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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Alexis de Tocqueville Biography TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS CHARLES HENRI CLÉREL DE (1805-59). A French statesman and political philosopher, born at Verneuil, in the Department of Seine-et-Oise. At the Restoration his father was made a peer of France. His mother was a granddaughter of Malesherbes, the academician, political writer, and magistrate, who defended Louis XVI at the bar of the Convention. Alexis de Tocqueville studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1825, traveled in Italy, and on his return became an assistant magistrate at Versailles. In 1831 he gave up his appointment at Versailles, and with his colleague there, Gustave de Beaumont, accepted a government mission to America, to study the working of the penitentiary system. The commissioners, after their return to Europe, published their report (Du système pénitentiaire aux Etats-Unis, 1832; Eng. trans., Philadelphia, 1833), an admirable work, which modified all the ideas previously entertained in France. regarding prison discipline. An important result of his travels was his great work De la démocratie en Amérique, published in 1835. In his introduction he sought to show that a great democratic revolution had for centuries been going on in Europe. There is a general progress towards social equality. In France it has always been borne on by chance, the intelligent and moral classes of the nation never having sought to guide it. In America he found that the same revolution bad been going on more rapidly than in Europe, and had indeed nearly reached its limit in the absolute equality of conditions. There, accordingly, he thinks we may see what may sometime happen in Europe. The work made a profound impression. Its author was elected to the Academy of Moral Science in 1836 and to the French Academy in 1841. In 1835 De Tocqueville visited England, where he received an enthusiastic welcome from the leaders of the Whig party. In 1837 he was defeated as a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies from Valognes, but two years after he was elected by an overwhelming majority, and ranged himself with the Moderate Opposition party. After the February Revolution he was a, formidable opponent of the Socialists and extreme Republicans. as well as of the partisans of Louis Napoleon. He became, in 1849, vice president of the Legislative Assembly, and from June to October in the same year was Minister of Foreign Affairs. During that time he defended the policy of the expedition to Rome, on the ground that it would secure liberal institutions to the states of the Church. After the coup d'état of December, 1851, he retired to Tocqueville, where he devoted himself to agricultural pursuits. In 1856 appeared his second great work, L'Ancien régime et la révolution. In June, 1858, he took up his abode at Cannes, where he died. De Tocqueville's Œvres et correspondence inédites were published (1860) by his friend De Beaumont, who prefixed a biographical notice. His Mémoires are a valuable contribution to the history of the revolution of 1848 and the coup d'état. An English translation, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, was published in New York in 1896. Consult: H. Jacques, Alexis de Tocqueville (Vienna, 1876) ; Bryce, "The Predictions of Hamilton and de Tocqueville," and H. B. Adams, "Jared Sparks and Alexis de Tocqueville," in Johns Hopkins University Studies in History and Political Sciences, series 5, vol. ix, and series 16, vol. xii (Baltimore, 1887 and 1904) ; Henry Sidgwick, "Alexis de Tocqueville" in Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses (New York, 1904); also Correspondence entre A. de Toequeville et Arthur de Gobineau (Paris, 1908). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 319-320. |