Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859.

French Liberal political scientist and politician.

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French nobleman, of Norman extraction.  His father Hervé, Count of Tocqueville, was a prefect in Metz (Lorraine) under the restored Bourbon monarchy in France.  The young Alexis de  Tocqueville was educated at home, and completed his secondary studies at the Collège Royal in Metz.   He proceeded to Paris in 1823 to study law at the University of Paris.  After graduating, Tocqueville undertook a tour of Italy and Sicily in 1826-27, the first of many journeys abroad he would take over the course of his life, not without personal difficulties (Alexis was physically frail and of sickly constitution). During his trip, he wrote many observations of social and political life in Sicily (most now lost), another enduring habit.   

His father, who had been close to the Bourbon king Charles X, was raised to the peerage of France in 1827. His father secured a minor judicial appointment for the 21-year-old Alexis as juge auditeur the Versailles law court in 1827.  It was here that Tocqueville met Gustave de Beaumont, then a young prosecutor, and the two soon forged a life-long friendship.  In 1828, Tocqueville met and became engaged to an Englishwoman nine years his senior, Mary Mottley, then a governess in Paris, who, despite his family's opposition, he would go on to marry in 1835. 

Alexis de Tocqueville greeted the July Revolution of 1830 with apprehension.  Although his political education under the French Liberal school had indisposed him to the ultra-royalist reactionary tendencies of the Bourbon monarchy, his father's closeness to the deposed Charles X was well-known.  Torn by family loyalty, Tocqueville struggled with the decision of whether to swear allegiance to the new "citizen-king" Louis-Philippe of Orleans, but eventually decided to do so at the urging of Beaumont. 

The two young magistrates connected to the former Bourbon court had little prospects of professional promotion under the new July Monarchy. So Tocqueville and Beaumont hit on the idea of advancing their careers by going overseas to undertake a study of conditions in American prisons on behalf of the French government.  They received the blessings of the French interior minister, and financed the journey themselves.  The 25-year-old Tocqueville and 28-year-old Beaumont set off from Le Havre and arrived in New York in May 1831.  They would spend the next ten months traveling across the United States.  They traveled from New York to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and then headed south, ending up visiting 17 out of the then extant 24 states.  They examined many American penitentiaries, but also took copious notes on life around them. Often greeted as foreign dignitaries where they went, they met much of American officialdom at all levels, including notables such as president Andrew Jackson, former president John Quincy Adams and Supreme Court chief justice Salmon P. Chase.  But they also interacted with many ordinary Americans, particularly when they ventured out of the main cities. They proceeded to spend a few weeks in Lower and Upper Canada, before returning to France in February 1832.

Tocqueville and Beaumont submitted their prison report to the French government in 1833.  But both went on to publish their own separate writings on their experiences and observations in America.  Beaumont published Marie, a novel based around slavery in the American South.  Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his notes on political and social life in America to produce De la démocratie en Amérique ("Democracy in America"). The first part (in two volumes) appeared in 1835, the second part (another two volumes) in 1840.  They were immediately translated into English by Tocqueville's English friend Henry Reeve.  Tocqueville's book came out around the same time as several other notable European travelogues of America, like those of Harriet Martineau, Francis Lieber and Charles Dickens, but none had quite the same impact.

Tocqueville's Democracy in America sought to explain the operation of republican democracy to a French public that was growing tired of the Orleanist regime.  However, in much of French public opinion at the time, the term "republic" or "democracy" was frightening, conjuring up memories of the bloody chaos of the Reign of Terror of 1790s.  Tocqueville presented the United States as an counterexample, a democratic republic that worked.  Tocqueville's Democracy in America was well received on both sides of the Atlantic.  Some immediately celebrated it as comparable to Montesquieu, and it quickly became a classic of political science.  The first part (1835)  is perhaps the more famous, containing most of his observations, and more optimistic in tone. The second part, published in 1840, is more abstract and philosophical, and a bit more pessimistic. The book was given a famous, if somewhat critical, review by John Stuart Mill. 

Tocqueville's premise is an emphasis on equality of economic condition, which leads to equality in political participation and makes democracy viable. While political and social equality and absence of privileges may be a commonplace observation about the United States, Tocqueville's assertion about the relative absence of great income and wealth disparities between rich and poor (slaves excepted), where "paupers are not to be found, and everyone has property of his own" may raise eyebrows.  While a doubtless exaggeration, it may not be too far from the truth in pre-industrial Jacksonian America, certanly compared to later, or to contemporary Europe.   He roots American democracy historically in New England townships.  Local self-government cultivated civil society and the habits of civic participation, and an aversion to despotism.  He emphasizes the importance of freedom of the press and assembly.  Tocqueville finds American politicians themselves rather dull and untalented, and is generally doubtful of the wisdom of the masses via universal suffrage, but commends the spirit of service of low-level salaried public officials.  He remarks on the lack of uniforms, badges and privileges in civil offices.  He admits bad laws exist in the US, but he claims they are not class-based. Stupidity is collective, not a veil to advance narrow interests. Among his most famous passages are his observations on the voluntary "spirit of association" he finds in many American communities, and the spirit of local self-government, detached from national politics.  He sees local associations as organic institutions that mediate between citizens and the state.   He commends the genius of the design of the American constitutional system (he constantly quotes from Madison and Hamilton's Federalist Papers), with its checks and balances and federalist structures, which he believes have been instrumental in curbing the dangers of excessive democracy.  But he reserves particular praise for the decentralization of power and localism as the principal safeguard against despotism.  He commends the degree of participation in local politics, and is surprised by how quickly even recent immigrants immerse themselves and participate in political life. 

Among the drawbacks, Tocqueville doesn't see much variety or freedom of opinion in America, and claims there is a tendency towards majoritarian oppression. He remarks derisively about Americans' acquisitiveness, their obsessive pursuit of money and riches.  But he also notes the strong role of religion in social life as mitigating individual self-absorption.  Tocqueville is perhaps the first writer to notice how the separation of Church and State has given religion a vitality and relevance, and has helped it flourish in the United States.  Tocqueville has harsh words about the treatment of Indians and Blacks (both slaves and freemen).  He condemns the indolence and pretensions of Southern plantation lords, and predicts the slavery will end up causing a horrific civil war (albeit not between the states, but between races). 

Besides economic equality, Tocqueville ascribes the success of the American republic to three root causes - (1) its distance from Europe, with no enemies nearby; (2) its laws, its federal and judicial structures, local townships, etc.(3) the moeurs and customs of the people, of civic participation, the separation of religion from politics, the universality of education, etc.. 

After his return from America, Tocqueville also collected notes on two journeys to England (1833, 1835),  to Ireland (1835), Baden and Switzerland (1836), and two journeys to Algeria (1841, 1846), but these were only published posthumously.

After his mother's death in 1836, Alexis de Tocqueville inherited a small fortune, which he used to launch a political career.  Tocqueville was elected as a delegate from the Norman district of Valognes in 1839 to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the parliament of the July Monarchy.  He was re-elected in 1842 and 1846.     In his first year as a deputy, Tocqueville headed a committee to investigate slavery in the French colonies, and delivered its famous report that same year (July, 1839) calling for the abolition of slavery.  On the other hand, Tocqueville vociferously defended the French invasion and occupation of Algeria, as a "civilizing mission".  However well-regarded as a writer, Tocqueville was not a great speaker, he speeches being rather long-winded and overly erudite.  And he did not quite have the deal-making skills to make him an effective political leader.   His political opinions, being rather idiosyncratic, did not give him the confidence of any party.  

Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed the February Revolution in Paris in 1848, and would later collect his observations of the momentous events in his posthumously published Souvenirs (1893).  Tocqueville was elected in April 1848 to the Constituent Assembly.  In May, Tocqueville (along with Beamont) were appointed to the Assembly's special committee charged with  drafting a constitution for the French Second Republic. .

A free market liberal, Tocqueville was instrumental in excluding the "right to work", pushed by socialist deputies, from the constitutional draft that was submitted to the assembly in September, deriding it as illiberal and dangerous nonsense, that logically contradicted the right to property that was also guaranteed by the French constitution.  His most significant contribution however was the push for introducing an American-style "President of France", directly elected by the people, via an electoral college. This was unsatisfactory to many French democratic republicans, who wanted to see executive power vested in a collective committee, drawn from the legislative assembly (as in the First Republic in the 1790s).   But Tocqueville insisted that separation of power would be better served by a separately-elected president.  Nonetheless, many republicans were wary of the potential of an independent president, backed by popular plebiscites, to undertake a Bonaparte-style coup, and turn the presidency into a throne.  Nonetheless, the presidential scheme prevailed and was adopted in the Constitution for the Second Republic, promulgated on November 4 (with some modifications - e.g. the president to be elected not by a college but by popular majority, for a non-renewable four year term, and no power to dissolve assembly).   

Ultimately, these fears were proved right.  Louis Napoleon Bonaparte was elected the first president of France  in December 1848, and from the outset seemed to have little intention to preserve the constitutional limits imposed on him, and full intention to convert the position into a permanent throne.  Two years after taking office, Louis Napoleon undertook a coup d'etat, and a year later proclaimed the end of the Second Republic, and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III.  

Tocqueville was a member of the conservative "Parti de l'Ordre" that had backed the original election of Louis Napoleon in December 1848.  He was elected on the Parti's rolls for the new Legislative Assembly of May 1849,  and served as foreign minister in the conservative French government of Odilon Barrot from June until October 1849.  Tocqueville resisted the 1851 coup and was arrested and briefly imprisoned after writing a letter to the London Times complaining about the Napoleonic coup.

Stricken by early stages of tuberculosis, Tocqueville withdrew from active politics in the aftermath of his release.  He retired to his chateau in Normandy, and concentrated on writing his great historical work on the Ancien Regime (1856).  It built on a small article he gave twenty years earlier to John Stuart Mill to publish in the Westminster Review in 1836.  In the treatise, Tocqueville takes a grand historical sweep of French history, and condemns what he perceives to be the steady centralization of power and expansion of the administrative state in France. He surveys the efforts of Cardinal Richelieu in the 17th C., carried through to extremes by Louis XIV and his successors in the 18th C., to disempower the aristocracy and provincial assemblies, and concentrate power in the royal court of the Ancien Regime.  This trajectory was deepened, rather than reversed, during the Revolution by the Jacobins, accelerated by Napoleon Bonaparte and now find its apogée in the regime of Napoleon III. He contrasts the French tendency towards a powerful central state with what he claims is a steady devolution and distribution of power in England and America during this same period. Tocqueville puts part of the blame on Enlightenment philosophers, like Voltaire and Rousseau.  

The Ancien Regime was well received by the reviews, and he traveled to England one last time in 1857 for a literary tour.  But his condition was worsening, overcome by tuberculosis, Alexis de Tocqueville died in April 1859, aged 53, in Cannes, shortly after his return.

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