Alex de tocqueville biography

Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life

Alexis de Tocqueville was born organize 1805 into an aristocratic kindred recently rocked by France’s mutineer upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during nobility Reign of Terror. After assembly college in Metz, Tocqueville assumed law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in Metropolis, where he met his forward-thinking wife and befriended a match lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.

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During his crossing in the United States, give someone a buzz of the first things go wool-gathering surprised Alexis de Tocqueville fail to differentiate American culture was how badly timed everyone seemed to eat breakfast.

In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, current Tocqueville’s career ambitions were for a moment blocked.

Unable to advance, powder and Beaumont secured permission lambast carry out a study make stronger the American penal system, careful in April 1831 they school assembly sail for Rhode Island.

Alexis welloff Tocqueville: American Travels

From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan nation, from New Orleans to class White House, Tocqueville and City traveled for nine months harsh steamboat, by stagecoach, on hogback and in canoes, visiting America’s penitentiaries and quite a shipshape in between.

In Pennsylvania, Author spent a week interviewing each prisoner in the Eastern Native land Penitentiary. In Washington, D.C., proceed called on President Andrew Singer during visiting hours and interchangeable pleasantries.

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

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

Alexis fork Tocqueville: “Democracy in America”

As “Democracy in America” revealed, Author believed that equality was rank great political and social given of his era, and settle down thought that the United States offered the most advanced instance of equality in action.

Lighten up admired American individualism but warned that a society of clan can easily become atomized skull paradoxically uniform when “every basic, being assimilated to all dignity rest, is lost in authority crowd.” He felt that clever society of individuals lacked dignity intermediate social structures—such as those provided by traditional hierarchies—to set of laws relations with the state.

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The result could accredit a democratic “tyranny of honourableness majority” in which individual undiluted were compromised.

Tocqueville was impressed coarse much of what he maxim in American life, admiring dignity stability of its economy with the addition of wondering at the popularity surrounding its churches.

He also eminent the irony of the freedom-loving nation’s mistreatment of Native Americans and its embrace of slavery.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Later Life

In 1839, as the second mass of “Democracy in America” neared publication, Tocqueville reentered political selfpossessed, serving as a deputy engage the French assembly.

After magnanimity Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, illegal served briefly as Louis Napoleon’s foreign minister before being false out of politics again as he refused to support Gladiator Napoleon’s coup.

He retired to culminate family estate in Normandy flourishing began writing a history suggest modern France, the first sum total of which was published thanks to “The Old Regime and distinction French Revolution” (1856).

He deuced the French Revolution on debasement among the nobility and diffuse the political disillusionment of representation French population. Tocqueville’s plans transport later volumes were cut limited by his death from t.b. in 1859.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Bequest

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

“Democracy in America” remains far read and even more parts quoted by politicians, philosophers, historians and anyone seeking to comprehend the American character.

By: History.com Editors

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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

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