TOCQUEVILLE, CHARLES-ALEXIS-HENRI-MARC-RICE-CLEREL de. - Historian and statesman, born into a noble family at Verneuil on 29 July 1805, died at Cannes on 16 April 1859.
In 1827 he obtained the office of auditor at the Tribunal of Versailles, which he accepted without enthusiasm. After the July Revolution he left his post and in 1831 travelled to the United States to study the systems of penal institutions there. These contacts provided the inspiration for the book in which he analyses democracy and, through American society, casts an eye on the conditions of French society (De la démocratie en Amérique [1835], Italian trans. Bologna 1932). The work was well received and in 1838 T. was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, and in 1841 to the Académie française. In 1839 he was elected deputy and remained in opposition until 1849. Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Odilon Barrot ministry from 2 June to 30 October 1849, he had to deal with matters concerning political refugees in Switzerland, the Austro-Piedmontese conflict and Austria’s and Russia’s relations with Turkey over Hungarian exiles. He consistently inspired his domestic and foreign policy on liberal principles, aiming between revolution and reaction to maintain a middle position in order to safeguard the idea of liberty; he gave proof of this in the proposals he drew up for the French Assembly regarding the possibility of constitutional revision and, finally, in subscribing to the protest against the coup d’état of 2 December. After this event he left political life and devoted himself exclusively to study. Reworking an article he had published in 1836 in the London and Westminster Review, entitled L'Etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789, and the Souvenirs, composed later and unpublished until 1893, in which he studied the causes of the revolutions of 1848, he produced his major work: L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856, Italian trans. by G. Pietrangeli, Città di Castello 1921). He died before completing the work, which was to have covered French history throughout the period of the Consulate and the Empire.
Alongside the idea of liberty he placed the sentiment of religion, but of a generic religiosity, in the sense that what mattered to him was that some religion or other be professed, perhaps one of a national character; he believed, in fact, that in any religious sentiment lay the best guarantee of liberty, but he was prepared to accept only the moral teaching of religion, not its metaphysics of the transcendent. Faced with the reality of the Roman Church, whose discipline he could not reconcile with his liberal sentiment, he nonetheless acknowledged the importance of the Catholic religion in the life of the spirit and regarded it as most favourable to the equality of citizens, while from his recollections of American life he drew the premises for affirming the profound difference between political power and religious power and the necessity of their clear separation.