Alexis de Toqueville

Tocqueville was born to a family of Catholic aristocrats that owned an ancient chateau in Normandy, and that included several members who had been sent to the guillotine for their support of the royal family during the French Revolution. He was educated in Metz, France before becoming a lawyer and judge. While working in Versailles, he met a prosecutor named Gustave de Beaumont. During the uncertain last months of the Bourbon Restoration, the two—who would become close friends—decided to propose a journey to the United States in order to study its unique penitentiary system, which many in France hoped to emulate. They travelled to America for a nine-month stay in 1831. While Tocqueville increasingly left the prison project to his friend (though the two would publish their findings about American prisons in 1833), he devoted the next eight years to working on Democracy in America, which would be published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. In 1841, Tocqueville was elected to the French Chambre des Députés: he served in this capacity until the Revolutions of 1848, after which he left politics for good. Tocqueville published his final work, entitled The Old Regime and the Revolution, in 1856. Three years later, in 1859, he died of tuberculosis.