Alexis de Tocqueville

Based on Wikipedia: Alexis de Tocqueville

In 1831, two young French aristocrats stepped off a ship in New York Harbor with an official mission to study American prisons. What they actually wanted to understand was something far more consequential: whether democracy could actually work.

Alexis de Tocqueville was twenty-six years old, the great-grandson of a man guillotined during the Terror, and the son of parents who had narrowly escaped the same fate. He had every reason to fear what happens when old orders collapse and new ones emerge. But instead of fearing democracy, he became its most penetrating analyst.

The Man Between Two Worlds

Born on July 29, 1805, Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, came from an old Norman aristocratic family with deep roots in the French nobility. His great-grandfather was Malesherbes, a statesman who defended King Louis the Sixteenth at his trial and paid for that loyalty with his life on the guillotine in 1793.

His parents, Hervé Louis François Jean Bonaventure Clérel, Count of Tocqueville, and Louise Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosanbo, survived the Revolution only because Maximilien Robespierre himself fell from power in 1794, just before their own appointments with the blade. Imagine growing up with that family history. Your grandparents murdered by revolutionary mobs. Your parents bearing the psychological scars of waiting in prison for their execution.

Yet Tocqueville did not become a reactionary. Under the Bourbon Restoration, when the monarchy returned to France, his father became a noble peer and prefect. Young Alexis attended the Lycée Fabert in Metz, receiving the classical education befitting his class. But he watched France lurch from monarchy to republic to empire to monarchy again, each transition violent, each leaving society more fractured.

What fascinated him was not which system was right, but why France kept tearing itself apart while other nations seemed to manage political change without endless bloodshed.

Journey to the New World

In 1831, Tocqueville convinced the July Monarchy government to send him and his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont to America, ostensibly to study its penitentiary system. The real purpose was to observe democracy in action.

They traveled widely. From east coast cities to what was then the northwestern frontier in Michigan. By steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. By stagecoach across the South and back up the eastern seaboard to New York. Tocqueville even made a side trip to Montreal and Quebec City.

Throughout the journey, he took extensive notes. Not just about prisons, though they did visit some. He observed everything: how Americans conducted town meetings, how they formed voluntary associations, how social equality shaped manners and ambitions, how religious faith coexisted with democratic governance, how the tyranny of the majority could suppress individual liberty just as effectively as any king.

Nine months later, they returned to France. They published their official report on prisons. But Tocqueville had something far more ambitious in mind.

Democracy in America

Published in 1835, with a second volume appearing in 1840, Democracy in America was unlike anything written before. It was part travelogue, part political philosophy, part sociology before sociology really existed as a discipline. Tocqueville wrote as a detached scientist observing a new species of political life.

He wrote during a transformative period in American history. The Market Revolution was connecting distant regions through canals and railroads. Western expansion was pushing indigenous peoples off their lands. Jacksonian democracy was extending voting rights to nearly all white men, not just property owners. The fabric of American life was being radically rewoven.

What Tocqueville saw was an enterprise that balanced liberty and equality, concern for the individual alongside concern for the community. But he also saw dangers.

He famously warned about the tyranny of the majority. In aristocratic societies, tyrants were easy to identify: they wore crowns and commanded armies. But in democracies, oppression could come from public opinion itself, from the overwhelming pressure to conform, from what everyone around you believes and expects.

He observed that "in democracies manners are never so refined as amongst aristocratic nations." This wasn't snobbery, exactly. It was an acknowledgment that aristocratic culture, for all its injustices, cultivated certain excellences that democratic culture did not naturally produce. The question was whether that trade-off was worth it.

Tocqueville had a passionate love for liberty. He wrote: "I have a passionate love for liberty, law, and respect for rights. I am neither of the revolutionary party nor of the conservative. Liberty is my foremost passion." This placed him in an uncomfortable position in French politics, where you were expected to choose sides clearly.

He wrote about a "depraved taste for equality" that could lead people to prefer being equal in servitude rather than unequal in freedom. This has often been misquoted on the internet as "Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom," but that's not what he wrote. He was describing a human tendency, not making a specific claim about Americans.

His view on government reflected his belief in liberty. Of centralized government, he wrote that it "excels in preventing, not doing." Big bureaucracies are excellent at stopping things from happening, at maintaining order, at enforcing uniformity. They are terrible at actually accomplishing positive goals, at innovation, at responding to local needs.

England and Ireland

Before finishing Democracy in America, Tocqueville departed for England in 1833. He had a private reason: to meet the family of Mary Mottley, a young woman he had encountered at Versailles. They would marry in 1836.

But he also wanted to observe what many imagined as the dawning age of democracy in Britain, particularly after the Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832. He stayed five weeks, and concluded there was "a good chance for the English to succeed in modifying the social and political set-up without violent convulsions."

Why? The British nobility was open to new recruits. He noted the difference was "clear from the use of one word." In English, "gentleman" applies to any well-educated man, regardless of birth. In French, "gentilhomme" can only be used of someone noble by birth.

This seemingly small linguistic difference revealed a fundamental social distinction. The British aristocracy could absorb rising merchants and professionals, could refresh itself with new blood and new wealth. The French aristocracy had sealed itself off, creating the rigid class divisions that made revolution inevitable.

In May 1835, Tocqueville returned to England, then traveled with Beaumont to Ireland, which was then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. What he saw there shocked him.

He described Ireland as having "all the evils of an aristocracy and none of its advantages." There was "no moral tie between rich and poor; the difference of political opinion of religious belief and the actual distance they live apart make them strangers one to the other, one could almost say enemies."

He remarked on the "unbelievable unity between the Irish clergy and the Catholic population." The people looked to their priests, and the clergy, "rebuffed" by the Protestant upper classes, had "turned all its attention to the lower classes; it has the same instincts, the same interests and the same passions as the people." This was a state of affairs "altogether peculiar to Ireland."

Beaumont would later write about their Irish observations in L'Irlande sociale, politique et religieuse in 1839. Its first sentence read: "The dominion of the English in Ireland, from their invasion of the country in 1169, to the close of the last century, has been nothing but a tyranny." Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish political leader, praised it highly.

Political Life in France

Tocqueville despised the July Monarchy that ruled France from 1830 to 1848, but he entered political life anyway in 1839. From 1839 to 1851, he served as a member of the lower house of parliament representing the Manche department, specifically Valognes.

He sat on the center-left, defended abolitionist views, and supported free trade. But he also supported the colonization of Algeria being carried out by King Louis-Philippe's regime. This contradiction would become more pronounced over time.

In 1842, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society, a recognition of his scholarly work on democracy.

By 1847, Tocqueville tried to found a Young Left party that would advocate for wage increases, progressive taxation, and other labor concerns. His goal was to undermine the appeal of the socialists by addressing workers' legitimate grievances through liberal reforms rather than revolutionary upheaval.

It didn't work. In February 1848, revolution came anyway. The July Monarchy fell.

The Revolution of 1848 and Its Aftermath

After the February 1848 revolution, Tocqueville was elected to the Constituent Assembly. He became a member of the commission charged with drafting the new Constitution of the Second Republic.

He defended bicameralism, having two legislative chambers rather than one. He supported the election of the President by universal suffrage. His reasoning was tactical: he believed the countryside was more conservative than the working population of Paris, so universal suffrage would counteract the revolutionary spirit of the capital.

A few days after the February insurrection, he anticipated that a violent clash was coming. On one side: the Parisian workers led by socialists agitating for a "Democratic and Social Republic." On the other: conservatives including the aristocracy and the rural population. The collision was, he thought, inescapable.

He was right. In June 1848, the streets of Paris erupted in what became known as the June Days Uprising.

General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac led the suppression of the uprising, and Tocqueville supported him. He advocated for "regularization" of the state of siege declared by Cavaignac and other measures promoting suspension of constitutional order. Between May and September, he participated in the Constitutional Commission that wrote the new Constitution.

From June to October 1849, Tocqueville served as Minister of Foreign Affairs in Odilon Barrot's government. During the troubled days of June 1849, he pleaded with Interior Minister Jules Armand Dufaure to reestablish the state of siege in the capital. He approved the arrest of demonstrators.

Since February 1848, Tocqueville had supported laws restricting political freedoms. He approved two laws passed immediately after the June 1849 disturbances that restricted the liberty of clubs and freedom of the press.

This seems shocking from the author of Democracy in America, that great testament to liberty. How could he support such repression?

According to Tocqueville himself, he favored order as "the sine qua non for the conduct of serious politics." He hoped to bring stability to French political life that would permit "the steady growth of liberty unimpeded by the regular rumblings of the earthquakes of revolutionary change."

In other words, he believed you had to establish order first, even if that meant temporarily restricting freedoms, because without order there could be no lasting liberty at all. Whether this was pragmatic wisdom or a betrayal of his own principles remains debated.

Opposition to Napoleon III

Tocqueville had supported Cavaignac for president in the 1848 election. He lost to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.

On December 2, 1851, Louis Napoléon staged a coup, dissolving the National Assembly and extending his term beyond constitutional limits. Tocqueville was among the deputies who gathered in the 10th arrondissement of Paris attempting to resist the coup and have Napoleon judged for "high treason."

He was detained at Vincennes, then released. He could have accommodated himself to the new regime. Many did. But Tocqueville refused.

His biographer Joseph Epstein concluded: "Tocqueville could never bring himself to serve a man he considered a usurper and despot. He fought as best he could for the political liberty in which he so ardently believed, had given it, in all, thirteen years of his life. He would spend the days remaining to him fighting the same fight, but conducting it now from libraries, archives, and his own desk."

Tocqueville retreated to his castle, the Château de Tocqueville in Normandy. There, he began work on what would become The Old Regime and the Revolution.

The Old Regime and the Revolution

Published in 1856, The Old Regime and the Revolution offered a radical reinterpretation of the French Revolution. Most people saw the Revolution as a complete break with the past, the destruction of the old order and the birth of something entirely new.

Tocqueville argued the opposite. The real importance of the Revolution, he claimed, was that it continued the process of modernizing and centralizing the French state that had begun under King Louis the Fourteenth.

The monarchy had been systematically destroying local institutions, intermediate powers, and regional autonomy for over a century. The Revolution didn't reverse this. It accelerated it. It swept away the remnants of feudalism and aristocratic privilege, yes, but it also created an even more powerful centralized state.

The failure of the Revolution, Tocqueville believed, came from the inexperience of the deputies who were too wedded to abstract Enlightenment ideals. They thought they could redesign society from scratch using reason alone. They had no practical experience in governance, no feel for how institutions actually work, no understanding of the messy compromises required in real politics.

This was a deeply conservative argument coming from a liberal. Tocqueville was saying that traditions and institutions embody accumulated wisdom, that you can't simply abolish everything and start over based on first principles, that abstract ideas imposed without regard for social reality lead to disaster.

He left the second volume unfinished when he died.

Algeria and the Contradictions of Liberal Imperialism

In 1841 and 1846, Tocqueville traveled to Algeria, which France had invaded and begun colonizing in 1830. He had even considered settling there as a colonist himself. From his election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, he had become parliament's foremost expert on the colony.

In 1837, he had written hopefully about eventual intermarriage between the French and indigenous Arabs, their amalgamation into a distinct whole. But after his first visit to Algeria with Beaumont, his position reversed completely.

When it came to French colonists, he "displayed his usual liberalism," criticizing the "coarseness and violence" of the military rule they suffered under. But from what he observed of Algerian society, including what he understood as "the absence of all political life," he was persuaded that violent subjugation was justified and that assimilation of indigenous people into French civil and political life could not and should never happen.

This is Tocqueville at his worst, his liberalism failing precisely when it mattered most. He could see the dangers of majority tyranny in America. He could analyze the social conditions that produced revolution in France. But when confronted with French imperialism, with the actual violent suppression of an entire people, his analytical clarity vanished.

He was not alone in this. Many nineteenth-century liberals supported empire, convinced that European civilization had a duty to spread its superior institutions. But that doesn't make it less of a profound moral and intellectual failure.

Personal Life and Death

In 1836, Tocqueville married Mary Mottley, the Englishwoman he had met at Versailles. Before their marriage, she converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, Tocqueville's professed religion.

She appeared to be comparatively devout. Tocqueville's own attitude toward religion was more complicated. It has been described as "utilitarian," regarding religion as "social cement, a safety valve for passions that might otherwise feed a revolutionary torrent dangerous to individual liberty."

Provided it was separated from state power, Tocqueville did not believe his church was bound to be anti-democratic. Religion could support democracy by providing moral foundations and checking the excesses of individualism and materialism.

Some in Tocqueville's family thought Mary was "too liberal, too Protestant, too middle-class, and too English." But Tocqueville described her as perhaps his only true friend. They hoped for a family but had no children.

A longtime sufferer from tuberculosis, Tocqueville's health deteriorated in his fifties. He eventually succumbed to the disease on April 16, 1859, at the age of fifty-three. He was buried in the Tocqueville cemetery in Normandy, survived by his wife of twenty-three years.

Legacy and Interpretation

Tocqueville was a classical liberal who advocated parliamentary government and was skeptical of the extremes of majoritarianism. During his time in parliament, he moved from center-left to center-right. The complex and restless nature of his liberalism has led to contrasting interpretations across the political spectrum.

Democracy in America has been interpreted differently across national contexts. In France and the United States, his work was generally seen as liberal. But in the British Isles, both progressives and conservatives found ways to interpret his work as supporting their own positions.

Conservatives appreciated his warnings about majority tyranny, his respect for tradition and religion, his skepticism of radical change. Progressives appreciated his support for equality, his criticism of aristocratic privilege, his analysis of how democracy could empower ordinary people.

This ambiguity is part of why Tocqueville remains relevant. He doesn't fit neatly into our current political categories. He was neither a pure individualist nor a communitarian, neither a progressive nor a reactionary, neither an optimist nor a pessimist about democracy.

He saw democracy as both liberation and threat, as enabling human flourishing and enabling new forms of oppression. He understood that destroying old hierarchies didn't automatically create freedom, that equality could coexist with conformity, that democratic peoples faced temptations and dangers just as real as those faced by aristocratic ones.

Reading Tocqueville today, what strikes you is not that he had all the answers. He didn't. His support for Algerian colonization, his willingness to restrict freedoms in 1848, his occasional aristocratic snobbery, all these reveal limitations.

What makes him enduringly valuable is the quality of his questions. How do you balance liberty and equality? How do you prevent the tyranny of the majority without returning to aristocratic privilege? How do you maintain excellence and cultivation in a democratic age? How do you preserve local autonomy against centralizing tendencies? How do you keep democratic societies from becoming soft, conformist, and unfree even as they proclaim liberty?

These questions haven't gone away. If anything, they've become more urgent. Tocqueville wrote before mass media, before social media, before the administrative state reached its current scale. Yet his analysis of how democracy shapes souls, how equality affects aspirations, how centralization weakens civic life, all of this still resonates.

He was a man between two worlds, an aristocrat by birth who understood that aristocracy was dying, a lover of liberty who feared that democracy might not secure it. He spent his life trying to understand the new world being born, hoping that by understanding it clearly, people might shape it more wisely.

Whether we have proven worthy of his hopes remains an open question.