What did alexis de tocqueville

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Alexis de tocqueville cause of death
Alexis de tocqueville contribution to sociology

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The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville

In 1831, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis de Tocqueville made his fateful journey to America, where he observed the thrilling reality of a functioning democracy. From that moment onward, the French aristocrat would dedicate his life as a writer and politician to ending despotism in his country and bringing it into a new age. In this authoritative and groundbreaking biography, leading Tocqueville expert Olivier Zunz tells the story of a radical thinker who, uniquely charged by the events of his time, both in America and France, used the world as a laboratory for his political ideas. Placing Tocqueville’s dedication to achieving a new kind of democracy at the center of his life and work, Zunz traces Tocqueville’s evolution into a passionate student and practitioner of liberal politics across a trove of correspondence with intellectuals, politicians, constituents, family members, and friends. While taking seriously Tocqueville’s attempts to apply the lessons of Democracy in America to French politics, Z

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Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French philosopher and statesman. Belonging to a Norman aristocratic family that traced its origins to the Battle of Hastings (1066), Tocqueville’s parents barely escaped the guillotine in the terror of the French Revolution. After studies in Metz and Paris, Tocqueville became a magistrate, but quickly grew bored by narrow legal work. In 1831, King Louis-Philippe commissioned Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont to study prison conditions in the United States, and the two travelled to America over nine months in 1831 and 1832. Tocqueville drew on this experience to produce his two-volume masterpiece, Democracy in America (1835/1840). Tocqueville would also travel to England, Ireland, and Algeria, writing noteworthy accounts of these voyages. He conducted correspondence with many of the most notable public and intellectual figures of the day, including the English liberal John Stuart Mill.

Politically as well as intellectually ambitious, Tocqueville served as a deputy and sometime advisor to Louis-Philippe during the July Monarch

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Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an aristocratic family recently rocked by France’s revolutionary upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during the Reign of Terror. After attending college in Metz, Tocqueville studied law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in Versailles, where he met his future wife and befriended a fellow lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.

Did you know? During his travels in the United States, one of the first things that surprised Alexis de Tocqueville about American culture was how early everyone seemed to eat breakfast.

In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, and Tocqueville’s career ambitions were temporarily blocked. Unable to advance, he and Beaumont secured permission to carry out a study of the American penal system, and in April 1831 they set sail for Rhode Island.

Alexis de Tocqueville: American Travels

From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan woods, from New Orleans to the White House, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled for nine months by steamboat, by stag