Losing control of Tocqueville: J. P. Mayer and the genesis of Gallimard’s Œuvres complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville

In June 2021, the last of the eighteen volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Œuvres complètes was published by Éditions Gallimard. This mammoth publishing venture had been set in motion more than seventy years earlier by Jacob Peter Mayer, a German-Jewish writer, sometime socialist and anti-Nazi activist, who had fled to England in 1936. Mayer moved from seeing Marx as the source of solutions to world problems to describing Tocqueville as the ‘prophet of mass democracy’. Mayer held that Tocqueville’s insights into democracy, fanaticism, international relations, equality and revolution were more relevant to the nation states of the post-war era than any other author. Mayer commenced a mission, supported by Gallimard and the Tocqueville family, to publish all of Tocqueville’s writings, intended both to make his work more accessible but also to underscore its contemporary relevance.

Making use of unpublished letters and documents from Mayer’s own papers as well as from the archives of Gallimard, this article tells the story of how Mayer came to direct the publication of Tocqueville’s complete works. It highlights the importance of his friendship with Tocqueville’s great grandnephew, Comte Jean de Tocqueville, who gave him access to the French writer’s unpublished papers, and it details the early disputes he had with the national commission that was set up by the French government to oversee the project. The article also describes how he eventually lost control of the project – he was certain because of French nationalism - after thirty years as editor-in-chief, an outcome reflecting his growing pessimism about the prospects of the free states of the West. His experience of editing Tocqueville confirmed in his eyes that free states lacked democratic cultures sufficient to sustain them.