Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris in 1805 into an old Norman noble family. His great-grandfather Malesherbes had defended Louis XVI and was guillotined, and his own parents were imprisoned during the Revolution and narrowly escaped death. After studying law he became a junior magistrate. In 1831, at twenty-five, he crossed the Atlantic with his friend Beaumont, officially to study the American prison system, and travelled for nine months in the United States; on his return he wrote Democracy in America, which made him famous at once, and at thirty-five he was elected to the Académie française. He later sat in the Chamber of Deputies and was briefly foreign minister in 1849. When Louis Napoleon staged his coup in 1851, Tocqueville was arrested for opposing it, and thereafter withdrew from politics to write. He suffered from tuberculosis in his last years and died at fifty-three.