The Aristocrat as Independent Voter : TOCQUEVILLE A Biography <i> by Andre Jardin; translated by Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $30; 548 pp.)</i>

Andre Jardin’s “Tocqueville,” surprisingly the first full-scale biography of this major 19th-Century figure, is a fine, old-fashioned piece of work, some of it original, much of it taken from the ample precedent scholarship. It provides an abundant store of information and an occasional surprise--a dozen years after its publication, we find the author of “Democracy in America,” now minister of foreign affairs, exclaiming: “But what animals these Americans are!”

It is as the author of “Democracy in America” that Tocqueville is known in this country; but what this biography reveals is not so much an admirer of America as a Frenchman of his time, circumstance and needs, even when he is in America. He came here with his friend Beaumont ostensibly as a student of penitentiary reform, but Tocqueville really wanted to take a larger look at this new republic, since it was clear to him that the European drift was in that direction, and what intrigued him was its democratic base, since he had been brought up to believe that a republic could function only when run by a virtuous elite. We know what he found and how he responded, but the biography also reveals, almost inadvertently, why he was such an accurate and comparatively unbiased observer.

For one thing, he had not biased himself by reading contemporary travel literature, much of it written by snide Tories pretending to take an unprejudiced look at the American experiment. Capt. Basil Hall’s infamous “Travels” had been only partially translated (the chapter on prison reform) into French, and, in any event, it was his companion Beaumont who read it. The result was that Tocqueville’s vision had not been prejudiced (other than by his relative Chateaubriand’s romance with New World nature). For another, Tocqueville and Beaumont readied themselves each day by preparing questions for the people they would meet, questions based upon their own observations sur place and designed to elicit responses useful to them as Frenchmen trying to prepare themselves for a possible future. They were not, as were the Tories, justifying a past.

Tocqueville’s Cartesian clarity, his relative lack of bias, meant that he used the answers to his questions to form a useful statement about America, but the questions themselves and their reasons reveal perhaps even more about France. By looking at this intelligent, open-minded, and inquiring young civil servant and nobleman of impeccable political parentage (great grandson of Malesherbes), Jardin’s book provides the American reader a marvelous introduction to the political shiftings, the gradual yet sometimes violent post-revolutionary cracking of the political structure in France as it grappled simultaneously with the shattered legitimacy of the past, a slippery present and an ill-defined future.

After the immediate success of “Democracy in America” (1835), Tocqueville entered the political arena and was elected deputy for the arrondissement of Valognes, the region of his family castle in Normandy. He sat left of center in the Chamber. Although many at the time thought of him as an Carlist aristocrat and some in this country think of him as an American-style conservative, Tocqueville considered the old aristocracy “dead for ever.” Over the years, he demonstrated his liberalism by fighting for parliamentary monarchy, separation of church and state, reform of the suffrage laws, improvement of the worker’s lot, for liberalizing public education, abolishing slavery wherever it existed, improving the prison system and eliminating poverty. He managed, nevertheless, to stay clear of several more powerful champions of liberal causes such as Lamartine, Royer-Collard, and Thiers, who would have liked to have him on their side but whose egos he mistrusted.

Independence is what most characterizes Tocqueville’s career. A colleague reproached him for “giving the right hand to the left, the left to the right and regretting that he does not have a third one to give invisibly.” “Freedom is the strongest of my passions. Voila . It is the truth,” he explained to disconcerted observers. If he moved left, it was, he claimed, to impose his color on the left, not change his own.

Another constant was his hatred of centralization. In “L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution,” Tocqueville analyzed the roots of centralization in France, which according to him went as far back as the reign of Philip the Fair in the Middle Ages. He lamented the fact that centralization had destroyed time-tested local organic structures and that the French nobility itself was at fault in the process. Tocqueville fought centralism in all of its manifestations as he saw them. For instance, rather an agnostic himself, he defended religious education because he believed in the healthy necessity of a third force besides the state and the people.

Tocqueville’s anticentralism colored his responses to the various colonial enterprises that characterize European history of the period. Thus, in newly conquered Algeria, he favored a kind of settlement based on local autonomy rather than central metropolitan power. He was the first man in the Chamber to push for a separate ministry for Algeria--a dream that became a fact only a century later in Leon Blum’s cabinet. He deplored the downfall of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, since the Turks were not only a desirable bumper between the major European predators, but also relatively tolerant themselves toward the diversity of their possessions. He admired the respect for local customs that the British had shown in India.

Tocqueville was an active, intelligent legislator, esteemed particularly for his work on penitentiary reform (inspired by the Philadelphia system) and on the abolition of slavery, but he was not a sensational figurehead. One might say that, like Montaigne, he had lived through a great deal of political turmoil and managed to preserve an independent judgment. When Louis-Napoleon was propelled into the presidency at the end of the bloody 1848 revolution, Tocqueville was given the foreign affairs ministry in the Barrot cabinet. He served with the same unsensational distinction as in the Chamber but was fired after only five months. He had protested Louis-Napoleon’s coup d’etat that made an emperor of the president and was briefly imprisoned in Vincennes--luckier in this than one of our great-grandfathers, who was sent to the Sahara for the same offense. From then to his death from tuberculosis in Cannes in 1859, Tocqueville led the life of a gentleman farmer and journalist who, amid numerous changes of residence to accommodate his health, wrote (but did not finish) “L’Ancien Regime et la Revolution.”

This long and scrupulous study of a man who was one of the most profound and prophetic thinkers of his time, is, alas, scrupulous to the point of boredom. The narration rarely deviates from an inexhaustible concatenation of facts related in the soberest of prose. Although it does justice to Tocqueville’s ideas, it fails in rendering the passion and the grace of his intellectual life and the social brilliance of the era. Moreover, the book is curiously organized: The order followed a mixture of the chronological and of the thematic, with several baffling leaps from one to the other. Andre Jardin’s work constitutes an excellent work of reference for the scholar. It is indexed and substantially but not cumbersomely footnoted. Still it makes the layman yearn for the livelier manner of much recent historical writing.