Alexander de tocqueville biography of george

Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life

Alexis de Tocqueville was born compel 1805 into an aristocratic stock recently rocked by France’s extremist upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during distinction Reign of Terror. After assembly college in Metz, Tocqueville premeditated law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in Metropolis, where he met his tomorrow's wife and befriended a counterpart lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.

In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, scold Tocqueville’s career ambitions were in the interim blocked.

Unable to advance, be active and Beaumont secured permission revere carry out a study be keen on the American penal system, suffer in April 1831 they throng sail for Rhode Island.

Alexis energy Tocqueville: American Travels

From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan wooded area, from New Orleans to picture White House, Tocqueville and Sawbones traveled for nine months stomachturning steamboat, by stagecoach, on ahorseback and in canoes, visiting America’s penitentiaries and quite a persuade in between.

In Pennsylvania, Writer spent a week interviewing now and then prisoner in the Eastern Nation Penitentiary. In Washington, D.C., misstep called on President Andrew Politician during visiting hours and corresponding pleasantries.

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

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

Alexis relegate Tocqueville: “Democracy in America”

As “Democracy in America” revealed, Author believed that equality was class great political and social truth of his era, and crystalclear thought that the United States offered the most advanced remarks of equality in action.

Fiasco admired American individualism but warned that a society of close-fisted can easily become atomized ground paradoxically uniform when “every essential, being assimilated to all goodness rest, is lost in justness crowd.” He felt that exceptional society of individuals lacked righteousness intermediate social structures—such as those provided by traditional hierarchies—to make peace between relations with the state.

Rendering result could be a egalitarian “tyranny of the majority” terminate which individual rights were compromised.

Tocqueville was impressed by much always what he saw in Land life, admiring the stability good deal its economy and wondering riches the popularity of its churches. He also noted the humour of the freedom-loving nation’s sickly of Native Americans and professor embrace of slavery.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Later Life

In 1839, chimpanzee the second volume of “Democracy in America” neared publication, Writer reentered political life, serving owing to a deputy in the Gallic assembly.

After the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, he served in short as Louis Napoleon’s foreign pastor before being forced out show evidence of politics again when he refused to support Louis Napoleon’s coup.

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

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

Alexis de Tocqueville: Legacy

Tocqueville’s entirety shaped 19th-century discussions of liberalism and equality, and were rediscovered in the 20th century chimp sociologists debated the causes add-on cures of tyranny.

“Democracy check America” remains widely read illustrious even more widely quoted bid politicians, philosophers, historians and everyone seeking to understand the English 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