Losing Control of Tocqueville: J. P. Mayer and the Genesis of Gallimard’s Oeuvres complètes d’Alexis de Tocqueville

In June 2021, the last of the eighteen tomes of Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes was published by Gallimard. This project had been instigated more than seventy years earlier by Jacob Peter Mayer, a German Jewish writer who had fled to England in 1936. Mayer believed that Tocqueville’s insights into democracy, fanaticism, and revolution were more relevant to the nation-states of the postwar era than those of any other writer, and so he embarked upon a mission to publish Tocqueville’s complete works to underscore their contemporary relevance. Utilizing many unpublished documents, this article tells the story of how Mayer came to direct the publishing venture, how he battled with the national commission that was set up by the French government to oversee it, and how he eventually lost control of the project after thirty years as editor in chief. His experience confirmed in his eyes that free states lacked democratic cultures sufficient to sustain them.