For eight years now, the Château de Tocqueville has hosted the Conversations Tocqueville — two days of wide-ranging discussion in Normandy, in a landscape of soft fields running down to the sea. This is the family home where Alexis de Tocqueville lived and wrote some of the most lucid pages in the history of democratic theory. Stéphanie and Jean-Guillaume de Tocqueville (Jean-Guillaume is president of the Tocqueville Foundation) welcomed us with a warmth and generosity that turned a series of conferences into something more: genuine conversation, in the fullest sense of the word. The “Conversations”, co-organised by the Foundation and Laure Mandeville of Le Figaro, bring together a remarkably varied cast each year: historians and philosophers specialising in Tocqueville, journalists, politicians, among them Benjamin Haddad, France's Minister for Europe, Francois-Xavier Bellamy and former Prime Ministers Bernard Cazeneuve and Enrico Letta, diplomats, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and, in a choice that is both symbolic and substantive, a lively group of students from the College of Europe in Bruges and the University of St. Andrews, three of whom are given the closing word of the entire event. A fitting decision: Tocqueville himself was just 25 when he set out on his long and arduous journey to the United States, officially tasked with studying the prison system.

The overarching question this year was: if Tocqueville returned today, what would he see? Quite a lot that he had already predicted. The soft tyranny of the majority. The individualismo that isolates citizens and leaves them vulnerable to manipulation. The risk of a non-violent but pervasive despotism exercised by the bureaucratic state. He would see Western democracies convulsed by populisms that are — as he had intuited — the rational response of citizens from whom genuine spaces of participation have been taken away. And he would see in Trump's America the most visible expression of the same phenomenon: the instrumental use of democratic forms to hollow out democratic substance.

Then there are things less commonly associated with him, at least, things I was less aware of. Travelling through the vast forests of Michigan and across the American plains, Tocqueville had already grasped the devastating impact of the "new world" on nature: the advance of colonisation destroying landscapes, ecosystems, ways of life that had existed for millennia. There was no condemnation in his prose, only a kind of anticipated grief for a loss that we today can see fully realised.

Tocqueville had also understood that American federalism is not a technical arrangement for distributing competences between levels of government, but a political stroke of genius in response to a genuinely hard question: how do you build a system capable of acting at whatever scale a problem requires, from the most local to the most global, without losing democratic legitimacy and rootedness at any level? As a French aristocrat, son of a father who had narrowly escaped the guillotine during the Terror, and acutely aware that Europe was nowhere near the degree of democratic equality that made such a system possible, Tocqueville understood its advantages as clearly as its tensions and limits. He offered no solutions. He observed, with rare visionary acuity, what was at stake.

I took part in Panel 6, dedicated to local democracy as a school of civic life, a phrase that is Tocqueville's own, from pages that have lost none of their substance on the kind of freedom that genuine local and associative participation can produce. The panel was moderated by Britta Sandberg, European correspondent of Der Spiegel, and included Fabien Aufrechter, the young and impressive mayor of Verneuil-sur-Seine, not by coincidence: the first mayor of Verneuil after the French Revolution was Hervé de Tocqueville, Alexis's father, and the town organised one of France's first local referendums in 2020 to block a road project threatening a forest. They won. Tocqueville would have approved. Also on the panel: Vincent Maître, Swiss National Councillor, bringing the experience of a federal system that Tocqueville had identified as one of the rare European examples of functioning local freedom; and Bill O'Dowd, founder of Dolphin Entertainment and member of the Leadership Council of United Way, the world's largest charitable network.

My central argument was that local democracy only becomes a genuine school of freedom when it is embedded in a multi-level system in which every level is transparent, legitimate, and capable of protecting citizens. Without that integration, proximity can produce clientelism just as easily as civic engagement. Tocqueville knew this well: local government needs a broader system to sustain it.

And this is where a concept Tocqueville developed becomes particularly relevant today: l’intérêt bien entendu, self-interest properly understood. You do not need to be virtuous to serve the common good. You simply need to understand your own long-term interest, which includes the health of the institutions and the community you live in. It is a secular, realist vision of civic life: it does not ask citizens to be angels, it asks them to be far-sighted, aware that their own interest can coincide with the general one.

The European Green Deal is a compelling illustration. Contrary to what fossil fuel lobbyists and climate sceptics like to claim, it did not fall from the sky. It was the product of a chain: science, media, months of young people in the streets, Fridays for Future, not against governments but demanding that they move, an electoral impact that forced politics to respond, and finally legislative translation at European and national level, despite the current stop-and-go. That framework created new markets, new companies, new jobs at local level, in communities that had been waiting for regulatory certainty before they could invest and act. Renewable energy communities are a direct corollary: citizens associating to produce energy, manage common goods, reduce costs collectively. It works where a clear legal and financial framework, a cooperative culture sustained by effective local institutions, and local media capable of explaining the benefits all exist at once. Where any one of these is missing, the mobilisation stalls.

Natura 2000 may be the most eloquent example of all. Over twenty years, local communities across Europe have used the Habitats Directive to block infrastructure projects that their own national governments had already approved. Small associations, local activists, sometimes a single determined mayor, they won because European law gave them standing and European courts gave them remedy. Without the European level, those battles would have been lost. And when that level chose to weaken its own tools, the victories dried up.

The cases where the chain breaks are equally instructive. Orbán's Hungary dismantled democracy piece by piece: first Parliament and the independent media, especially local outlets, handed to friends, then civil society organisations through legislation targeting foreign-funded NGOs, then the resources of local governments, then the courts. Orbán understood, better than many defenders of democracy, that the system is a chain. Break enough links and everything collapses. The forms remain, and in Hungary's case, they proved just enough to channel, after sixteen long years, what remained of the democratic spirit into a real electoral victory.

So let us resist the romantic idea of the local as an automatically more citizen-friendly space: proximity is as often a source of clientelism and inefficiency as of genuine participation. What is needed is to strengthen civil society, institutions at every level, a free and serious press, and the national and European legislative framework that connects them, simultaneously, as parts of a single ecosystem. Weaken one, and you weaken the rest. Tocqueville died at 53 in Cannes in 1859, of tuberculosis, with L'Ancien Régime unfinished on his desk. He had spent his final years away from active politics, he had refused to back Louis-Napoleon's coup, and bonapartist France had no place for him. He was melancholic, yes. But he was not a pessimist in any true sense: he believed that democratic freedom was possible, indeed necessary, however difficult and never guaranteed. Two centuries on, that remains his most important lesson.

https://tocquevillefoundation.org/conversations-tocqueville/