I

In the immediate postwar era, a reevaluation of the European past occurred in the aftermath of the horrors of National Socialist-inspired fascism and the transformations of the continent following the successes of Soviet communism.Footnote ¹ One prominent element of the reevaluation concerned which intellectuals and philosophers could be held responsible for the events of the twentieth century and who could, by contrast, be seen to have been battling against fanaticism. The implications of such analyses were both negative and positive, identifying the enemies of liberal civilization and those who not only were its defenders, but also might be employed afresh to sustain it. For Karl Popper in 1945, famously, Plato, Hegel, and Marx threatened “the open society.”Footnote ² Jacob H. Talmon, in his popular The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), added Rousseau to those whose writings had contributed to fascism.Footnote ³ Max Weber was lauded for being in the opposite camp, reinterpreted by Talcott Parsons and a series of further editors up to the establishment of the Weber Gesamtausgabe (complete works) from 1975 by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Mohr Siebeck publishing house in Tübingen.Footnote ⁴

Controversy has been marked across all the free states of the West concerning the canon of truly liberal authors and membership of the antiliberal canon. One consequence was a renaissance of editorial scholarship from the 1940s, seeing new editions of classic works but also the publication of swathes of lesser-known writings, in addition to hitherto unpublished or little-known manuscripts and correspondence of those deemed relevant to the defense of liberty. In some instances, one scholar or institution emerged to direct the publishing revolution, an example being Julian P. Boyd, Princeton University’s chief librarian, with Thomas Jefferson’s papers from 1943, or Leonard W. Labaree and his successors at Yale University concerning Benjamin Franklin from 1954. In the case of Ralph A. Leigh, the editor of the monumental Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, working with the Institut et musée Voltaire from the early 1960s, the intention was to defend Rousseau against accusations of protofascism.Footnote ⁵ Less controversial even than Weber in terms of liberal lineage was Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59), the incomparable student of democracy in the United States and historian of the French Revolution, minister of foreign affairs for a short period during the 1848 revolution in Paris, and perpetual critic of socialism and extremism. The main figure behind the postwar editions of Tocqueville’s writings, correspondence, and manuscripts, Jacob Peter (J. P.) Mayer (1903–92), was German, escaping the Nazis in 1936 for a circle centered at the London School of Economics (LSE), becoming close to Harold Laski and R. H. Tawney, gaining British subjecthood, and subsequently dedicating much of his life to Tocqueville, working in tandem with the great French publisher Gallimard and Tocqueville’s family.

Mayer’s admiration of Tocqueville was related to Talcott Parsons’s veneration of Weber.Footnote ⁶ They were both convinced that the social sciences of the postwar era needed to be developed on the basis of the study of the works, often little known hitherto, of such great scholars. Born into a Jewish family in Frankenthal in southwest Germany, Mayer studied philosophy and politics at several universities in the early to mid-1920s, including the University of Freiburg, where he was taught by Heidegger and Husserl. In 1927, he began writing articles for political periodicals, and two years later he started working as a researcher in the archives of the Social Democratic Party in Berlin. It was here that he came across some mostly unpublished manuscripts by Marx, which would later become known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. His 1932 edition of the manuscripts, which he edited jointly with Siegfried Landshut, raised his profile in the party and enabled him to meet with party leaders, such as the chairman, Otto Wels.Footnote ⁷ He also became involved in the anti-Nazi activities of the Neue Blätter circle of social democrats and formed a close friendship with Adam von Trott, a member of this circle who would later be executed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. In 1936, as life for Jews in Nazi Germany became increasingly precarious, Mayer fled to London, where he was soon joined by his wife and infant son.

Mayer spent the first two years of his life as an émigré editing and coauthoring a study of European political thought, which was published in England in 1939.Footnote ⁸ The volume was intended to bolster the antifascist movement across the Continent by delineating antifanatic traditions in European history. He had also by this time embarked on an intellectual journey away from Marx and towards Tocqueville, who he believed had predicted the dangers of plebiscitarian democracies that the world was now witnessing with the ascendancy of Hitler and Mussolini. He made only a few passing references to Tocqueville in the chapters he wrote for Political Thought: The European Tradition, but he was already describing the French thinker as one of “the great prophets of the age of mass-democracies.”Footnote ⁹ By the beginning of 1938, Mayer had conceived the idea of writing a study of Tocqueville in which he would cast the Frenchman in just this role: the “prophet of the mass age,” as the title of the English edition of the book expressed it.Footnote ¹⁰ Mayer’s fascination with Tocqueville marked his own movement from socialism to liberalism.

The following article provides an intellectual history of the publication of the Tocqueville edition. It is concerned with the peculiar history of Mayer as an editor, which had major implications for Mayer’s own intellectual journey and his sense of Tocqueville’s ongoing relevance for the free states of the West. Mayer, unlike almost every other major editor of liberal luminaries, worked for the most part outside universities and hence without institutional backing. Relatively late in life, his defense of Tocqueville resulted in his becoming a professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Reading, where he set up a research center dedicated to the study of the French liberal. Mayer’s story is significant because it reveals the different ways in which open or liberal societies were working to maintain themselves culturally, and the problems that arose when nationalism and nation-states came to influence an initially pluralistic publishing venture. Publishing any work is rarely straightforward. But Mayer’s Tocqueville was plagued by problems, some of his own making, which ultimately resulted in his being largely forgotten, a fate avoided by comparable editors during the postwar decades especially when the venture itself was so successful. Mayer felt in the end that the history of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes confirmed the malaise of contemporary liberalism. He died concerned for the future, convinced that bureaucracy and antidemocratic cultures were undermining free states.

II

Today Mayer tends to get a bad press. For three decades, he was the editor in chief of Éditions Gallimard’s edition of the complete works of Alexis de Tocqueville. When he died in 1992, obituaries described him as “eminently humble and kindly,” “a great scholar,” and “a notable expert on Tocqueville.”Footnote ¹¹ But these days, on the rare occasions when his name is evoked in academia, scholars have little positive to say about him.Footnote ¹² This would not have come as a shock to Mayer. Towards the end of his life, when a friend pointed out that his name did not appear in several volumes on Tocqueville published by one of his former colleagues, Mayer replied, “I am not surprised that I am hardly mentioned.”Footnote ¹³

A recent critical account accompanied the appearance in June 2021 of the last of the eighteen tomes of Gallimard’s Oeuvres complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville. In an article for La revue Tocqueville, Françoise Mélonio, the principal editor of the tome and a long-standing Tocqueville expert, provided a summary of the publishing venture’s fraught history in which she assessed Mayer’s contributions as the first editor in chief.Footnote ¹⁴ Mélonio fairly acknowledged Mayer’s role as the instigator of the project, and she commended the creative zeal he showed throughout his career. But she dismissed his scholarly competence and reputation while criticizing his aggrandizing self-perception as the “discoverer” of Tocqueville for latter-day readers.Footnote ¹⁵ She contrasted Mayer’s lowly status as an intellectual with the much more vaunted position of Raymond Aron (1905–83), who resurrected Tocqueville for French audiences and who would come to assume the role of chairman of the national commission that had been set up by the French state in 1950 to oversee the publication of the Oeuvres complètes.Footnote ¹⁶ Much of Mélonio’s coverage of Mayer concerned the dispute he had with Aron and the other members of the commission following its reorganization in 1979 at the behest of the French prime minister, Raymond Barre (1924–2007), a reorganization that Mayer perceived as tantamount to a coup. Relying on the papers of her colleague André Jardin (1912–96), who had worked on the project when Mayer was the editor in chief, Mélonio wove a tale that cast Mayer in an unfavorable light. He comes across as an embittered would-be saboteur, seeking to derail the project by surreptitiously searching for an alternative publisher and by attempting to block the commission’s access to some of the Tocqueville papers.

There is, however, another story to be told. First, while it is true that it was Aron’s interpretation of Tocqueville that came to predominate in France, scholars are increasingly recognizing the extent to which Mayer’s reading of Tocqueville influenced how the French writer came to be perceived in the United States and West Germany.Footnote ¹⁷ Some have argued that Aron’s interpretation, which positioned Tocqueville as a key thinker in the liberal tradition, was far less nuanced than Mayer’s, and that Aron could only present himself to the French as Tocqueville’s recuperator by keeping quiet about earlier readings of Tocqueville, such as Mayer’s own.Footnote ¹⁸ Second, the battle lines that were drawn between the collaborators on the project did not simply pit Mayer, a German-born Englishman, against an alliance of French institutions and academics. Before the French state became involved, Mayer had managed to secure his own alliances with both the Comte (Jean) de Tocqueville (1896–1974), the great-grandnephew of the Tocqueville, and Gaston Gallimard (1881–1975), the founder and director of the French publishing house. After the national commission was established, there was at times much rancor between its senior members and the executives of Gallimard. Meanwhile, Jean de Tocqueville was an unwavering defender of Mayer during the latter’s many disputes with the commission.

This article utilizes Mayer’s own papers, as well as the archives of Gallimard, to tell that other story.Footnote ¹⁹ It shows how Mayer came to be the editor of the Tocqueville papers, how he was soon at loggerheads with the national commission over the question of who should have executive control of the project, and how he clung to his role as editor in chief despite the ongoing feuds with his sometime collaborators.

III

The publication in 2021 of the last of the tomes, comprising a three-volume miscellany of Tocqueville’s correspondence, marked the end of a venture that Mayer had initiated more than seventy years earlier. That he had originally predicted it would take only five years to complete is an indication not only of how the scale of the task grew over the years, but also of the delays and disagreements that occurred along the way. A major factor in how Mayer secured the position of editor in chief was his friendship with Jean de Tocqueville. In 1938, Mayer wrote to the Comte informing him of his intention to write a book about his famous uncle. In his reply, Jean de Tocqueville said he would be happy to meet with Mayer and show him the documents he had at his Paris house, but that the bulk of Tocqueville’s papers his family owned were housed in their château in Normandy.Footnote ²⁰ Owing to the Second World War, it was not until 1948 that Mayer was able to visit the château and view this extensive collection of documents. However, Mayer was not the first to be given access to the documents and a full account of how he ended up being the one responsible for organizing and editing them necessitates delving into the backstory of the Tocqueville papers and the various other writers and academics who had searched for, consulted, copied, and even occasionally misplaced them in the early twentieth century.

On his death in 1859, Tocqueville left his papers to his English wife, Mary Mottley (1799–1864), and she authorized Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s friend and erstwhile traveling companion, to produce an edition of his works. Mottley never had good relations with Tocqueville’s brothers and so, when she died in 1864, she bequeathed her husband’s papers to Beaumont.Footnote ²¹ In 1891, at considerable financial cost, Tocqueville’s grandnephew, Christian de Tocqueville (1862–1924), reacquired the papers for the Tocqueville family, thus greatly augmenting the collection of Tocqueville’s manuscripts that Christian had inherited from his grandfather, Édouard, Tocqueville’s older brother.Footnote ²²

The writer and political activist Antoine Rédier (1873–1955) may have been the first person outside the family to be granted access to the Tocqueville papers.Footnote ²³ Christian de Tocqueville gave him permission not only to view the papers, which were stored in the charter room on the third floor of the family château, but also to take some of them back to his Paris office for use in the research for his biography Comme disait monsieur de Tocqueville, which was published in 1925.Footnote ²⁴ On a visit to France in 1920, the Yale historian Paul Lambert White also managed to get in contact with Christian de Tocqueville and was soon invited to view the contents of the charter room, where he discovered, inter alia, fourteen cahiers—that is, the notebooks in which Tocqueville recorded his impressions during his ninth-month journey across America. White compiled a catalogue of all the US-related documents and hired a local schoolteacher, M Bonnel, to produce copies that were later sent to Yale. Christian de Tocqueville also put White in touch with Rédier, and White was allowed to make copies of some of the documents in Rédier’s possession, including forty-eight unpublished letters from America.Footnote ²⁵ The copies of these manuscripts also eventually made their way to Yale, though some of the original documents were never returned to the château and remain missing to this day.Footnote ²⁶

In an article that appeared in the October 1922 edition of the Yale Review, White provided translations of some passages from these unpublished letters and cahiers.Footnote ²⁷ He also began drafting a book, but his work on the manuscripts was cut short by his untimely death from appendicitis in 1922 at the age of thirty-two.Footnote ²⁸ John D. Allison initially took over White’s role at Yale and continued to pay Bonnel for his transcription work, then Allison passed the torch to George W. Pierson (1904–93), a graduate student, who began to organize Bonnel’s notebooks. Pierson also visited the Tocqueville château in 1929 and 1931, now as a guest of Christian’s son, Jean de Tocqueville, and identified many more unpublished papers in the charter room.Footnote ²⁹

Rédier later claimed that he also visited the château of Beaumont’s family around 1900 and was allowed to make copies of Mary Mottley’s letters to her husband. Some of these letters were originals, though others were copies that Mottley herself had made of letters she wrote to Tocqueville before they were married. She destroyed the original letters as she was concerned how posterity might judge her for the intimacy she had expressed to a man who was not yet her husband. Rédier later gave the copies he made to Jean de Tocqueville and thus they too became part of the Tocqueville archive.Footnote ³⁰

IV

During the interwar years when Rédier, White, and Pierson were browsing the Tocqueville archives held at the château, Mayer’s thoughts were far from Tocqueville. But not long after he fled Nazi Germany, he became resolved to write a study of the great French thinker. In January 1938, he wrote to Jean de Tocqueville telling him about this plan and they met shortly afterwards. It was the beginning of an enduring friendship. Over one hundred letters from the Comte were found among Mayer’s papers—letters replete with expressions of goodwill and gratitude. “My mother, my daughters and I gather to send you a thousand very good memories and to assure you of our faithful friendship,” he wrote to Mayer in 1950.Footnote ³¹ In 1953, when the Comte was negotiating with Pierson over the sale of the manuscript of La démocratie en Amérique to Yale, it was to Mayer that he turned for advice.Footnote ³²

Mayer worked swiftly on his book, which he wrote in German, and had finished it by the end of the year. He submitted the draft to Gallimard, and the firm’s director, Gaston Gallimard, replied on 16 January 1939 to say that they had read his manuscript with great interest but did not feel it fitted well with their publications. However, M Gallimard went on to say that if Mayer could collect any unpublished or posthumous writings of Tocqueville related to his last major work, L’ancien régime et la révolution, that could shed light on how he developed his thesis, then that was something they would be interested in. Mayer’s reply was enthusiastic. Not only could he gather relevant posthumous writings but he would also be able to include some unpublished writings currently stored in the Tocqueville château since Jean de Tocqueville had given him permission to search the family archives.Footnote ³³

Mayer was aware at this time that Gallimard were also in contact with Luc Monnier, who was preparing a new edition of Souvenirs, Tocqueville’s autobiographical account of the 1848 revolution in Paris. Monnier was yet another scholar who had contacted Jean de Tocqueville and had been granted access to unpublished materials. Mayer now wrote to Monnier to ensure that there would not be any duplications of unpublished documents between their separate Tocquevillean projects.Footnote ³⁴ This concern was alleviated a few days later by Jean de Tocqueville, who assured Gallimard that there were no such duplications. However, the Comte also indicated that he had very few documents relating to L’ancien régime, which prompted Gallimard to inform Mayer that they regrettably would not now require him to pursue the task they had earlier suggested he take on.Footnote ³⁵ This letter was dated 10 February 1939, yet just twelve days later, Mayer sent a proposal to Gallimard for a new edition of Tocqueville’s main works, and by early March Gallimard were not only endorsing the plan with Mayer as the editor, but had agreed to publish a translation of Mayer’s study of Tocqueville, a book they had rejected two months earlier.Footnote ³⁶

What had occurred in the previous three weeks that had led to this turnaround? The extant correspondence between Mayer and Gallimard does not make this entirely clear. However, Mayer later wrote that it was Bernard Groethuysen (1880–1946) who suggested to Gallimard that he be appointed the editor of a new edition of Tocqueville’s works after a friend of Mayer had sent Groethuysen the manuscript of his Tocqueville study.Footnote ³⁷ Mayer also indicated in a letter to Harold Laski (1893–1950) written in July 1939 that Gallimard had agreed to publish his book provided he took on the role of the general editor of the complete works.Footnote ³⁸

Mayer proposed that Gallimard should publish four volumes: a new edition of Souvenirs that would be edited by Monnier and would include copies of unpublished papers that Jean de Tocqueville had already sent to Monnier, a new edition of L’ancien régime that Mayer would edit and which would also include some unpublished material, a volume of unpublished correspondence that would be edited jointly by Mayer and Rédier, and a new edition of La démocratie that Jean de Tocqueville had suggested Pierson could edit. Mayer would be the overall editor of the project. He also expressed his belief that Jean de Tocqueville should receive a reasonable percentage of the royalties from those volumes that included unpublished material. Mayer’s study of Tocqueville would, as already agreed with Gallimard, be published along with the first volume.Footnote ³⁹

In his preamble to this proposal, Mayer implied that Jean de Tocqueville had indicated that Mayer should be the general editor. The Comte, who had also received a copy of the proposal, replied to Mayer that he could not be the one to invest Mayer with the role of general editor as it was ultimately up to the publisher, though he would be happy for Mayer to direct the project alongside Gaston Gallimard.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nonetheless, it was evident that Gallimard had already chosen Mayer to be the editor in chief, as Mayer pointed out in his reply to Jean de Tocqueville.Footnote ⁴¹ A month later, still seeking reassurance that he was Gallimard’s first and only choice, Mayer wrote to Gaston Gallimard to ask him “if you would be so kind as to write me a note saying that you consider me to be the sole general editor of our edition” in order to facilitate his negotiations for financial support.Footnote ⁴² M Gallimard replied, “As we wrote to you before, we will indeed consider you as the general editor, and, with the possible exception of ‘LES SOUVENIRS’ … we only wish to deal with you as the representative of both the owners of the unpublished documents and the other contributors to the edition.”Footnote ⁴³

In March, Mayer began seeking that financial support. He outlined the proposed project in a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation’s office in Paris, stressing that the money Gallimard were able to grant him was insufficient and enquiring whether the foundation could provide him with a stipend of forty pounds a month. A few months later, he sent the same letter, with a few minor edits, to Laski, asking whether Laski’s “American friends” might be able to pay the monthly stipend. Laski wrote back that he would “write in the next few days to America.”Footnote ⁴⁴

V

The outbreak of war in September 1939 led to an eight-year hiatus. In the summer, Mayer was working with Rédier on the volume of unpublished letters while regularly corresponding with the London publishing firm J. M. Dent, who were preparing an English translation of his study of Tocqueville for publication. This book appeared in November.Footnote ⁴⁵ The French version was due to follow soon, but Gallimard, which had relocated to Normandy by October, were highly critical of the translation that Mayer had paid for, and in April 1940 they recommended a new translator.Footnote ⁴⁶ Then, around this time, Mayer’s correspondence with Rédier, Gallimard, and Jean de Tocqueville largely ground to a halt and would not be resumed until the war had ended.

Gallimard continued to correspond with Monnier about his work on the new edition of Souvenirs, which was published in 1942, but Mayer became absorbed in a plethora of other activities. In late 1939, he joined a subgroup of the London-based think tank Political and Economic Planning that was tasked with producing reports for the government on postwar reconstruction. In 1942, he began teaching classes for the Worker’s Educational Association and in the same year he started working for a division of the Ministry of Economic Warfare responsible for assessing the effectiveness of propaganda aimed at the German population. The following year, with the help of Laski, he secured a twelve-month contract with the LSE to conduct research into British political parties within the Department of Government, which Laski headed. He also published slim volumes on Max Weber and on French political thought during the war years, and he began conducting his pioneering research into the effects of film viewing on audiences, which would culminate in his 1946 book Sociology of Film.Footnote ⁴⁷

Towards the end of 1945, Mayer reestablished contact with Gallimard. He had hired the translator they had recommended to translate his book on Tocqueville and they now agreed to edit the translated text and publish it, though they warned him that the production time for books in France was lengthy due to a lack of paper.Footnote ⁴⁸ In May 1946, Brice Parain of Gallimard informed him that the book was soon to be put into production and that they could probably send him proofs in the summer. He also said, “We would like to know if you have been able to resume the preparation of the edition of the Works of Tocqueville for which we had established, by mutual agreement, a publication program.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In his reply, Mayer expressed his readiness to continue with the plan and suggested they concentrate on the four volumes already discussed.Footnote ⁵⁰

By the autumn of 1947, however, Mayer had concocted a new and much more ambitious proposal. The four volumes of his 1939 proposal had now expanded to ten volumes. In addition to the new editions of La démocratie (volumes 1 and 2), Souvenirs, and L’ancien régime, he proposed two volumes of previously published correspondence, two further volumes of unpublished correspondence, and two volumes of political, economic, and literary documents. He estimated that all ten volumes could be completed by 1952.Footnote ⁵¹ The following month, Gallimard sent him a contract. The first clause was unequivocal: “Mr Peter Mayer undertakes to assume responsibility for the edition of the Complete Works of Tocqueville, to be published in ten volumes.”Footnote ⁵² In the letter of reply which he sent with the signed contract, dated 30 October 1947, Mayer wrote, “I am very happy with the conclusion of this matter and I hope that the publication of the complete works of TOCQUEVILLE will put in its true place a French classic and will bring us both the satisfaction of a justice rendered which will justify our efforts.”Footnote ⁵³

To continue with the project, it was, of course, necessary to gain access to the unpublished papers in the Tocqueville château. During the war, the château had been commandeered by the Nazis to serve as the headquarters of a military command. When the family returned following the German surrender, they found that much of the furniture and other contents of the building had been damaged or stolen. Fortunately, before the German invasion of Normandy in 1940, Jean de Tocqueville had had the good sense to arrange for all the Tocqueville papers to be moved to the Administration of National Archives. As the charter room where the papers had been stored was set on fire by the occupiers, by late 1946 the papers still remained with the National Archives while Jean de Tocqueville sought to repair the extensive damage to the château.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the meantime, Mayer labored on a new English edition of Souvenirs, which appeared in 1948 as The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville. The text was largely based on Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’s 1896 translation of the first edition of the book published in 1893 and edited by Jean de Tocqueville’s father, but Mayer had compared the translated text with the original French text and made many amendments. He also provided translations of the new material that Monnier had included in his 1942 edition of the work. Mayer dedicated the book to Jean de Tocqueville “with profound gratitude” and arranged for the Comte to be the recipient of the first copy.Footnote ⁵⁵

By the summer of 1948, the Tocqueville papers had finally been returned to the château, but the shelves in the charter room had still not been repaired and so the papers were stored in the room in forty wooden boxes.Footnote ⁵⁶ Nonetheless, in mid-September of that year Mayer was finally able to visit the château, where he was received by Jean de Tocqueville and his mother, the Comtesse Alix de Chastenet de Puységur (1875–1954), the widow of Christian de Tocqueville.

Mayer recounted his experiences at the château in an article entitled “Tocqueville at Home” which he delivered as a talk on the BBC’s Third Programme that was broadcast in January 1949.Footnote ⁵⁷ He spent the morning of his first day examining Tocqueville’s manuscripts in the writer’s study. Here he uncovered a vast quantity of unpublished papers and when he told Jean de Tocqueville that it would be essential to examine these papers before continuing to work on the Oeuvres complètes, the Comte said that Mayer could take them away to study in depth. He also handed Mayer two large files containing a complete inventory of the manuscripts. The next morning, Mayer perused the thousand or so volumes in Tocqueville’s working library that were arranged in piles across the attic floor. They included works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas Jefferson, and George Grote, as well as innumerable books and pamphlets related to his research for L’ancien régime.

Mayer and Jean de Tocqueville drew up a contract. It stipulated that the Comte would lend Mayer the Tocqueville papers in his capacity as general editor of the Oeuvres complètes and that they were to be housed at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France in Paris. Furthermore, for those volumes of the complete works that would make use of this material, Mayer would pay the Comte one third of the royalties he received from Gallimard.Footnote ⁵⁸ The next morning, Mayer and his assistant loaded their lorry with seventeen boxes of documents, which they took to the Institut de France, where Mayer and his colleagues would labor on them over the coming decades.

Mayer had been forced to leave many of the books and pamphlets of interest piled up in the attic room, but two years later he returned to the château and spent hours sorting through this additional material, assisted at times by Jean de Tocqueville’s eldest daughter. On this trip, he uncovered more unpublished writings. Some of these, such as a bundle of documents labelled “Discussion dans la Chambre le 11 Septembre 1840,” Mayer realized would give much insight into Tocqueville’s political activities. After four days at the château, he estimated that he had examined as many as eight thousand volumes and had set aside fifty yards of books to send to Paris. He elected to take with him in his suitcase an especially interesting selection of books and manuscripts.Footnote ⁵⁹

With contracts drawn up between Mayer, Gallimard, and Jean de Tocqueville, everything seemed to be set for a smooth ride. The Comte would lend Mayer the documents, Mayer would oversee the tasks of transcribing and editing them, and Gallimard would publish the resulting volumes. Mayer also began to form an editorial committee that initially included Laski, Rédier, Jean de Tocqueville, and Gaston Gallimard, as well as the French ambassador to London, René Varin, and the Sorbonne historians Pierre Renouvin (1893–1974) and Paul Vaucher (1874–1959).Footnote ⁶⁰ However, the relative harmony between the three main stakeholders in the project was soon to be disturbed when the French state became involved.

On 12 July 1949, a meeting was held at the Direction générale des arts et des lettres on the Quai d’Orsay to discuss how the editing and publication of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes should proceed. The attendees included Jacques Jaujard (1895–1967), director general of arts and letters at the Ministry of National Education; Louis Joxe (1901–91), director general of cultural relations at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Brice Parain as the representative of Gallimard; the historian Charles-Hippolyte Pouthas (1886–1974); and Mayer.Footnote ⁶¹ The conclusions they reached were presented to the minister of national education, who made the decision to establish a national commission to oversee the publication venture.Footnote ⁶² La commission nationale pour l’édition des oeuvres d’Alexis de Tocqueville was officially established on 11 January 1950 with Jaujard and Joxe as cochairmen.Footnote ⁶³ A subcommittee, the Comité de travail, chaired by Pouthas, was also set up that would be responsible for ensuring the editorial accuracy of the publications. André Jardin, a history teacher who had discovered Tocqueville after the war, was appointed the subcommittee’s secrétaire scientifique.Footnote ⁶⁴

Initially, Mayer was encouraged by the attention that the French government had decided to pay towards the great publishing enterprise that he had instigated and was now directing. At the meeting in July 1949, he was able to present to the assembled dignitaries some of the findings he had already made among the documents that were now gathered at the Institut de France, where he had been given an office. He wrote to his wife the following day, “I have been thinking again about yesterday’s meeting at the Quai D’Orsay and I really believe that I have achieved something of very far-reaching significance. They have never believed me, not even Jean de T., when I said that I have invaluable Foreign Office documents. But they see it NOW.”Footnote ⁶⁵ He was especially impressed by Pouthas, who he thought was “most charming.” “We had a fascinating discussion and I could not wish to have a finer and more tactful chairman,” he told his wife.Footnote ⁶⁶

Later that year, he confessed to her that “the immensity of this affair begins to weigh heavily on me,” but it was already bearing fruit.Footnote ⁶⁷ Not only had he uncovered the important Foreign Office documents, but by early 1950 he had also found fourteen letters from John Stuart Mill to Tocqueville, only seven of which were already known about, as well as around thirty from Henry Reeve, the English translator of La démocratie.Footnote ⁶⁸ Meanwhile, the new edition of La démocratie, comprising the first two of the ten proposed volumes, was already in print.

Another significant development was that, with the assistance of Laski and Varin, Mayer had secured some long-term funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York.Footnote ⁶⁹ The funds would be administered by the London-based National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). Mayer received the first cheque from the NIESR in March 1950.Footnote ⁷⁰ In April, he met Madame de Larminat, Beaumont’s great-granddaughter, and she invited him to visit the Beaumont château in the summer in order to examine the Tocqueville documents stored there.Footnote ⁷¹ Everything seemed to be falling into place. Following an intensive period of work on La démocratie, Mayer wrote in his journal,

However, it would not be long before relations between Mayer and the Comité de travail, especially the subcommittee’s “charming” chairman Pouthas, were irretrievably to be broken.

VI

From one angle, the deterioration in relations was inevitable. Mayer was an unlikely choice of editor of the works of such a renowned French writer, or indeed of any French writer. He was a native German-speaker and had only learned French as a second language in school.Footnote ⁷³ Furthermore, he became a British citizen in 1950 and the whole time he labored on the Tocqueville papers at the Institut de France, his home was in the village of Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire. When he was working in Paris, he would lodge with friends or stay in hotels. As Mélonio has pointed out, the fact that he ended up editing the Frenchman’s works, and that he did so with the support of American and British institutions, dramatically underscores Tocqueville’s marginality in the French intellectual world of the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ⁷⁴ By the outbreak of the war, a Tocqueville revival was already underway in the Anglosphere, initiated by White’s report in 1922 of the unpublished manuscripts he had discovered in the Tocqueville château and given extra impetus by the publication, first, of Pierson’s monumental study Tocqueville and Beaumont in America in 1938 and then of the English translation of Mayer’s study of Tocqueville the following year, almost a decade before the French translation was finally published. The revival in the United States was cemented by Phillips Bradley’s new edition of Democracy in America published by Knopf in 1945. Indeed, Pierson could say in 1955 that “for the past twenty years we have been in the midst of a Tocqueville revival.”Footnote ⁷⁵

But by the end of the 1940s, there was something of a Tocqueville revival occurring in mainland Europe as well. “From the late 1940s,” wrote Martina Steber, “the West German public witnessed an explosion of interest in Tocqueville’s works.”Footnote ⁷⁶ In 1943, the Italian historian Benedetto Croce published an article on Tocqueville, and then in 1949 Tocqueville’s writings began to be taught at the Italian Institute for Historical Studies, which Croce had founded three years earlier.Footnote ⁷⁷ Monnier’s new edition of Souvenirs, which appeared in 1942, had sparked a resurgence of interest in Tocqueville in his native country, but Gallimard included the book in their Mémoires du passé pour servir au temps présent series—an indication that readings of Tocqueville in France still very much confined him to the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁸ It was partly the multifarious failures of Marxism that were evident by the 1950s—the failure to bring an end to capitalism, to prevent the rise of fascism in Western Europe, to resist the Soviet Union’s descent into Stalinism—that led European intellectuals around this time to seek a new prophet for the postwar world, an antidote to fanaticism, and a staunch defender of moderation.

The French government’s late but increasingly vested interest in Tocqueville is a reflection of this changing intellectual landscape characterized by a growing patriotic nationalism. When attention was cast towards Tocqueville, it became problematic that a German-born Englishman was editing the great Frenchman’s complete works. A state intervention was deemed necessary. As a 1952 memo in the Gallimard archives put it, “The Department of Cultural Relations, concerned to see an Englishman (Peter Mayer) directing an edition of Tocqueville’s Complete Works, proposed the creation of a ‘Commission Nationale pour l’édition des Oeuvres de Tocqueville’ alongside a ‘Comité de travail’.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The enterprise needed to be explicitly French and it was evident that Mayer did not fit.

Ostensibly, relations between Mayer and the Comité de travail broke down over disagreements about the form in which the new edition of L’ancien régime should be published. Pouthas and the subcommittee’s secretary, Jardin, believed that the original text of the work should be published in the same volume as the variants of the text that Jardin had been compiling from Tocqueville’s unpublished writings. Mayer, on the other hand, felt it was better for there to be two separate volumes, one containing the original text, the other the variants. Mayer also wanted to include an annotated bibliography in one of the volumes, as he had for La démocratie, but Pouthas insisted in a letter to Mayer dated July 1951 that this was “impossible” because L’ancien régime, unlike La démocratie, was a work of history, not sociology.Footnote ⁸⁰ Clearly incensed by this letter, instead of replying directly to Pouthas, Mayer responded by writing to Jardin, in English, and declaring he was going to publish L’ancien régime as two separate volumes. He also included a barbed comment aimed at Pouthas: “I shall and must disregard any interference of the chairman of the Comité de Travail with the executive decision of the director of the Edition.”Footnote ⁸¹

Pouthas, having been informed by Jardin of the contents of this letter, responded with an irate letter of his own in which he insisted that Mayer had already agreed in a meeting to one volume, and so he found it “unacceptable and incorrect, to put it mildly” that Mayer had suddenly changed his mind about this and had told Pouthas to stop interfering in his decisions. Pouthas ended the letter with an acerbic paragraph in which he indicated that he and Mayer might not be able to work together at all given that Mayer was ignoring agreements previously made.Footnote ⁸²

The dispute, however, was not just between Mayer and the subcommittee members. Parain also wrote a letter to Mayer around this time in which he said that Jardin had come to the Gallimard offices to express his dissatisfaction with the decision Gallimard had made to publish L’ancien régime as two volumes. According to Parain, Jardin felt that by not including his editorial notes on the variants of the text with the original text itself, Gallimard were seeking to undermine his contributions; he was reported to be unsure about whether to continue working on the project. Parain suggested to Mayer that diplomacy was the best policy and they should concede some ground to Jardin in order to keep the peace. But in his reply Mayer insisted there should be two separate volumes and that a bibliography must be included to ensure the commercial success of the edition. He was unwilling to yield even an inch to what he called “the Pouthas–Jardin diktat.”Footnote ⁸³

Pouthas met with Jean de Tocqueville around this time and they discussed the fracas. The Comte, as he reported in a letter to Mayer, believed that the opposing points of view could be reconciled if all parties endeavored to have their horses pull the cart in the same direction (his own metaphor). But if Pouthas had hoped Jean de Tocqueville was going to acknowledge the subcommittee’s executive superiority, he was to be disappointed. “As I said to Mr Pouthas,” the Comte told Mayer, “it seems to me that the Mayer–Gallimard tandem outweighs the Comité de patronage group (and its offshoot, the Comité de travail) in terms of seniority—and financial responsibility, not to mention the contribution of my unpublished works.”Footnote ⁸⁴ It was significant that he used the term “Comité de patronage,” indicating that he felt the body to be unhelpfully representing illegitimate interests.

Of course, the cause of the fracas was not really the disagreement over whether there should be one volume of L’ancien régime or two; it was, rather, the lack of clarity about who had executive control over the publication venture: Pouthas, in his capacity as the chairman of the Comité de travail, or Mayer, as the director of publishing. Mayer made this explicit in a memo, entitled “Notes on my difficulties with M. Pouthas,” which he wrote in English in advance of a meeting with the chairman of the British Franco Cultural Relations Committee after the French ambassador, René Massigli (1888–1988), had informed the British government that Pouthas and all the members of the Comité de travail were threatening to resign.

After insisting that the national commission and its subcommittee had only a consultative function, Mayer complained in this memo that Pouthas “almost immediately attempted to assume an executive function by directing almost exclusively M. Jardin’s work and by trying to obtain direct contact with the publishers.” Because of such underhand acts, Mayer stated that he could “see no point in my working either with M. Pouthas or with M. Jardin,” though he ended the memo by saying that he was willing to meet with the commission “to discuss possibilities of overcoming the impasse created by the ambition” of Pouthas and Jardin.Footnote ⁸⁵

The “difficulties” reached a tentative resolution following a two-hour meeting between Jaujard, Joxe, Varin, Jean de Tocqueville, and Mayer (among others) in which Mayer presented a document detailing what he believed should be the respective rights and responsibilities of the national commission and the director of publishing.Footnote ⁸⁶ This document was discussed by the attendees and then subsequently amended into a list of working rules in January 1952. The rules stipulated that the Comité de travail was responsible for drawing up the plan for the publication of the volumes, ensuring the editorial accuracy of the work, and monitoring its progress. While this appeared to give an executive role to the subcommittee, the document also stipulated that the director of publishing (i.e. Mayer) must be kept up to date on the progress of the work and informed of any new discoveries of Tocqueville documents. Mayer was also given the power to convene the Comité de travail if he wished. Attached as an appendix to the rules was an extract from a letter by Jean de Tocqueville in which he gave several conditions governing the disclosure of the unpublished documents held by the Institut de France. One of these was that the contents of any document could only be disclosed to a party outside the national commission subject to the prior agreements of Jean de Tocqueville and Mayer.Footnote ⁸⁷

At the end of January, Mayer confessed in his journal,

Mayer often framed these power struggles in terms of Anglo-Gallic rivalry. In the same journal entry, he wrote, “I often walked around Paris alienated and apathetic, so absorbed was I in the relentless jealousy of my colleagues. I had never thought that French scholars could be so petty and unobjective.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In his memo, he had described Pouthas’s and Jardin’s “behaviour” as being “contrary to all British experience,”Footnote ⁹⁰ and repeated the claim in a letter to his contact at the NIESR:

Casting this fight, which continued intermittently for decades, as French–British rivalry is, of course, too simplistic. There may have been among the members of the national commission some concern, perhaps some regret, that the position of publishing director of the works of such a significant French thinker had fallen to someone who was not a French national, did not speak French as a first language, and did not live in France. But Mayer had contracts with, and the support of, both Jean de Tocqueville and Gaston Gallimard and they both seemed to regard him as qualified for the role. Indeed, the rivalry could often be better understood as one between the commission on the one hand and the triumvirate of the publishing director, the publisher, and the owner of the Tocqueville documents on the other.

In July 1952, Gaston Gallimard wrote to Joxe, who was then copresident of the national commission along with Jaujard, to complain that Jaujard had written to him in an unacceptable tone. The locus of dispute was again concerning whether L’ancien régime should be published as one volume or two. So upset was Gallimard over what he perceived as Jaujard’s lack of courtesy that he felt “it is no longer possible for me to collaborate with him and I must give up publishing the Works of Alexis de TOCQUEVILLE under the patronage of the National Commission.”Footnote ⁹² In a separate letter to Jaujard, Gallimard railed, “I didn’t have to wait for you to publish Alexis de TOCQUEVILLE—I didn’t and don’t need your Committees and Commissions.”Footnote ⁹³ Joxe had to write a conciliatory reply to appease him.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the same month, Pouthas wrote to Jean de Tocqueville to lodge “complaints about the conditions of our collaboration with M. Peter Mayer” and to ask the Comte “to warn M. Peter Mayer, if you see fit, not to use your name and your decisions, as he is constantly doing, to cover up his own.” Pouthas enclosed several letters from Mayer to Jardin “in which he makes threats that I find ridiculous and laughable.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Jean de Tocqueville’s response was a display of unalloyed loyalty to his friend. In particular, he informed Pouthas, “I think I should remind you that my arrangements with M. PETER MAYER are not a matter of concern to third parties, since they were made (under conditions of the utmost disinterestedness on the part of M. PETER MAYER) well before the National Committee was created and even more so well before I was called to sit on it.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Relations remained dreadful throughout the decade. In November 1959, Mayer wrote to his wife from Paris that he was “liquidating the edition,” though it would take two years, he reported, “to complete the process of a slow and undignified death.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In fact, Mayer remained involved while feeling increasingly sidelined. His name might appear on the cover of a new volume of the Oeuvres complètes as “sous la direction de J.-P. Mayer,” but in practice Jardin and numerous other editors were responsible for new work. The last time Mayer’s name appeared on an edition was in 1977, with the correspondence between Tocqueville and Louis de Kergorlay published as the second volume of the thirteenth tome of the Oeuvres complètes. Despite the despondent letter to his wife in 1959, he clung on. It was, after all, his life’s work.

Mayer was only finally ousted from his role as editor in chief after the deaths of Jean de Tocqueville in 1974 and Gaston Gallimard a year later. In 1979, French prime minister Raymond Barre was informed that those who were overseeing the publication of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes were encountering various obstacles that were retarding the project’s progress and preventing its completion. As a result, he authorized a restructuring of the national commission: it would now be placed under the auspices of the Centre national des lettres, which would be responsible for selecting commission members, while Raymond Aron, whose 1967 study Les étapes de la pensée sociologique had inserted Tocqueville into the canon of French political thought, would be its president.Footnote ⁹⁸ This newly organized commission decided in October 1979 that those who were collaborating on the volumes should henceforth only report to Aron or, acting on Aron’s behalf, Jardin. In other words, once the national commission had signed off on the manuscripts, they should be published regardless of the opinions of Mayer or the publisher.Footnote ⁹⁹ Unsurprisingly, Mayer felt that such a reorganization of executive responsibilities was “unacceptable as it would make me as Editor-in-chief powerless,” and he wrote to Aron threatening legal action.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In a letter to Gallimard, he said, “I am under the impression that he [Aron] and his collaborators intend to take over my Tocqueville Edition. I have a Contract with Gallimard and the French Government has no legal claim on this Contract.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nonetheless, in April the following year, Gaston Gallimard’s son, Claude, abruptly wrote to Mayer to inform him that, because of the national commission’s restructuring, Gallimard had no choice but to terminate their contract with him. Mayer responded with more threats of legal action, though ultimately they came to nothing.Footnote ¹⁰²

From this point on, the publication venture continued with little input from its instigator. Following Aron’s death in 1983, François Furet took over the presidency of the national commission, and then, when he died in 1997, the mantle was passed to Jean-Claude Casanova. Meanwhile, upon Jardin’s death in 1996, the role of secrétaire scientifique was inherited by Mélonio. She and Casanova saw the project to its long-overdue completion in 2021.Footnote ¹⁰³

VII

Mayer’s fractious relationship with the national commission, and his eventual loss of control over the project, personified one of the chief concerns of his intellectual life: the crushing of the individual by the state. In the writings of his later years, he often referred to the phenomenon of Vermassung—signifying a loss of identity or individuality—which he saw as a peculiar discontent of modern mass society. He believed that Tocqueville, unlike Marx, had adopted Vermassung as a point of departure, recognizing that it represented an existential problem that could not be solved by reconstituting the social or economic system. But how, then, could it be solved? While Tocqueville had asked the right questions, it was in Mayer’s view up to current thinkers to formulate new solutions. And yet he despaired of the ability of his contemporaries to solve what he saw as the problem of the interconnection between the state and the loss of individuality. In his book on Weber, Mayer had asked, “How can the individual maintain his independence in the presence of this total bureaucratization of our life?” That, he said, became the guiding theme of Weber’s sociology.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It was a major theme of Mayer’s own life too.

Mayer’s interactions with the national commission, and its subcommittee, led him to develop an antipathy to state bureaucracy, but also to blame French scholars for their conformism. In his journal, he held that even a lofty goal like editing Tocqueville’s papers would inevitably become contaminated by “the pettiness of our contemporary life.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For a period, he was more optimistic about the cultures to be found in the United States, where, from 1959, he began to spend more time. The way he was received and treated at American universities contrasted greatly with his interactions with French academics. “It’s overwhelming how friendly and hospitable they all are towards me,” he told his wife after an event at the University of Washington.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ He was also impressed with the “wonderful” students he encountered in the States. He felt that American universities were more willing to give him the freedom to pursue his own projects, although a permanent professorship failed to materialize.

The function of Tocqueville’s thought had changed for Mayer by the 1950s. In his 1939 book Prophet of the Mass Age, he had criticized Laski for classifying Tocqueville as a liberal, but by the 1950s Tocqueville had become for Mayer “a liberal of a new kind.” He believed that Tocqueville had dedicated his life to creating the proper culture for free states. In 1958, when Mayer was discussing the possibility of releasing a new edition of his Tocqueville book, it was this element he emphasized, meaning that the conclusion had to be rewritten from scratch.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The following year, in an article entitled “Tocqueville Today,” Mayer argued that Tocqueville’s new liberalism derived from the recognition that rights relied upon duties, the national cultures of sustaining liberty: “A careful distinction between political rights and duties gives Tocqueville’s political thinking its contemporary relevance, for no one can assert with certainty that any modern national society we can see, has achieved a proper balance between rights and duties. The problem remains as salient and as urgent as in Tocqueville’s times.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In the 1970s, he made the same point in a conference paper entitled “Reflections on Equality,” stating that Tocqueville had recognized that democratic societies could end up being either free or unfree depending on their political cultures and the private lives of the people. The dangers that might bring about the latter condition were not just the tyranny of the state but also problems relating to culture, such as the values people adopted, the art they consumed, and how they spent their time:

Again, Mayer emphasized society’s “stifling conformism.” He discussed Weber’s idea that the threat to freedom can come from a “bureaucratic caste,” but he criticized Weber for having “failed to see the conformist powers which such a ‘bureaucratic democracy’ could have, and has, brought into play.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

In 1976, Mayer was asked to write a study of values by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan (1909–2000), and that became his main focus for the following years. In 1978, he said that one of the goals of the values project would be to help people “overcome the nauseating and negative influences of our over-bureaucratised, conformist and materialist societies.”Footnote ¹¹¹ This was his ideal, to be a Tocqueville figure himself, but he despaired of the possibility of success. In fact, the previous year he had confessed to Arthur Adkins, one of his collaborators on the project, that he had made little progress with it and had not even bothered to contact Coggan for a while “because I am very pessimistic about the general moral climate and the outlook of this country and this nation.”Footnote ¹¹² In 1983, he wrote a letter to The Times in response to an article asserting that the individual had become dehumanized, making it vital for leaders to speak up for the individual. Mayer said he agreed, but added, “I wonder whether we have not ‘progressed’ so far that the individual hardly exists anymore.”Footnote ¹¹³ He went into great detail about the values book, which he was still working on, and ended the letter by saying, “I am now actively engaged in the preparation of this book for publication and I hope enough strength is given me to complete it.” It remained unfinished at his death.

VIII

The ignominious end to his tenure as the editor in chief of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes was only the latest of many unpalatable experiences Mayer felt he had in dealing with stifling bureaucracies and the tortuous politics of organizations. By the time he began working on the Tocqueville papers, frustration and disillusionment had led him to sever ties with an array of organizations he had worked for since arriving in England in 1936: the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Worker’s Educational Association, Political and Economic Planning, and the LSE. In 1942, he wrote (in a language he had not yet mastered) the following to an old friend from his Berlin days:

It initially seemed that his Tocqueville project would grant him the autonomy he craved. Jean de Tocqueville and Gaston Gallimard put their faith in him as the publishing director, and he swiftly formed an editorial committee composed of a few good friends, including, in later years, R. H. Tawney, Lewis Namier, and Isaiah Berlin, who could offer him intellectual support and guidance. But with the intervention of the French state soon after the project’s inception, he found himself once more entangled in exhausting political feuds.

Mayer did not live to see the eighty-years-later fulfilment of the publishing enterprise that he had set in motion. Up until the end of his life, he remained proud of what he had accomplished, though bitter about how he felt he had been usurped. In 1989, his health in decline, he told a friend who had asked him how many books of the complete works had been sold worldwide, “I must have published some 3 million volumes by and on Tocqueville: in the U.K., U.S.A., France, Germany, Japan, etc.” That same year, when another friend asked him if he had read the recently published English translation of Jardin’s biography of Tocqueville, Mayer knowingly responded, “I would much rather not comment upon it, since mine would be bound to be a highly biased view.” But then in a postscript he added that he had just looked at the French version of the book again and was incensed to note there were no acknowledgments of his work on the Tocqueville volumes that he had edited. “It is obvious,” he ended the letter, “that the book gives the impression that the founder/editor of the Oeuvres Completes and related books and studies on Tocqueville does not exist!”Footnote ¹¹⁵

The reception of the works of most significant authors is one of continual contestation regarding interpretation. This has unquestionably been the case for Tocqueville. Yet the major works of recent times agree on the significance of Tocqueville for the present, especially with the contemporary crisis of liberalism.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In other words, Mayer’s perspective is being restated, even if he has largely been excised from the story. He failed, too, to complete Tocqueville-inspired books on the cultures of liberty and died deeply pessimistic about the future of democratic free states.