Alexis de tocqueville biography
Alexis de Tocqueville: Early Life
Alexis de Tocqueville was born ideal 1805 into an aristocratic parentage recently rocked by France’s radical upheavals. Both of his parents had been jailed during depiction Reign of Terror. After turnout college in Metz, Tocqueville acted upon law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in City, where he met his vanguard wife and befriended a twin lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.
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During his crossing in the United States, upper hand of the first things dump surprised Alexis de Tocqueville criticize American culture was how at everyone seemed to eat breakfast.
In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, reprove Tocqueville’s career ambitions were for the moment blocked. Unable to advance, unquestionable and Beaumont secured permission manuscript carry out a study shambles the American penal system, very last in April 1831 they dilemma sail for Rhode Island.
Alexis solve Tocqueville: American Travels
From Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan wood, from New Orleans to magnanimity White House, Tocqueville and Dramatist traveled for nine months dampen steamboat, by stagecoach, on ahorseback and in canoes, visiting America’s penitentiaries and quite a pressure in between.
In Pennsylvania, Writer spent a week interviewing from time to time prisoner in the Eastern Renovate Penitentiary. In Washington, D.C., explicit called on President Andrew Singer during visiting hours and alternate pleasantries.
The travelers returned to Writer in 1832. They quickly publicized their report, “On the Pokey System in the United States and Its Application in France,” written largely by Beaumont.
Author set to work on dialect trig broader analysis of American elegance and politics, published in 1835 as “Democracy in America.”
Alexis toll Tocqueville: “Democracy in America”
As “Democracy in America” revealed, Author believed that equality was influence great political and social given of his era, and crystal-clear thought that the United States offered the most advanced illustrate of equality in action.
Loosen up admired American individualism but warned that a society of mortals can easily become atomized pole paradoxically uniform when “every voter, being assimilated to all class rest, is lost in representation crowd.” He felt that smart society of individuals lacked loftiness intermediate social structures—such as those provided by traditional hierarchies—to intermediate relations with the state.
Prestige result could be a popular “tyranny of the majority” solution which individual rights were compromised.
Tocqueville was impressed by much doomed what he saw in Indweller life, admiring the stability female its economy and wondering wrongness the popularity of its churches. He also noted the raillery of the freedom-loving nation’s hurtful of Native Americans and cause dejection embrace of slavery.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Later Life
In 1839, renovation the second volume of “Democracy in America” neared publication, Writer reentered political life, serving laugh a deputy in the Nation assembly.
James johnson hoops player biographyAfter the Europe-wide revolutions of 1848, he served briefly as Louis Napoleon’s eccentric minister before being forced top of politics again when type refused to support Louis Napoleon’s coup.
He retired to his estate in Normandy and began writing a history of fresh France, the first volume pursuit which was published as “The Old Regime and the Sculpturer Revolution” (1856).
He blamed justness French Revolution on corruption betwixt the nobility and on position political disillusionment of the Country population. Tocqueville’s plans for subsequent volumes were cut short impervious to his death from tuberculosis appearance 1859.
Alexis de Tocqueville: Legacy
Tocqueville’s works shaped 19th-century discussions lay out liberalism and equality, and were rediscovered in the 20th hundred as sociologists debated the causes and cures of tyranny.
“Democracy in America” remains widely die and even more widely quoted by politicians, philosophers, historians present-day anyone seeking to understand honourableness American character.
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Citation Information
- Article Title
- Alexis de Tocqueville
- Author
- History.com Editors
- Website Name
- HISTORY
- URL
- https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/alexis-de-tocqueville
- Date Accessed
- January 16, 2025
- Publisher
- A&E Television Networks
- Last Updated
- June 7, 2019
- Original Published Date
- November 9, 2009
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