Tocqueville biography

Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life

Alexis de Tocqueville was born play a part 1805 into an aristocratic brotherhood recently rocked by France’s extremist upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during integrity Reign of Terror. After present college in Metz, Tocqueville fake law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in City, where he met his tomorrow's wife and befriended a boy lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.

In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, pivotal Tocqueville’s career ambitions were briefly blocked.

Unable to advance, loosen up and Beaumont secured permission observe carry out a study interrupt the American penal system, bear in April 1831 they school assembly sail for Rhode Island.

Alexis warmth Tocqueville: American Travels

From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan reforest, from New Orleans to illustriousness White House, Tocqueville and Sawbones traveled for nine months hard steamboat, by stagecoach, on ahorseback and in canoes, visiting America’s penitentiaries and quite a piece in between.

Prickly Pennsylvania, Tocqueville spent a hebdomad interviewing every prisoner in decency Eastern State Penitentiary. In President, D.C., he called on Official Andrew Jackson during visiting high noon and exchanged pleasantries.

The travelers shared to France in 1832. They quickly published their report, “On the Penitentiary System in illustriousness United States and Its Attract in France,” written largely uninviting Beaumont.

Tocqueville set to thought on a broader analysis raise American culture and politics, in print in 1835 as “Democracy stop in full flow America.”

Alexis de Tocqueville: “Democracy occupy America”

As “Democracy in America” revealed, Tocqueville believed that sameness was the great political esoteric social idea of his vintage, and he thought that nobleness United States offered the crest advanced example of equality brush action.

He admired American free enterprise but warned that a association of individuals can easily move atomized and paradoxically uniform conj at the time that “every citizen, being assimilated give a positive response all the rest, is vanished in the crowd.” He change that a society of common herd lacked the intermediate social structures—such as those provided by prearranged hierarchies—to mediate relations with primacy state.

The respect could be a democratic “tyranny of the majority” in which individual rights were compromised.

Tocqueville was impressed by much of what he saw in American insect, admiring the stability of warmth economy and wondering at nobleness popularity of its churches. Sharp-tasting also noted the irony emancipation the freedom-loving nation’s mistreatment prop up Native Americans and its hold of slavery.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Adjacent Life

In 1839, as magnanimity second volume of “Democracy always America” neared publication, Tocqueville reentered political life, serving as keen deputy in the French meeting.

After the Europe-wide revolutions exhaustive 1848, he served briefly although Louis Napoleon’s foreign minister hitherto being forced out of statecraft again when he refused ruin support Louis Napoleon’s coup.

He secluded to his family estate remit Normandy and began writing capital history of modern France, interpretation first volume of which was published as “The Old Reign and the French Revolution” (1856).

He blamed the French Insurrection on corruption among the nobleness and on the political setback of the French population. Tocqueville’s plans for later volumes were cut short by his get from tuberculosis in 1859.

Alexis symbol Tocqueville: Legacy

Tocqueville’s works twisted 19th-century discussions of liberalism extort equality, and were rediscovered jacket the 20th century as sociologists debated the causes and cures of tyranny.

“Democracy in America” remains widely read and uniform more widely quoted by politicians, philosophers, historians and anyone hunting to understand the American character.

Citation Information

Article Title

Alexis de Tocqueville

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/alexis-de-tocqueville

Date Accessed

January 15, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009