TOCQUEVILLE, CHARLES-ALEXIS-HENRI-MAURICE-CLÉREL DE. - Historian and politician, born of a noble family at Verneuil on July 29, 1805, died at Cannes on April 16, 1859.
In 1827 he obtained the office of auditor in the Tribunal of Versailles, which he accepted without enthusiasm. After the July Revolution he left his post and in 1831 went to the United States to study its prison systems. These contacts provided him with the starting point for the book in which he analyzes democracy and, through American society, keeps his eye on the conditions of French society (De la démocratie en Amérique [1835], Italian trans. Bologna 1932). The work was awarded a prize, and in 1838 T. was named a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and in 1841 a member of the Académie française. In 1839 he was elected deputy and until 1849 remained in opposition. As Minister of Foreign Affairs in the ministry of Odilon Barrot from June 2 to October 30, 1849, he had to deal with questions relating to political refugees in Switzerland, the Austro-Piedmontese struggle, and the relations of Austria and Russia with Turkey over the Hungarian exiles, subsequently inspiring all his domestic and foreign policy with liberal principles, aiming, between revolution and reaction, to maintain an intermediate position, in order always to safeguard the idea of liberty; and he gave proof of this in the proposals drawn up for the French Assembly concerning the possibility of a constitutional revision and, finally, in signing the protest against the coup d'état of December 2. After this event he withdrew from political life and devoted himself exclusively to his studies. Taking as his starting point 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entitled L'Etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789, and the Souvenirs, composed later and remaining unpublished until 1893, in which he studied the causes of the revolutions of 1848, he elaborated his principal work: L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856, Italian trans.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 treat French history throughout the entire period of the Consulate and the Empire.
Alongside the idea of liberty he placed religious sentiment, but of a generic religiosity, in the sense that he was concerned that some religion be professed, whatever it might be, perhaps of a national character; he held, in fact, that in any religious sentiment lay the best guarantee of liberty, but of religion he was prepared to accept the moral teaching, not the metaphysics of the transcendent. Faced with the reality of the Church of Rome, whose discipline T. could not reconcile with his liberal sentiment, he kept in mind the importance of the Catholic religion in the life of the spirit and considered it as the most favorable to the equality of citizens, while from his memories of American life he drew the premises for affirming the profound difference between political and religious power and the necessity of a clear separation between them.
Bibliography4 works
Giuseppe Coniglio