Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), French political writer and statesman, whose work on the United States political system became a classic.

Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville was born July 29, 1805, in Verneuil, and studied law in Paris. With the French publicist Gustave Auguste de Beaumont de la Bonninière, he went abroad in 1831 to study the penal system in the U.S. The two men reported their findings in Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et son application en France (The Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, 1832). After returning to France in 1832, Tocqueville wrote his most famous work, Democracy in America (2 volumes, 1835-40; trans., 4 volumes, 1835-40). One of the earliest and most profound studies of American life, it concerns the legislative and administrative systems in the U.S. and the influence of social and political institutions on the habits and manners of the people. Tocqueville maintains in this work that the full development of democracy occurred in the U.S. because conditions there best permitted the diffusion of European social ideas. He was highly critical of certain aspects of American democracy. For example, he believed that public opinion tended toward tyranny and that majority rule could be as oppressive as the rule of a despot.

As a member of the French Chamber of Deputies (1839-48), Tocqueville advocated a number of reforms, including the decentralization of government and an independent judiciary. He became vice president of the National Assembly in 1849 and for part of that year was minister of foreign affairs. After opposing the 1851 coup d'état of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, later French emperor as Napoleon III, Tocqueville retired from political life. He died on April 16, 1859, in Cannes.

Tocqueville's major works offer a penetrating analysis of the principal political and social ideas of his period. His main emphasis was the evolutionary developments underlying all changes in society. His second most important work, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856; trans. 1856), which he left unfinished at his death, interprets the French Revolution as having been the result of gradual changes in the structure of government and in political attitudes toward equality and freedom. Among his other writings is Recollections (1893; trans. 1896). An English translation of his notebooks for the period 1833-35 was published as Journeys to England and Ireland (1970).