Alexis de Tocqueville

French · 1805 to 1859

Born Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville on July 29, 1805, in Paris into an old Norman aristocratic family that had only just escaped the guillotine, he was the great-grandson of the statesman Malesherbes, beheaded in 1793 for defending Louis XVI at his trial. His parents would have died too had Robespierre fallen a few months later. He grew up at the château of Verneuil, was schooled at the Lycée Fabert in Metz, and trained for the magistracy, taking up a junior judgeship at Versailles in 1827. After the July Revolution of 1830 brought the Orléans monarchy to power, he obtained leave to study the American penitentiary system, and on May 11, 1831, sailed for New York with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, twenty-five years old, with a notebook and a brief to look at everything. They covered seven thousand miles in nine months, from Boston to New Orleans, from Sing Sing to the Michigan frontier. Democracy in America appeared in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, an analytic portrait of the new republic that warned of the soft despotism of mass opinion even as it explained how the habits of free association protected liberty. He sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1839, served briefly as foreign minister under Louis-Napoleon, and was arrested after the coup of December 1851; he refused the oath to the new Empire and retired to Tocqueville to write The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). A lifelong sufferer from tuberculosis, he died of the disease on April 16, 1859, in Cannes, at the age of fifty-three, his English wife Mary Mottley at his bedside.