Alexis de Tocqueville

• 1. Introduction

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  Alexis de Tocqueville sailed to the United States in 1831 on a narrow assignment. The July Monarchy had sent him to examine American prisons and penitentiaries. He went with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont, and the two did visit prisons. But they traveled far beyond their brief. They rode steamboats down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. They crossed the frontier into Michigan, then the north-west edge of the country. They took stagecoaches through the South and back up the coast to New York. Tocqueville filled notebook after notebook with observations. He returned within nine months, and the report he was sent to write became the smaller half of his legacy. The larger half was a book about democracy itself. Who was this aristocrat, born into a family that had nearly lost its heads to the guillotine? How did a man who treasured liberty come to vote for laws restricting it? And why did a French diplomat decide that the future of half the world rested with two nations he barely knew?

• 2. An Aristocracy Marked By The Blade

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  The guillotine took Tocqueville's great-grandfather in 1793. That ancestor was the statesman Malesherbes, and his fate hung over the family Tocqueville was born into on the 29th of July 1805. His parents nearly shared it. His father, Hervé Clérel, Count of Tocqueville, had served in the Constitutional Guard of King Louis XVI. His mother was Louise Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosanbo. Both might have faced the blade themselves, but the fall of Maximilien Robespierre in 1794 spared them. The family was old, aristocratic, and Norman. When the Bourbon Restoration came, fortunes turned again. Tocqueville's father rose to become a noble peer and a prefect. The boy himself attended the Lycée Fabert in Metz. He grew up between two worlds, a fading aristocratic order and something newer pressing in behind it, and that division would shape everything he wrote.

• 3. The Restless Liberal In Parliament

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  Tocqueville despised the July Monarchy, yet he built his political life inside it. He began his career in 1839, the same year he was elected to the lower house of parliament for the Manche department, sitting for Valognes. He served there until 1851. He sat first on the centre-left, defended abolitionist views, and upheld free trade. At the same time he supported the colonisation of Algeria carried on by the regime of Louis-Philippe I. A classical liberal, he advocated parliamentary government and distrusted the extremes of majoritarianism. Over his years in parliament he drifted from the centre-left to the centre-right. In 1847, he tried to found a Young Left party, a Jeune Gauche, that would push for wage increases and a progressive tax to blunt the appeal of the socialists. His liberalism was complex and never settled. That restlessness produced admirers across the political spectrum, and it meant his work could be read in opposite ways depending on where the reader stood. In France and the United States his writing read as liberal. In the British Isles, progressives and conservatives alike claimed it for their own.

• 4. Order As The Price Of Liberty

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  A few days after the February 1848 insurrection, Tocqueville made a grim prediction. He expected a violent clash between the Parisian workers, led by socialists demanding a Democratic and Social Republic, and the conservatives, who included the aristocracy and the rural population. He thought it inescapable. The June Days Uprising of 1848 proved him right. When General Cavaignac suppressed it, Tocqueville backed him. He advocated the regularization of the state of siege and other measures suspending the constitutional order. Elected to the Constituent Assembly of 1848, he joined the commission drafting the new Constitution of the Second Republic. He defended bicameralism and the election of the President by universal suffrage. Because the countryside was thought more conservative than the labouring population of Paris, he saw universal suffrage as a way to counteract the revolutionary spirit of the capital. He served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Odilon Barrot's government from the 3rd of June to the 31st of October 1849. During the troubled June days he urged Interior Minister Jules Armand Dufaure to reestablish the state of siege and approved the arrest of demonstrators. He backed laws restricting the liberty of clubs and the freedom of the press. This stood in stark contrast to his defence of freedoms in his American writing. Order, he said, was the condition without which serious politics could not be conducted, the stability that would let liberty grow steadily without the recurring earthquakes of revolution.

• 5. The Man He Would Not Serve

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  The 2nd of December 1851 brought the coup that ended Tocqueville's political life. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte had won the presidency, and Tocqueville had backed Cavaignac against him in the election of 1848. When the coup came, Tocqueville joined the deputies who gathered at the 10th arrondissement of Paris to resist it. They wanted Napoleon III tried for high treason, since he had violated the constitutional limit on terms of office. Tocqueville was detained at Vincennes, then released. He supported a Restoration of the Bourbons against the Second Empire that Napoleon III founded. Then he quit politics and retreated to his castle, the Château de Tocqueville. His biographer Joseph Epstein summed up the choice. Tocqueville, he wrote, could never bring himself to serve a man he considered a usurper and despot. He had given thirteen years of his life fighting for the political liberty he believed in. He would spend his remaining days, Epstein wrote, conducting the same fight from libraries, archives, and his own desk. There he began drafting The Old Regime and the Revolution, publishing the first tome in 1856 and leaving the second unfinished.

• 6. Two Volumes On A New World

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  Democracy in America appeared in 1835, with a second volume following in 1840. Tocqueville wrote it from the perspective of a detached social scientist, observing a country in upheaval. The Market Revolution, Western expansion, and Jacksonian democracy were transforming American life as he watched. He saw democracy as a balancing act between liberty and equality, between concern for the individual and concern for the community. He declared his own loyalties plainly. I have a passionate love for liberty, law, and respect for rights, he wrote. I am neither of the revolutionary party nor of the conservative. Liberty is my foremost passion. Yet he also saw a danger inside equality. He described a depraved taste for equality that impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, reducing men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. That line is often misquoted online as a statement about slavery, the result of older translations. The 2004 translation by Arthur Goldhammer renders the meaning as written above. Tocqueville also studied how property shaped power. American legislatures abolished primogeniture and entails, breaking up large estates within a few generations and making children more equal over time. In Europe, he argued, the lower classes had no hope of real wealth and the upper classes found money crass. In the United States, a worker who saw a man in fine clothes simply assumed that hard work would soon let him afford the same.

• 7. Majorities, Mediocrity, And New Tyranny

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  I do not know of any country where there is less independence of mind, and true freedom of discussion, than in America. That was Tocqueville's verdict on the power of the majority. He argued that ordinary Americans refused to defer to those with superior talent and intelligence, so natural elites won little share in political power. The same equality of mores produced a kind of mediocrity. The majority, he wrote, has enclosed thought within a formidable fence. A writer is free inside that area, but the one who steps beyond it faces everyday persecution, and a career in politics is closed to him. Tocqueville warned that modern democracy might be especially good at inventing new forms of tyranny. Radical equality, he feared, could breed the materialism of an expanding bourgeoisie and the selfishness of individualism. James Wood of The New Yorker described the danger Tocqueville foresaw, a people so enamored with a relaxed love of present enjoyments that they lose interest in the future of their descendants. Such a despotism would be worse than the tyranny of Roman emperors, who could harm only a small group at a time. Tocqueville compared a despotic democratic government to a protective parent keeping its citizens as perpetual children, presiding over them like a shepherd watching a flock of timid animals. He also reshaped the word individualism. He defined it as a calm and considered feeling that disposes each citizen to withdraw into the circle of family and friends, leaving the greater society to look after itself.

• 8. Race, Empire, And A Single Body

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  The first who attracts the eye is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. So Tocqueville described the American races, devoting the last chapter of his first volume to the question while Beaumont gave his entire book, Marie or Slavery in America, to slavery. Tocqueville saw the evils inflicted on black people and natives, even though he supported colonialism. He argued that racial prejudice was strongest in states that had abolished slavery and most intolerant where slavery had never existed. He doubted that sending the black population to Africa could solve anything, noting that a colony like Liberia could never remove as many people in a year as were born. In 1855 he wrote for Maria Weston Chapman's Liberty Bell that he was pained to see the freest people in the world among the last civilized nations still maintaining personal servitude. On Algeria, where he traveled in 1841 and 1846, his views moved over time. He had once imagined intermarriage between French and Arabs, a single body formed from both. In an 1841 essay he called for domination and colonization, and admitted that France was waging war more barbarically than the Arabs themselves. He praised the methods of General Bugeaud, yet after his 1846 visit he turned against the invasion of Kabylia. He compared the Berber tribes there to Rousseau's noble savage, men who appoint their own chiefs and scarcely notice they have chiefs. In his 1847 Report on Algeria he warned that if French methods went unchanged, colonization would end in a blood bath. The historian Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison notes that Tocqueville used the word extermination to describe what was happening to native peoples during the colonization of the Western United States.

  Mary Mottley was the young Englishwoman Tocqueville met at Versailles, and he crossed the Channel in 1833 partly to meet her family. They married in 1836, after she converted to Roman Catholicism. He described her as perhaps his only true friend, though parts of his family found her too liberal, too Protestant, too middle-class, and too English. They hoped for children and had none. His own attitude toward religion was described as utilitarian, a social cement and a safety valve for passions that might otherwise feed revolution, so long as it stayed separate from state power. Tocqueville had suffered bouts of tuberculosis for years. The disease took him on the 16th of April 1859, and he was buried in the Tocqueville cemetery in Normandy. Mary Mottley, his wife of 23 years, survived him. He left behind one prediction that would outlast his century. There are now two great nations in the world, he wrote, the Russians and the Anglo-Americans, each seemingly called by some secret design of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.