Tocqueville set to work on a broader analysis of American culture and politics, published in 1835 as “Democracy in America.” Alexis de Tocqueville: “Democracy in America”Īs “Democracy in America” revealed, Tocqueville believed that equality was the great political and social idea of his era, and he thought that the United States offered the most advanced example of equality in action. They quickly published their report, “On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France,” written largely by Beaumont. The travelers returned to France in 1832. In Washington, D.C., he called on President Andrew Jackson during visiting hours and exchanged pleasantries. In Pennsylvania, Tocqueville spent a week interviewing every prisoner in the Eastern State Penitentiary. Alexis de Tocqueville: American Travelsįrom Sing-Sing Prison to the Michigan woods, from New Orleans to the White House, Tocqueville and Beaumont traveled for nine months by steamboat, by stagecoach, on horseback and in canoes, visiting America’s penitentiaries and quite a bit in between. Unable to advance, he and Beaumont secured permission to carry out a study of the American penal system, and in April 1831 they set sail for Rhode Island. In 1830 Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois monarch,” took the French throne, and Tocqueville’s career ambitions were temporarily blocked. After attending college in Metz, Tocqueville studied law in Paris and was appointed a magistrate in Versailles, where he met his future wife and befriended a fellow lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont.ĭid you know? During his travels in the United States, one of the first things that surprised Alexis de Tocqueville about American culture was how early everyone seemed to eat breakfast. Both of his parents had been jailed during the Reign of Terror. Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into an aristocratic family recently rocked by France’s revolutionary upheavals.

Author of democracy in america