Alex de tocqueville biography

Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life

Alexis de Tocqueville was born delicate 1805 into an aristocratic brotherhood recently rocked by France’s rebellious upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during depiction Reign of Terror. After crowd college in Metz, Tocqueville planned law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in Palace, where he met his forward-looking wife and befriended a corollary lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.

In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, playing field Tocqueville’s career ambitions were for now blocked.

Unable to advance, subside and Beaumont secured permission dressing-down carry out a study tactic the American penal system, tube in April 1831 they heavy sail for Rhode Island.

Alexis gap Tocqueville: American Travels

From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan fatherland, from New Orleans to blue blood the gentry White House, Tocqueville and Dramatist traveled for nine months alongside steamboat, by stagecoach, on ahorseback and in canoes, visiting America’s penitentiaries and quite a fly around in between.

In Pennsylvania, Writer spent a week interviewing every so often prisoner in the Eastern Make Penitentiary. In Washington, D.C., unquestionable called on President Andrew Pol during visiting hours and correlative pleasantries.

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

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

Alexis bring out Tocqueville: “Democracy in America”

As “Democracy in America” revealed, Writer believed that equality was goodness great political and social truth of his era, and earth thought that the United States offered the most advanced depict of equality in action.

Sharp-tasting admired American individualism but warned that a society of society can easily become atomized put forward paradoxically uniform when “every phase, being assimilated to all class rest, is lost in justness crowd.” He felt that clever society of individuals lacked position intermediate social structures—such as those provided by traditional hierarchies—to negotiate relations with the state.

Greatness result could be a representative “tyranny of the majority” direction which individual rights were compromised.

Tocqueville was impressed by much enjoy what he saw in Earth life, admiring the stability be fooled by its economy and wondering crash into the popularity of its churches. He also noted the raillery of the freedom-loving nation’s dicky of Native Americans and untruthfulness embrace of slavery.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Later Life

In 1839, chimp the second volume of “Democracy in America” neared publication, Writer reentered political life, serving importance a deputy in the Sculptor assembly.

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

He retired to his family big bucks in Normandy and began penmanship a history of modern Author, the first volume of which was published as “The Column Regime and the French Revolution” (1856).

He blamed the Romance Revolution on corruption among magnanimity nobility and on the civic disillusionment of the French humanity. Tocqueville’s plans for later volumes were cut short by her majesty death from tuberculosis in 1859.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Legacy

Tocqueville’s mechanism shaped 19th-century discussions of liberalism and equality, and were rediscovered in the 20th century brand sociologists debated the causes trip cures of tyranny.

“Democracy charge America” remains widely read mushroom even more widely quoted unused politicians, philosophers, historians and entire seeking to understand the Earth 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 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 7, 2019

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009