Curator of Modern European Books and Manuscripts

Heavily worked over, corrected, overlaid with scribbles on scraps of paper cut and pasted onto its ragged pages, the original working draft of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America looked like “rubbish” when it first arrived at Yale in May 1954—in fact, parts of it came wrapped in butcher paper that was even labeled as such. It certainly did not look like what history professor George Wilson Pierson and University Librarian Jim Babb were expecting to find: a fair copy of the finished manuscript, which Pierson had seen decades earlier at the family chateau in Tocqueville.

By the time the manuscript was transferred to the newly built Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library 10 years later, however, librarians and scholars recognized it as something infinitely more valuable: a sustained glimpse into Tocqueville’s mind in the act of composing one of the most brilliant analyses of American political culture ever produced by a foreign observer. A cornerstone of Beinecke’s Modern European collections, it has kept scholars and editors busy collating, comparing, and working to untangle the author’s creative process ever since.

Acquired through the Edwin J. Beinecke Book Fund 77 years later, in May 2021, the original working draft of Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized resembles Toqueville’s “rubbish” in some respects. Both are written in French, both bear astute commentary on the complex political culture of a colonial (or postcolonial) society overseas, and both reveal a messy compositional process that seemed not to have changed much in a century or more. Yet they also show how much has changed—not only in the time between the writing of these texts, but also between the moments of their acquisition.

One manuscript was written by a French aristocrat looking for lessons in a successful democracy crafted by the ruling elites of a former British colony; the other was written by an “Arab Jew” (as Memmi like to call himself) with an insider’s view of life on the ground under French colonial rule in a country still struggling to win its independence.

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