Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis Clérel de Tocqueville (Paris 1805 - Cannes 1859) was a French historian and politician who published an insightful review of the United States entitled Democracy in America (1835), based on a nine month tour of the young country. It remains the most comprehensive treatise of American society to this day.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention .... In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united.

De Tocqueville further wrote:

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other .... They brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion.

He published a second volume of Democracy in America in 1840, in which he described:

Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America ... In the United States ... Christianity itself is a fact so irresistibly established, that no one undertakes either to attack or to defend it.

Tocqueville asserted that, at that time, America was a democracy—indeed, where the fundamental principle of government was “the sovereignty of the people.” He also asserted that most rich American men were thought to have been born poor; the American society was a very fluid one, marked by the rapid rise and fall of personal wealth.

In another book, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), Tocqueville gave a great meditation on the origins and meanings of the French Revolution.

He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1839 and was foreign minister for a few months in 1849. He died in Cannes on April 16, 1859.

Some paragraphs

(In French)

LIVRE PREMIER

CHAPITRE II Que l'objet fondamental et final de la Révolution n'était pas, comme on l'a cru, de détruire le pouvoir religieux et d'énerver le pouvoir politique.

LIVRE II

CHAPITRE X Comment la destruction de la liberté politique et la séparation des classes ont causé presque toutes les maladies dont l'ancien régime est mort.

The Old Regime and the Revolution.

Writings

• Democracy in America (1835)
• Souvenirs (1848)
• The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856)

See also

• American Revolution
• Enlightenment

References

• Tocqueville at Britannica