Tocqueville, Islam, and Democracy

By Alan S. Kahan (not for citation without the author’s permission)

Posted on December 16, 2010

“Alongside each religion is found a political opinion that is joined to it by affinity”.[1]

Tocqueville’s understanding of religion has been the subject of, to say the least, considerable commentary. Outside the question of his personal faith, where letters are the chief evidence, the literature has focused primarily on Democracy in America and to a lesser extent on The Old Regime and the Revolution. This focus is justified by the considerable attention Tocqueville devoted to religion in these works, particularly in Democracy. Their subject matter naturally led Tocqueville to focus his discussion of religion on Christianity.

The discussion of religion in these books is strongly influenced by their intended readership. Although Tocqueville also had in mind convincing free-thinking French liberals that the Church was not necessarily the enemy of freedom, in Democracy Tocqueville above all wanted to flatter French Catholics into accepting democracy. In The Old Regime he wanted to explain why they had not done so, criticize their failure (insofar as it was their fault), and like the good preacher he was, exhort them to repentance, albeit with little hope of seeing them reform. The needs and prejudices of his readers combined with Tocqueville’s own concerns to shape his discussion of religion in these two books. If we step beyond the bounds of Tocqueville’s discussion of Christianity, we can find new perspectives from which to examine his views which refract his views from different angles. By examining Tocqueville’s views of Islam we can see better how Tocqueville understood the relationship between religion, democratic society, and freedom.

It is testimony to the importance Tocqueville gave religion that he read and annotated the Koran. His knowledge of Islam nevertheless remained superficial. He knew nothing of Shi’a Islam or of the vast traditions of Islamic law and commentary. Nevertheless, Tocqueville did devote significant study to Islam. The impulse behind his study was not abstract curiosity, nor was it merely theoretical – such motives rarely moved Tocqueville. His study of Islam was provoked by his political involvement with France’s colonization of Algeria. But his notes and comments on Islam were not solely directed at this limited context. In his reading of the Koran, as in his discussion of Christianity and religion in general, Tocqueville sought to understand the practical effects of different forms of spirituality.

Certain aspects of Tocqueville’s general approach to religion need to be stressed to understand his approach to Islam. For Tocqueville, religious belief of some kind was an essential bulwark of freedom. Happily, indeed providentially, religion was not an accident.[2] Human beings were naturally religious in the same way that they had a natural desire for freedom. Tocqueville did not think religion was destined to disappear with economic and educational progress.[3] However, while Tocqueville’s analysis did not lead to a prediction that religion would necessarily disappear (yet another instance where Tocqueville was wiser than Marx), the existence of democratic society did not necessarily imply the persistence of religion either. Even if some sort of spiritual faculty was present in human souls at birth, it was capable of being extinguished by stronger passions, e.g. materialism. Although “the instinct and the taste of humanity uphold this doctrine [spiritualism/religion]”[4], Tocqueville feared that religion might disappear. Therefore:

... no matter which religion has put down deep roots within a democracy, be careful about weakening it... instead protect it carefully as the most precious heritage of aristocratic centuries; do not try to tear men away from their ancient religious opinions in order to substitute new ones, for fear that, during the transition from one faith to another, when the soul finds itself for the moment devoid of beliefs, love of material enjoyments comes to spread and fill the soul entirely.[5]

Three of the reasons Tocqueville thought religion so necessary to democratic societies are particularly relevant to his discussion of Islam: the relationship between religion and materialism in democracies, already alluded to; the psychological relationship between religious belief and freedom; and finally the relationship between religion and the state. These reasons make up a kind of rubric according to which particular religions can be judged.

The relationship between religion and materialism is, like most of the relationships Tocqueville draws, situational, rather than constant. In an aristocratic society people are too inclined to ignore their material interests, and Tocqueville would have tried to make them less interested in the other world and more interested in material needs. “But today, I feel indulgent towards all the follies that spiritualism can suggest. The great enemy is materialism, not only because it is in itself a detestable doctrine, but also because it is unfortunately in accord with the social tendency”. Tocqueville argued that “there is no religion that does not place the object of the desires of men above and beyond the good things of the earth, and that does not naturally elevate his soul toward realms very superior to those of the senses”. This is true even of “the most false and dangerous religions”, whose name is left carefully unspecified, so that readers may fill in the name of whatever denomination displeases them most.[6]

Tocqueville wrestled very much with the issue of balance between the spiritual and the material. This becomes clear in his letters and in some of the rejected passages for the Democracy. Thus a rejected passage reads:

To be concerned only with the needs of the body and to forget about the soul. That is the final outcome to which materialism leads.

To flee into the deserts, to inflict sufferings and privations on yourself in order to live the life of the soul. That is the final outcome of spiritualism. I notice at the one end of this tendency Heliogabalus and at the other St. Jerome.

I would very much want us to be able to find between these two paths a road that would not be a route toward the one or toward the other. For if each of these two opposite roads can be suitable for some men, this middle road is the only one that can be suitable for humanity.[7]

The image of Heliogabalus and St.Jerome is also found in a letter by Tocqueville to his friend Louis de Kergorlay where, after carefully stating that he will now come to what he thinks himself, Tocqueville states that since human beings have both bodies and souls, they are a mixture of the angel and the beast, and that any philosophy or religion which tries to ignore one or the other will produce some extraordinary individuals but will not have much impact on humanity at large. Tocqueville therefore has racked his brains to discover “a middle path to which humanity can keep and which leads to neither Heliogabalus nor St. Jerome”. Tocqueville prefers spiritualism (“I adore the angel, and I would like to see it predominate at any price”) but he will settle for a balance, because that is all that it is possible to achieve with the crooked timber of humanity. [8]

Balance is necessary to humanity not only in a moral sense, nor solely in response to the democratic tendency to materialism, it also plays a directly political role. Tocqueville’s views on this subject are complex, but to state them as simply as possible, in a democratic society religion is not a necessary precondition for freedom, since he never says that it must come first, but it is a necessary accompaniment of a durable freedom: “For me, I doubt that man can ever bear complete religious independence and full political liberty at the same time; and I am led to think that, if he does not have faith, he must serve, and, if he is free, he must believe.”

This passage is more complex than it first appears. Individual religious faith, arrived at independently, is not enough to preserve political freedom, for such an independent faith would suggest the complete religious independence that Tocqueville said is incompatible with political liberty. Rather, one must belong to an organized religion; one must have subordinated one’s individual judgment in religious matters, if one is to preserve the open psychological space necessary for freedom. This reading is confirmed by what Tocqueville says of religion elsewhere: “A religion is an association in which you give up your liberty in a permanent way. Associations of this type are necessary.” Why? because if democratic human beings follow their democratic instinct to decide all questions themselves, there will simply be too many questions to decide, and in despair they are likely to accept the first despotic authority that will take this terrible burden away from them. “Men cannot do without dogmatic beliefs.... among all dogmatic beliefs, the most desirable seem to me to be dogmatic beliefs in the matter of religion”. In order to preserve their ability to choose in some areas, human beings must surrender it in others. Tocqueville evidently (if tacitly) thought it more important that everyone be politically independent than religiously independent.[9]

Nevertheless Tocqueville strongly rejected the idea of a state religion imposed on all citizens to spare them the burden of religious freedom. Free democratic human beings need to have a religion, in Tocqueville’s view, but they do not all need to have the same religion, and in no circumstances whatsoever should this be a religion imposed by the state. Tocqueville’s reasoning on this point was as much political as it was religious. In The Old Regime he argued that “it was much less as a religious doctrine than as a political institution that Christianity aroused... furious hatreds”. As soon as it becomes associated with the government religion risks becoming discredited whenever governments fall into discredit. Tocqueville’s remarks about the relationship between Church and State in The Old Regime echo the thoughts he had expressed in general terms in Democracy: as for State religions, I have always thought that if sometimes they could temporarily serve the interests of political power, they always sooner or later become fatal to the Church.... I would prefer to chain priests within the sanctuaries than allow them out of it.[10]

The relationship between religion and materialism, the psychology of religion and freedom, and the relationship of religion to the state, are particularly important to understanding Tocqueville’s judgment of Islam. We do not know when Islam first came to Tocqueville’s attention, or how. Certainly he was familiar at an early date with Montesquieu’s discussion of Islam in the Persian Letters and Spirit of the Laws, and probably with other references to Islam in eighteenth-century French literature. This is all that is necessary to explain the first brief reference to Islam in volume one of Democracy, published in 1835. However, he wrote two articles about Algeria during his unsuccessful parliamentary campaign in 1837, and Algeria would preoccupy him from his election to parliament in 1839 until the end of the July Monarchy in 1848. In order to understand Algeria, it was only natural that someone with Tocqueville’s views of the political and social importance of religion should try to understand Islam, the religion of its inhabitants. By the time he made his second reference to Islam in volume two of the Democracy, published in 1840,Tocqueville had read and annotated a considerable portion of the Koran.[11] Tocqueville’s first impressions of Islam were mixed, but he became more hostile over time, although it is possible by reading Tocqueville somewhat against the grain to make out a more favorable “Tocquevillian” view of Islam.

Tocqueville went to considerable trouble to try and find a good French translation of the Koran and the Hadith, the traditions of Mohammed’s life and actions. His informants told him there were none, and directed him to what they considered the best available French translation of the Koran. In March, 1838 Tocqueville wrote to his friends Francisque de Corcelle and Louis de Kergorlay that he was reading the Koran in his spare time. He told Corcelle that he was not seduced by Mohammed, but that Mohammed was “an able man amid all his divagations. It is difficult to strike a more able bargain between spiritualism and materialism, the angel and the beast. The Koran is nothing but this.” This is in a certain respect the highest praise Tocqueville could give a religion, since he thought that any religion that sought to effect humanity at large had to recognize that human beings were a mixture of “the angel and the beast”, and he sought constantly to find a middle path between the two. The letter to Corcelle implies that the Koran might be such a path. Yet in the same month as his letter to Corcelle he wrote in a very different tone to Kergorlay. While he again stated that the Koran was “a pretty able compromise between materialism and spiritualism”, he also found it vastly inferior to the Gospels, and said he could not conceive how a mutual acquaintance had found it superior to them. He described the compromise between materialism and spiritualism made by Mohammed in negative terms, and complained that “the violent and sensual tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I don’t see how they can escape a man of good sense (emphasis original). Tocqueville was disturbed that “the first of all religious duties is to blindly obey the prophet” and that “holy war is the first of all good works”.[12] Tocqueville went on to say that the Koran represented progress over polytheism in that it contained “clearer and truer ideas of God” and “embraces certain general duties of humanity with a more extended and clearer vision. But it arouses passions, and in this respect I do not know if it has not done more harm to men than polytheism.” “Mohammed has”, wrote Tocqueville “exercised an immense power over the human species that I think, all in all, has been more harmful than salutary”.[13]

Moving from Tocqueville’s letters to his notes on the Koran, we find the same mixed but on balance negative appraisal. He writes that the Koran contains “almost all the general principles of morality that all religions contain”, and he approves of its special emphasis on charity. But he remarks on Mohammed’s violence, particularly towards idolaters and Jews, the injunction to Jihad, and the killing or conversion of infidels by force. In almost all the Koran, Tocqueville writes, “Mohammed is much more concerned with making people believe than with giving rules of morality. And he employs terror more than any other motivation”. Lest one think the Koran is unique in this, however, Tocqueville compares Mohammed in this respect to Moses, and he states that “one recognizes Moses all the time. It [the Koran] hardly goes beyond the Ten Commandments”.[14]

Thus, although Tocqueville gave possible grounds for an apology for Islam, i. e. that it is the sort of able compromise between the material and spiritual which is needed in a religion in a democratic society, he himself did not take this view of Islam, and he preferred Christianity as an antidote to materialism. A similar argument could be made in regard to Islam as “submission” (the meaning of the word “Islam”) to the will of God. Given that Tocqueville argued that religion is a kind of association in which human beings must surrender, as long as they are part of the association, their liberty, and that such associations are necessary, especially in democracies, then the fideist aspect of Islam (as of other religions) would seem to meet with Tocqueville’s approval. However, in practice Tocqueville thought that Islam’s affinity was with despotism rather than freedom, even if both in its compromise between spiritualism and materialism, and its requirement for dogmatic faith in religious matters, it would seem possible to make the opposite case.

In this context it is as well to dismiss two possible objections to Islam which Tocqueville might plausibly be supposed to have held, but which he did not. The first of these is the problem of predestination. Like Calvinists, Muslims believe that the question of individual salvation is predetermined. Tocqueville, as is well known, rejected all theories, whether secular or religious, that claimed that the future of humanity or of individual human beings was predetermined. Indeed he wrote in Democracy that the “doctrine of fatality” is particularly attractive to people in democratic times and that if it took hold, “it would soon paralyze the movement of new societies and reduce Christians to Turks” (Gambetta later attacked Catholicism for encouraging fatalism. Was Tocqueville projecting a potential critique of Christianity onto Islam?).[15] However, Tocqueville was well aware that the Puritans, whose contribution to American freedom he thought crucial, were Calvinists who believed in predestination. There is a distinction to be made between the theological doctrine of predestination and the human practice of fatalism. It is only the latter that Tocqueville condemned. Tocqueville ascribed the stagnation of Islamic societies to other reasons than the doctrine of predestination.

Secondly, in The Old Regime Tocqueville compared the revolutionaries with Islam, because like Islam the Revolution “flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs”.[16] This would be a rejection of Islam only if it was a rejection of the Revolution. Certainly Tocqueville criticized both the French Revolution and Islam for tendencies to excessive violence. Nevertheless, Tocqueville was by no means an opponent of the Revolution (at least of what he considered its “good parts”), and the same could be said, in this respect at least, of Islam. Proselytism, whether religious or political, is in Tocqueville’s view a necessary consequence of the idea of equality.

Nevertheless, Tocqueville’s overall judgment of Islam was negative (and it became more so over time) despite the positive elements he saw in it. But the main reason for his disapproval of Islam had less to do with any particular disposition of the Koran than with its larger context. What led Tocqueville in the final analysis to strongly reject Islam was its relationship to political freedom. Islam has a natural affinity with despotism, according to Tocqueville, not because of predestination or even fatalism, not because of violence, but rather because of the absence of any separation between Church and State. The reason Tocqueville gives for the lack of separation of Church and State in Islam is at first glance paradoxical: it is the absence of a priesthood, an absence which Tocqueville thinks is in principle good.

In preparation for his first voyage to Algeria,in May-June 1841, Tocqueville read and annotated a variety of material about Algeria and its population. At some point in this period he wrote a piece titled “Why there is no Priesthood (sacerdoce) among the Muslims”. Unlike most of his Algerian notes, according to the editor, these pages “are written without crossing-out and in an exceptionally legible manner, which allows one to suppose that Tocqueville, intending to preserve this note, carefully recopied it”.[17]

Tocqueville thought the absence of a priesthood in Islam a striking fact, a fact “which in itself seems at first glance very unusual, because all religions, and above all all those which have strongly influenced the human imagination, have acquired or preserved their influence with the aid of a priestly corps very separate from the rest of the nation and very strongly constituted”. This absence was “a good amidst all the evils to which the Muslim religion has given birth. For a priestly body is in itself the source of much social malaise, and when a religion can be powerful without the aid of such a means, one must praise it for that”. In this passage Tocqueville, freed from the constraints of a Catholic audience, allowed a Protestant side of his thought to be glimpsed. The democratic “priesthood of all believers”, as Luther put it, was to be preferred to the aristocratic if not hereditary position of the Catholic clergy.

Tocqueville gave two reasons why Islam had no priests. Early Islam was organized for war and as a result there was little ritual, and what there was was simple, without any need of a priest to perform it. But much more important, according to Tocqueville was that “Islam is the religion which has the most completely combined and intermixed the two powers [civil and religious]”. Since there was no separation of Church and State, there was no need, and for that matter no means, of distinguishing the clergy from other educated people. Tocqueville’s chief complaint about Islam is that the separation between Church and State, so laboriously acquired in Europe, never happened in Islam. Tocqueville recognized that this separation did not come about in Europe with the Church’s consent, but what mattered was that it never came about at all in Islam. “Religion and justice have always been combined in Muslim countries, like the ecclesiastical courts tried to do in Christian Europe”.[18]

The fundamental problem was that the Koran simultaneously regulated the general moral and religious duties of humanity, and provided detailed rules of civil and political law. This combination led to two serious problems from Tocqueville’s perspective, one of political organization, and one of social organization, which together had disastrous results for Muslim countries. The political problem was that Islam had combined civil and religious authority “in such a way that the high priest is necessarily the ruler, and the ruler the high priest, and that all the acts of civil and political life are more or less regulated according to religious law”. Thus the politico-religious institution of the Caliphate, which combined supreme civil and religious authority in one individual, was anathema in Tocqueville’s eyes. Socially, “since the Koran is the common source from which issue religious law, civil law and even in part secular science, the same education is given those who want to become religious ministers, doctors of law, judges and even scholars. The sovereign takes indiscriminately among this educated class the ministers of religion or imams [Tocqueville does not consider imams a priestly body], the doctors of law or muftis and the judges or Cadis”. Thus the secular and the sacred were constantly intermixed. While Tocqueville did not say if this was detrimental from a religious point of view, it was catastrophic from a secular perspective: “This concentration and confusion established by Mohammed between the two powers has on the one hand produced this particular good [the absence of a priesthood], and on the other hand it has been the first cause of the despotism and above all of the social immobility which has, almost always, been characteristic of Muslim nations and which finally made them all fall before the nations which have embraced the opposite system”.[19]

This is the reasoning behind Tocqueville’s negative judgment of Islam found in volume two of Democracy (1840), a judgment both more knowledgeable and more hostile than that found in volume one:

Mohammed made not only religious doctrines, but also political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and scientific theories descend from heaven and placed them in the Koran. The Gospel, in contrast, speaks only of the general relations of men with God and each other.... That alone, among a thousand other reasons, is enough to show that the first of these two religions cannot long dominate during times of enlightenment and democracy, whereas the second is destined to reign during these centuries as in all others. [20]

Two things worth noting about this passage are, firstly, the tone of false confidence which Tocqueville adopts with regard to the domination of Christianity. He was by no means confident that the democratic religious future would be Christian, rather than pantheist or frankly materialist. This passage was probably written to help convince devout French Catholic readers of his bona fides. Was he wholly sincere in his praise of Christianity? Doubtless he was, at least of his ideal of Christianity. Historical reality, as Tocqueville knew, was another matter. But to convince French readers of the need to reconcile religion and freedom, it made more sense to appeal to the ideal than to the real.

With regard to Islam, however, Tocqueville had no need to develop an ideal different from what he perceived to be the reality, and he did not. His reasoning of 1840 is repeated in an 1844 letter to Richard Monckton Milnes. Milnes had made a trip to the Middle East and returned, in Tocqueville’s view “a little more Muslim than is suitable”. As far as Tocqueville was concerned:

As I got to know this religion better, I better understood that from it above all comes the decadence that before our eyes more and more affects the Muslim world. Had Mohammed committed only the mistake of intimately joining a body of civil and political institutions to a religious belief in a way to impose on the first the immobility that is in the nature of the second, that would have been enough to doom his followers in a given time first to inferiority and then to inevitable ruin. The grandeur and holiness of Christianity is in contrast to have tried to reign only in the natural sphere of religions, abandoning all the rest to the free movement of the human mind.[21]

Regardless of the accuracy of Tocqueville’s statement about Christianity (when he attempted to make a similar remark in Democracy, his brother and father criticized it and he left it out),[22] the fundamental source of his rejection of Islam seems clear. Islam presented many advantages from a Tocquevillian perspective: a stance midway between materialism and spiritualism, a proper dogmatism in matters of faith, a strong emphasis on charity (very important to Tocqueville), and the absence of a priesthood. Nevertheless, none of this could compensate for its historical failure, by comparison with Christianity, to establish and maintain a strong separation, political, civil, and educational, between Church and State, the religious and the secular realms. Tocqueville’s views on Islam and his reading of the Koran underlined the importance he placed on this separation. The reason for the decline of the Muslim world is not fatalism, it is the absence of separation of religion and state.

Is the solution for the Islamic world then conversion to Christianity? Absolutely not, in Tocqueville’s view. This is in accord with the statement made in Democracy that it is wrong to try to persuade a democratic nation to changes its religion. Thus in his 1847 report on Algeria, written well after his negative view of Islam had crystallized (and after a second voyage to Algeria in November-December 1846), Tocqueville wrote that it was wrong to try to discourage Islamic education in Algeria, and that on the contrary Islamic religious education ought to be encouraged, for fear that otherwise ignorant and fanatical leaders would take the place of a more educated and presumably moderate class. This is not to say that Tocqueville was sanguine about Islam’s fate. How could he be, when he was not confident in the fate of Christianity? Thus he wrote that Islam too was faced with the danger of materialism, and indeed that Islamic faith, while still very lively, was daily losing ground in Algeria to “the interests of this world”, as shown by the fact that many Muslim Algerians were willing to take service in the French army.[23]

Islam might thus, in Tocqueville’s view, be inferior to Christianity in certain respects, but it neither could nor should be replaced by Christianity. Rather it should be preserved. Were Tocqueville a Muslim, we might imagine him encouraging elements in Islam that could lead to a separation of Mosque and State. Islam does, from a Tocquevillian perspective, potentially meet many of the needs of democratic society.

Understanding Tocqueville’s views of Islam does not result in a great upheaval in our understanding of Tocqueville’s thought. His concerns about the social and political functions of religion remain the same, as do his analytical methods. Nevertheless this examination permits us to understand his attitude to religion in new ways. Because neither Christianity nor the Christian/Catholic prejudices of a broad readership were engaged (there was no readership for his notes, and only one reader at a time for his letters), Tocqueville could more freely express some of his attitudes. Thus, for example, we see him develop a Protestant view of the priesthood, and present an unapologetically instrumental view of religion. If some aspects of his analysis of religion in Democracy are repeated, e.g. the role of religion in combating materialism, other sides to this story are now given greater emphasis, as in the crucial importance Tocqueville placed on the separation of Church/Mosque and State, or else given new expression, e.g. the need for religions to balance materialism and spiritualism.

Above all, however, we learn from his discussion of Islam that for Tocqueville the relationship between religion and democratic society, religion and freedom, is not simply a concern of the West. For Tocqueville democracy was a global phenomenon, and the relationship between democracy and religion was not just a story about Christianity or Western religions. Whether he was examining Christianity or Islam, what concerned Tocqueville was the relationship that religion might have with democracy and with freedom. However aristocratic his thought may have been in certain respects, the fundamental moral equality of all human beings and all human souls was central to his way of thinking. When it came to religion, Tocqueville was without reservation a democrat.

[1] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Nolla ed., p. 467.

[2]Democracy, pp. 959-60.

[3] Democracy, p. 473; p. 960j.

[4] Democracy, p. 959.

[5] Democracy, p. 958.

[6] Democracy, pp. 745-6, 956, 962n.

[7] Democracy, p. 960k.

[8] Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 1836, Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Louis de Kergorlay, in Alexis de Tocqueville Œuvres complètes (henceforth OC), ed. J. P. Mayer, vol. 13, t. 1, p. 389.

[9] Democracy, pp. 714, 743, 745

[10] Democracy, pp. 961-2.

[11] He read the Koran in March of 1838, after a voyage to Algeria in 1837 [check dates

[12] Tocqueville is translating or rather citing the translation of the ambiguous term “jihad” as “holy war”.

[13] Tocqueville to Corcelle, in Correspondance d’Alexis de Tocqueville et de Francisque de Corcelle, in OC, vol. 15, part 1, 19 March, 1838, p. 98; Tocqueville to Kergorlay, March 1838, OC, pp. 28-9.

[14] Tocqueville, Notes sur le Coran, in OC, vol. 3, pt. 1, pp. 154, 156, 158-60.

[15] Democracy, p. 858.

[16] The Old Regime, p. 101.

[17] Tocqueville, «Notes prises avant le voyage d’Algérie et dans le courant de 1840», in OC, vol. 3, pt. 1, p. 173n.

[18] Tocqueville, “Notes” OC, vol 3 pt. 1, pp. 173-74; «;Notions diverses tirées du compte rendu relatif aux années 1837, 1838, et 1839», in OC, vol 3 pt. 1, p. 181..

[19] Tocqueville, “Notes” OC, vol 3 pt. 1, p. 174.

[20] Democracy, pp. 746-7.

[21] Tocqueville to Milnes (Lord Houghton), 29 May, 1844, cited in Democracy, p. 747e. He said much the same thing in a letter to Gobineau, also much taken with Islam, in a letter of 22 October, 1843, in which he suggested that Islam on the whole was a regress in comparison with polytheism. Given his other remarks on the subject, this latter was probably meant merely to counter Gobineau’s enthusiasm, rather than representing Tocqueville’s settled conviction. See OC, vol. 9, pp. 68-9.

[22] See Democracy, p. 468a.

[23] Tocqueville, Report on Algeria, 1847, OC, vol 3 pt. 1, p. 326; Second letter on Algeria, 22 August, 1837, OC, vol 3 pt. 1, pp. 151-52.>