Tocqueville, ALEXIS CHARLES HENRI CHÉREL DE, was born at Verneuil, in the department of Seine-et-Oise, 29th July 1805. His father, the head of the ancient family of Tocqueville in Normandy, whose wife was a granddaughter of Malesherbes, narrowly escaped the guillotine, but did not emigrate, and, having preserved his property, reassumed in 1815 the title of Count. Young Tocqueville was called to the bar at Paris in 1825, and after a short tour in Italy became an assistant magistrate at Versailles. In 1831 he accepted a government mission to America, to report on the working of the penitentiary system, but the chief fruit of which was his great work, De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835; 15th ed. 1868; Eng. trans. 1835). Democracy, which was the first carefully thought out book written in Europe on the subject, made at once a great sensation. The accuracy of the statements, the skill with which the matter had been digested, and the beauty of the style were loudly praised by critics. The author was described as the continuator of Montesquieu, and the greatest political writer of his time. He became successively a member of the Academy of Moral Sciences and of the French Academy. The work is a fair and lucid statement from a moderate point of view; but his knowledge was hardly sufficient to bear the whole deductive structure of system which he built on it. In 1835 De Tocqueville visited England, where his work had made him known, and where he received an enthusiastic welcome from the leaders of the Whig party. In the same year he married Miss Mottley, an Englishwoman. He shortly afterwards, by a family arrangement, entered into possession of Tocqueville. He stood in 1837 as candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, and was defeated; but two years later was returned by his neighbours, the Norman farmers, by an overwhelming majority. As a speaker De Tocqueville did not succeed, but he exercised great influence on the legislature. Immediately after the revolution of 1848 he was the most formidable opponent of the Socialists and extreme Republicans, and as strenuously opposed Louis Napoleon. He became, however, in 1849 vice-president of the Assembly, and from June to October in the same year was minister of Foreign Affairs. At this time he vindicated the policy of the expedition to Rome, on the ground that it would secure liberal institutions to the States of the Church. After the coup d'état he returned to Tocqueville, where he devoted himself to agricultural pursuits. He there wrote
L'ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856; Eng. trans. same year), a work now regarded as defective, not merely in width and depth of knowledge, but in being too favourable to the Revolution. He had also written a work on the reign of Louis XV. (1846-50). In June 1858 he broke a blood-vessel, and took up his abode at Cannes, where he died, 16th April 1859. Tocqueville's Œuvres et Correspondance Inédites were published in 2 vols. (1860), by his friend M. de Beaumont, with a biographical notice (trans. as Memoirs, Letters, and Remains, 1861). A collected edition of his works appeared at Paris in 9 vols. in 1860-65. See his Souvenirs (trans. 1896); a monograph by Jaques (Vienna, 1876); and his Conversations and Correspondence with Nassau Senior (2 vols. 1872).