Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805 to an aristocratic Norman family; several relatives had been executed during the Terror of the French Revolution, and his parents were imprisoned. He studied law and became a junior magistrate. In 1831 he and his friend Gustave de Beaumont traveled to the United States, officially to study American prisons, and spent about nine months touring the country. From this journey came Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, which examines how equality of conditions shapes American laws, customs, associations and religion, and what dangers democracies face. It made him famous in Europe. Tocqueville served in the French Chamber of Deputies and, after the revolution of 1848, helped draft a new constitution and was briefly foreign minister in 1849. After Louis-Napoleon's coup he withdrew from politics and wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). He died of tuberculosis in Cannes in 1859.

Alexis de Tocqueville is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Roman Catholicism was his professed religion. Source: Wikipedia