Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville: The Aristocrat Who Read Democracy's Future

He went to America to inspect prisons. That was the mission the French government approved in 1831, and he and Gustave de Beaumont duly filed the report on their return. Tocqueville later admitted the penitentiaries had been a pretext. What he had actually spent nine months doing was taking the measurements of a society that did not yet exist in Europe, and working out what it would do to people when it arrived. He was twenty-five, and he was right about a startling number of things.

A Family That Nearly Died in the Terror

Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was born on 29 July 1805 in Paris, into an old aristocratic Norman family whose recent history was a warning. His great-grandfather, the statesman Malesherbes, went to the guillotine in 1793. His parents were imprisoned and expected the same; they were saved by the fall of Robespierre in 1794. Under the Bourbon Restoration his father became a peer and a prefect.

He was educated at the Lycée Fabert in Metz, trained in law, and was appointed *juge auditeur* at Versailles, where he formed the friendship with Beaumont that would shape his life. In 1833 he travelled to England partly to meet the family of Mary Mottley; they married in 1836. His relations found her too liberal, too Protestant, too middle-class and too English. He called her perhaps his only true friend. They had no children, though they wanted them.

Nine Months

They landed in New York in May 1831 and criss-crossed the United States for nine months, taking in Canada as well. The official product was *Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis*. The unofficial one was *De la démocratie en Amérique*, published in two parts in 1835 and 1840, and immediately popular on both sides of the Atlantic.

The book's organising idea is not political but social: that over the preceding seven centuries the conditions of men had grown steadily more equal, and that this levelling was an irresistible revolution which institutions could channel but not reverse. Everything else follows from it. Because equality dissolves the intermediate bodies that once restrained rulers, democracies are exposed to a tyranny of the majority that limits thought more effectively than any censor. Because equality isolates people, it breeds the condition he named individualism — a retreat into private life that leaves the field to the state.

His answer was association. The Library of Congress preserves the passage: Americans of all ages constantly unite, not only in commercial and industrial associations but in a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small. He called the art of association the mother science of democratic life, on the view that citizens who cannot combine cannot be free.

He was also, unusually for his moment, interested in what the arrangement did to women. In no country, he wrote, had such constant care been taken to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes — and yet he attributed American strength to the superiority of their women, and expected the republic to raise women closer to equality with men.

Deputy, Minister, Prisoner

He was elected to the Académie française in 1841 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1842. He sat in the Chamber of Deputies for Manche from 1839 to 1851, drifting from centre-left to centre-right. In 1847 he tried to found a "Young Left" that would offer higher wages and progressive taxation as an answer to socialism.

He saw 1848 coming, writing before the June Days that a violent clash between the Parisian working population led by socialists and their opponents would be inescapable. Elected to the Constituent Assembly, he sat on the constitutional commission and argued for bicameralism and universal suffrage, calculating that rural conservatism would counterweight Parisian radicalism. He supported General Cavaignac's suppression of the June rising and measures suspending constitutional order, and as Minister of Foreign Affairs from June to October 1849 he approved restrictions on political clubs and the press. Order, he believed, was the condition of serious politics.

When Louis-Napoléon seized power on 2 December 1851, Tocqueville resisted and was briefly detained at Vincennes. He then left public life for the Château de Tocqueville and wrote *L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution*, published in 1856, which argued that the Revolution had continued the centralising modernisation begun under Louis XIV rather than breaking with it. The second volume was never finished. Tuberculosis killed him at Cannes on 16 April 1859.

Why Alexis Is Called a Genius

Here the claim is intellectual, and the evidence is unusually strong. Tocqueville invented a way of reading societies — deducing political outcomes from social structure rather than from constitutions — roughly seventy years before sociology existed as a discipline, and the method generated predictions that came true.

He forecast that the slavery question would end in civil war. He forecast that the United States and Russia would end up dividing the world between them. He warned that an industrial aristocracy would rise out of the ownership of labour and told the friends of democracy to keep an anxious eye on it permanently. He identified the specific pathologies of mass equality — conformity of opinion, materialism, social isolation — that democratic societies have been arguing about ever since, and gave them names. Harvey Mansfield of Harvard calls *Democracy in America* at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America; the work is standard reading at Cambridge, Oxford and Princeton.

The counter-case matters. His evidence base was a nine-month tour conducted largely through educated, Anglophone, mostly Whiggish informants, and his misses are as instructive as his hits: he did not foresee the American literary flowering of Emerson, Poe and Whitman, or the country's scientific ascent. His treatment of race is analytically thin and morally compromised. He was a genuine and persistent critic of slavery — he noted that racial prejudice ran stronger in states that had abolished it, and wrote in 1855 that he was pained and astonished that the freest people on earth was almost the last civilised nation still maintaining personal servitude — yet he held that Black assimilation was impossible and that Native Americans would inevitably become extinct. On Algeria, the parliament's leading expert on the subject advocated domination and colonisation, praised Bugeaud's methods, and supported separate legal regimes for European settlers and Arabs, though after visiting in 1846 he turned against the Kabylia campaign and helped deny it funding. His own political career was minor: five months at the foreign ministry, spent partly restricting the press. The genius is in the analysis, not the man's practice of politics.

Legacy

He is the rare thinker claimed by everyone. Nineteenth-century French and American readers took him for a liberal; the British found ammunition in him for progressive and conservative positions alike, and the pattern has held. Modern debates about civil society, social capital and the loneliness of prosperous democracies run directly out of his chapters on association and individualism. Prizes, institutes and lectures carry his name. Most tellingly, the two predictions that made his reputation — the Civil War and the Cold War — came from a young French aristocrat who never returned to America after 1832, and who worked them out from first principles about what equality does to human beings.

Achievements

• president (1849–1852)
• Minister of Foreign Affairs (1849–1849)
• Seat 18 of the Académie française (1841–1859)
• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Montyon Prize — 1835
• Educated at University of Paris and Lycée Fabert