Tocqueville crossed the Atlantic to inspect prisons and came back with Democracy
In 1831 the French government sent a young aristocrat to report on American penitentiaries. Alexis de Tocqueville did tour some jails, then spent nine months roaming from Michigan's frontier to New Orleans. The prison report is forgotten; the book that grew from his notebooks is counted among the first works of sociology and political science.
Tocqueville was born on 29 July 1805 into an old Norman noble family scarred by the Terror. His great-grandfather Malesherbes went to the guillotine in 1793, and his own parents might have followed had Robespierre not fallen in 1794. His father later served the restored Bourbons as a peer and prefect.
The American journey, made with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont, took them by steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi and by stagecoach through the South, with a detour to Montreal and Quebec City. Democracy in America appeared in two volumes, in 1835 and 1840. It examined how ordinary people lived and how they related to markets and the state, and it warned against the excesses of majority rule. Readers have claimed it ever since: the French and Americans saw a liberal text, while in Britain both progressives and conservatives found their own views confirmed. A visit to England convinced him that its aristocracy, open to newcomers, could reform without upheaval; Ireland, by contrast, struck him as having every vice of aristocracy and none of its benefits.
His political career fits awkwardly with his reputation. Elected for the Manche department in 1839, he backed abolition and free trade yet supported the conquest of Algeria. After the 1848 revolution he helped draft the Second Republic's constitution, arguing for two chambers and a president chosen by universal suffrage, partly because rural voters would offset radical Paris. As foreign minister from June to October 1849 he approved curbs on political clubs and the press, explaining that order had to come first if liberty was to grow steadily.
When Louis Napoléon seized power on 2 December 1851, Tocqueville joined the deputies who tried to have him tried for high treason, and was briefly detained at Vincennes. He then withdrew to his château and wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution, published in 1856, arguing that the Revolution carried on the centralising project begun under Louis XIV and faltered because its deputies clung to abstract ideals. The second volume was never finished; he died on 16 April 1859.
Source: Alexis de Tocqueville
