Revolution of 1848
- Died:
- April 16, 1859, Cannes (aged 53)
- Title / Office:
- Chamber of Deputies (1839-1848), France
- Notable Works:
- “Democracy in America”
- “The Old Regime and the Revolution”
- Subjects Of Study:
- French Revolution
- United States
- democracy
- On the Web:
- Online Library of Liberty - Alexis de Tocqueville: A Bibliographical Essay by John Lukacs (Apr. 04, 2025)
The Revolution of 1848 brought about a new political situation for France and for Tocqueville. Having decried apathy as the chief danger for France, Tocqueville recognized even before the revolution that France was faced with a politically awakened working class that might well propel French politics into socialist and revolutionary channels. Tocqueville considered economic independence as necessary to the preservation of his own intellectual independence. He thus viewed pressures of the dependent poor for state welfare and of the unemployed for state employment as the initial steps to a universal and degrading dependence on the state by all social classes. Unsympathetic to revolutionaries and contemptuous of socialists before the revolution, Tocqueville opposed the demands of the Parisian workers during the June days of 1848, when their uprising was bloodily suppressed by the military dictator General Louis Cavaignac, as well as in the debates over the constitution of 1848. The only intellectual change produced in Tocqueville by the events of 1848 was a recognition of the strength of socialist ideas and of the problematic nature of the proprietary society. Although he had sought to reconcile the aristocracy to liberal democracy in Democracy in America, he rejected social democracy as it emerged in 1848 as incompatible with liberal democracy.
Politically, Tocqueville’s own position was dramatically improved by the February Revolution. His electorate expanded from 700 to 160,000 under universal manhood suffrage. He was elected as a conservative Republican to the Constituent Assembly by 79 percent of the voters and again in 1849 by more than 87 percent. Along with Beaumont, he was nominated to the committee that wrote the constitution of the Second Republic, and the following year he became vice president of the Assembly. A government crisis produced by French armed intervention to restore papal authority in Rome prompted his appointment as minister of foreign affairs between June and October 1849, during which time he worked cautiously to preserve the balance of power in Europe and to prevent France from extending its foreign involvements. His speeches were more successful and his self-confidence soared, but the results gave him little more durable satisfaction than those he had attained during the July monarchy under Louis-Philippe.
Shortly after his dismissal from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in October 1849, Tocqueville suffered a physical collapse. After a slow recovery he performed a final service for the Second French Republic. As reporter for the constitutional revision committee, he attempted to avert the final confrontation between the president and the legislature, which ended with an executive seizure of dictatorial power. Briefly imprisoned for opposing Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état on December 2, 1851, Tocqueville was deprived of all political offices for refusing his oath of loyalty to the new regime. Thrown back on a small circle of political allies and friends, he felt a deeper sense of isolation and political pessimism than ever before.
Return to politics
Seeking to reenter politics, he reverted to the strategy of his youthful success—the publication of a book on the fundamental themes of liberty and equality. He chose as his subject the French Revolution, and, after years of research and intermittent illnesses, The Old Regime and the Revolution appeared in 1856 as the first part of his projected study. Tocqueville sought to demonstrate the continuity of political behaviour and attitudes that made postrevolutionary French society as prepared to accept despotism as that of the old regime. In this final study the traumatic events of the years 1848–51 were clearly the source of his emphasis on the durability of centralization and class hostility in French history. France seemed less the democratic society of the future he had glimpsed in America than the prisoner of its own past. Against the pessimism of his analysis of French political tendencies, The Old Regime reaffirmed the libertarian example of the Anglo-American world. The acclaim that greeted this study briefly dispelled the gloom of his last years. Once again a public figure, he made a visit to England in 1857 that culminated in an audience with the prince consort and was the last public triumph of his life. He returned to his work, but, before he could finish his study of the Revolution, he collapsed and died.
Reputation of Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville’s reputation in the 19th century reached its high point during the decade following his death as the great European powers accommodated themselves to universal suffrage. He died just at the onset of a revival of liberalism in France. The nine-volume publication of his works, edited by Beaumont (1860–66), was received as the legacy of a martyr of liberty. In England his name was invoked during the franchise reform debates of the 1860s, and in Germany it was linked to controversies over liberalization and federalization in the years preceding the empire devised by Otto von Bismarck. After 1870 his influence began to decline, a process not substantially reversed by either the posthumous publication of his Recollections in 1893 or that of his correspondence with his friend, the diplomatist and philosopher Arthur de Gobineau. By the turn of the century, he was almost forgotten, and his works, which seemed too abstract and speculative for a generation that believed only in ascertained knowledge, were generally regarded as outdated classics. Moreover, Tocqueville’s prediction of democracy as a vast and uniformly leveling power seemed to have miscarried by not foreseeing both the extent of the new inequalities and conflicts produced by industrialization and those produced by European nationalisms and imperialism. The classless society had failed to appear in Europe, and America seemed to have become European by becoming nationalist and imperialist. In France, Tocqueville’s name was too closely identified with a narrowly defined Liberal tradition, which rapidly lost influence during the Third Republic. Although his work as an innovative historian was acknowledged, it is significant that the revival of his ideas and reputation as a political sociologist owes so much to American, English, and German scholarship.
The 20th-century totalitarian challenge to the survival of liberal institutions produced by two world wars and by the Great Depression of the 1930s fostered a “Tocqueville renaissance.” The outdated facts of his books seemed less significant than the political philosophy implicit in his search to preserve liberty in public life and his strategies for analyzing latent social tendencies. His work was found to display a wealth of fruitful philosophical and sociological hypotheses. At a popular level, the renewed upsurge of social democracy in Europe after 1945 combined with the polarization of the Cold War to produce a view of Tocqueville in the West as an alternative to Marx as a prophet of social change. Again, as in the late 1850s and 1860s, Tocqueville rose to heights of popularity, especially in the 1990s in the United States, where his travels were retraced. It seems certain that Tocqueville will continue to be invoked as an authority and inspiration by those sharing his contempt of static authoritarian societies as well as his belief in the final disappearance of class divisions and in liberty as the ultimate political value.
Seymour Drescher The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica