Lessons from Tocqueville in America...the “best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America."

  

Streamed live on Mar 6, 2023

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America has been called by Harvey Mansfield the “best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America." What can a 200-year-old book teach us about democracy in America today? Join Jeremy Jennings, author of Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America; Olivier Zunz, author of The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville; and Catherine Zuckert of the University of Notre Dame, for a discussion of Tocqueville’s masterpiece and its lessons for modern Americans. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.

ADDENDUM ( - Wikipedia)

Travels[edit]

In 1831, Tocqueville obtained from the July Monarchy a mission to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the United States and proceeded there with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont. While he did visit some prisons, Tocqueville traveled widely in the United States and took extensive notes on his observations and reflections.^[22] He returned within nine months and published a report, but the more well-known result of his tour was De la démocratie en Amérique, which appeared in 1835.^[11] Beaumont also wrote an account of their travels in Jacksonian America: Marie or Slavery in the United States (1835). ^[23] [24] During this trip, Tocqueville made a side trip to Montreal and Quebec City in Lower Canada from mid-August to early September 1831.^[25]

Apart from North America, Tocqueville also made an observational tour of England, producing Memoir on Pauperism. In 1841 and 1846, he traveled to the French colony of Algeria. His first travel inspired his Travail sur l'Algérie, in which he criticized the French model of colonisation which emphasized assimilation to Western culture, advocating that the French government instead adopt a form of indirect rule, which avoided mixing different populations together. He went as far as openly advocating racial segregation as a form of consociationalism between European colonists and Arabs through the implementation of two different legislative systems for each ethnic group (a half century before implementation of the 1881 Indigenous code based on religion).^{[citation needed]}

In 1835 Tocqueville journeyed through Ireland. His observations provide one of the best pictures of the state of Ireland before the Great Famine (1845–1849). They chronicle the growing Catholic middle class and the appalling conditions in which most Catholic tenant farmers lived. Tocqueville made clear both his opposition to aristocratic power and his affinity for his Irish co-religionists.^[26]

After the fall of the July Monarchy in the French Revolution of 1848, Tocqueville was elected a member of the Constituent Assembly of 1848, where he became a member of the commission charged with the drafting of the new Constitution of the Second Republic (1848–1851). He defended bicameralism and the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. As the countryside was thought to be more conservative than the labouring population of Paris, he conceived of universal suffrage as a means to counteract the revolutionary spirit of Paris.

During the Second Republic, Tocqueville sided with the Party of Order against the socialists. A few days after the February 1848 insurrection, he anticipated that a violent clash between the Parisian workers' population led by socialists agitating in favour of a "Democratic and Social Republic" and the conservatives, which included the aristocracy and the rural population, would be inescapable. Indeed, these social tensions eventually exploded in the June Days Uprising of 1848.^[27]

Led by General Cavaignac, the suppression of the uprising was supported by Tocqueville, who advocated the "regularization" of the state of siege declared by Cavaignac and other measures promoting suspension of the constitutional order.^[27] Between May and September, Tocqueville participated in the Constitutional Commission which wrote the new Constitution. His proposals, such as his amendment about the President and his reelection, reflected lessons he drew from his North American experience^[28]

Minister of Foreign Affairs[edit]

Tocqueville at the 1851 "Commission de la révision de la Constitution à l'Assemblée nationale"

A supporter of Cavaignac and of the Party of Order, Tocqueville accepted an invitation to enter Odilon Barrot's government as Minister of Foreign Affairs from 3 June to 31 October 1849. During the troubled days of June 1849, he pleaded with Interior Minister Jules Armand Dufaure for the reestablishment of the state of siege in the capital and approved the arrest of demonstrators. Tocqueville, who since February 1848 had supported laws restricting political freedoms, approved the two laws voted immediately after the June 1849 days which restricted the liberty of clubs and freedom of the press.^[29]