TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE

TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS DE (1805–1859), French political theorist, historian, and political liberal.

Alexis de Tocqueville remains best known as the author of two classics: De la démocratie en Amérique (1835 and 1840; Democracy in America) and L'ancien régime et la révolution (1856; The Old Regime and the Revolution).

Tocqueville was born on 29 July 1805 into an old Norman aristocratic family that had suffered severely from the French Revolution. His life was dedicated to understanding the origins and implications of that upheaval for his nation and the larger world. Despite a frail voice in a fragile body he chose a career in politics. In preparation for that career he was strongly influenced by the lectures of the historian and statesman François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787–1874), who traced the decline of aristocratic privilege over the centuries preceding the French Revolution. At the same time Tocqueville became deeply interested in the Anglo-American world, which was to become his major source for a lifetime of comparisons with developments in his own country.

The July Revolution of 1830 was a turning point for the young Alexis. The Bourbon dynasty, to which his family was closely tied, was displaced by the "citizen king," Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–1848). The revolution confirmed Tocqueville's conviction that France was moving rapidly and inevitably toward "equality of conditions." Breaking with the perspective of the older generation's liberals epitomized by Guizot, Tocqueville looked toward America rather than aristocratic Great Britain as a potential model for the democratic future. Because of his family's continued loyalty to the exiled Bourbons, Tocqueville's political position had also become precarious. He and his close friend and fellow liberal, Gustave-Auguste de Beaumont de la Bonninière, formulated a plan to obtain official permission to study prison reform in America. In doing so they also hoped to establish a reputation for themselves as experts on the new political order, which would qualify them to participate in building France's political future.

democracy in america

The two young men traveled through the United States for nine months in 1831–1832. The first-fruits of their journey was a joint report in fulfillment of their official mission: Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis (1833; On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France). On the basis of his observations and further readings Tocqueville attempted to lay bare the essential components of political society in the United States. He focused on those aspects of America most relevant to his own liberal philosophy and political ambitions. The vitality, the limitations, the excesses, and the potential future of democracy became the themes of Democracy in America.

The period immediately following the publication of Democracy was probably the happiest in Tocqueville's life. The book instantly won him an international reputation as a judicious political scientist. It was soon translated and published in Great Britain, the United States, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Hungary, Denmark, and Sweden. A voyage to England and Ireland in 1835 solidified lifelong friendships with the British elite, a bond that was reinforced that same year by his marriage to an Englishwoman, Marie Mottley. As a source of comparisons and intellectual exchange, England became, in Tocqueville's words, his second country.

Returning to France, Tocqueville began a sequel to his Democracy, now focusing on democratic ideas, beliefs, and mores in America. The second Democracy took longer to write and took Tocqueville further afield than its author had anticipated. Although published in 1840 under the same title as the earlier work, it ended up being as much about democracy in France and Europe as in the United States. Tocqueville's observations on the continuing bureaucratization of the French state and the progressive diminution of French political life during the late 1830s caused him to envision a new threat to democracy. Centralization and apathetic individualism made egalitarian societies vulnerable to a new form of despotism. Tocqueville's theme, as he wrote to John Stuart Mill, had become less America than "the influence of equality on the ideas and the sentiments of men." The ambiguities created by chapters on this new theme, interspersed with others more directly focused on America, accounted for some confusion among readers, and for the more muted reception of the 1840 volume in France.

Just as he completed his second Democracy, Tocqueville fulfilled his youthful ambition to step into the political arena. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839 from Valognes. Tocqueville's need for uncompromising dignity and independence, however, deprived him of the influence to which he aspired in the legislature of the July Monarchy. For then ext eight year she remained only a well-respected spokesman for legislative committees. On nonpartisan issues such as prison reform and colonial policy, he put his familiarity with American and British examples to good use.

The Revolution of 1848 presented Tocqueville with new threats and new opportunities. France was immediately faced with militant working-class demands for extensive and even revolutionary social reforms. Tocqueville was determined to combat what he viewed as the combined danger of increased state power and a proletarian attack on the basic principle of private property. France's electoral system also changed dramatically in 1848. The provisional government called for a new national constituent assembly based on universal male suffrage. Tocqueville's own voting constituency therefore suddenly expanded from several hundred to 160,000. In his campaigns for reelection in the Second French Republic, Tocqueville made the transition so well that he became the most successful vote getter in his department of La Manche. He subsequently opposed all radical social reform and joined the National Assembly in crushing a working-class uprising in 1848. The following year he briefly served the Republic as foreign minister, from June to October 1849. During a long period of illness in 1850 Tocqueville began a memoir on the Revolution of 1848. It was published posthumously, in 1893, under the title Souvenirs (1896; Recollections).

When the Republic was overthrown on 2 December 1851 by President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (later Napoleon III; r. 1852–1871), Tocqueville refused to take an oath to the new regime and withdrew from politics. Seeking to sustain his liberal mission by other means, Tocqueville reverted to the strategy of the 1830s, touching on his fundamental concern with the relation of liberty to equality. He sought to trace the origins of France's entrapment in cycles of despotism and revolution by investigating the two centuries preceding the French Revolution. After four years of intensive archival research the Old Regime and the Revolution was published in 1856. Tocqueville located the deep structural sources of France's alterations of upheaval and despotism in the long-term evolution of the prerevolutionary monarchy and society. At the same time he offered his readers a counterpoint to his pessimistic analysis of French political instability by continuous comparisons with the Anglo-American world. The acclaim from liberal sympathizers in France and abroad that greeted his new history dispelled some of the gloom of his last years.

influence

In the midst of writing his sequel to the Old Regime, Tocqueville died on 16 April 1859 at Cannes. Although he quickly became the posthumous leader of French liberalism, his reputation in France languished at the end of the nineteenth century. In the following century the totalitarian challenges to the survival of liberal democratic institutions helped to stimulate a "Tocqueville renaissance." After World War II the revival of his Democracy was fostered by the emergence of the United States as a world power. The expansion of political democracy in Eastern Europe after 1989 sustained that momentum. Tocqueville's The Old Regime became the foundational text for a revision of the prevailing Marxist interpretation of the Revolution in France itself.

However, the revival of interest in Tocqueville has not been based only on a sequence of events. A major change in the scholarly attention to Tocqueville's writings emerged during the late twentieth century. There was a broadening consensus on the relevance of his thought to democracy on a global scale. This growing encounter with Tocqueville's major writings is evidenced by an explosion of international scholarship. That scholarship has given us a rich sense of Tocqueville's complex dialogues with himself and his contemporaries and with the challenges faced by the world of the early twenty-first century. Some have sought to demonstrate that Tocqueville was entrapped by the limitations of his own time and background. Others have argued that he ultimately despaired of his hopes for political liberty in an egalitarian world. Yet a majority of historians and social scientists find in his thought a deeper affirmation of the resilience of democratic liberal institutions and mores. Tocqueville's sensitivity to civil society as a determinative of institutional success or failure has been echoed by contemporary students of political thought. Tocqueville's cumulative legacy is evidence of his unparalleled power to bring contemporary political concerns into sharper focus even where consensus on fundamentals remains difficult to achieve.

See alsoFrench Revolution; Marx, Karl; Michelet, Jules; Napoleon III; Revolutions of 1830; Revolutions of 1848.

bibliography

Drescher, Seymour. Tocqueville and England. Cambridge, Mass., 1964. Assesses the influence of England on Tocqueville's life and thought.

Jardin, André. Tocqueville: A Biography. Translated by Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway. New York, 1988. The most recent and detailed narrative of Tocqueville's life.

Lamberti, Jean-Claude. Tocqueville and the Two Democracies. Cambridge, Mass., 1989. Stresses changes in Tocqueville's view of democracy between the 1835 and 1840 volumes.

Mélonio, Françoise. Tocqueville and the French. Translated by Beth G. Raps. Charlottesville, Va., 1998. An account of French attitudes toward Tocqueville and his works during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Schleifer, James T. The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Indianapolis, 2000. An abundantly documented reconstruction of the major concepts in Democracy, using Tocqueville's extensive notes and drafts. Schleifer stresses the unity of the two books, published in 1835 and 1840.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Tocqueville Reader: A Life in Letters and Politics. Edited by Olivier Zunz and Alan S. Kahan. Oxford, U.K., 2002.

Welch, Cheryl B. De Tocqueville. Oxford, U.K., 2001. A synthesis of Tocqueville's political thought from the perspective of political science.

Seymour Drescher