More than three-quarters of a century after it was first commissioned, the project to publish Alexis de Tocqueville’s Oeuvres complètes  remains, ironically, incomplete. He only lived to be fifty-three. He composed almost everything he wrote over little more than twenty-five years. It is difficult to be sure who is to blame most for this lamentably sluggish progress. There are so many deserving candidates for opprobrium. Countless editors at the Commission Nationale; generations of directors at Gallimard; time-serving bureaucrats and flunkies at the Centre National des Lettre, and perhaps especially the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: all have a lot to answer for. Such otherwise inexcusable professional procrastination cannot be wholly blamed on that tendency to state-sponsored inertia for which the French are famous. Even academic infighting—scarcely unknown in this case—explains only so much. In fairness, it is not as if nothing has been done. Since 1951, eighteen so-called Tomes have been wholly or partially finished. More than thirty separate volumes within these Tomes have appeared. Moreover, tardiness of production has often proved the result as much of unanticipated riches as of unfinished tasks. The original “plan” for the Oeuvres complètes envisaged seven tomes and fourteen volumes. That probably could have been finished, perhaps a generation ago.

Put another way, delay in matters of scholarship may have its merits. That has certainly proved true in this instance. Tocqueville’s principal publications—Democracy in America, Souvenirs,