Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was born in Paris on 29 July 1805 into a Norman aristocratic family, and died in Cannes on 16 April 1859. A magistrate by training, he traveled to the United States in 1831–1832 with Gustave de Beaumont, officially to study the American penitentiary system; the journey produced Democracy in America (De la démocratie en Amérique), whose first volume appeared in 1835 and second in 1840. He served as a deputy from 1839, was elected to the Académie française (1841), and was briefly Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1849. After Louis-Napoléon’s coup of 1851 he withdrew from political life and devoted himself to The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). His memoirs, the Souvenirs, were published posthumously. ...