Alexis de Tocqueville, Part 1: Biography

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On the morning after an American election, Book Report turns to the foreign visitor whose name still gets pulled into American political arguments. Alexis de Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who spent nine months traveling the United States in his twenties and came home to write Democracy in America. Politicians, professors and newspaper columnists quote him constantly, often with lines he never wrote. This series is about the man and what he actually said: two volumes on America, a private memoir of a revolution, and a history of the old French monarchy that explains why France kept exploding.

He was an unlikely person to explain democracy. He belonged to the class that democracy was replacing. Tocqueville was born in Paris on July 29th, 1805, into an old noble family from Normandy. His great-grandfather was Malesherbes, the royal minister who helped defend Louis the Sixteenth at the king's trial and was later guillotined during the Terror. Alexis's parents were imprisoned in the same period and came close to execution themselves. The fall of Robespierre saved them. In this family, the French Revolution was not an abstraction. It was a list of relatives.

His father, Hervé, became a prefect under the restored Bourbon monarchy, which meant running a French department on behalf of the crown. While the family was posted to Metz, in the east of France, Alexis attended the local school and read his way through his father's library. At sixteen, that reading knocked out the Catholic faith he had been raised in. Decades later, in a letter to a friend, he described being seized afterward with "the blackest depression." Belief never fully returned. He continued to treat religion as something a free society needs, and he wrote about it with respect and some longing. That gap, between what he thought people needed and what he himself could hold onto, runs through his books.

He studied law in Paris, and in 1827 took a junior judicial post at the court in Versailles. There he met two people who shaped the rest of his life. One was Gustave de Beaumont, a fellow young magistrate who became his traveling companion, collaborator and lifelong friend. The other was Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman from a middle-class Protestant background. Some of his relatives considered her too English, too Protestant and too middle-class. He married her anyway in the mid-1830s. She converted to Catholicism, and the couple had no children.

In 1830 a short revolution in Paris replaced the Bourbon king Charles the Tenth with his cousin Louis-Philippe. For a young judge from a royalist family, this was awkward. Tocqueville accepted the new regime without enthusiasm, and he and Beaumont found a respectable way to step out of the situation. They asked to study the American prison system, which French reformers were then curious about. The government approved the mission.

They landed at Newport, Rhode Island, in May 1831, and left in February 1832. In about nine months they covered the eastern cities, the frontier in Michigan, Montreal and Quebec, steamboats down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, a hard winter trip overland through the South, and a return to New York. They did visit prisons, and they did write the report. But they also interviewed lawyers, judges, officials, farmers and anyone else who would talk, and Tocqueville filled notebooks. The prisons were the ticket. The subject was the country.

Volume one of Democracy in America appeared in 1835 and made him famous at thirty. Volume two, more abstract and more worried, followed in 1840. In 1841 he was elected to the French Academy.

He did not want to be only an author. In 1839 he won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies for Valognes, near the family château in Normandy, and he held it until 1851. He sat with the moderate left and argued for the abolition of slavery in French colonies. He also visited Algeria in 1841 and 1846, supported the French conquest there, and endorsed brutal methods of war against the Algerian resistance. Recent scholars have pressed hard on this. The same mind that warned about the abuse of power at home accepted it abroad in the name of national greatness. That contradiction belongs in any honest picture of him.

Tocqueville was respected in parliament, but he was no party boss. He knew it. In his memoirs he admits that he could hardly remember the faces of people who did not interest him, and that ordinary politicians bored him profoundly. That is not the temperament of a coalition builder.

In January 1848 he stood up in the Chamber and told his colleagues that they were sleeping on a volcano. The majority answered with ironic cheers. A month later, the monarchy fell. He was elected to the new assembly, helped draft the constitution of the Second Republic, and lived through the June Days, when the government crushed an uprising of Paris workers. In June 1849 he became foreign minister under the new president, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, and held the post for about five months.

Louis Napoleon was Napoleon's nephew, and he did not intend to remain a constitutional president. On December 2nd, 1851, he seized power. Tocqueville joined the deputies who tried to resist, and he was briefly locked up in the fortress of Vincennes. His political career ended there. He refused to serve a regime he considered a usurpation.

Retirement gave him time. He had already written a private memoir of 1848, partly at Sorrento on the Bay of Naples. Now he went into the old provincial archives to study how France had been governed before 1789. The result was The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856. He planned a second volume and never finished it. He had suffered from tuberculosis for years, and he died in Cannes on April 16th, 1859, at fifty-three. He was buried at Tocqueville, in Normandy.

The shape of the life explains the books. Here was a man from the old order who concluded, early and without pleasure, that equality was coming whatever anyone did. The question he kept asking was what kind of equality it would be: one where citizens govern themselves, or one where they are comfortably managed. He went to America to see the first kind working. Next time, Book Report opens volume one of Democracy in America and follows him into the New England town meeting.