite differently. Entering into almost daily conversation with the translator , think about ways in which to modify slightly, include slightly his translations. So at some point, all of this added up, and it became kind of obvious to me that if i were ever to write anyones biography, it would be his. I ended up knowing more about him than anybody else, and i spent 20 years of my life is a historian, writing about 19th and 20th century intellectual, social, and political history. I thought, there was my chance to write a book about somebody who played a significant role in my countries adoption with the United States and played a significant role in the country of my youth, friends france. As i had a chance to reconnect with people and put together in a formal way many of my ideas about the two countries and deepen them. Also, writing a biography is something i had never done before. It is a special genre of history and is difficult to do, so i enjoyed the challenge. I had very strong motivations and was especially fortunate, also, to make this decision at a time when finally, all of the work was coming out and being published. Most of the full transcriptions were already published. He had a very short life, born in 1905, died in 1953, and his life was cut short by tuberculosis, but he had a very full life as a writer. Democracy of america, his collections on the 1848 revolution, and his book on the french revolution was finished, but it was so important to be a politician then to be a writer. He worked very hard at being a politician. History fears that he was not successful, but he put a lot of work into it. There were many reports and major issues at the time, the abolition of slavery in the french colonies, he was a lifelong abolitionist. The conquest of algeria she was a colonialist. He spent a lot of time trying to reconcile church and state and french political life. He devoted much time writing speeches and his speeches are beautiful. He was not not a great public speech speaker, so his speeches are better written than listened to. Altogether, including the correspondence, his works comprise 32 volumes. I must be one of the few people in the world who have read them all. But my friend who was directing the publication of his complete works, they began publishing them in 1951. 73 years. They were in a hurry, obviously. But she was generous enough to share with me everything that was still in press. So i had the benefit of everything that i could read. I felt that was extremely good. I will say, i felt that we needed a new biography, rightly so. The classic biography is very good and covers his life very well. Does not attempt to make any significant connections between his work and political work, which i thought was a great gap in it. [inaudible] it does not do a deep analysis of democratic theory, but is great, so i think it needed to be redone. In the biography on the shelf, there are biographies, is a very good historian, published five years ago and it has very good moments and it. But it seems a contribution to democratic theory. [inaudible] so i felt that needed to be corrected. There is a biography that is incomplete, so i think we can deduce those are the three you find on the shelves. I felt we needed a new one. I thought i would give it a try. One of the best moments i had working on the book was in reading the letters. He was a wonderful letter writer and must have written letters almost every day of his life. He buried himself in letters. You take a sentence from one, you put it into another, and thats ok. But as i said, i had a friendship with him in writing these letters. I was even worried about how we would respond to this, that and the other. But now, ok, here is the work done and for you to talk about it. Thank you for agreeing to do so. Thank you very much. We have two commentators this afternoon, the first of whom is an associate professor of french and history, and an affiliate of african and africanamerican studies, women and gender studies, and the war in Society Programs at george mason university, where she also serves as a director for faculty diversity. She has held multiple fellowships at the stanford humanities center, university of cambridge, the university of st. Andrews center for french history and culture, west Point Military academy, and society in cincinnati. She is the author of the military enlightenment, war and culture in the fresh empire, french empire, published in 2017 and was the final for the oscar tanager book prize in 18thcentury studies. Christie, welcome. The screen is yours. Thank you so much for that kind introduction. It is such a pleasure to be here to discuss his biography. Here it is. I will be citing from it in a couple of minutes. I want to begin by saying, i absolutely devoured this book. Congratulations, olivier, on this outstanding, authoritative biography, and i want to say, i cant wait to teach it alongside his writings. I am sure many of our colleagues will soon be doing the same, so thank you, and congratulations for this work. In addition to being researched and detailed, it is beautifully written and structured. Its a real page turner, i think , and read to me in many ways as the kind of nonfictional tale of the comingofage of one of historys greatest political theorists of democracy. I found it particularly rewarding as a historian and educator to conceive of the making of the man, his education, his quandaries, his relationships of political and spiritual engagement, his greatest and persisting aspirations, his times fascinating he is fascinating and at times devastating blind spots, and this is one of the strong and important contributions that this biography is making, bringing us these sides together. For those of us who teach this to undergraduate and graduate students of history, or for people who are interested in the work of the historian in our methods and on trying your hand at them, i think this glimpse into the life and work, and i want to make a distinction between the hard labor that goes into the making of history, rather than work as the body of the final product. Looking at this side of the labor of token of him as a politician, and it is informative as a historians practice. It misses the sense of intimidating genius when they look at the finished product of these incredible works. That he produced. With this in mind, i wanted to say a few words about the complex vision that emerges, just a couple of questions for all of us to think about. First, for those of us who know his work and particular, democracy in america, i found it so interesting that you have a sense of building a type of friendship with him by engaging with the broader corpus of his work, including his correspondence. I think sometimes one can feel, even in democracy in america, a sense of the intimate, unintimate tone and narrative voice that is recognizable and can give the reader a sense of proximity to him, a sense of knowing or understanding the author in some way. But generally speaking, he often appears in curriculum and on people reading lists as a giant of political philosophy, a foundational historian, interpreter of american democracy and the origins of the french revolution in this way, he can feel very distant and indeed disembodied from this perspective. He can therefore fall into the category of what is called the unmarked scholar. I just want to Say Something about this notion of the unmarked scholar in the chapter d colonizing education, a pedagogic intervention, in the edited volume to colonizing the university, which came out in 2018, what dennis explains is i am quoting her here, the unmarked scholar requires no introduction. You do not need to explain his appearance in the text and he requires no further markers of allocation. What the unmarked scholar says is more important than who he is. He speaks from a place which is just there, the place which is no place. Reinterpreting the disembodied authoritarian voice of the unmarked scholar through reconstructing an embodiment in geopolitical context is a key to the colonizing practice. I want to note here that oliviers biography opened up this possibility in important ways, and in reading the book, one realizes how little one actually knows about him and his life, and how valuable and embodied an ethnographic approach to thinking about this writer can actually be. I wanted to make that point. But we cannot fall prey to his observations that historians often provide too many facts and too little insight. He brings his long experience as a scholar into this biography, and offers a key and insightful view to this man as one of conviction and contradiction. We see him at the opening of the psion of an older aristocratic family in france, emerging from the ashes of the french revolution with esteemed members of his elder generation, meeting their end under the blade of the guillotine. We see him as a naive traveler to america, who saw things before he knew anything, or seems to know things before he even had the historical background to interpret them. I shook my head, seeing that he had never read certain books, and he showed us the process of his education over time, these people are not born with a type of genius that allows them to know all things or to touch a book to their head and understand, we see him as working hard to obtain this knowledge, to take hundreds of hundreds of pages of notes and in struggle to organize. He writes chapters and throws them away. This is such a valuable vision as we approach him and look again at these key works. We see him as an eyewitness to americas greatest times, to the indian removal act, the trail of tears, to chattel slavery, upon which he comments and also strikes his traveling companion in very strong ways. We see how a specialist of prison reform, initially, though he has to become a specialist on the way, who ends up in prison himself. I am interested in oliviers observations, if any, on what he was thinking when he was behind bars. He was perhaps not experiencing the prison system as an elite visitor in the ways in which someone from a more common background would have experienced prison, but i thought that was an interesting thing to perhaps hear more about. We see him as a social network of tremendous privilege, but one that still needs to be navigated. I was struck in this work, as i have been in biographies of other great white male intellectuals, of the 18th and 19th centuries, of the role of women, the Critical Role of women both in intellectual engagement and also in making significant connections, hosting salons, connecting these intellectuals and politicians to others, both within the country in question and also abroad. That was a really important point you brought home at several points, and i appreciated your spotlighting the lives of these women, including his spouse, mary. We see him i think this is such a critical part of your work engaging in praxis, right, the transformation of theory into practice. The desire to practice what he preached and see the blind spots that come along with that, to see him trying to chart a path as an independent, which seems to be a very important message, and you underlined it also in your remarks. This is not a sort of legitimate, monarchist in disguise, nor is he a revolutionary of the sort. Neither is he an extreme republican in that sense. He tries to chart this middle path. What is so interesting, the way his friendship and family relationships evolve as he continues to try to chart that path and maintain his independence. I think that readers will find this very illuminating, about this effort toward practice and about founding a position that is unique and allows him to occupy political space with integrity. We see him as a zealous colonialist, that is something that he takes on very openly. This is a point for which he has received a lot of criticism, especially in this postcolonial era. Your examination of that in its own chapter, i think, was a very good gesture. We see him struggling with physical and mental health, and i feel also this is a very timely piece of your interpretation and part of his life that you put forward, to not only talk about his struggles with illness, tuberculosis, but also his struggles with depression and moments of being completely overwhelmed, moments of needing to retreat from his social life, and that he himself was vocal about these issues in his communications with close ones in his letters. This is a part of a scholarly habit at the time, or of peoples lives that is far too often sort of diminished in public discussion and i think is really wonderful, that you have put forward here. He is plagued by doubts, i the loss of his faith. At the same time, he works on helping to craft as historians going into these archives. He also see him arguing with people across continents, traveling, and in many ways at times, seeming like a bit of a nomad, searching for his health, searching for information, searching for ties as they ebb and flow along with his politics and his writing. My question for you, and i would like to move there now with this bit of backdrop that i helped illuminate some of the work and significance of this book, i would like to ask you a couple of questions. One about your work as a biographer, and another, returning to this question of blind spots. First of all, i am really interested in the challenge of becoming a biographer as you have done here. The type of research it demands, the type of analysis, the type of writing. Did you learn anything new or surprising about him, or about his work in writing this biography compared to how you looked at him in his work before . Are there new insights or new possible interpretations that you would bring back into a classroom if you were to teach it now in light of what you know . I am interested in those discoveries of yours and the challenges, and in that process of becoming a biographer, which i am sure audience members will be interested in hearing about as well. With regard to his blind spots, you treat them very fairly and with nuance from the beginning of your tail. You remark upon his inability to conceive of american political divisions initially, as well as the workings of local politics and governments. There are some ways his own aristocratic background and the french lens that he and beaumont bring to the initial trip to america, they color their interpretations of what they see and their inability to perceive some of what is going on. You are open regarding his initial stance of support of colonialism, and the evolution of his thought in the last part of his life, to be more of an anticolonialist. Relatedly, i this may have been my ignorance, was completely shocked to learn that he had hired one of the great villains of 19th century history a historian of race and racism seeing the author of the essay on the inequality of race, one of the most racist works in this period of history, it is referred to as a diabolical work of polly genesis polygenesis, but there was some disgrace, working with a great villain, but i learned he ended up critiquing this essay as dangerous and egregious philosophy love it. I wanted to ask you about capitalism, going back to the first trip to america. You mentioned on page 52, they viewed america through a french lens, which led them to underestimate in particular economic dynamism. I am curious about your take regarding this understanding of american capitalism in relation to democracy, where he attributes or in some ways conflates the two by holding the former into the latter, it seems to me. I wanted to read from page 89 in the book and you are quoting him here. He is describing cincinnati, where we see comments about the busyness and energy of business chocked up to democracy. He says everyone has come to make money. Nobody is keen to stay here. Absolutely no one is vital. No one is engaged in intellectual speculation and everyone is occupied with something, to which he dedicates himself with passion. Nobody has any notion of an upper class. The jumble is complete. Democracy is unlimited. For me, reading through that lens of his blind spots that you brought forward, thinking about the ways that ultimately he is conflating democracy and american capitalism, and wondering if you wanted to flesh that out a little bit more for us here. Another blind spot that is of interest to me, his silence in the french revolution on french slavery, as you know of the work silencing the past, he is listed among historians and writers who are guilty of silencing. I wont read a quote from that work, although i have them, but this notion of neglecting a part of french history that is obvious and significant and central to conceptualizing the function of the 18th century regime before the revolution. I am so interested in your perspective as a biographer, in his social and family connections. Were there really no members of the colonial lobby . Did he not have a feeling for how slavery in the colonial empire were major elements of the regime he is describing as he looks at the 18th century, the regime and the french revolution . From that perspective of network that you build up so much in the biography, i am interested in how that slips by. Thank you so much, i apologize for being a little long, but this is such a fantastic biography area i encourage all of the listeners to pick it up. Its a fantastic read and a tremendous contribution, so thanks. Thank you, kristi. How much time do i have to react here . A few minutes. Ok. We will have more time to discuss. I will go back through a few points. Those comments are extremely generous. I want to begin by, a remark he pointed out, that he was in some kind of middle, you know, and it is something that is often said, of course, somewhere in the middle. What i want to say, the middle is not, the center is not an easy place to be. It is a very demanding place. It is not a compromise place. Its difficult to explain. Its looking for a way to transcend opposites, not reconcile them. I think that is an effort all along, because one of the great discoverers of the american trip , i am talking here only for the white male population, as a lifelong abolitionist also, worried about the slavery thing right after. One of the great discoveries was that equality could be a source of literacy for people. As a young man, for his friends and family members, equality was a bad word. It was leveling. It was the end of privileges for people like him. One of the great discoveries, there was a society where in the population, equality could be a source of freedom. At some more abstract level, equality and literacy were one and the same, because if everyone is equal, you are free. And if you are free, everyone is. We can get into the speculations further down. One very quick word about the connection with slavery and family members involved in the slave trade, the only one i know for sure was involved in the slave trade, briefly i think, was the great and romantic novelist writer. [inaudible] his aunt had married a young writers older brother. There was a relationship between the two. [indiscernible] he was like a surrogate father. But there was at least one connection, at least the only one i know. Whether the slave trade had a place in the book of the old regime, i dont so, but i dont think that was part of the argument i was trying to build for my book. Anyway, i want to go to the same level, talk a second about. He was a young man who was publishing, had some literary talents, and hired him and liked him. But it is only later in life that they go to this crazy historical theory, and became the founding father to. In a very naive sort of way, because it was borne down as an intellectual construction to impress members of the French Academy of political science. Then they said, wait a second. Those ideas are dangerous and they are going to fall into the wrong hands. Are a fool. What was interesting to me in this conversation, this racism and calvinistic predestination, which is pretty remarkable. Quickly on another point, if i have a second, if i may, on capitalism, [inaudible] cincinnati on. He did not have a great deal of understanding about economies. Neither had beaumont, for that matter, and by the way, both had very different notions. When you read the text, there are some very combined those two sources and put them in one text. But in effect, they had a very distinct understanding of america. But he did not have a lot to say about america and capitalism. He said the sense of energy and maybe this notion, this certificate that there was more to capitalism than sheer interest is something that he calls selfinterest. The connection between private gain and the common good, which i think is a very important part of democratic theory. That is the extent to which i think he made a significant connection with the positive elements. [inaudible] we can go back to all of this. I really wanted in this biography, as a historian, i was interested to figure out, how could we figure it out, you know . How he could lets face it. He was a young man who was 25 years old, knew nothing about this country, had a stroke of genius that french people were interested in british constitutionalism, and wanted to see democracy directly. But he hardly spoke english. Probably well enough, but he spent nine and a half months here and then influence the ways in which we, americans and others in the world, think about society, civil society, and our lives. How did he do it . That was interesting to me, to figure this out. Of course, much of it is sheer intelligence, and i think observation is part of it. In upstate new york in 1831, 1832, in the midst of the revival along the valley, we heard of the second great awakening. He talked to partisan ministers he wanted to talk to catholic priests because he was anxious to tell his mother he was going to church, so he wrote wonderful letters to his mother about that. But he spoke to chaplains, you know . He said these truly important things about american religions that were more than money. How did he do it . I think observation was part of it. Between france and america, france, england and america, the british trips he took before volume one, then between volume one and two were critical, and later on, it became germany in his other world comparisons. There was observation, there was comparison, but how did he fill the gaps . I think sheer intelligence, sheer invention, sheer creativity, you know . People realized it. John stuart mill said as much. A great french politician of the restoration years as well, who said much of it is invention. [inaudible] [laughter] thank you thank you. Those of you who wish to pose a question, it is time to get in the queue or use the raise hand function for the q a on zoom. We will call on you as we see you appear. Our second commentator this afternoon is cheryl welch, the retired senior lecturer in the department of government at harvard university. She got her phd from Columbia University and has interests in the area of research and political thought, 19th century france, liberal and democrat theory, and the history of human rights. She has published numerous articles on liberalism, unitarianism. Shes the director of the took field review, the author of liberty and utility, the french ideologues and the transfer may of liberalism, and she is the editor of open with the cameras competitiv of the cambridge companion. Welcome. Thank you, eric. Thank you so much for this invitation to speak. It is such a pleasure to be here to discuss the new biography. I just wanted to start with a little anecdote. As a young academic in the mid type the mid 1980s, i participated in a wonderful Wilson Center conference in paris that focused on comparison french and american views of the concept of liberty. The occasion was the 100th anniversary of that gift from france to the United States, the statue of liberty. I always thought that the greatest gift from france to the United States was a thinker who has been explaining americans to themselves and stimulating new comparative perspectives for almost two centuries. This new intellectual biography by a french american historian who straddles the american and european contents is especially welcome, and i might say a third gift, so thank you very much for what i know was a labor of love and a tremendous investment of your time. Let me Say Something about what i think is the overall contribution of the book and then raise a few very general points that i hope olivier can talk more about. I will leave one of mine out for time and because christie has already brought it up. Like oliviers earlier book, the tocqueville reader, this biography never loses sight of the richness, the diversity, the complexity of his thought. Tocqueville had a very subtle intelligence, but the ability to combine the big picture with facts on the ground. I think the biggest contribution here, and olivier has already alluded to it, is that his work allows us to see the mind at work in real time because for the first time, we have an historian of 19th Century America who also understands the french context who is relieving that experience with tocqueville. So the reader gets a proper sense of the balance between what he took from his american sources, what came from his underlying worries and moral concerns about france, and what came from his own brilliance as a psychologist who was able to somehow imagine new connections amongst people in a democratic world. We always knew these were the primary sources of tocquevilles thought. What we did not know is how they came together in particular cases, and that is what oliviers biography allows us to see. A new perspective in this book on one of tocquevilles most influential contributions to democratic theory, his theory of association. Tocqueville rejected the nearly universal view that associations were dangerous factions. Rather, he painted a picture of them as the Building Blocks of a new kind of positive civil society. Olivier shows us for the first time the genesis of this innovation. It was based on, as olivier said , extremely modest empirical observation. Since tocqueville missed the significance of most emerging religious, educational, charitable associations, as well as secret societies like the masons, which he apparently never mentioned. In this case, tocqueville combined input from certain sources in boston and philadelphia with ongoing concerns that he had about the repression of associations in france, but clearly here biggest contribution came from his own intuition about how the power of Human Connection could spillover into political advocacy. That came from him, and then he reread it into american history. Keeping in mind that complexity and evolution of tocquevilles thought is a very big contribution, but i dont think it means that olivier can to make very large and bold claims. One of the payoffs of this careful method of contextualizing tocquevilles thought is to allow olivier to argue persuasively that tocqueville decisively cast his lot with democracy, with the future. In tocqueville scholarship, there has been an ocean of ink spilled over the ways in which tocquevilles theory is poised between aristocracy and democracy, or is secretly aristocratic, or smuggles in aristocratic barriers to democracy, or is at heart conflicted and ambivalent. Yet without ignoring tocqueville s hesitations or the nuances of his thought, olivier argues that tocquevilles commitment to democracy was sincere and was based on deep conviction, not because he was resigned to something that was inevitable, which he was, but because he was in his own distinctive way, and olivier allows us to see that, attracted to the normative power of a democratic vision of universal justice. This is often not very clear in tocqueville or even denied by many scholars. But i think this seems right to me, and i think it explains what has attracted subsequent readers to tocqueville whose circumstances are quite different, but who are also committed to negotiating a democratic future. It explains some of that permanent interest. For a tocqueville scholar, this new biography i think is a must read against which to test claims in Many Political camps. In my questions for olivier, i really want to push him a bit to speculate. Historians dont like to speculate about contemporary politics, but i want to know what his painstaking work might mean about which parts of tocquevilles legacy are most useful and most persuasive today. If tocqueville is a man who understood democracy, how might he help us understand our contemporary democratic crises, which one might argue are quite different than those that he observed in jacksonian america . My first point, and again, olivier has already brought this up in a different context, but my first point concerns democracy and religion. Tocqueville is famous for his analysis of the ways in which american democracy is entwined with religion and depends on it for political stability. Commentators focus on the legacy of puritanism or generalized protestantism or on some kind of civil or civic religion. Those commentators i think well need to reckon with oliviers claims that tocqueville got a lot of things about american protestantism wrong. For example, that it would slide into a kind of disbelief or anemic unitarianism. That he completely ignored other aspects like the great revival that are crucial to understanding the role of religion in american democracy in history and today. So i think that that will actually spin off some commentary, but my question concerns subsonic is a in democracy. Tocqueville was always tuned concerns catholicism in democracy. Tocqueville was always tuned to the catholic faith. It is one of the sources of tocquevilles sincere commitment to universalism. For example, olivier also shows how a concern with social injustice throughout tocqueville s wife was filtered through a particular catholic view of benevolence and charity. I really appreciated this at the end of the book. I think olivier decisively cuts through why tocqueville was read the sacraments before he died. Without knowing his private thoughts, his attempt to be at peace with his wife and to affirm the faith which he aspired is completely consistent with his private and public life. So there is not a mystery to explain there. So moving to aid very general question, given the role of catholicism in american political life today is prominent, contentious, polarizing, and its influence among public intellectuals is increasing, i wonder if olivier could comment a bit more on the way in which catholicism could practically support democracy and the ways in which it might be problematic even in his own view. It is a kind of large question. I had a second question about democracy and inequality which i am going to skip over. My final question is about Democratic Political culture and change. This picks up on some of the things that kristi mentioned in her comments, but one of the lessons about democracy in america and the old regime is that stable democracy works only when it is supported by certain values, ideas, attitudes, beliefs, customs that are ingrained in the culture. We know what these are. According to tocqueville it is a sense of common citizenship, respect for law, awareness of your own rights and the rights of others, practical political experience, a sense that ones own sense is linked to the collective good ones own interests are linked to the collective good. But these values and virtues were precisely what were missing in tocquevilles france, and arguably what are in very short supply in contemporary america despite profound differences from 19th century france. In some ways we look more like 19th century france than tocquevilles america. The prestige of National Political institutions and especially the legislature is low. The public exhibit is very little trust in political elite, largely alienated from politics. Inequality is entrenched and worsening, and our legislative body is deeply divided by partisan enmity and divisions. The habit of painting arrivals as enemies or traders is common, and here i think of your wonderful introduction to the work on tocqueville in revolution, and what she expresses a lot of these views. If it ever existed, the healthy political culture that tocqueville celebrated, it has clearly decayed in the u. S. , and it seems we face what he feared. Polarization, the collapse of shared values, and shared civic knowledge. It is also a lesson that political cultures are very sticky and very difficult to change by political and legal means. But it strikes me on reading oliviers account of tocqueville s political career that using politics and law to transform toxic culture was precisely the difficult task that tocqueville set himself in france of the 19th century. Unlike some of the accounts of tocquevilles career and protects, tocqueville takes being a politician quite seriously. But what i am interested in in his account of tocqueville is the constant attempts you can see very clearly in your chapters on tocqueville and politics both to guard his moral independence in a representative system that was dysfunctional and corrupt in many ways, and at the same time, to combine with others. Hes always trying to combine with others to create a collective force of change in the legislature. He never squared that circle, but neither did he give up until he was sidelined by bonapartes coup detat. He did not push for many of the solutions that he had found in america like decentralization or empowering local levels of government or even widening the suffrage because he thought those divisions were so great that these measures would backfire in those circumstances. He did not give them up as longterm goals, but in the shortterm. So what did he do . He hoped to educate the political elite to provide exemplary leadership, to develop their proper role in the legislature as the moral and deliberative center of politics, and to push for gradual change. So again, we know none of this worked out in the short run. In his memoirs he blamed the Political Class for spineless in us and cowardice. For spinelessness and cowardice. So can we learn anything about how to nudge a toxic political culture in a more positive direction from the way in which tocqueville himself tried to apply the lessons of democracy in america when he went to france, a country then in some ways more like our own than the idealized portrait he painted of 19th Century America . Or is this story of tocqueville and politics another cause for pessimism . After all, it did end in revolution and the longest period of frances history of democratic despotism, and tocquevilles words. So perhaps too pushed when he First Century problems onto tocqueville, but it is so compelling that i would love to hear what olivier has to say. Thank you. Olivier. Olivier well, i want to begin with just a small anecdote that happened a couple of weeks ago. Forgive me. The First Edition came out at the same time as the copy of it right here, and the translation is beautiful. But it was in english, and one of my students was a run for was a wonderful writer, and i worked with her on the final copy, of course. Not only a student, but a good friend. So i published it, and i was in paris a couple of weeks ago, and the book just came out. The first time in my life, but it just so happen. So there was an interview i had, and it was in the midst of the election come of the french elections. So the topic couldnt be more, what is the relevance today. One of the figures everyone was discussing was a level of abstention in the french election. 20 , very high. Very high abstention. And on this radio program, there was this fellow who argued that there is nothing wrong with abstention. It was actually a political statement. You dont have a candidate you could approve because it was either the extreme right or a kind of traditional right, so 1 3 of the population was justified not to show up. And i did agree with that and i said, well, i live in a country where there is a great push by conservatives to suppress elections, and abstention is not the way to go. So we had an interesting debate about this. I think you probably knew that. Ok. We live in a toxic political culture. We resemble that your position needs to take over, to govern in the name of the people , which was a french political melody, and which happens to become right now. So there is a similarity. And i want to rephrase somewhat. Democracy is difficult to maintain. It requires effort. Effort liberty is not something that you really can do whatever you want. It is the ability to achieve your best that is quite different. It is the liberty of achieving. And what was difficult is to build the habit. Creating a habit. So theres a great deal about how to be a democrat, to be a constant effort. So i think, because again, if there is value in reading tocqueville today, it is not about in america. [indiscernible] [laughter] because i am frenchamerican. We all feel that we want to be loved. But theres nothing i can do. Tocqueville i think will be read for his message, which is it depends on participation. It is as much a call for participation as it is all right. The question about is complicated. Tocqueville was a precocious young man and a difficult teenager, by the way. He said it himself, you better have it when youre young. His father was a prefect in the french restoration. [indiscernible] that is not such an uncommon thing. What was more uncommon is that he didnt enjoy this loss of face. He felt the pain of doubt. He was in need of proof or certainty, and he couldnt find it. He couldnt find it in faith. Like christie mentioned about his depression, i am glad you did because tocqueville suffered all his life with depression. He felt doubt that was crippling , and he always tried to overcome that. So part of the strength of his writing, i think, is to have managed to turn his doubts into creative force. So in other words, it is not just brilliance, but the strength of overcoming doubt. So there is a connection there that i think is really interesting. That is the strength of his writing and how it translates, even with people who disagree with him. For the first volume of democracy in america, it was who did a lot of work on how to improve the lives workers. He created a national workshop. But before that he was a theorist and studying the working class. He understood that tocqueville was on the right side of history in realizing that life was dramatically changing, and by the 1840s, tocqueville predicted that the major fight in the future would be between the haves and the havenots. The whole theory of industrial aristocracy was the destruction of england. But the elephant in the room is karl marx because of the way in which they were very related. In class terms. Tocqueville, of course, never met marx. Even though the two would relax in the reading rooms of the british museum, they signed up in the same year. They mightve met, but they didnt. They were there at the same time. They think the same way. [indiscernible] but i think the socialist press in the 1840s, tocqueville returns to socialists for law and order issues because by then , he sides with order and says, ok, i forget bid them to use the word democratic just because they want full power. Anyway, many out there are worried about capitalism. [indiscernible] the Unitarian Church was growing very rapidly in the 1870s. So when he met some of the important people in the church, 15 of the 35 churches in boston were unitarian in 1831. He felt strongly that was the way of the future. He was wrong about this. He remained loyal to the catholics in a way. I think what elect most about catholicism was not the hierarchy. That was the connection in his mind. He felt that his greatest failure was as the minister of Foreign Affairs in 1849, after having inherited the french invasion of rome, and therefore the roman revolutionaries, and reestablished the to power, he felt his greatest failure was to lead the pope he felt that was a personal failure. But that was really something he felt needed to be done. He kept hoping it might happen. Thank you. Weve got a raised hand by stephen, so lets turn to stephen. If you would unmute yourself, you may join the conversation. Welcome to the seminar. Stephen . Two very brief questions. The first is whatever one refers to here is tocqueville, is that technically correct, or should he be referred to as de tocqueville . And second, in his travels and doing research on democracy in america, did he have any conversations with slaves or native american . Olivier thank you. The first question is very short. The answer to it is very short. In french, you dont use the so your first two people by their last name without using the de, or d. I think in english you can go either. I think the french way is becoming more common in the englishlanguage, but the english way used to be more common. If you read books from the 1940s and 1950s, 1960s, you will still see the de more often, but i think it begins to change in the 1980s and 1990s. So you cant go wrong either way, so long as you are consistent. On slavery, tocqueville met slaves that for saas at versace. He lived in a house of white slave owners. Slavery was prominent. Tocqueville entered the plantation once. He spent a week and a home in tennessee. There were three in the house. It was a nice home. The men was a postmaster. He remarked that he never did any work. Only gave orders. Native americans, tocqueville met them three times during his trips. The first time, he was extremely distressed because they were poor and drunk and begging, and he was very distraught because it was worse than anything he had in his imagination of the noble savage. But the second time tocqueville spent time with native americans was in the michigan forest. There they were very much still in the traditional environment. They were in their lives very much before the destruction of their environment. And the third time was what christie mentioned, the dramatic encounter with a tribe crossing the mississippi in one of the initial installments of the policy. So these were the three encounters he had. Thank you. Catherine, your hand is up. These unmute and please unmute and pose your question. Ok. My question, i want to take back to the role of the politician in the context of 1848. I am wondering what you think of his actual thoughts about the people, so to speak. He has a very ambivalent relation to 1848 and prefers order to the chaos of especially the summer of 1848. So i am just wondering if, for all of his love of democracy, did he actually like and trust the people . I am thinking too of your comment about that he sort of missed the whole awakening, and that is a very charismatic sort of expression of the people, the very kind of thing he seemed to dislike, and i think helps explain his preference for catholicism, along with all the kind of things you also described. Could you talk a little bit about what you think his actual feelings towards the people were . Olivier well, i think it is a very good question because [indiscernible] which israel which is real. So i think he thought of himself as a democrat by reason. So yes, he was an elitist. Theres no question about it. He likes to be with the people in the know. So do i come actually. And i think probably a lot of us. I like to be informed and so on. I think he was shy and did not have easy relationships with others, so this is why he was such a great writer in a way because he could not take the time to express his feelings. He was not a good public speaker , but a good conversationalist. Those moments with a select audience of people like him. I think there is a populist dimension, a connection with the people that he totally missed. Yet i think he took the opportunity to campaign in suffrage in 1848 very seriously, and he campaigned effectively and universal suffrage of 1848. He led the people of his village to vote in february 1848 in the first election, and a very famous passage where he what you need to do before you go to vote. But then people asked him to talk, so he addresses them. You see one of those rare instances where he had to mingle with the local peasantry and so forth. In the electoral campaigns where the electorate was really reduced, you could go to 300 people and only talk to 20 or 30 of them because he could not actually indulge in the that others had because of his poor health. So your right to say that. It was a much more intellectualized understanding of democracy than you dont see him in that context, i believe. Thank you. I am going to squeeze in one last question very quickly, if i may. This returns to algeria and his observations. You write that, history has not been kind to tocquevilles views of colonial expansion and exclusion of natives from government. A question is about his powers of observation. He spends a relatively short time in the United States and yet manages to capture a great deal and write two very important books about it. What about his powers of observation in algeria . Is this a case where seeing ig aerial seeing algeria as the wild west was to be United States that obscured his insights . Did you talk to the wrong people . What did he see or what didnt he see . Olivier jennifer translated all of the algerian text, and he actually saw quite a bit of it. He made two trips to the area, one which he was sick most of the time, so that limited his ability to take notes. We have very few notes of his first trip. He spoke to mostly people in the french army to get a sense of what was and was not achievable. In the second trip, he went to see villages. But again, he was mostly interested in villages of french settlements, so he never studied the life of the local populations. He had few encounters with them. A few, but not many. He spent a great deal of time trying to figure out whether colonization was possible and what were the possible conditions. Thank you. We could go on for much longer. There is a lot in the book that we have only scratched the surface of. I will underscore something christie said. This is a very readable book, and it is one that i think well both inform and entertain those who pick it up. But i want to thank those in our audience. Apologies to those whose questions we could not get to. I express my appreciation to cheryl and kristi, olivier, and christian. Christian, back to you for final words. Christian thank you. What a great conversation this was. Thank you all. All right. Today we are talking about and i am going to start with you question as always. The question for today is why does the u. S. Become a global empire . Ok. Why does the u. S. Become a global empire . And why did the u. S. Become a global empire . Ok. Why did the u. S. Become a global empire