All but the Form is Serious'. Slavery, Racism and Democracy in Gustave de Beaumont’s 'Marie

This paper examines Gustave de Beaumont’s often neglected political thought as expressed in his 1835 novel Marie, ou de l’esclavage aux États-Unis. Despite being most commonly seen as a sort of “addendum” to Alexis de Tocqueville’s thought, Marie entails original and stimulating social and political views. I argue that these views can be read as fragments of a consistent theoretical pattern, a dizygotic twin of Tocqueville’s better-known “liberalisme d’espece nouvelle”. In order to test this hypothesis I focus my analysis on three of Marie’s main themes: slavery, race, and political democracy. I argue that, through the novel’s narrative form, Beaumont both displays a keen analysis of slavery (rejecting its understanding as a negative condition – that is, as something flourishing within legal voids – and highlighting instead the deliberate political efforts which allow its perpetration) and a constructivist conception of race belonging. Nonetheless, by intertwining Pascal’s dualism between coeur and raison and Montesquieu’s dialectic between moeurs and lois, Beaumont proposes a distinctly conservative declination of the “tyranny of the majority” theory, suggesting that only a monarchic political power is strong enough to protect minorities from popular hate. As a whole, Marie’s liberalism seems at the same time more socially progressive and more politically conservative than Tocqueville’s, showing an originality which suggests an opportunity for further study.