Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath

by Alexis de Tocqueville, Olivier Zunz (Editor), Arthur Goldhammer (Translator)

Overview

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Souvenirs was his extraordinarily lucid and trenchant analysis of the 1848 revolution in France. Despite its bravura passages and stylistic flourishes, however, it was not intended for publication. Written just before Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup prompted the great theorist of democracy to retire from political life, it was initially conceived simply as an exercise in candid personal reflection. In Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath, renowned historian Olivier Zunz and award-winning translator Arthur Goldhammer offer an entirely new translation of Tocqueville’s compelling book.

The book has an interesting publishing history. Yielding to pressure from friends, Tocqueville finally approved its publication, although only after those portrayed in the work—most, unflatteringly—had died. After Tocqueville’s death, his grandnephew published a redacted version, but it was not until 1942 that French editors restored the potentially offensive passages.

Goldhammer’s is the first English translation to do justice to Tocqueville’s original uncensored masterpiece of analytical description, stylistic subtlety, vivid social panorama, and incisive critique of political blundering and cowardice. Zunz’s introduction—and his addition of several of Tocqueville’s ancillary speeches, occasional texts, and letters—round out a unique volume that significantly enhances our understanding of the revolutionary period and Tocqueville’s role in it. In this new edition, Zunz highlights the persistent influence of the United States on the life and work of a man who tirelessly, albeit futilely, promoted the American model of government for the New French Republic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813939025
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	12/14/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Olivier Zunz, Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia, is the author of Philanthropy in America: A History and editor of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels (Virginia), among other books. Arthur Goldhammer, an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University and a member of the editorial board of French Politics, Culture, and Society, has translated more than one hundred and twenty-five works from the French, including Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution.

Editorial Reviews

Edited by Olivier Zunz and flawlessly translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Tocqueville’s Recollections is now available in a nicely illustrated new edition. [I]n addition to the text itself and its various appendices, Zunz has added just short of a hundred pages of correspondence, speeches and occasional writings penned or delivered by Tocqueville in the period stretching from the birth of the Second Republic until its overthrow in December 1851. These welcome additions allow us not only to assess Tocqueville’s political interventions but also to observe his shift in mood from relative optimism to profound pessimism.

Standpoint Magazine

Recollections contains Tocqueville’s thoughts "in the raw" as a participant in the upheavals that shook France between 1848 and 1853.

Liberty and Law - Samuel Gregg

This is the definitive English edition of Tocqueville’s Recollections. It has been splendidly edited and introduced by Olivier Zunz, who has chosen key documents from Tocqueville and others to accompany this greatest of all French political memoirs. And it has been marvelously translated by Tocqueville’s greatest English translator, Arthur Goldhammer. Tocqueville is a difficult writer to render into English. He is subtle, nuanced, ironic, and many earlier generations of French thought and literature breathe through his prose. Goldhammer captures it all, while explaining his approach in a luminous essay on Tocqueville’s style.

David A. Bell

Zunz has had a long fascination with Tocqueville, in part because of their shared mission. Both are French and both try to understand America. Zunz, as a historian of America, has written Philanthropy in America: A History,Why the American Century?Making America Corporate, 1870-1920, and The Changing Face of Inequality. Zunz frequently cites Tocqueville, whom he regards as something of a lifelong companion

UVa Today

Recollections is unique among Tocqueville’s major writings. In this devastating chronicle of the failures of friends and foes in the Revolution of 1848, he abandons the distance of his more analytical writings to reveal his candid reactions to the ultimate moral and political challenge of his time. We now have the definitive English edition: beautifully presented by Olivier Zunz, punctuated by the satirical sketches of Daumier, and wonderfully translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Capturing the stylistic brilliance of Tocqueville as immediate political portraitist and juge de soi, this new version of the Recollections also reminds us that some firsthand accounts of collective crisis can speak across time and culture. Like the best of political novels, they expand our sense of the possibilities and limitations of our own political world.

Cheryl Welch

Goldhammer’s is the first English translation to do justice to Tocqueville’s original uncensored masterpiece of analytical description, stylistic subtlety, vivid social panorama, and incisive critique of political blundering and cowardice. Zunz’s introduction—and his addition of several of Tocqueville’s ancillary speeches, occasional texts, and letters—round out a unique volume that significantly enhances our understanding of the revolutionary period and Tocqueville’s role in it.

Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture

"Goldhammer’s is the first English translation to do justice to Tocqueville’s original uncensored masterpiece of analytical description, stylistic subtlety, vivid social panorama, and incisive critique of political blundering and cowardice. Zunz’s introduction—and his addition of several of Tocqueville’s ancillary speeches, occasional texts, and letters—round out a unique volume that significantly enhances our understanding of the revolutionary period and Tocqueville’s role in it. "—author of Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture

"Edited by Olivier Zunz and flawlessly translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Tocqueville’s Recollections is now available in a nicely illustrated new edition. [I]n addition to the text itself and its various appendices, Zunz has added just short of a hundred pages of correspondence, speeches and occasional writings penned or delivered by Tocqueville in the period stretching from the birth of the Second Republic until its overthrow in December 1851. These welcome additions allow us not only to assess Tocqueville’s political interventions but also to observe his shift in mood from relative optimism to profound pessimism. "—author of Standpoint Magazine

"Zunz has had a long fascination with Tocqueville, in part because of their shared mission. Both are French and both try to understand America. Zunz, as a historian of America, has written Philanthropy in America: A History, Why the American Century? Making America Corporate, 1870-1920, and The Changing Face of Inequality. Zunz frequently cites Tocqueville, whom he regards as something of a lifelong companion "—author of UVa Today

"

Recollections contains Tocqueville’s thoughts "in the raw" as a participant in the upheavals that shook France between 1848 and 1853.

"—Samuel Gregg, author of Liberty and Law

From the Publisher

Sept. 6, 2016
A shrewd, on-the-ground account of how political change is made—and unmade—by the author of Democracy in America.Never published in de Tocqueville’s lifetime (1805-1859), his reflections on the collapse of Louis-Philippe’s constitutional monarchy and its aftermath are notable for brutally frank portraits of allies and enemies alike in the struggle to define the Second Republic. The author was staunchly opposed to the socialists who strove to push the new republic to the left, but he was well aware of the weaknesses of those who shared his moderate views. His chronicle of the constitutional commission’s meetings acidly depicts his fellow members as schemers, ideologues, and self-serving bureaucrats incapable of fashioning a workable government. Nonetheless, he discounted the threat of further unrest. “When people claim that nothing is safe from revolution,” he writes, “I say they are wrong: centralization is safe. In France…the one institution we cannot destroy is centralization.” The book is chock-full of such astute observations, which make it valuable reading for any serious student of government. (It is, however, appropriately published by a university press, since anyone unfamiliar with the details of 19th-century French history will be flipping frequently to the Chronology at the front and the Biographical Dictionary at the back.) Adding to its value, the author is seemingly incapable of writing a dull sentence, and he is a master of the cool put-down. Of his pious, family-centered sister-in-law, he writes, “one could not hope to meet a more decent woman or a worse citizen.” Running into two politicians who had contributed to Louis-Philippe’s downfall but were alarmed by the violent demonstrations that accompanied it, he sneers, “never have victors looked more like men about to be hanged.” Although colored by the desire to justify his stint as foreign minister in 1849, his text remains perceptive as it leads up to the coup that launched the Second Empire and ended his political career. In many ways as relevant as the day it was written and great fun to read.

Kirkus Review