TOQUEVILLE, CHARLES-ALEXIS-HENRI-MAURICE-CLÉREL de. — Historian and statesman, born of a noble family at Verneuil on 29 July 1805, died at Cannes on 16 April 1859.
In 1827 he obtained the position of assistant judge at the Versailles Tribunal, which he accepted without enthusiasm. After the July Revolution he left the post, and in 1831 went to the United States to study its penitentiary systems. These contacts provided the inspiration 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 received an award, and T. was appointed a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1838 and a member of the French Academy in 1841. In 1839 he was elected deputy and remained in opposition until 1849. Minister of Foreign Affairs in the ministry of Odilon Barrot from 2 June to 30 October 1849, he had to deal with questions concerning political refugees in Switzerland, the Austro-Piedmontese conflict, and Austria’s and Russia’s relations with Turkey regarding the Hungarian exiles; subsequently, too, he based all his domestic and foreign policy on liberal principles, seeking, between revolution and reaction, to maintain an intermediate position, in order always to safeguard the idea of freedom. He demonstrated this in the proposals prepared for the French Assembly concerning the possibility of a constitutional revision and, finally, by signing the protest against the coup d’état of 2 December. After this event he withdrew from political life and devoted himself exclusively to study. Drawing on an article of his published in 1836 in the London and Westminster Review, entitled L'Etat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789, and on the Souvenirs, composed later and remaining unpublished until 1893, in which he studied the causes of the revolutions of 1848, he developed his principal work: L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856, Italian trans.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 have dealt with French history throughout the period of the Consulate and the Empire.
Alongside the idea of freedom he placed religious sentiment, but understood religiosity in a general sense: what mattered to him was that some religion should be professed, perhaps one of a national character. He believed, in fact, that any religious sentiment offered the best guarantee of
freedom; but from religion he was prepared to accept its moral teaching, not the metaphysics of the transcendent. Faced with the reality of the Church of Rome, whose discipline T. was unable to reconcile with his liberal sentiment, he recognized the importance of the Catholic religion in the life of the spirit and regarded it as the one most favorable to the equality of citizens, while from his recollections of American life he drew the premises for asserting the profound difference between political and religious power and the necessity of their clear separation.