Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Alexis Henri Charles Chérel, Comte de Tocqueville

TOCQUEVILLE, Alexis Henri Charles Chérel, Comte de (1805-1859), was born at Verneuil on July 29, 1805. His family on the father's side were of good descent, and distinguished both in the law and in arms, while his mother was the granddaughter of Malesherbes. Alexis de Tocqueville was brought up for the bar, or, rather, according to the division of that profession in France, for the bench, and became an assistant magistrate in 1830. A year later he obtained from the Government of July a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in America, and proceeded thither with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont. He returned in somewhat less than two years, and published a report on the subject of his mission, but the real result of his tour was the famous ‘’De la Démocratie en Amerique’’, which appeared in 1835, and very soon made his reputation. It was at once caught up by influential members of the Liberal party in England, which country Tocqueville soon after visited, and where he married an Englishwoman. Returning to France, and beginning life as a country gentleman at Tocqueville, he thought to carry out the English ideal completely by standing for the chamber of deputies. But, with a scruple which illustrated his character, he refused Government nomination from Molé, and was defeated. Later he was successful, and sat for several years both before and after the revolution of February, becoming in 1849 vice-president of the assembly, and for a few months minister of foreign affairs. He was a warm supporter of the Roman expedition, but an equally warm opponent of Louis Napoleon, and after being one of the deputies who were arrested at the ‘’coup d’état’’ he retired from public life. Twenty years after his first, he produced another book, ‘’De I’Ancien Régime’’, which almost, if not quite, equalled its success. His health was never very strong, and in 1858 he broke a blood-vessel. He was ordered to the south, and, taking up his residence at Cannes, died there on the 16th of April 1859. He had published some minor pieces during his lifetime, and his complete works, including much unpublished correspondence, were produced after his death in uniform shape by De Beaumont.

During the last twenty years of his life, and for perhaps half that time after his death, Tocqueville had an increasing European fame, which for the last ten or fifteen years has been stationary if not diminishing. Both phenomena are susceptible of explanation. Although he has been accused by some of his own countrymen of having "le style triste," his manner, which is partly imitated from Montesquieu, has considerable charm; and he was the first and has remained the chief writer to put the orthodox liberal ideas which governed European politics during the first half or two-thirds of the 19th century into an orderly and attractive shape. He was, moreover, as has been said, much taken up by influential persons in England,—Senior, John Stuart Mill, and others,—and he had the great advantage of writing absolutely the first book of reasoned politics on the facts of democratic government as observed in America. Besides all this he was, if not an entirely impartial writer, neither a fanatical devotee of democracy nor a fanatical opponent of it. All this gave him a very great advantage which he has not yet wholly lost. At the same time he had defects which were certain to make themselves felt as time went on, even without the alteration of the centre of liberal opinion which has taken place of late years. The chief of these was a certain weakness which can hardly be described in English by any word more dignified than the familiar term "priggishness." His correspondence with Mole above alluded to is an instance of this, and it was also reflected on in various epigrams by countrymen and contemporaries; one of these accuses him of having unluckily "begun to think before he had begun to learn," while another, with more real than apparent inconsistency, declares that he "avait l'air de savoir de toute eternite ce qu'il venait d'apprendre." His book on America, though undoubtedly a very remarkable piece of political deduction, has the drawback of proceeding on very insufficient premisses and of trying to be too systematic. His book on the Ancien Regime is also wanting in solid information, and commits the great error of assuming rather than proving that the Revolution of 1789 was a proceeding of unmixed good, which delivered France from a state (not of unmixed evil, for Tocqueville was too careful a student to imagine that, but) of evil exclusively caused by the existence of monarchical and aristocratic institutions. In fact, the fault of both books is that their author is not a practical politician, a fault which is constantly illustrated and exhibited in his correspondence. He appears both in reading history and in conducting actual political business (of which, as has been seen, he had some experience) to have been constantly surprised and disgusted that men and nations did not behave as he expected them to behave. This excess of the deductive spirit explains at once both the merits and the defects of his two great works, which will probably remain to some extent political classics, though they are less and less likely to be used as practical guides.