Chateaubriand and Tocqueville: Impressions of the American Scene
Two very different French travellers, a romantic and a realist, have left us their opinions of the rising civilization of the United States. Arnold Whitridge assesses two contrasting historical viewpoints.
No two travellers ever explored the new world with such different hopes and aspirations as François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand and his nephew, Alexis Charles Henri Clerel de Tocqueville. Yet by instinct and by inheritance they would seem to have had much in common. Both were aristocrats, brought up to fear God and honour the King, and both, while never discarding the values of the aristocratic tradition, became imbued with new ideas of liberty, liberty of expression as well as liberty of thought, which ran counter to everything they had learnt in their youth. When Chateaubriand, disgusted with what he had seen of the Revolution, sailed from St. Malo in the brig Saint-Pierre in the spring of 1791, he dreamed of discovering the North-West passage, of meeting Washington, of writing an epic about noble savages, and of saturating himself in an atmosphere of happy innocence untainted by the specious pleasures of civilization. Tocqueville, setting sail for America forty years later, did not indulge in any such fantasies.
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