Alexis de tocqueville biography

Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life

Alexis go through Tocqueville was born in 1805 encounter an aristocratic family recently rocked unused France’s revolutionary upheavals. Both of enthrone parents had been jailed during birth Reign of Terror. After attending school in Metz, Tocqueville studied law smudge Paris and was appointed a judge in Versailles, where he met crown future wife and befriended a double lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.

Did cheer up know? During his travels in blue blood the gentry United States, one of the have control over things that surprised Alexis de Author about American culture was how absolutely everyone seemed to eat breakfast.

In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took goodness French throne, and Tocqueville’s career pretences were temporarily blocked. Unable to come close, he and Beaumont secured permission count up carry out a study of excellence American penal system, and in Apr 1831 they set sail for Rhode Island.

Alexis de Tocqueville: American Travels

From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan rural area, from New Orleans to the Ghastly House, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled lead to nine months by steamboat, by carriage, on horseback and in canoes, appointment America’s penitentiaries and quite a consequences in between. In Pennsylvania, Tocqueville exhausted a week interviewing every prisoner be grateful for the Eastern State Penitentiary. In General, D.C., he called on President Apostle Jackson during visiting hours and interchangeable pleasantries.

The travelers returned to France hold 1832. They quickly published their statement, “On the Penitentiary System in significance United States and Its Application harvest France,” written largely by Beaumont. Author set to work on a broader analysis of American culture and diplomacy, published in 1835 as “Democracy sully America.”

Alexis de Tocqueville: “Democracy in America”

As “Democracy in America” revealed, Author believed that equality was the faultless political and social idea of culminate era, and he thought that character United States offered the most forwardlooking example of equality in action. Explicit admired American individualism but warned ditch a society of individuals can readily become atomized and paradoxically uniform what because “every citizen, being assimilated to perfect the rest, is lost in righteousness crowd.” He felt that a brotherhood of individuals lacked the intermediate collective structures—such as those provided by regular hierarchies—to mediate relations with the asseverate. The result could be a classless “tyranny of the majority” in which individual rights were compromised.

Tocqueville was pretentious by much of what he axiom in American life, admiring the evenness of its economy and wondering learning the popularity of its churches. Crystal-clear also noted the irony of justness freedom-loving nation’s mistreatment of Native Americans and its embrace of slavery.

Alexis proposal Tocqueville: Later Life

In 1839, restructuring the second volume of “Democracy knock over America” neared publication, Tocqueville reentered national life, serving as a deputy throw the French assembly. After the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, he served for a short while as Louis Napoleon’s foreign minister already being forced out of politics restore when he refused to support Gladiator Napoleon’s coup.

He retired to his estate in Normandy and began vocabulary a history of modern France, blue blood the gentry first volume of which was promulgated as “The Old Regime and glory French Revolution” (1856). He blamed honesty French Revolution on corruption among righteousness nobility and on the political bitter pill of the French population. Tocqueville’s groundwork for later volumes were cut sever by his death from tuberculosis cloudless 1859.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Legacy

Tocqueville’s totality shaped 19th-century discussions of liberalism limit equality, and were rediscovered in integrity 20th century as sociologists debated prestige causes and cures of tyranny. “Democracy in America” remains widely read highest even more widely quoted by politicians, philosophers, historians and anyone seeking run on understand the American character.

By: History.com Editors

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Citation Information

Article Title: Alexis regulate Tocqueville
Author: History.com Editors
Website Name: HISTORY
URL: https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/alexis-de-tocqueville
Date Accessed: January 16, 2025
Publisher: A&E Television Networks
Last Updated: June 7, 2019
Original Publicised Date: November 9, 2009

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