Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville (29 July 180516 April 1859), was a French diplomat, political philosopher and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America (appearing in two volumes, 1835 and 1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In these, and in reflections on his travels in England and Ireland, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
Tocqueville was active in French politics, first under the July Monarchy (1830–1848), during which he was considered the parliament's foremost expert on the French colonial project in Algeria, and then, following the 1848 Revolution, in the Second Republic (1849–1851). He retired from political life after Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup and thereafter began work on The Old Regime and the Revolution. Tocqueville argued the importance of the French Revolution was to continue the process of modernizing and centralizing the French state which had begun under King Louis XIV. He believed the failure of the Revolution came from the inexperience of the deputies who were too wedded to abstract Enlightenment ideals.
Tocqueville was a classical liberal who advocated parliamentary government and was sceptical of the extremes of majoritarianism. During his time in parliament, he was first a member of the centre-left before moving to the centre-right, and the complex and restless nature of his liberalism has led to contrasting interpretations and admirers across the political spectrum. For example, Democracy in America was interpreted differently across national contexts. In France and the United States, Tocqueville's work was seen as liberal, whereas both progressives and conservatives in the British Isles interpreted his work as supporting their own positions.
Early life Tocqueville came from an old aristocratic Norman family, the great-grandson of the statesman Malesherbes, who was guillotined in 1793. He was the third son of Hervé Louis François Jean Bonaventure Clérel, Count of Tocqueville, an officer of the Constitutional Guard of King Louis XVI, and Louise Madeleine Le Peletier de Rosanbo who, themselves, might have faced the guillotine but for the fall in 1794 of Maximilien Robespierre. Under the Bourbon Restoration, Tocqueville's father became a noble peer and prefect.
Tocqueville attended the Lycée Fabert in Metz. He continued his studies there until obtaining his baccalaureate in 1823. After graduating from high school, he obtained a law degree from the University of Paris in 1826.
Political career
Tocqueville, who despised the July Monarchy (1830–1848), began his political career in 1839. From 1839 to 1851, he served as member of the lower house of parliament for the Manche department (Valognes). He sat on the centre-left, defended abolitionist views and upheld free trade while supporting the colonisation of Algeria carried on by Louis-Philippe I's regime. In 1842, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.
In 1847, Tocqueville sought to found a Young Left (Jeune Gauche) party which would advocate wage increases, a progressive tax, and other labor concerns in order to undermine the appeal of the socialists.
In the Second Republic After the fall of the July Monarchy in the Revolution of 1848, Tocqueville was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly of 1848, where he became a member of the commission charged with the drafting of the new Constitution of the Second Republic (1848–1851). He defended bicameralism and the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. As the countryside was thought to be more conservative than the labouring population of Paris, he conceived of universal suffrage as a means to counteract the revolutionary spirit of Paris.
During the Second Republic, Tocqueville sided with the Party of Order against the socialists. A few days after the February 1848 insurrection, he anticipated that a violent clash between the Parisian workers' population led by socialists agitating in favour of a "Democratic and Social Republic" and the conservatives, which included the aristocracy and the rural population, would be inescapable. Indeed, these social tensions eventually exploded in the June Days Uprising of 1848."Regularization" is a term used by Tocqueville himself, see , Third part, pp. 289–290 French ed. (Paris, Gallimard, 1999).
Led by General Cavaignac, the suppression of the uprising was supported by Tocqueville, who advocated the "regularization" of the state of siege declared by Cavaignac and other measures promoting suspension of the constitutional order. Between May and September, Tocqueville participated in the Constitutional Commission which wrote the new Constitution. His proposals, such as his amendment about the President and his reelection, reflected lessons he drew from his North American experience.Coutant Arnaud, Tocqueville et la constitution democratique, Paris, Mare et Martin, 2008, 680 p. See also "Le blog de arnaud.coutant.over-blog.com". A supporter of Cavaignac and of the Party of Order, Tocqueville accepted an invitation to enter Odilon Barrot's government as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 3 June to 31 October 1849. During the troubled days of June 1849, he pleaded with Interior Minister Jules Armand Dufaure for the reestablishment of the state of siege in the capital and approved the arrest of demonstrators. Tocqueville, who since February 1848 had supported laws restricting political freedoms, approved the two laws voted immediately after the June 1849 days which restricted the liberty of clubs and freedom of the press.
This active support in favour of laws restricting political freedoms stands in contrast of his defence of freedoms in Democracy in America. According to Tocqueville, he favoured order as "the sine qua non for the conduct of serious politics. He [hoped] to bring the kind of stability to French political life that would permit the steady growth of liberty unimpeded by the regular rumblings of the earthquakes of revolutionary change″.
Opposition to Louis Napoleon Tocqueville had supported Cavaignac against Louis Napoléon Bonaparte for the presidential election of 1848. Opposed to Louis Napoléon Bonaparte's 2 December 1851 coup which followed his election, Tocqueville was among the deputies who gathered at the 10th arrondissement of Paris in an attempt to resist the coup and have Napoleon III judged for "high treason" as he had violated the constitutional limit on terms of office. Detained at Vincennes and then released, Tocqueville, who supported the Restoration of the Bourbons against Napoleon III's Second Empire (1851–1871), quit political life and retreated to his castle ().Epstein, Alexis De Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide (2006), p. 160.
Against this image of Tocqueville, 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." There, he began the draft of , publishing the first tome in 1856 but leaving the second one unfinished.
Travels
North America In 1831, Tocqueville obtained from the July Monarchy a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the United States and proceeded there with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont. While they did visit some prisons, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled widely in the United States: from the east-coast cities to what was then the north-west frontier, Michigan; by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans; and by stagecoach across the South back toward the east coast and north to New York. Tocqueville also made a side trip to Montreal and Quebec City."Alexis de Tocqueville's visit to Lower Canada in 1831". Throughout his trip, he took extensive notes on his observations and reflections. He returned within nine months and published a report, The Penitentiary System in the United States, although the more well-known result of his tour was his major work Democracy in America, which appeared in 1835. Meanwhile for Beaumont, their joint travels were the inspiration for a work of romantic fiction. In Jacksonian America: Marie or Slavery in the United States (1835),Gustave de Beaumont. Gustave de Beaumont. "Marie ou l'Esclavage aux États-Unis". an essay on race is interwoven with a tale of forbidden love between an idealistic young French traveler and Marie, an American woman who appears white but discovers she has African ancestry.
England and Ireland Tocqueville returned to France in February 1832. Before putting the finishing touches to his reflections on American democracy, he departed for England in 1833. Tocqueville had a private reason for crossing the Channel: to meet the family of Mary Mottley, a young woman he had met at Versailles. The couple were married in 1836. He stayed five weeks in England, eager to observe what many imagined as the dawning of the age of democracy, the passage of the Parliamentary Reform Act. Tocqueville concluded that there was "a good chance for the English to succeed in modifying the social and political set-up ... without violent convulsions". The British nobility was open to new recruits. He suggested that the difference with the French was "clear from the use of one word" as "gentleman in English applies to any well-educated man, regardless of birth, whereas in France gentilhomme can only be used of a noble by birth".
In May 1835, Tocqueville returned to England but then in summer with Beaumont travelled on to Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 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". In this circumstance he remarked on the "unbelievable unity between the Irish clergy and the Catholic population". The people looked to the clergy, and the clergy "rebuffed" by the "upper classes" ("Protestants and enemies"), had "turned all its attention to the lower classes; it has the same instincts, the same interests and the same passions as the people; [a] state of affairs altogether peculiar to Ireland".
Back in England, Tocqueville found confirmation of a close connection between centralisation and democratisation. He observed that in England centralisation took a form less absolute than in France. It was of "legislation and not administration", and co-existed with a "spirit of [civic] association" that in responding to specific and local issues narrowed the range of government intervention. Tocqueville had intended the joint impressions of their trip to Britain and Ireland would form the basis of a work by Beaumont, just as their common reflections of the United States on had served as him as material for Democracy in America. Beaumont did produce L'Irlande sociale, politique et religieuse (1839). Much praised by Daniel O'Connell, the first sentence of its historical introduction 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."
Algeria