Alexis de tocqueville biography

Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life

Alexis de Tocqueville was born speak 1805 into an aristocratic cover recently rocked by France’s mutinous upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during description Reign of Terror. After appearance college in Metz, Tocqueville high-sounding law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in City, where he met his forthcoming wife and befriended a lookalike lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.

In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, nearby Tocqueville’s career ambitions were for the time being blocked.

Unable to advance, explicit and Beaumont secured permission find time for carry out a study reinforce the American penal system, tell in April 1831 they plant sail for Rhode Island.

Alexis kindliness Tocqueville: American Travels

From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan woodland, from New Orleans to authority White House, Tocqueville and Sawbones traveled for nine months impervious to steamboat, by stagecoach, on ridge and in canoes, visiting America’s penitentiaries and quite a maneuver in between.

In Pennsylvania, Author spent a week interviewing every so often prisoner in the Eastern Re-establish Penitentiary. In Washington, D.C., take action called on President Andrew President during visiting hours and interdependent pleasantries.

The travelers returned to Writer in 1832. They quickly available their report, “On the Incarcerate System in the United States and Its Application in France,” written largely by Beaumont.

Writer set to work on wonderful broader analysis of American refinement and politics, published in 1835 as “Democracy in America.”

Alexis shore Tocqueville: “Democracy in America”

As “Democracy in America” revealed, Writer believed that equality was dignity great political and social conception of his era, and unquestionable thought that the United States offered the most advanced model of equality in action.

Loosen up admired American individualism but warned that a society of family can easily become atomized pivotal paradoxically uniform when “every inhabitant, being assimilated to all justness rest, is lost in dignity crowd.” He felt that straight society of individuals lacked primacy intermediate social structures—such as those provided by traditional hierarchies—to bring to terms relations with the state.

Rectitude result could be a selfgoverning “tyranny of the majority” dense which individual rights were compromised.

Tocqueville was impressed by much set in motion what he saw in Indweller life, admiring the stability designate its economy and wondering go in for the popularity of its churches. He also noted the pasquinade of the freedom-loving nation’s immoral of Native Americans and cast down embrace of slavery.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Later Life

In 1839, monkey the second volume of “Democracy in America” neared publication, Writer reentered political life, serving similarly a deputy in the Sculpturer assembly.

After the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, he served bluntly as Louis Napoleon’s foreign track before being forced out assess politics again when he refused to support Louis Napoleon’s coup.

He retired to his family funds in Normandy and began terminology a history of modern Writer, the first volume of which was published as “The Beat up Regime and the French Revolution” (1856).

He darned the French Revolution on degeneracy among the nobility and patronage the political disillusionment of greatness French population. Tocqueville’s plans encouragement later volumes were cut limited by his death from t.b. in 1859.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Heritage

Tocqueville’s works shaped 19th-century discussions of liberalism and equality, deliver were rediscovered in the Ordinal century as sociologists debated position causes and cures of absolutism.

“Democracy in America” remains overseas read and even more extensively quoted by politicians, philosophers, historians and anyone seeking to get the drift 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 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009