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• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Key Terms
• Foreword
• The Manuscripts of Tocqueville
• Some Details Concerning the Present Edition
• Abbreviations and Symbols Used In This Edition
• Note On the Manuscripts
• Acknowledgments
• Illustrations
• Editor’s Introduction
• I: Legacies
• II: To Understand the Revolution
• Democracy In America a (1835), Volume I]: Part I
• Introduction a
• Chapter 1: Exterior Configuration of North America
• Chapter 2: Of the Point of Departure and Its Importance For the Future of the Anglo-americans a
• Reasons For Some Singularities That the Laws and Customs B of the Anglo-americans Present
• Chapter 3: Social State of the Anglo-americans
• That the Salient Point of the Social State of the Anglo-americans Is to Be Essentially Democratic
• Political Consequences of the Social State of the Anglo-americans
• Chapter 4: Of the Principle of the Sovereignty of the People In America
• Chapter 5: Necessity of Studying What Happens In the Individual States Before Speaking About the Government of the Union a
• Of the Town System In America C
• Town District
• Town Powers In New England
• Of Town Life
• Of Town Spirit In New England
• Of the County In New England
• Of Administration In New England a
• General Ideas On Administration In the United States
• Of the State
• Legislative Power of the State
• Of the Executive Power of the State
• Of the Political Effects of Administrative Decentralization In the United States C
• Chapter 6 A: of the Judicial Power In the United States and Its Action On Political Society B
• Other Powers Granted to American Judges
• Chapter 7: Of Political Jurisdiction In the United States Tn 4
• Chapter 8: Of the Federal Constitution
• Historical Background of the Federal Constitution a
• Summary Picture of the Federal Constitution J
• Attributions of the Federal Government
• Federal Powers
• Legislative Powers: R [difference Between the Constitution of the Senate and That of the House of Representatives]
• Another Difference Between the Senate and the House of Representatives W
• Of Executive Power 16
• How the Position of the President of the United States Differs From That of a Constitutional King In France
• Accidental Causes That Can Increase the Influence of the Executive Power
• Why the President of the United States, to Lead Public Affairs, Does Not Need to Have a Majority In the Chambers
• Of the Election of the President
• Mode of Election
• Election Crisis
• Of the Re-election of the President
• Of the Federal Courts 24
• Way of Determining the Jurisdiction Tn 5 of the Federal Courts
• Different Cases of Jurisdiction
• The Federal Courts’ Way of Proceeding
• Elevated Rank That the Supreme Court Occupies Among the Great Powers of the State
• How the Federal Constitution Is Superior to the State Constitutions
• What Distinguishes the Federal Constitution of the United States of America From All Other Federal Constitutions
• Of the Advantages of the Federal System In General, and of Its Special Utility For America M
• What Keeps the Federal System From Being Within the Reach of All Peoples; and What Has Allowed the Anglo-americans to Adopt It

I

Legacies

Alexis de Tocqueville belonged to an old Norman family, Clérel, which took the patronymic de Tocqueville in 1661.24 In the following centuries, the family, Clérel de Tocqueville, left their land from time to time to serve the church or the crown, imitating in this their ancestor, Guillaume Clarel, who had participated in the battle of Hastings.

The Revolution surprised a family firmly established on the Cotentin peninsula, on good terms with its vassals, and honoring its seigniorial duties. When the revolutionary tide reached Normandy, it carried away only the dovecote of the château. It took from the Tocqueville family just the privilege of raising pigeons.

Hervé de Tocqueville welcomed the revolution with a certain sympathy. After a short stay in Brussels, disgust for the life of the émigré—the notes of his son on the depravity of a powerless aristocracy are the direct echo of the opinions of the father—led him to return to Paris, where he enlisted in the national guard. On 10 August 1792, Hervé de Tocqueville was part of a section of the national guard that, coming from the faubourg Saint-Victor, was preparing to defend the Tuileries. Rallying to the opinion of citizens met along the way, the men who made up the section decided to march against the palace; following this sudden change of opinion Hervé surreptitiously abandoned the section.

After several months in Picardy, Hervé returned to Paris in January 1793. At the end of the month, he went to Malesherbes and, on March 12, married Louise Le Peletier de Rosanbo, granddaughter of the famous Malesherbes.

The refuge at Malesherbes protected its inhabitants until the end of autumn. The defender of Louis XVI was strongly urged to leave France, but he stubbornly remained, intending perhaps to serve as the defender of the Queen. On 17 and 19 December, two members of the revolutionary committee arrested all the inhabitants of the château. Hervé de Tocqueville, his wife, the Peletier d’Aunay family, and the young Louis de Rosanbo owed their lives only to 9 Thermidor. They would see Malesherbes, Madame de Rosanbo, Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand, and his wife perish.25

The unpublished memoirs of Hervé de Tocqueville speak, not without some melancholy, about moments spent in the company of Malesherbes and other prisoners at Port-Libre (Port-Royal).26 The months that preceded the trial and inevitable sentence of death for Malesherbes brought forth within Hervé a boundless admiration for the noble old man who with dignity mounted the scaffold following his daughter and granddaughter.

Such events must have been evoked many times in the family, and Alexis always saw in his great-grandfather, Malesherbes, an exemplary figure without peer.27 At one time he would conceive the project of writing a book on his ancestor. The idea would come to nothing, but the shadow of Malesherbes hovers over many pages of Democracy.28 A bust of the President of the Cour des Aides, placed on the worktable of the author, would preside silently over the writing of many works.

Under the Empire, the Tocqueville family lived in Paris in the winter and at Verneuil in the summer, where Hervé 29 accepted the more or less symbolic position of mayor.30 The education of the children was entrusted to the Abbé Lesueur, who had been Hervé’s private tutor and who did not hide his partiality for Alexis.31 Several documents attest to the anti-liberal tendencies of Lesueur as well as to his position as an intransigent Catholic monarchist; in this he seemed in better agreement with the ultra sympathies of the Countess de Tocqueville than with the more conciliatory and intelligent position of her husband.32

The days of the future author of Democracy were occupied by the lessons of the Abbé, reading sessions with the family, composition exercises, and visits by relatives and friends.33 The private tutor believed in a brilliant future for his pupil.34 Like his brothers and his intimate friend, Louis de Kergorlay,35 the young Alexis considered a military career.

We perhaps owe the abandonment of Alexis’s military plans to the Abbé Lesueur’s insistence: “My dear Édouard,” wrote the Abbé in 1822, “you must counsel him against becoming a military man. You know the drawbacks better than we, and I am sure that he will rely more on his brothers than on his father. That character, Louis de Kergorlay, put this idea in his head. They are going to meet again, and indeed my plan is to ask M. Loulou to leave us alone and to mind his own business.”36

A distant cousin, from a quite similar family background, Kergorlay had established the bonds of a profound friendship with Tocqueville. They expressed it in an abundant correspondence that deals as much with Tocqueville’s works as with books, parliamentary opinions, and the matrimonial plans of Kergorlay; it also includes many commentaries and recommendations of the latter on the writings of his friend.37 Kergorlay’s mark on the pages of Democracy is clear and easy enough to spot.

With the Restoration, Hervé began a roving career as a prefect, beginning in 1814 in Maine-et-Loire. Hervé afterward fulfilled the same functions in Oise and in Dijon (1816). In 1817, he accepted the prefecture of Metz, where he remained until 1823. He then moved to Amiens, and in 1826 was finally back in Versailles. His nomination as a peer of France on 4 November 1827 forced him, for reasons of incompatibility of duties, to leave his position in January 1828. The July Revolution would eliminate the peerage and remove him forever from political life.38

The Countess Louise de Tocqueville, who seemed never to have been able to recover from her months of detention, followed her husband in his different posts until 1817, the moment that she settled definitively in Paris. The family correspondence shows her prostrate, requiring the constant attention of those around her. Alexis lived with her until 1820.

In April of that year, while his two brothers began their military careers, Alexis rejoined his father in Moselle to complete his studies at the royal college of Metz, which he finished in 1823.39 He then returned to Paris to begin his studies in law.40

At the end of 1826, his law studies finished, Tocqueville started on a journey to Italy and Sicily in the company of his brother, Édouard. His nomination as juge auditeur at Versailles, on 5 April 1827, precipitated his return to Paris.

The Machine at Law

Tocqueville spent the first months at the prefecture of his father. Following the latter’s resignation, he then shared an apartment with a new friend, Gustave de Beaumont.41

The family Bonnin de La Bonninière originated in Touraine. It had spread into the neighboring provinces and had recently acquired the patronymic de Beaumont. At the beginning of the century the Count Jules de Beaumont, his wife, and their four children lived at the château de La Borde, at Beaumont-la-Chartre, in Sarthe. Jules de Beaumont was the mayor there during the Empire. It was in this setting, little different from that of Verneuil, that Gustave had spent his childhood.

The Tocquevilles devoted afternoons to reading and conversation, including among their visitors Chateaubriand, who profited particularly from his visits to work on his Moïse. At the home of the Beaumonts, the family read together and devoted itself to music, painting, and charitable works.42

Even if the Beaumont family belonged to the minor provincial nobility and could not include among its ancestors a Lamoignon de Malesherbes, the family had, like the Tocqueville family, distinguished itself in arms and was related to the Lafayette family.

In February 1826, Gustave de Beaumont was named substitut du procureur du roi at Versailles. Tocqueville struck up a friendship with him when he assumed his responsibility as juge auditeur,43 in June 1827.

The future author of Democracy chose a legal career with some hesitation. He was afraid of turning into a “machine at law.”44 His first weeks of work as a magistrate showed him the deficiencies of his legal preparation and revealed a certain trouble speaking in public that he would regret all his life. He would attribute a large part of his failure in politics to this difficulty.

Gustave de Beaumont placed him under his protection. It was the beginning of a friendship that, Tocqueville would say, “was born already old.”45 Heine from his perspective would compare the two friends to oil and vinegar.46 The first letter that still exists of their correspondence goes back to the month of October 1828. It is devoted to a long reflection on A History of England From the First Invasion by the Romans to the Commencement of the Reign of William the Third, by John Lingard, which Tocqueville shared with his “dear future collaborator.”47 The two friends shared readings and together attended Guizot’s course on the history of civilization in Europe.48

In September 1829, Beaumont was named substitut for the department of Seine. The distance that separated him from his friend did not interrupt their friendship. Beaumont came to Versailles as soon as his work allowed. Tocqueville now shared his apartment with Ernest de Chabrol, who took Beaumont’s place at the court of première instance at Versailles.

The July Revolution broke out soon after. It was going to change considerably the life of the two young magistrates.

The July Days

Although they belonged to a milieu largely hostile to the French Revolution, Tocqueville and Beaumont were not contemporaneous with the event. As such, their ideas, without being completely opposite to those of their relatives, were inevitably different. They witnessed the July Revolution with more disillusionment and sadness than hatred.

In a letter to Henry Reeve,49 Tocqueville admitted:

If Tocqueville exaggerated the coldness and disinterestedness with which he observed the two opposing options, he was sincere in the idea that history could just as easily have made him an ultra as a liberal.

Beaumont found himself in a quite similar situation. In Paris on 30 July 1830, he wrote in his memoirs: “All the men wore a tri-colored ribbon in their button hole, or a cockade on their hat. I did not have one; no one said anything to me. But when someone approached me yelling ‘Long live the Charter’ in a demanding tone, I gave the same cry, and it didn’t cost my conscience anything to do so.”51

The following day, Tocqueville returned to the town hall of Versailles the musket and ammunition that he had received the day before as a member of the national guard and declared to Ernest de Blosseville: “There is nothing more to be done; everything is finished. At the gate of Saint-Cloud, I have just seen the convoy of the monarchy pass by, the King, the children of France, the ministers are in carriages surrounded by body guards. And well! Would you believe, the escutcheons of the royal carriages are hidden beneath mud coverings.”52

From the time of the appointment of the Polignac government on 8 August 1829,53 Tocqueville and Beaumont expected an event of this type. A partisan of the Bourbons, Tocqueville owed a certain loyalty to his social origins, but the accomplished deed of the change of dynasty led him in fact to discover a great fidelity to France.54 It was far from the intention of Tocqueville and Beaumont to qualify themselves as liberals in 1830. Nonetheless, the fact of putting the honor of France as well as the principles of the Charter and of liberty before the Bourbons put them closer to liberal positions than they (and Tocqueville in particular) believed.

This loyalty to the nation rather than to the Bourbons nevertheless isolated them from their milieu. Friends and relatives withdrew from public life as the possibility of overturning the monarchy seemed more unreal, in particular after the month of August, when all officials were asked to swear an oath of loyalty to Louis-Philippe. At that moment Hippolyte de Tocqueville and Louis de Kergorlay left the army, and Hervé lost his title of peer of France.55

For their part, Tocqueville and Beaumont were confronted with a difficult choice: swear an oath to the new king or abandon their judicial careers. Tocqueville swore an oath, and justified his decision by the fear of anarchy:

When Henrion, a friend of aristocratic origin, criticized Tocqueville’s decision, the latter responded in words that leave no doubt about his position:

It was out of these precise circumstances that the idea of the journey to America was born.58 The plan and its realization did not take much time. On 31 October 1830, six days after Tocqueville took the oath a second time, following his nomination to the post of juge suppléant, the two magistrates presented to the government a proposal for a mission whose purpose was to study the American penal institutions.59

It involved describing and understanding the advantages and disadvantages of the two systems in use in the United States. The Pennsylvania system provided for incarceration in solitary confinement night and day as well as individual work by each person in his cell. The Auburn system, in the state of New York, provided for imprisonment in solitary confinement and work in common, but under the strict law of silence.

About his American plans, Tocqueville gave the following argument that he confided to his friend Stoffels:

It is therefore understood that initially the book on the United States was considered a means: that of opening the doors of a political career for its author. But the publication that Tocqueville is referring to in the cited passage still lacked a name and substance. Moreover, the initial intention of Tocqueville and Beaumont was to publish a shared text on the political institutions and mores of the North Americans. So we are a long way from the birth of Democracy in America and Marie, ou l’esclavage aux États-Unis.

The reasons that Beaumont had for leaving France for a time were not very far from those of Tocqueville. In Marie, he gave the following romantic version that he put in the mouth of the protagonist:

It could also be that Beaumont had refused to remove two compromising documents relating to the trial of the Baroness de Feuchères, and it has been suggested that the government sent him to the United States with the intention of removing him from the matter.62 The Baroness de Feuchères was, we recall, an adventuress of English origin. She was accused of having murdered her lover, the old Prince de Condé. The person who undoubtedly profited the most from the death of the latter turned out to be Louis-Philippe himself, since his son was the direct heir of the largest portion of the wealth of the last Condé. If it is incorrect that the French government sent Beaumont to the United States for the purpose of removing him from the trial, it remains true that it was bent on including a magistrate of aristocratic origin in a trial in which the king could be implicated. By proceeding in this way, the government shielded itself from the suspicions of the legitimists and, if the judgment ever implicated the conduct of the monarch,63 it could always turn against a lawyer who did not have the reputation of being favorable to the new regime.

America

Tocqueville and Beaumont left for America on April 2, 1831. Their baggage included dozens of letters of introduction and a few works on the United States: those of Volney and of Cooper, a history of the United States, and the book by Basil Hall. They did not need them very much. All the information that they were curious about was to be provided on site. It seemed to them that the book they planned to write upon their return had to concern America as much as democracy, and they were very impatient to know both.

During the crossing of the Atlantic, they translated one part of Basil Hall’s work64 as preparation for their research on the prisons; they learned about the history of the United States and discussed the Cours d’économie politique of Jean-Baptiste Say.

On the afternoon of 9 May, they reached Newport. They were in New York the next day. They would remain in the United States until 20 February 1832.65

Upon their arrival, Tocqueville and Beaumont discovered that the publicity that their official mission had received in the American press opened every door to them.66 So the official study of the penitentiary system and the unofficial research on that new form of government called democracy seemed to look very promising.

Concerning democracy, the greatest difficulty was found not in America, but in France.

Once first impressions had passed, the two friends realized that their eagerness to know and understand American society required above all a real knowledge of French society, which they lacked. The purpose of their journey became more precise. It would concern a double and simultaneous intellectual journey whose subject would be France as well as America. “I will admit to you that what most prevents me from knowing what is happening on this point in America,” wrote Tocqueville to his friend Blosseville, “is being almost completely ignorant of what exists in France.”67 This observation is found many times in his correspondence.

It then became imperative to contact colleagues, friends, and relatives in order to obtain the information necessary for understanding America by way of understanding France.

On this point, Tocqueville began by asking his father, Chabrol, and Blosseville for information about the French administration:

About twenty questions followed concerning French ideas on American political institutions, on the national character, on the different classes of society, on the commercial situation, the future of the country, its position in religious matters, etc.

In order not to influence the responses of his informants, Tocqueville decided not to share with them his impressions about America except by chance. The first letter to his family contained a long description of the journey and of the arrival in America, but reflections about American society had to wait until the letter to Édouard dated 28 May:

A letter to Ernest de Chabrol, a few days after that one, returned to the same idea:

Only the exceptional physical conditions of the United States seemed to justify the survival of the republic and allow the free exercise of interest: “America finds itself, for the present, in such a favorable physical situation that particular interest is never contrary to general interest, which is certainly not the case in Europe.”71

At the beginning, as we see, Tocqueville was above all recalling Bodin and Montesquieu.72 We must wait until the end of the journey to see climatic theories given a less important place. The final versions of the manuscript of Democracy still emphasize the decisive importance of the physical setting on American democracy, however.73

Tocqueville also thought that it was the exceptional physical conditions of the United States that allowed the Americans to get along without public power.74 If a public career was closed to ambition, a thousand others were open to the Americans. In America “the entire world seems [...] a malleable material that man turns and shapes as he wills.”75

The element that thwarted the harmful effects of the unlimited desire for money soon appeared clearly; it was religion. At the end of June Tocqueville wrote to his family: “Never have I felt so much the influence of religion on the mores and the social and political state of a people than since I have been in America, and it is impossible here to ignore the necessity of this force for motivating and regulating human actions.”76

Before the multitude of sects and doctrines, the author had no doubt about the one that was suitable for democracy:

Exceptional physical conditions, private interest, religion, in that it puts a brake on the inordinate taste for material wealth—these are, from the first weeks of the American journey, the three elements that profoundly marked Tocqueville’s arguments.

In the months that followed, natural conditions would no longer cover physical circumstances strictly speaking, but would also include the point of departure and the origin of the United States; interest would take various forms: individualism, monotony, love of material enjoyments, manufacturing aristocracy, industrialization of art and of life; religion would also be called patriotism, honor, and general ideas. But, added to a certain theory of history, the three initial elements—physical conditions, interest and religion—would continue to form the framework of the entire system of Democracy.

The journey led Tocqueville and Beaumont from New York to Albany and Buffalo; it let them briefly see the great wilderness beyond Detroit, at Pontiac and Saginaw; it took them to the Great Lakes and to Canada in order to bring them back afterward to New England and New York. From there, the travelers went to the west and the south. They saw Philadelphia and Baltimore; they passed through Philadelphia again in order to see next Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans.78 They returned to the north by Montgomery, Norfolk, Washington, and finally New York.

All of this allowed scarcely any leisure. As Tocqueville wrote to Louis de Kergorlay: “What categorizes a traveler are his questions, his research, and not the degree of facility with which he expresses himself in the national language.”79 The two magistrates, transformed into indefatigable questioners, interrogated, took notes, read and observed.80 Tocqueville made rough notebooks in which he noted the result of his research. Beaumont did the same and carefully recorded each of their interviews.81

Tocqueville’s notes are not truly a travel diary, nor do they constitute the only material out of which his theory is going to emerge.82 Reading them provides little information about his principal ideas. If you are unaware of the theoretical presuppositions of the author, the notes are sometimes uninteresting, even insignificant. The fragments of conversations, various remarks, and interviews only make some sense on the condition that they be considered not as the beginning of reflections on the United States but as stages in an intellectual process predating the American journey.

It is not by chance, or by some peculiar mental skill, that the whole book is already found in the first impressions about America.83 Even if he wrote the opposite to some of his correspondents,84 Tocqueville was in America as much to observe the facts that would allow him to write Democracy as to give body and substance to a certain idea of Democracy that he already had in mind before the American journey.85

The theory began to take shape by bits and pieces in the letters sent to France. “Keep this letter, I beg of you,” wrote Tocqueville to his mother, “it contains details that I do not have the time to note and that I will find again later with pleasure.”86 This request was found in all of his travel correspondence.

We must not forget, however, that Tocqueville did not travel alone. If, in the end, the two friends each offered to the public his own version of democracy, it is no less true that until their return to France the notion of a great work on democracy in America was elaborated in concert, in the “duel of minds” that Tocqueville mentioned several times. It is difficult in these conditions to decide on the paternity of an idea, or the origin of a citation. The final result would forever obliterate the daily debates of the two travelers.

As has sometimes been said, Beaumont had more than the effect of a catalyst on Tocqueville. He drew Tocqueville’s attention to many phenomena in American society. He collaborated with energy on the writing and revision of Democracy. Finally he produced an admirable social novel meant to accompany the work of his friend. Beaumont’s notes could have given an idea of the intellectual debate with Tocqueville. In their absence, Beaumont’s criticisms of the manuscript of Democracy, the drafts of his own books, and the reading of his publications bring clearly to light an intelligence that was only slightly inferior to that of Tocqueville.

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when the book project ceased to be shared. The first news from America sent by Beaumont spoke of “our great work.”87 In a letter to his mother dated 7 October, he mentioned for the first time “my plans,” and the expression was found again in the correspondence that follows.88 Between May and October, Beaumont discovered, then got to know more closely the American Indians, and as George W. Pierson noted, perhaps this is what explains the abrupt change in his plans.89

If family correspondence spoke with enthusiasm about the brilliant future that their works on America were to bring to the travelers, the letters addressed to colleagues remained nonetheless quite vague:

Tocqueville was obviously not interested in disclosing to his superiors that what most interested him in America was not the project officially announced, but writing about the American republic. Only Le Peletier d’Aunay seemed to have been let in on the secret: “I expected a good work from you,” wrote d’Aunay to Tocqueville in August 1831, “and this field of your observations makes me certain of it. You will show us this America much more exactly than all the other travelers, beginning with Liancourt and Volney. Nothing will escape, I am sure, from the observation of your solid intelligence. On your return, give the government the report promised. But save, for your reputation, your glory, the full journey to that country.”91

Beaumont and Tocqueville in America had different interests, but their intention was to publish their books simultaneously, as two parts of the same work. In 1831, and for some time after, their books constituted the two sides of the same coin. They would become distinct only later. The first edition of Système pénitentiaire still announced a joint work on America by Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, with the title Institutions et mœurs américaines. A month after the publication of Système pénitentiaire, a letter from Tocqueville to Edward Everett still suggested a collaborative work: “We are now busy, M. de Beaumont and I, composing a more general work on America.”92

On 20 February 1832, Tocqueville and Beaumont left New York to return to France.

Tocqueville hardly considered any longer taking up the duties that he had at Versailles. He entertained other plans that he revealed in confidence to Ernest de Chabrol: “I do not know if I must withdraw entirely,” he confessed, “as I am often tempted to do, or try to advance; what I see clearly at least is that I will not put on the robe of juge suppléant again. I will no longer be seen at Versailles, or I will be seen with another title. This point is decided (but between us).”93

The Penitentiary System

After returning to France at the end of March, Beaumont rejoined his family in Sarthe, while Tocqueville remained in Paris.

Beaumont began to write the report on the penitentiary system and met Tocqueville in Paris in mid-April in order to ensure his collaboration. Weeks passed. As Beaumont moved ahead preparing the report on the prisons, Tocqueville was plunged into a great despondency from which he did not want to emerge for work on any intellectual endeavor.94 He seemed incapable of adapting to the idleness that followed the year of feverish agitation spent in North America. He accepted visiting the prison of Toulon, then those of Geneva and Lausanne in May and June, but the largest part of the work of writing the report fell to Beaumont.95

Before these journeys, Tocqueville came to the aid of his friend, Louis de Kergorlay, implicated in the adventure of the Duchess de Berry. On 9 March, for the first and last time, Tocqueville exercised his profession as a lawyer. He defended Kergorlay who, acquitted, was soon set free.96

The defense of one of the prisoners of the Carlo Alberto must not suggest that Tocqueville had changed his position about the subversive efforts to overthrow the July Monarchy. If he preferred the Bourbons, if his friendship for Kergorlay was unshakable, he remained clearly opposed to the violent expulsion of the reigning monarch. The American letters already revealed the fear of a precipitous return to Europe in case of the overthrow of the monarchy97 and the fear of seeing the “hothead,”98 Hippolyte, involved in such an overthrow.

As for his opinion about the ultras, it can be clarified by a letter in which, sensing that his older brother was tempted to take some radical decision against the July Monarchy, Tocqueville expressed himself in these terms:

The pages of a plan for a review100 that Tocqueville and Beaumont at one time intended to establish with the participation of Blosseville, Chabrol, Montalembert, and a few others put clearly in view the political convictions of the future editors:

The plan was soon abandoned, probably at the end of the summer of 1833.

When he was not yet finished with his report and not thinking only about the creation of a review, Beaumont was again faced with the shadowy affair of the Baroness de Feuchères. This time it concerned a trial for defamation by the baroness against the Rohan family, descendants of the Prince de Condé. Beaumont refused to take charge of it and explained that he knew nothing about the question, that he was working on his report, that the eighteen-month leave that had been granted to him had not yet ended.102 The response was not long in coming. On 16 May 1832, he was removed from his duties.

Little satisfied by a profession that weighed on him, uncertain of his qualities for exercising it, Tocqueville found in the dismissal of Beaumont the pretext for honorably abandoning the legal career. As soon as he learned the news in Toulon, he presented his resignation.103

Once the work of drafting the report on the penitentiary system was finished, Tocqueville reviewed the text written by Beaumont, collaborated actively on the introduction, and wrote part of the notes. The two magistrates submitted their report on 10 October. Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et de son application en France appeared in January 1833.

The First Democracy

The work on the penitentiary system was generally well received. Reviews noted with satisfaction the full account of the question and the impartial presentation of the advantages and disadvantages of the two systems in use in the United States. If the authors seemed to lean toward the system used in Pennsylvania, they did not seem to forget either the high cost of the construction of a penitentiary of this type or the danger of keeping the prisoners isolated in their cell night and day. In August, the Académie des sciences morales et politiques awarded the Montyon prize to Système pénitentiaire.

Tocqueville and Beaumont had planned to complete their American journey with a visit to England. They thought that England would offer an image of the Americans before their departure for the United States as well as that of a society midway between aristocratic France and democratic America. They also thought that England was at the dawn of a revolution that would lead to democracy. The cholera epidemic that broke out at the end of 1831 had precipitated their return to France. Once the prison report was published, Tocqueville went to England from August 3 to September 7, 1833.104

“By going to England, I wanted [...] to flee for a time from the insipid spectacle that our country presents at this moment. I wanted to go to relieve my boredom a bit among our neighbors. And besides! Some claim that they are definitely going to begin a revolution and that one must hurry to see them as they are. So I hastened to go to England as to the final performance of a beautiful play.”105

A few days spent on the other side of the Channel enlightened Tocqueville about his error. England was not on the eve of a revolution. Unlike the French aristocracy, the English aristocracy was open; it continued to exercise ancestral duties and the inferior classes of society could attain aristocracy by money.106

“The English aristocracy,” wrote Tocqueville in his notes, “belongs very much by its passions and its prejudices to all the aristocracies of the world, but it is not based on birth, something inaccessible, but on the money that everyone can acquire; and this single difference allows it to resist, when all the others succumb either to peoples or to kings.”107

A week after his arrival in London, he wrote to Beaumont: “In short, I do not recognize in anything here our America.”108 If, following these observations, England did not serve strictly speaking as a reference point for the American and French situations, it was no less one of the keys for understanding America. It is evoked throughout Democracy.

Upon his return to Paris, Tocqueville began writing his book.109 To do this, he settled into the attic of his parents’ house, on rue de Verneuil. Beaumont, for his part, made a short journey to the Midi where his book began to take the double form of a novel and a social commentary.

In a later letter to his wife, Tocqueville would evoke the first months spent writing his book as follows:

Provided with his notes on the United States, publications brought back from America, an ample correspondence with Americans and Frenchmen, his own letters, and a list of the subjects of his notes,111 Tocqueville drew up the initial plan of his book.

The first outline included three categories: “Political society (relations between the federal and particular governments and the citizen of the Union and citizen of each state), civil society (relations of the citizens with each other), religious society (relations between God and the members of society, and of the religious sects with each other).”112

Tocqueville continued by specifying what should be found under each division:

He then noted, in two columns, the ideas that correspond to each principle:

Under the word federation, we read the following:

The section with the theme society included in turn:

Finally, religious society:

Certain ideas outlined in this first sketch would not be found again in the definitive version. The canals, roads, gambling, etc. were so many elements that would be abandoned in the process of writing.116 Others would be joined to the second part, such as the army, paternal power, Catholicism, the desire to make money.

The fundamental idea of the entire book, the keystone on which Tocqueville’s whole theory rests, the idea for understanding the struggle between aristocracy and democracy, between a principle that divides and a principle that unites, was already evident.

Once the general lines of the work were drawn, Tocqueville attacked the work of writing in the strict sense. For this, he followed a singular system that he described in this way to Duvergier de Hauranne:

If Beaumont informed Tocqueville in a summary way about the works that appeared on the United States, the author went forward alone and scarcely consulted any books on America, with the exception perhaps of the book by Chevalier.118

The writing moved ahead at a good pace. In November 1833, Tocqueville thought he would finish the part devoted to the institutions of the United States (what now constitutes the first part of the first volume of this edition) before the first of January 1834, and at one moment had the idea of publishing the first volume before the second.119

This plan was abandoned, and Tocqueville buckled down immediately to writing the second part, which little by little increased to an extent beyond what the author had foreseen. In addition, the part devoted to the American political institutions was reviewed and corrected several more times and, before being completed, required the aid of several collaborators.

Even as he worked relentlessly on his book, Tocqueville helped Beaumont with the writing of his.120 Their collaboration continued throughout the whole following year, in Paris and in Sarthe. The influence of Tocqueville on the writing of Marie is difficult to measure. Beaumont’s manuscripts bear the trace of conversations and of comments by Tocqueville, but the small number of available manuscripts does not allow us to assess the true extent of his influence.121 Beaumont consulted his friend about certain passages of his book and even at the last moment asked for his opinion about certain fragments that were too reminiscent of Chateaubriand.122

At the beginning of the year 1834, Tocqueville hired an American living in Paris, Francis Lippitt,123 to help him in the compilation of the documents that he brought back from the United States. At the house of the author’s parents, Faubourg St. Germain, Lippitt compiled books and brochures, newspaper clippings and diverse documents.

Theodore Sedgwick, another American whom Tocqueville contacted when he still needed information about the United States, but whom he did not hire, seems to have played a more important role. His journal bears the traces of several interviews with Tocqueville that would exercise a clear influence on several points of Democracy.124

Once the writing of the principal part of the work was finished (only the last chapter of the second part was missing), Tocqueville had a copy of his manuscript made and circulated. In this way his brothers and his father, Gustave de Beaumont, and Louis de Kergorlay read the quasi-totality of the work. A few passages were read aloud at the evening gatherings of Madame Ancelot.125

When Édouard, on 15 June, wrote to his brother to share his observations critiques, only the revision of the second part remained to be done in order to complete the work. Tocqueville worked on the revision during the month of July, striking out a great deal and in some places retaining only one out of three pages of the initial draft. The same month, he contacted the publisher, Charles Gosselin, who committed to publishing the text in November. He planned a printing of five hundred copies.

On 14 August 1834, Tocqueville left Paris for the château de Gallerande, in Sarthe, and there joined Beaumont. The two friends spent their days hunting and making final corrections on their texts.

Once the work was finished, a title remained to be found.

In 1833 the book by Tocqueville and Beaumont had been announced with the title American Institutions and Mores.126 Once Beaumont’s project became differentiated from that of Tocqueville, the latter, in March 1834, announced to Senior the publication of a book on “American institutions.”127 Beaumont kept the term “American mores.” In July, at the time of Tocqueville’s arrangements with his publisher, the treatise on American institutions received the title “The Dominion of Democracy in the United States”;128 in a perhaps later note announcing the publication and contained in the drafts of the first part, we find “The Dominion of Democracy in America,” while a first version of the same announcement mentioned “The Dominion of Democracy in the United States.” In mid-October, with the book in proofs, the publisher wrote to the author to ask him the title of his book. That is when Tocqueville chose Democracy in America.129

In the Courier Français of 24 December 1834,130 Léon Faucher announced the publication of the work and reproduced a few passages from Democracy in America. The text appeared with this title in January 1835.131

The Reception of Democracy

If it is true that the workers in the print shop had shown Tocqueville’s book particular attention and interest, the dazzling success of the Democracy was no less totally surprising to its author.

Tocqueville thought that the recent political tension with the United States would not fail to increase interest in and curiosity about the American continent and could therefore create a favorable situation for the success of the Democracy. But readers seem to have been attracted immediately by something far beyond the simple effect of timeliness. Moreover, if the indemnity affair—indemnities that the Americans had demanded from the French since the Napoleonic period—could be profitable to Tocqueville in France, such was not the case in America, where the publication of the Democracy was delayed until 1838.132

The appearance of the Democracy was unanimously acclaimed. Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Guizot, and Royer-Collard never tired in their praise. Very few publications met its appearance with silence. The reviews of Salvandy133 and Sainte-Beuve134 alone were enough to consecrate the author.135

“Not one of the chapters of this book,” wrote Sainte-Beuve, “fails to testify to one of the best and most assured minds, to one of those minds most appropriate for political observation, a field in which we find so few striking and solid strides since the incomparable figure of Montesquieu.”136 The name of the great légiste also appeared from the pen of Salvandy who, in the Journal des débats,137 proposed for Democracy the subtitle “The Spirit of American Laws.”138

Among the number of discordant voices, the following can be cited:

American readers, for their part, downplayed certain critical observations of the author about American society,140 but would acknowledge the impartiality of the work and particularly its clear superiority over the commentaries of English travelers.

Foreign publications did not spare compliments. The English found in Tocqueville an abundance of arguments against the American republic141 and recalled in reviews the precarious character of the experiment.142 The London and Paris Courier of 14 January 1836 asserted on its part: “Much, indeed, has been written by Englishmen respecting America, and a good deal by visitants from the continent of Europe. But with the solitary exception of the Démocratie en Amérique, by M. de Tocqueville, nothing absolutely has been written by a foreigner which approaches to an accurate delineation of our political organization.”

When, in December, the Moniteur du commerce mentioned “this excellent book that everyone has known and judged for a long time,” the remark did not seem exaggerated. Democracy was in fashion, and the Académie des sciences morales et politiques ratified the public’s interest with the Montyon prize, which bestowed on the author twelve thousand francs.

For its part, the publication of Marie, ou l’esclavage aux États-Unis143 brought a success in no way inferior to that of Democracy.144 Between 1835 and 1842, there would be five editions of the novel by Gustave de Beaumont. It would fall afterward, and very wrongly, into oblivion. Its reception was generally warm, though measured, although the Quarterly Review did not hesitate to declare it “the most interesting [book] that has ever yet been published on the subject of American society and manners by a native of the European continent.”145 Francisque de Corcelle wrote the review for the Revue des deux mondes.146

The principal failing of the book was proclaimed immediately. Marie had the peculiarity of being a novel and a social commentary at the same time. As such, it did not succeed in satisfying either those who love theoretical works, who preferred the Democracy by far, or those who read novels. The author of the review in the Journal desdébats147 saw this correctly when he wrote:

Shortly after the publication of Marie, Beaumont abandoned the plan for a second part (announced in the notice).148 Two years later, when he was writing Irlande, he seemed to care so little about his novel that he wrote to Tocqueville: “My book is my great and only passion, even more than yours is for you; I am not doing a second book, it is the first; and I am afraid of missing the mark, although I am full of zeal.”149

England and the Second Democracy

Tocqueville had begun the writing of a book on America with the intention, no matter how unhelpful it might be, of making himself known for the purpose of a political career. His friend Blosseville had even used the opportunity of his review of the Democracy to assert, “Such books should open the way to the parliamentary tribune.”150

But in March 1835, Tocqueville was not thinking so much about the career of a politician as about profiting from the extraordinary reputation that the appearance of his book had just given him. If the Democracy had not yet opened the doors of the Chamber of Deputies, it had earned him the friendship of a few prominent individuals who were going to play an important role in the writing of the second part of his book. They were Jean-Jacques Ampère, Royer-Collard, with whom Tocqueville was going to begin a profound and determinant intellectual relationship, and Corcelle.

Beaumont, Kergorlay, and Édouard de Tocqueville would form the principal trio of critics of the manuscript of the second part of the Democracy. The text would as well, here and there, bear the imprint of Ampère and Corcelle.

At the beginning of the year 1835, Tocqueville worked on the writing of a report on pauperism151 and planned a new journey to England. When Tocqueville and Beaumont were at the point of making important personal and professional decisions, the two friends crossed the Channel.152

What changes had taken place during the last two years? Was the English aristocracy capable of resisting the advance of democracy? Such were the questions that Tocqueville and Beaumont asked themselves. Their first observations concerned a strong tendency toward centralization. The point was important, and Tocqueville recognized the necessity of speaking about it in the second part of Democracy.153 John Stuart Mill, Lord Minto, and Henry Reeve confirmed his impressions on this subject,154 but it was Nassau W. Senior above all who, on the occasion of two long conversations, gave him the most detailed arguments on centralization.

But the centralizing movement and the rise to power of the middle classes did not, for all that, imply revolution and the destruction of the aristocracy. As Tocqueville had already observed during his journey of 1833, England was very far from a revolution. At the time of this new journey, Mill confirmed his judgment:

From the time of his first journey to England, Tocqueville had shared this sentiment: in that country, the poor man aspires to occupy the place of the rich and can sometimes succeed. “The French spirit is to want no superior. The English spirit is to want inferiors.”157

In Social and Political State of France, Tocqueville would note that the difference between the French aristocracy and the English aristocracy consists in the fact that only the English one is truly an aristocracy, that is to say a tiny part of society, having “qualities” such as blood, intelligence, money, culture, etc. In France, on the other hand, the sole quality of the aristocracy is birth, which makes it impossible for anyone to attain it. In the second part of Democracy, this idea would force Tocqueville to give full attention to the process of administrative centralization, inasmuch as it is the first and most powerful effect of the democratic revolution, and is capable of making its effects felt even on the English aristocracy.158

For Beaumont there was a totally different discovery. He who so vigorously defended the cause of the Indians and Blacks was struck by the situation of the Irish. He noted regarding them:

The two friends divided subjects. To Tocqueville, America; to Beaumont, England,160 and Beaumont intended to devote a book to the Irish cause. In 1837, he went to England for a second time and visited Ireland in order to complete his research on site. L’Irlande, sociale, politique et religieuse would be published in 1839.161

The manuscript of Beaumont’s book contains criticisms in Tocqueville’s hand. That of Tocqueville would be considered attentively by Beaumont before its publication. Their collaboration continued to include innumerable exchanges of ideas.162

The press gave L’Irlande a reserved reception, but the book received the approbation of English intellectuals. In October 1839, John Stuart Mill wrote to Beaumont:

Like Marie,L’Irlande would be only a half-success. This second book was also the last. At one time pushed by Tocqueville to become interested in Austria, Beaumont would cease all important intellectual work following the death of one of his sons.

The Second Democracy

On 26 October 1835, Tocqueville married Mary Mottley, thus formalizing a relationship that was already several years old. Beaumont and Kergorlay were witnesses.

In 1828 or 1829, at Versailles, Tocqueville had met this English woman of bourgeois origin who lived with her aunt, Mrs. Belam.164 The correspondence of Tocqueville and his wife has almost totally disappeared. The documents that remain attest to a certain discomfort, in the family as well as among a few friends, about a marriage judged disappointing.

On 15 November the couple went to Baugy, near Compiègne, close to Édouard de Tocqueville. That is where Alexis began to work on the second part of Democracy. His first plan was to divide the third volume into two parts:

Then the outline became complicated:

Little by little, the work took on its definitive form:

Individualism, which opened the book, would finally be placed at the beginning of the second part of the third volume. The idea of speaking again about slavery remained only a plan, but the principal ideas of the whole work were already present. The work of writing, with several interruptions,168 would take four years (from November 1835 to November 1839).

In January 1836, following a division of family properties due to the death of his mother, Alexis received the château de Tocqueville and the title of count that came with it, although he would always refuse to use the title. He appeared hardly inclined in the beginning to spend much time in a cold and damp château. Various renovations that his wife would have done would be necessary before Tocqueville decided to live there for long periods. Many pages of the second Democracy would see the light of day there, sometimes under the critical eye of Corcelle, Beaumont, Kergorlay, or Ampère, regular guests at the château.

A large part of the first section of the book seemed finished when, in July, after the marriage of Gustave de Beaumont with Clémentine de Lafayette, Tocqueville and his wife left for Baden, in Switzerland. In November they returned to Baugy.169 There, Tocqueville worked daily from 6:00 to 10:00 o’clock in the morning. The writing went well. Only one thing was missing for the author: “a good instrument of conversation, I needed you [Beaumont] or Louis.”170

During the following months, Tocqueville took careful note of all the information, of every conversation that could be useful for his work. He interviewed Thiers on the problem of centralization, Kergorlay on the army, Charles Stoffels on literature. He also met an American named Robinson and a number of other people.171

From mid-July to mid-August the Corcelles stayed at Tocqueville. At the end of July, the Beaumonts joined the small set. In the intellectual circle thus constituted by Tocqueville only one member was missing, Louis de Kergorlay, whom he did not hesitate to call his master.172

In January 1838, at Baugy, Tocqueville reviewed the chapter on honor. March and April were devoted to the question of centralization, to the army and to the preparation of the fourth and last part of the book. On 15 May, Corcelle and Ampère were present for a reading of the chapter on revolutions. In July, August, and September, the last chapters took their definitive form. The last two chapters on centralization and the idea of equality grew in length and purpose. The only thing remaining was to revise the chapter on the philosophical method of the Americans and the one on general ideas.

On 19 October 1838, Tocqueville would write to Beaumont: “I have just written, my dear friend, the last word of the last chapter of my book.”173

The revision of the whole book would occupy all of the following year. Kergorlay, who spent most of the autumn at Tocqueville [the village], came to help the author who worked to revise the first part of his book. Unsatisfied, Tocqueville had burned it.

In January 1839, Tocqueville read part of his manuscript to Chateaubriand, but confessed to Beaumont that he did not think he would be able to advance much in the revision of the whole book before the month of March. The work stretched until mid-November, the date when Tocqueville returned to Paris with a copy of his manuscript in order to have it read and approved a final time by Beaumont and Kergorlay.

Tocqueville had spoken to his correspondents about a book on “American manners.” The title that tempted Tocqueville was: “The Influence of Equality on the Ideas and the Sentiments of Men.” The book appeared in April 1840, however, with the same title as that of 1835.

The reception of the second part was not as unanimously laudatory as what had accompanied the appearance of the first volume. More theoretical and less descriptive, the second Democracy found a public little prepared for the reading of a philosophical work of such length and ambition. The criticism that appeared in this regard in The Examiner reflected the tone.174

Hunt’s Merchant Magazine noted: “In our deliberate judgment, it is the most original, comprehensive, and profound treatise that has ever appeared regarding our republic.”175 The prestigious Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, acknowledging that the second part did not merit the unconditional approval given to the first, added: “It is a superstructure of theorizing without any base to support it.”176

If favorable reviews were many—and in particular the one of John Stuart Mill must be pointed out177 —the same judgment was found just about everywhere in the English press: “too great a disposition to theorize,”178 or again: “Perhaps this method of generalizing facts is occasionally pushed too far.”179 The verdict seemed definitive. Tocqueville’s contemporaries seemed little inclined to accept this philosophy of democracy that the author was offering to their understanding. The appearance of the first volume of the Democracy had elicited nearly seventy commentaries; that of the second brought forth scarcely half that number.

In the months immediately following the publication, Tocqueville wrote little and so to speak made no allusion to his book. Elected deputy on 2 March 1839, he intended to concern himself more with his new duties.

“Nothing has been and remains more contrary to my tastes than to accept the condition of author in this world,” he wrote to Royer-Collard in 1839, explaining:

The occasion would not present itself before 1852, when, forced to abandon all political activity following the coming to power of a person of whom he highly disapproved, Tocqueville decided to take up the pen again in order to remind the French of the events that had brought them liberty. That was the beginning of work on L’Ancien régime et la révolution.

[24.] The village of Tocqueville and the château are about fifteen kilometers from Cherbourg. On the origins of the Tocqueville family see G.-A. Simon, Les Clarel à l’époque de la conquête d’Angleterre et leur descendance dans la famille Clérel de Tocqueville (Caen: Société d’Impression de Basse Normandie, 1936); and Histoire généalogique des Clérel, seigneurs de Rampan, Tocqueville, Clouay, Lignerolles, ... (Caen: Imprimerie Ozanne et Cie., 1954).

My intention here is to present the principal features of Tocqueville’s biography during the years that preceded the Democracy. For more details, refer to R.-Pierre Marcel, Essai politique sur Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1910); Antoine Rédier, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville (Paris: Perrin, 1925); J.-P. Mayer, Prophet of the Mass Age: A Study of Alexis de Tocqueville (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1939); André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: Hachette, 1984); Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007).

[25.] Monsieur de Rosanbo was guillotined on 20 April 1794; Malesherbes, Madame de Rosanbo, Jean-Baptiste de Chateaubriand and his wife, the older daughter of the Rosanbos, were guillotined the following day.

[26.] On the captivity and execution of Malesherbes, Édouard de Tocqueville published one part of the memoirs of his father with the title “Episodes of the Terror,” Le contemporain, revue d’économie chrétienne, January 1861, republished as a brochure in 1901.

[27.] When Tocqueville was looking for a position, his father wrote him a letter of recommendation in which he explained:

Letter of 15 January 1827 to an unspecified recipient, with the kind permission of the Bibliothèque de Versailles.

[28.] Tocqueville’s political career finished with a gesture worthy of President Malesherbes. Arrested with many of his colleagues at the time of the coup of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Tocqueville in prison at Vincennes received an order to be set free. He immediately wrote to the prefect: “I have just received an order setting me free. I had not solicited it and I have authorized no one to solicit it; since it does not include all of my colleagues detained for the same reason and in the same way in the same prison, I have reason to believe that it has been addressed to me by mistake, and in any case, I cannot benefit from it, since my intention is to leave here only with my colleagues.” Vincennes, 3 December 1851, with the kind permission of the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris.

[29.] According to André Jardin, Hervé could have been the secret agent of the Count d’Artois during the Empire (Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 16). This book also devotes a chapter to his career as prefect (pp. 18-39).

[30.] The father of Alexis seems to have fulfilled his duties with a zeal that was particular to him, but not without presenting a certain resistance to the orders of the Emperor. In 1814, for example, he organized the mass marriage of young men about to be conscripted into the army and posted decrees so high that it was impossible to read them. Antoine Rédier, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville, p. 34.

[31.] Hippolyte, the eldest, was born on 1 October 1797, and began a military career on 1 July 1814. He participated in the Spanish expedition with the rank of captain and left the army on 15 October 1830. Married to Émilie Evrard de Belisle, he would spend most of his time developing his property of Nacqueville, in the Contentin.

Édouard, born in 1800, entered the army in 1816, but had to leave it in 1822 for health reasons. In 1829, he married Alexandrine Ollivier, who owned a large property at Baugy, in Oise. Tocqueville would feel particular affection for their sons, René and Hubert. André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 46-50.

Alexis was born in 1805.

[32.] In a letter from Lesueur to Édouard, 13 September 1822, we read regarding secret societies:

[33.] The catalogue of the library of the Tocqueville château, established in 1818, includes, among other prestigious names, those of Montaigne, La Bruyère, Locke, Bacon, Fontenelle, Pope, Morelly, Montesquieu, Thomas More, Buffon, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Voltaire, Plutarch, Grotius, Hume, and Bossuet. YTC, AIe.

[34.] At the time of a family celebration in 1822, the Abbé Lesueur addressed to the Countess de Tocqueville the following verse regarding her son:

[35.] During the weeks that followed the July Revolution, Tocqueville would momentarily regret not having followed his initial impulse, that of entering a military career: “I regret more than ever not having followed the initial ideas of my youth and not entering the army”—he confessed to his friend Charles Stoffels on 26 August 1830.

[36.] Letter from the Abbé Lesueur to Édouard de Tocqueville, 14 September 1822, YTC, AIV. The same idea is found in a letter dated 16 September: “How sad it would be to smother under a helmet a talent that promises so many distinctions.”

[37.] This correspondence is published in the two tomes of volume XIII of the Œuvres complètes.

[38.] In 1829, Hervé de Tocqueville had published a brochure on the proposed municipal law, entitled De la charte provinciale. On this point, the ideas of the son would not be those of the father, but they would partially echo them. In 1847, Hervé de Tocqueville published Histoire philosophique du règne de Louis XV, in two volumes, and in 1850, Coup d’œil sur le règne de Louis XVI. These two works continue to have a certain interest.

[39.] Two of his school compositions are preserved: “De Laudibus Demosthenes” and “L’importance de l’éloquence chez l’homme.” A “Discours sur le progrès des Arts dans la Grèce” had a certain effect. In 1822, Hervé presented his son with an edition of Horace (Qvinti Horatii Flacci Opera. Londini Aeneis Tabulis incidit Iohannes Pine MDCCXXXIII [MDCCXXXVII], 2 vols.) with this dedication: “Given to my son, Alexis, on 5 September 1822, the day when he obtained the prize of honor in Rhetoric, the first prize in Latin translation, the second prize in French composition, and four certificates of merit. Metz, 5 September 1822. The Count de Tocqueville.” Bernard Quavitch, catalogue 1069, December 1986. I owe this information to the kindness of Marjorie G. Wynne, librarian of Yale University.

[40.] He would gain his diploma after the presentation of two theses: “De usurpationibus aut de usucapionibus” and “L’Action en rescision ou nullité.” André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 70.

[41.] George W. Pierson indicated the importance of the influence of Beaumont in Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938), and even earlier in “Gustave de Beaumont: Liberal,” Franco-American Review 1 (1936-1937): 307-16. More recently, Seymour Drescher has insisted on the significance of Beaumont’s texts for understanding Tocqueville in an interesting appendix to Tocqueville and Beaumont on Social Reform (New York: Harper, 1968), pp. 201-17, “Tocqueville and Beaumont: A Rationale for Collective Study.” See also Christine Dunn Henderson, “Beaumont y Tocqueville,” in Eduardo Nolla, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville. Libertad, igualdad, despotismo (Madrid: Gota a Gota, 2007), pp. 73-99.

[42.] Rose Préau de la Baraudière had been called “La Providence” by the inhabitants of Beaumont-la-Charte. On her tomb is written: “She was, while alive, the mother of the poor.”

[43.] A position without salary and with vaguely defined duties.

[44.] To Kergorlay, 23 July 1827, OC, XIII, 1, p. 108.

[45.] In a note from Tocqueville to Beaumont criticizing his oratorical style (YTC, CIVa).

[46.] “It must be said in fairness about M. de Tocqueville, who reported, that he upheld his convictions with energy; he is a man of the mind, who has little fervor and who, beneath the frozen surface, follows the arguments of his logic; consequently his speeches have a certain frigid brilliance, like sculpted ice. But what M. de Tocqueville lacks in feeling, his friend, M. de Beaumont, possesses in superabundance; and these two inseparable companions, whom we see together everywhere, in their travels, in their publications, in the Chamber of Deputies, complement each other in the best possible way. The one, the severe thinker, and the other, the man with smooth feelings, go together like a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of oil.” Heinrich Heine, Allemands et Français (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1881), pp. 313-14.

Another contemporary noted: “Gustave de Beaumont was as lively as he was amiable; he had solid qualities of the heart and a vivacity of spirit that gave rise to a great deal of grace and gaiety. Tocqueville, in contrast, was cold, reserved, master of himself to the point of calculating his actions as well as his relationships.” Louis Passy, Le marquis de Blosseville, souvenirs (Évreux: Charles Hérissey, 1898), p. 107.

In the following pages, but above all in the pages of the Democracy, we will gain a better idea of Beaumont’s decisive role in the work of his friend.

[47.] Letter of 5 October 1828, Correspondance avec Beaumont,OC, VIII, 1, p. 71. A year later, Tocqueville wrote to his friend: “We are now intimately bound, bound for life, I think” (ibid., p. 89); and a little later:

[48.] We have the notes of Tocqueville for the lectures given between 11 April 1829 and 29 May 1830, which deal with Charlemagne and feudal society. Tocqueville also knew the contents of the other lectures.

[49.] Letter to Reeve, 22 March 1837, OC, VI, 1, pp. 37-38.

[50.] Beaumont expressed himself in nearly identical terms:

[51.] Beaumont’s unpublished memoirs on the July Revolution (YTC, AV). Beaumont summarized his thinking about the revolution as follows:

[52.] Louis Passy, Le marquis de Blosseville, p. 130.

[53.] This is Beaumont’s opinion in his unpublished memoirs. Tocqueville wrote the same to his brother, Édouard. André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 83-84.

[54.] Tocqueville would describe his feelings in this way: “Tied to the Royalists by the sharing of a few principles and by a thousand family bonds, I see myself in some way bound to a party whose conduct seems to me often not very honorable and almost always extravagant. I cannot help suffering immensely from their faults, all the while condemning them with all my power.” Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, 18 October 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[55.] Hervé seemed to fear that the new government, suspecting his loyalty to the Bourbons, had his mail opened. During his journey in America, Tocqueville asked his sister-in-law, Alexandrine, to assure his father that his letters arrived punctually and sealed. Letter to Madame Édouard de Tocqueville, 18 October 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[56.] Letter to Charles Stoffels, 26 August 1830, YTC, AVII. Tocqueville swore the oath for the first time on 16 August 1830.

The conduct of Beaumont testifies to his desire to move beyond the quarrels of the moment. Thus, he opposed the policy of not applying the principle of amnesty to those who pillaged Paris on 27, 28, and 29 July, and he decided not to go forward with trials brought about by facts that seemed to him covered by the amnesty. He wrote a report on the question and defended it before the king on 14 September 1830. YTC, AV.

[57.] Draft of a letter to Henrion, 17 October 1830, YTC, AVII.

[58.] See OCB, V, pp. 15-16. Young Tocqueville had perhaps spoken to Chateaubriand about his American projects. In a letter to Charles Stoffels of 26 August 1830 (YTC, AVII), he commented on them in this way: “If I am forced to leave my career, and if nothing necessarily keeps me in France, I have decided to flee the idleness of private life and to take up the busy existence of the traveler again for a few years. For a long time I have had the greatest desire to visit North America. I will go there to see what a great republic is. The only thing I fear is that, during that time, one will be established in France.” The study of the penitentiary system is “a very honorable pretext that makes us seem particularly to merit the interest of the government, whatever it may be, and that assures us its good will upon our return.” Letter of 11 October 1831 to Charles Stoffels, YTC, AVII.

[59.] See Note sur le système pénitentiaire et sur la mission confiée par M. le Ministre de l’Intérieur à MM. Gustave de Beaumont et Alexis de Tocqueville (Paris: H. Fournier, 1831).

[60.] Letter to Charles Stoffels, 4 November 1830, YTC, AVII. But, in a letter probably dating from 1835 (OC, XIII, 1, p. 374), Tocqueville affirmed on the contrary: “I did not go there with the idea of doing a book, but the idea of a book came to me there.”

Tocqueville’s letters must be used with certain precautions. The author very clearly takes into account the person who is to receive his letters. Thus, he sometimes writes to his correspondents what they expect, hiding certain information from his most intimate friends, while sharing it with acquaintances, etc.

[61.] Beaumont, Marie, I, pp. 2-3.

[62.] Louis André, La mystérieuse Baronne de Feuchères (Paris: Perrin, 1925), pp. 261-62. On the Feuchères affair, we can also consult Marjorie Bowen, The Scandal of Sophie Dawes (New York: Appleton, 1935); and Emile Lesueur, Le dernier Condé (Paris: Alcan, 1937).

[63.] The Beinecke Library holds, under the classification CIf, some of Beaumont’s letters to his superiors on the matter of the Baroness de Feuchères.

[64.] A few pages of notes remain in YTC, BIf 2.9.

[65.] This is not the place to reconstitute the American itinerary in detail. Moreover, it is impossible in this matter to improve on what George W. Pierson said in Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1938). I use the mention of this work to express my deep acknowledgment to Mr. Pierson for the time that he devoted to my questions and for the encouragement that he constantly lavished on me during my work.

[66.] “It is true that the newspapers, which deal with everything, have announced our arrival and expressed the hope that we will find active assistance everywhere. The result is that all doors are open to us and that everywhere we receive the most flattering welcome.” Letter from Tocqueville to his mother, 29 April-19 May 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[67.] Letter of 30 October 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[68.] Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, 18 May 1831, YTC, BIa2. Tocqueville asked him to give the same questions to Élie de Beaumont. He also asked that the lectures of Guizot on Roman society and the Middle Ages be sent to him.

[69.] YTC, BIa2. The passage refers to Chateaubriand. In 1825, Tocqueville had written a few pages criticizing an article of Chateaubriand that had appeared in the Journal des débats of 24 October, and in which the latter recommended to the French the model of the American democracy. “The only task worthy of genius would have been to show us the difference that exists between American society and us,” wrote Tocqueville, “and not to abuse us with a false likeness.” Quoted by Antoine Rédier, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville, p. 93.

[70.] Letter of 9 June 1831, YTC, BIa2. Tocqueville copied this passage into his alphabetic notebook A. This letter contains several key ideas of the book. Chabrol is also the recipient of a letter dated 26 November 1831 that contains very precise information about the American judicial system. YTC, BIa2.

[71.] Tocqueville added in the same letter: “This people seems to be a company of merchants, gathered for business; and the further you dig into the national character of the Americans, the more you see that they have sought the value of everything only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it make?” Letter of 9 June 1831 to Ernest de Chabrol, YTC, BIa2.

[72.] See the letter to Ernest de Chabrol of 26 July 1831, YTC, BIa2; James T. Schleifer, The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 45, 52-53; and George W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, p. 126.

[73.] See, for example, p. lxix.

[74.] “Here, there is no public power and, truly speaking, there is no need for it.” Letter of 9 June 1831 to Ernest de Chabrol, YTC, BIa2. In another letter to Chabrol on 16 June 1831, Tocqueville wrote: “As for the government, we are still looking for it. It doesn’t really exist” (YTC, BIa2).

[75.] Letter of 9 June 1831 to Ernest de Chabrol, YTC, BIa2.

[76.] Letter to Édouard, 20 June 1831, YTC, BIa2.

[77.] Letter to Ernest de Chabrol, 26 October 1831, YTC, BIa2. This letter contains a long reflection on religions in the United States.

[78.] Their knowledge of the south of the Union was consequently very limited. Tocqueville recognized this in a letter to Édouard: “I am leaving America after using my time there wisely and pleasantly. I have only a superficial idea about the South of the Union, but in order to know it as well as the north it would be necessary to have remained there six months. In general, two years are necessary to develop a complete and exact picture of the United States. I hope, however, that I have not wasted my time.” Letter of 20 January 1832, YTC, BIa2.

[79.] Letter to Kergorlay, 4 July 1837, OC, XIII, p. 460.

[80.] Six lists of questions exist: 1. List of forty-two questions on criminal justice. 2. List of seven questions on education. 3. Six questions on political questions. 4. Twelve questions on town rights. 5. Three questions on roads. 6. Other questions on town problems. YTC, BIIb.

[81.] We have the travel notes of Tocqueville, but nearly all of Beaumont’s notes are lost. The few rare notes that remain show observations that are more wide-ranging and more detailed, but less theoretical in nature than those of Tocqueville. They would have been of great interest for the reconstruction of the intellectual journey of the two friends.

[82.] The notes of the journey to America have been published in Voyages en Sicile et aux Etats-Unis,OC, V, 1.

[83.] For example, in a letter of 29 June 1831 to Louis de Kergorlay, OC, XIII, 1, pp. 225-36.

[84.] If I ever do something [blank] about America, it will be in France, and with the documents that I am bringing back, that I will try to undertake it. I will leave America able to understand the documents that I have not been able to study yet: that is the clearest result of the journey. Moreover, on this country, I have only notes without order or coherence: detached ideas that only I have the key to, isolated facts that remind me about a host of others. What I am bringing back of most interest are two small notebooks in which I have written word for word the conversations that I had with the most notable men of this country. This sum of paper has an inestimable value for me, but only for me who can sense the value of the questions and answers. The only, somewhat general ideas that I have expressed about America until now are found in some letters addressed to my family and to a few people in France. Even then, these were written hastily, on steamboats, or in some hole where I had to use my knees as a table. Will I ever publish anything about this country? In truth, I do not know. It seems to me that I have some good ideas; but I still do not know yet in what framework to put them, and public attention frightens me (letter of Tocqueville to his mother, 24 October 1831, YTC, BIa2).

Compare the passage quoted with this fragment from a letter to Édouard of 20 June of the same year:

[85.] In a letter published in the correspondence with Kergorlay, but perhaps addressed to Eugène Stoffels, as André Jardin has pointed out, Tocqueville confessed: “For nearly ten years, I have been thinking about part of what I explained to you just now. I was in America only to enlighten myself on this point. The penitentiary system was a pretext; I took it as a passport that would enable me to penetrate everywhere in the United States.” Correspondance avec Kergorlay,OC, XIII, 1, p. 374.

Also see the letter to Charles Stoffels, 21 April 1830, reproduced in Appendix V of the second volume, which already advances the theory of history that is present in Democracy.

[86.] Letter of 26 April-19 May 1831, YTC, BIa2. The remark is found again in the letters addressed to his friends. Thus, in the letter to Kergorlay of 29 June 1831 (“Keep this letter. It will be interesting for me later.”), OC, XIII, 1, p. 236; or in that of 16 July 1831, to Ernest de Chabrol (“Do not forget to keep my letters.”), YTC, BIa2.

[87.] Gustave de Beaumont, Lettres d’Amérique, pp. 28, 45, 48, 66, and 92.

[88.]Ibid., p. 159; “my work,” in a letter of 26 October; and “the great work that is going to immortalize me,” in a letter of 8 November.

[89.] In a letter of 1 August 1831, to his father and in another of 2 August, addressed to Ernest de Chabrol, Beaumont already announced his interest in the fate of the Indians. Ibid., pp. 105 and 110.

[90.] In a draft of a letter written in Philadelphia, November 1831 (YTC, BIa2). He also hid his plans from Ernest de Chabrol (letter of 24 January 1832, YTC, BIa2).

[91.] Letter of Le Peletier d’Aunay, 16 August 1831, YTC, BId.

[92.] Letter to Edward Everett, 6 February 1833, with the kind permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Tocqueville, Alexis de. Letter to Edward Everett, 6 February 1833. Edward Everett papers).

[93.] To Ernest de Chabrol, 24 January 1832, YTC, BIa2.

[94.] Letter of 4 April 1832 to Beaumont, OC, VIII, 1, pp. 111-12.

[95.] You know what Beaumont’s publications are; but there is a detail that perhaps you do not know. The first work that we published together, M. de Beaumont and I, on the American prisons, had as the sole writer, M. de Beaumont. I only provided my observations and a few notes. Although our two names were attached to that book which was, I can say more easily now, a true success, I have never hidden from my friends that M. de Beaumont was so to speak the sole author (letter of 26 June 1841, supporting Beaumont’s candidacy to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, very probably addressed to Mignet, YTC, DIIa).

[96.] His plea appears in OC, XIII, 1, pp. 321-27.

[97.] The idea of an exile in the United States also crossed their minds. See note j of p. 1302 of the second volume.

[98.] In his letter to Édouard, on 20 June 1831, Tocqueville exhorted his brother to have the utmost patience (YTC, BIa2). Also see the letter to Kergorlay of 21 June 1831, OC, XIII, 1, pp. 235-36.

[99.] Letter to Hippolyte, 4 December 1831, YTC, BIa2. In contrast, in a rough copy of a letter of August 1831, probably addressed to Dalmassy, Tocqueville noted: “Something tells me that we will not escape from civil war.” YTC, BIa2.

[100.] See the correspondence exchanged on this subject by Tocqueville and Beaumont in OC, VIII, 1, pp. 119-30.

[101.] With the kind permission of the Library of Princeton University (General Manuscripts [MISC] Collection, Manuscripts Division. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections), reproduced in OC, III, 2, pp. 35-39. The same idea is found again in a letter to Mary Mottley:

[102.] In a letter of 18 April 1832, YTC, CIf.

[103.] On 21 May 1832, YTC, CIc.

[104.] The notes of the journey to England in 1833 are published in Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie,OC, V, 2, pp. 11-43.

[105.] Letter to the Countess de Pisieux, 5 July 1833, YTC, CIf.

[106.]OC, V, 2, p. 36.

[107.]OC, V, 2, pp. 29-30.

[108.] Letter to Beaumont, 13 August 1833, OC, VIII, 1, p. 124.

[109.] James T. Schleifer has reconstructed in detail the writing of the most important chapters of Democracy in The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.”

[110.] Letter of Tocqueville to his wife, with the only citation as “Sunday morning,” YTC, CIb.

[111.]“Sources manuscrites. Subjects that can be of some interest to treat.” YTC, CIIc. The list includes more or less the same questions as the first plan of the book.

[112.] YTC, CVh, 1, p. 23.

[113.] YTC, CVh, 1, pp. 23-25.

[115.] YTC, CVh, 1, pp. 26-27.

[116.] At the head of the bundle of drafts that bears the number 3 (copied in notebook CVh, 1) appears the following note:

[117.] Tocqueville to Duvergier de Hauranne, 1 September 1856, OCB, VI, pp. 332-33.

[118.] It is possible that he knew about several letters by Chevalier published in the Revue des deux mondes. See volume II, p. 898 of this edition and OC, VIII, 1, pp. 176, 202-3. Moreover, Tocqueville read Basil Hall’s book during the crossing. He does not seem to have consulted Society in America by Harriet Martineau.

[119.] Remember that the Democracy of 1835 was published in two volumes.

[120.] The collaboration of Tocqueville on Beaumont’s novel probably dated from the first moments of its development. In the manuscript of Marie, concerning the plan of the novel, this note is found in Tocqueville’s handwriting:

[121.] In the margins of the manuscript of Marie, there are comments by Tocqueville, written in pencil. The latter particularly pointed out unfortunate similarities to Atala: “You cannot close your eyes to the fact that this has a great deal of similarity with Atala” (vol. II, p. 136 of Marie ); “Here again you have to be careful about father Aubry. Perhaps I am wrong. Think about it” (vol. II, p. 151 of Marie ); “Again, be careful here of Atala” (vol. II, p. 156 of Marie ).

[122.] Thus this note from Beaumont meant for Tocqueville that is found in the manuscript of the novel:

[123.] See note a of p. 84.

[124.] Sedgwick met Tocqueville in the offices of the American delegation to Paris and pointed out several books that could be useful to him. His journal for the months of November and December 1833, of January and February 1834, refers several times in succession to Tocqueville (pp. 28, 29, 32, 79, 85, 98). See Sedgwick, Theodore III. Paris journal, volume 3, November 1833-July 1834, pp. 80-81, 85. Sedgwick family papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

On 20 January 1834, for example, Sedgwick indicated that Tocqueville found that “Russia and the United States [...] were the only powers which presented an avenir [a future]. Both are aggrandizing—the others are stationary or diminishing” (pp. 80-81).

You find on p. 85 (Friday, 24 January 1834): “Either this day or the day before went with Tocqueville over to the legation and show [sic ] him the books there which might assist him.” On p. 98 (8 February 1834): “Tocqueville called about 11 for more information about the États-Unis.” With the kind permission of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Tocqueville also counted on the collaboration of two other American residents in Paris: Edward Livingston, head of the American representation in Paris, and Nathaniel Niles, secretary of the delegation.

[125.] See OC, VIII, 1, p. 141, and Madame Ancelot, Un salon de Paris, de 1824 à 1864 (Paris: Dentu, 1866), p. 79. Did Guerry, a friend of Beaumont, read part of the manuscript? The jacket that contains the chapter on the point of departure and the one that contains the chapter on the social state bear this comment: “The copy has been sent to Guerry.”

[126.] Tocqueville gave a very similar title to Sparks. Letter of 30 August 1833, YTC, CId.

[127.]Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior (London: H.S. King and Co., 1872), I, p. 2. In his prologue to Marie (p. viii), Beaumont echoes the original title of the joint work and declares: “M. de Tocqueville described the institutions; I myself tried to sketch the mores.”

[128.] “G[osselin] asked me what the title of the work would be. I had only lightly considered it, so that I was quite embarrassed. I answered, however, that my idea was to title the book: The Dominion of Democracy in the United States. Since then I have thought about it, and I find the title good. It expresses well the general idea of the book and puts it in relief. What does my judge say about it?” OC, VIII, 1, p. 141.

[129.] Letter of 18 October 1834, copied in CVh, 2, pp. 55-56: “We do not have the title of your work, and I forgot yesterday to ask you about it. We cannot set the pages without the title.”

[130.] Léon Faucher, “Democracy in the United States, by M. Alexis de Tocqueville (unpublished),” Courier français, 358, 24 December 1834.

[131.] On the 23rd, 27th, or 31st of the month, depending on the sources.

[132.] This is the opinion of Jared Sparks in his letter of 6 June 1837 to Tocqueville (YTC, CId). Sparks had contracted with a publisher in Boston for the preface and notes of an American version of the Democracy. He would abandon the project when he learned of the imminent appearance of another edition.

[133.] Narcise-Achille de Salvandy, “Democracy in America,” Journal des débats, 23 March and 2 May 1835.

[134.] Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “Alexis de Tocqueville. De la démocratie en Amérique,” Le temps, 7 April 1835. The first one to be astonished by the good reception of the work, Tocqueville wrote to Sainte-Beuve the next day:

[135.] On the last day of March, Gosselin asserted to the author: “But it seems that you have created a masterpiece” (Letter to Beaumont, 1 April 1835, OC, VIII, 1, p. 151). The second edition was published in June, and the third at the end of the year. The fourth and fifth date from 1836. The sixth was published the following year, and the seventh in 1839.

[136.]Le temps, 7 April 1835.

[137.]Journal des débats, 23 March 1835.

[138.]Le semeur noted: “Either we are very wrong, or M. de Tocqueville greatly studied Montesquieu before studying America” (4, no. 9 [4 March 1835]: 65-68, p. 65).

The commentaries of the entire French press agreed on the point. Le national de 1834, on 7 June 1835, described the text as “a work whose high level will be felt by all those who meditate on the current state of society in Europe, and on the future that is in store for it.”

[139.]Gazette de France, 3 and 13 February 1835. The passage quoted is found in the issue of 3 February.

[140.] For example, the review in American Quarterly Review, 19, March 1839, pp. 124-66.

[141.] See Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 37, no. 230 (1835): 758-66. The commentary of the Atheneum is particularly critical: “rational, at times, even to dullness [...] a dislike of its ambitious style—its reduction of everything to theory—and its over-arrogant aim at uniting the sentenciousness of Montesquieu to the florid description of the Comte de Ségur” (394, 16 May 1835, p. 375). In a letter of 6 June 1837 (YTC, CId), Jared Sparks informed Tocqueville that the English reviews that mention the passages against democracy in Tocqueville’s work had been reproduced in American publications, and that, in his opinion, this fact might diminish the desire for a quick translation of Democracy.

[142.] Among the English critiques, that of John Stuart Mill stands clearly apart. Tocqueville wrote to him, “You are [...] the only one who has understood me entirely” (Letter of 7 December 1835, OC, VI, 1, p. 302). Mill’s commentary had been published in the London Review 30, no. 2 (1835): 85-129.

[143.]Marie, ou l’esclavage aux États-Unis, tableau des mœurs américaines. Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1835. 2 vols.

[144.] Beaumont’s novel appeared in Brussels in 1835. It was translated into Spanish in 1840 and republished in 1849, and translated into Portuguese in 1847. An abridged edition was published in Germany in 1836. The second French edition dates from 1835, the third from the following year, the fourth from 1840, and the fifth and last from 1842.

[145.]Quarterly Review 53, no. 106 (1835): 289.

[146.] Francisque de Corcelle, “De l’esclavage aux États-Unis,” Revue des deux mondes, 4th series, 6, 1836, pp. 227-46.

[147.]Journal des débats, 6 December 1835.

[148.]Marie, I, p. iii.

[149.] Letter from Beaumont to Tocqueville (15 July 1837?), OC, VIII, 1, p. 209.

[150.]L’écho français, 11 February 1835.

[151.] “Mémoire sur le paupérisme,” Mémoires de la Société académique de Cherbourg, 1835, pp. 293-94. It is impossible to indicate the precise reason for the writing of this work, which was inspired by the work of Villeneuve-Bargemont, Économie politique chrétienne, and which will be mentioned again elsewhere. Tocqueville had promised a second part that he never wrote.

[152.] The notes and drafts of L’Irlande allow us to follow in a precise way the journey of Beaumont and Tocqueville to England and Ireland in 1835. Tocqueville and Beaumont left Paris on 21 April, reached Calais on the 22nd and were in London on the 24th, where they lodged at the Ship-Hotel. The next day they went to the opera to see Anna Bolena. They began their visits in the English capital, continuing until 24 June. From 7 July to 9 August, they visited Ireland. On the latter date, Beaumont left to visit Scotland and Tocqueville went to Southampton. On the 18th he crossed the Channel. On 23 August he was again in Cherbourg.

[153.]Voyages en Angleterre, Irlande, Suisse et Algérie,OC, V, 2, p. 49. There is also a long, unpublished conversation with Sharp (YTC, CXIb.1). Beaumont’s notes contain other unpublished conversations.

[154.]Ibid., pp. 49, 52-54.

[155.] YTC, CX.

Tocqueville explained the success of the democratic principle in England in this way:

[156.] YTC, CX. Cf. OC, V, 2, p. 47.

[157.]Voyage en Angleterre,OC, V, 2, p. 47.

Mill explained the same idea in this way:

[158.] During their journey, which took them to several large cities of England, Tocqueville and Beaumont observed the terrible effects of industrialization, which they could already have done in part during the journey to the United States. On this subject, they knew about the book by J.B. Say and about the treatise by Villeneuve-Bargemont. The famous description of Manchester is found in Voyage en Angleterre,OC, V, 2, pp. 79-82.

[159.] YTC, CX.

[160.] Tocqueville explained this point in a letter of 5 May 1835 to his father. André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, p. 229.

[161.] The second and third editions saw the light of day in 1839; the seventh and last, in 1863. The English translation appeared in 1839. The English translator took care to eliminate several passages critical of England; he summarized and altered a certain number of Beaumont’s arguments.

[162.] Beaumont noted this idea of Tocqueville:

[163.] Letter of J.= S. Mill to Beaumont, 18 October 1839, YTC, CIe.

[164.] Concerning Mary Mottley, few things are known. See Antoine Rédier, Comme disait Monsieur de Tocqueville, pp. 122-28, and André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville, pp. 50-56.

[165.] YTC, CVa, p. 6.

[166.] YTC, CVa, p. 6.

[167.] YTC, CVa, pp. 28-30.

[168.] During their journey to England, Mill had begged the French visitors to contribute to the London and Westminster Review by writing articles on France and the United States. In 1836, Tocqueville sent Mill a first and only article on the social and political state of France before and after the Revolution, which was meant to be an introduction to a series of publications on France. “Political and Social Condition of France,” London and Westminster Review, 25, 1836, pp. 137-69 (reproduced in OC, II, 1, pp. 33-66). The similarity between the first paragraphs of the article and the chapter on the philosophical method of the Americans is clear and enlightening.

[169.] The long stays of Tocqueville at Baugy make it difficult to measure the influence exercised by Édouard.

[170.] Letter of 22 November 1836 to Beaumont, OC, VIII, 1, p. 174. The same month, Tocqueville wrote to Kergorlay in very similar terms: “I feel the importance of this second work, which will find criticism wide-awake and will not be able to take the public by surprise. So I want to do my best. There is not a day so to speak that I do not feel your absence. [...] There are three men with whom I live a bit every day, Pascal, Montesquieu and Rousseau. I miss a fourth who is you.” Letter of 10 November 1836, OC, XIII, 1, p. 418.

[171.] He found the time to think about the continuation of his work on pauperism and asked Beaumont to bring him all available information about the savings banks and the English pawnshops. There is a list of questions from Tocqueville for Beaumont in YTC, CXIb.13. Cf. OC, VIII, 1, pp. 185, 191, 193, 196, and 200. He did not find the time to choose some unpublished excerpts from Democracy for the London and Westminster Review as Mill had requested (OC, VIII, 1, p. 187).

Tocqueville also dedicated his efforts to two bids, one to enter the Chamber of Deputies in November and a second to get himself elected to the Académie française. These two attempts failed. Entry to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques was seen by Tocqueville only as a consolation prize that would make his entry to the Académie française more difficult. He would enter there on 24 December 1841. He published, in addition, two letters on Algeria, on 23 June and 22 August 1837, in La presse de Seine-et-Oise.

[172.] “For, after all, and without giving a useless compliment, I believe you are my master.” Letter to Kergorlay, 4 September 1837, OC, XIII, 1, p. 472. Cf. Kergorlay’s answer, 30 September, ibid., p. 477. Alexis was then working on the chapters on good morals. In September, he laid down the foundations of the chapter on American manners.

[173.]OC, VIII, 1, p. 321.

[174.]The Examiner, 17 May 1840.

[175.]Hunt’s Merchant Magazine, 3 July 1840, p. 443.

[176.]Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 48, no. 298 (1840): 463-78, p. 463.

[177.]Edinburgh Review 145 (1840): 1-25.

[178.]Dublin University Magazine 16, no. 95 (1840): 544-63, p. 563.

[179.]The New York Review 7, no. 13 (1840): p. 234.

[180.] Letter to Royer-Collard, 20 November 1838, OC, XI, p. 74. Cf. the letter to Corcelle, 25 June 1838, OC, XV, 1, pp. 100-101.