alexis de tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Paris on July 29, 1805. Tocqueville's father was a royalist prefect from Normandy who supported the Bourbon monarchy, his great-grandfather was a liberal aristocrat killed in the French Revolution, and his mother was a devout Roman Catholic who strongly advocated a return on the Old Regime. Tocqueville's father's appointments as prefect of different towns meant that he lived away from the family for much of Tocqueville's early life. In his father's …

…focused on writing The Old Regime and the French Revolution in the early 1850s. This work is an account of French history leading up to the French Revolution in 1789 which emphasizes factors which led to the failure of the Revolution and the continual lapses into despotic government which Tocqueville witnessed during his lifetime. In 1856 Tocqueville's father died. Just a few years later, on April 16, 1859, Tocqueville himself died of tuberculosis. His Recollections were published posthumously in 1893.