Tocqueville, Alexis de (älĕksēs də tôkvēl`), 1805–59, French politician and writer. He was prominent in politics, particularly just before and just after the Revolution of 1848 (see revolutions of 1848 revolutions of 1848, in European history. The February Revolution in France gave impetus to a series of revolutionary explosions in Western and Central Europe. However the new French Republic did not support these movements.
..... Click the link for more information. ), and was minister of foreign affairs briefly in 1849. His observations made in 1831 during a government mission to the United States to study the penal system resulted in De la démocratie en Amérique (2 vol., 1835; tr. Democracy in America, 4 vol., 1835–40), one of the classics of political literature. A liberal whose deepest commitment was to human freedom, Tocqueville believed that political democracy and social equality would, inevitably, replace the aristocratic institutions of Europe. He analyzed the American attempt to have both liberty and equality in terms of what lessons Europe could learn from American successes and failures. Tocqueville's other important works are L'Ancien Régime et la révolution (1856; tr. 1856), which stressed the continuance after the French Revolution of many trends that had begun before, and his Recollections (1893; tr. by A. Teixeira de Mattos, 1896; complete ed. by J. P. Mayer, 1949). There are numerous English editions of his works, correspondence, and travel notebooks.

Bibliography

See biography by J. P. Mayer (tr. 1960, repr. 1966); studies by E. T. Gargan (1965), M. Zetterbaum (1967), S. I. Drescher (1968), R. Boesche (1987), L. E. Shiner (1988), S. A. Hadari (1989), and S. Wolin (2001).

Tocqueville, Alexis (-Charles-Henri-Maurice Clérel) de

Alexis de Tocqueville, detail of an oil painting by T. Chassériau; in the Versailles Museum.

(credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born July 29, 1805, Paris, France—died April 16, 1859, Cannes) French political scientist, historian, and politician. Born into an aristocratic family, he entered government service by choice. After the July Revolution of 1830, his position became precarious because of his family's ties to the ousted king, and he undertook a nine-month study trip to the U.S. with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Out of it came his best-known work, Democracy in America, 4 vol. (1835–40), a highly perceptive and prescient analysis of the American political and social system, as well as of the vitality, excesses, and potential future of democracy, with attention to the situation in France. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839 and held various political offices after the Revolution of 1848. The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), a pessimistic analysis of French political tendencies, was the first volume of his unfinished study of the French Revolution.