Alexis de Tocqueville

France state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1805–1859 ○ Natural causes

Liberal statesman and author of Democracy in America who sat in the 1848 Constituent Assembly and was foreign minister in 1849

Born in 1805 into an old aristocratic Norman family, he went to the United States in 1831 on a July Monarchy mission to study its prisons and drew on the journey for Democracy in America (1835 and 1840). He sat in the lower house for the Manche from 1839 to 1851. After the revolution of 1848 he was elected to the Constituent Assembly and joined the commission that drafted the constitution of the Second Republic, siding with the Party of Order against the socialists. As foreign minister in Odilon Barrot's government from 3 June to 31 October 1849 he urged the renewed state of siege in Paris and approved the arrest of demonstrators. He tried to resist the coup of 2 December 1851, was briefly detained, and then left politics to write The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). His Recollections, a private journal of 1848, appeared after his death. He died of tuberculosis at Cannes in 1859.

Also known as: Alexis Charles Henri Clérel de Tocqueville