TOCQUEVILLE, ALEXIS HENRI CHARLES MAU RICE CLEREL, COMTE DE (1805-1859), was born at Ver neuil on July 29, 18o5. Alexis de Tocqueville became an assistant magistrate in 1830. A year later he obtained from the French Gov ernment a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in Amer ica. On his return he wrote De la Democratie en Amerique (1835, 3rd ed., 1868). It was at once caught up by influential members of the Liberal party in England, which country Tocqueville soon after visited, and where he married an Englishwoman. Returning to France, he was elected a member of the Academie des sciences morales et politiques (Jan. 6, 1838). He sat in the chamber of deputies for several years both before and after the revolution of February, becoming in 1849 vice-president of the assembly, and f or a few months minister of foreign affairs. He was a warm supporter of the Roman expedition, but an equally warm opponent of Louis Napoleon; he was arrested at the coup d'etat, and retired from public life. Twenty years after his first, he produced another book, De l'ancien regime, which almost, if not quite, equalled its success. His health was never very strong, and in 1858 he broke a blood-vessel. He was ordered to the south, and died at
Cannes on April 16, 1859. His complete works, including much unpublished correspondence, were produced after his death in uni form shape by H. G. de Beaumont (Oeuvres completes de Tocqueville, 9 vols., 186o-1865).
During the last twenty years of his life, and for perhaps half that time after his death, Tocqueville had an increasing European fame. He was the first and has remained the chief writer to put the orthodox liberal ideas which governed European politics during the first half or two-thirds of the 19th century into an orderly and attractive shape. He wrote the first reasoned political account of democratic government in America. If not an entirely impartial writer, he was neither a devotee nor an opponent of democracy.
See Heinrich Jacques, Alexis de Tocqueville; ein Lebens- and Geistes bild (Vienna, 1876) ; James Bryce, The Predictions of Tocqueville (Baltimore, 1887) ; Count de Puymaigre, Les Souvenirs d'Alexis de Tocqueville (1893, Eng. trans. 1896) and Correspondance entre Alexis de Tocqueville et Arthur de Gobineau (1908).