Portrait of Charles-Henri-Alexis de Tocqueville Clerel (Paris 1805-Cannes 1859), French philosopher and historian. Painting by Theodore Chasseriau (1818-1856). Versailles, Château De Versailles (Photo by DeAgostini)
School period
Gallery of Alexis de Tocqueville
12 Rue Saint-Vincent, 57000 Metz, France
Tocqueville attended the Lycée Fabert in Metz between 1817 and 1823.
College/University
Career
Gallery of Alexis de Tocqueville
Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859). Found in the collection of Musée de l'Histoire de France, Château de Versailles. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images)
Gallery of Alexis de Tocqueville
Illustration of Alexis de Tocqueville. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection)
Gallery of Alexis de Tocqueville
Lithograph of Alexis de Tocqueville. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection)
(As Democracy in America revealed, Tocqueville believed th...)
As Democracy in America revealed, Tocqueville believed that equality was the great political and social idea of his era, and he thought that the United States offered the most advanced example of equality in action.
(The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of r...)
The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of revolutionary France and the despotic rule it toppled. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) is an objective observer of both periods - providing a merciless critique of the ancien régime, with its venality, oppression, and inequality, yet acknowledging the reforms introduced under Louis XVI, and claiming that the post-Revolution state was in many ways as tyrannical as that of the King; its once lofty and egalitarian ideals corrupted and forgotten. Writing in the 1850s, Tocqueville wished to expose the return to despotism he witnessed in his own time under Napoleon III, by illuminating the grand, but ultimately doomed, call to liberty made by the French people in 1789. His eloquent and instructive study raises questions about liberty, nationalism, and justice that remain urgent today.
(The book The Old Regime and the Revolution analyzes Frenc...)
The book The Old Regime and the Revolution analyzes French society before the French Revolution and investigates the reasons to cause the Revolution. Tocqueville in the book continued developing his theory of continuity. He argued that although the French tried to build a government to be different from the old regime, they eventually circulated back to a powerful central government. Tocqueville's reasoning still remains as relevant today as it was then. This book is one of the most important ones about the deepest thoughts of democratic society by Tocqueville, one of the greatest thinkers of political economics on the planet.
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French legal and political scholar, politician, and historian. He is most well known as the author of the book Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840.
Background
Alexis de Tocqueville was born on July 29, 1805, in Paris, France, to a Norman aristocratic family. He was the great-grandson of the statesman Chretien Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, a liberal aristocratic victim of the French Revolution and a political model for Tocqueville.
Education
Tocqueville attended the Lycée Fabert in Metz between 1817 and 1823. Later, Tocqueville studied law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in Versailles, where he met his future wife and befriended a fellow lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.
In 1831, Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, a friend and colleague, traveled to the United States to study prison reforms and spent nine months in the country. They hoped to return to France with knowledge of a society that would make them fit to help shape France's political future.
The trip produced the first joint book published by the two, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France, as well as the first part of Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
Tocqueville spent the next four years working on the final portion of Democracy in America, which was published in 1840. Largely due to the success of the book, Tocqueville was named to the Legion of Honor, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and the French Academy. The book was and remains so popular because it deals with issues such as religion, the press, money, class structure, racism, the role of government, and the judicial system - issues that are just as relevant today as they were then. Many colleges in the United States use Democracy in America in political science, history, and sociology courses, and historians consider it one of the most comprehensive and insightful books ever written about the United States.
Later, Tocqueville toured England, which inspired the book, Memoir on Pauperism. Another book, Travail sur l'Algerie, was written after Tocqueville spent time in Algeria in 1841 and 1846. During this time he developed a critique of the assimilationist model of French colonialism, which he shared in the book.
In 1848 Tocqueville became an elected member of the Constituent Assembly and served on the Commission responsible for creating the new Constitution of the Second Republic. Then, In 1849, he became France's Minister of Foreign Affairs. The next year President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte removed him from his post, after which Tocqueville became quite ill. In 1851 he was imprisoned for opposing Bonaparte's coup and was barred from holding further political offices. Tocqueville then retreated to private life and wrote L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution. The first volume of the book was published in 1856, but Tocqueville was unable to complete the second before he died of tuberculosis in 1859.
(The Ancien Régime and the Revolution is a comparison of r...)
1856
Religion
Tocqueville was a Roman Catholic. He saw religion as being compatible with both equality and individualism, but believed that religion would be strongest when separated from politics.
Politics
Despite his aristocratic upbringing, Tocqueville believed that the spread of democracy was inevitable. By analyzing American democracy, he thought to help France avoid America's faults and emulate its successes. Chief among his many insights was to see equality of social conditions as the heart of American democracy. He noted that although the majority could produce tyranny its wide property distribution and inherent conservatism made for stability. American literature, then still under European influence, he felt would become independent in idiom and deal with plain people rather than the upper classes. The American zeal for change he connected with a restless search for the ideal. Noting the permissiveness of democracy toward religion, he anticipated denominational growth. Discerning natural hostility to the military, he foresaw an adverse effect of prolonged war on American society. He anticipated that democracy would emancipate women and alter the relationship of parents to children. He saw danger in the dominance of American politics by lawyers.
Views
Quotations:
"Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom."
"Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."
"Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure."
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."
"Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all."
"There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult - to begin a war and to end it."
"The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Alexis de Tocqueville suffered from frequent bouts of tuberculosis.
Interests
Reading, history
Connections
Alexis de Tocqueville met Mary Motley, an English woman brought up in France, in 1828. After overcoming considerable parental opposition from his side, he married Mary in 1835.