alexis de tocqueville democracy in america 1835

(Fighting would continue until the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781). After thirteen colonial delegations met in Philadelphia in June and July 1776, they (as the new Congress) officially endorsed Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the new nation of the United States of America. The Revolution officially began in April 1775, with a skirmish in Lexington, Massachusetts-the cause of Paul Revere’s famous Midnight Ride. While Tocqueville refers to early American history stretching back to the sixteenth century, and especially highlights the establishment of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, his work also assumes a general familiarity with the events of the American Revolution against England, of which it had long been a colony. Three years later, in 1859, he died of tuberculosis. Tocqueville published his final work, entitled The Old Regime and the Revolution, in 1856. 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. 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 18. They travelled to America for a nine-month stay in 1831.

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. While working in Versailles, he met a prosecutor named Gustave de Beaumont. He was educated in Metz, France before becoming a lawyer and judge. 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.

Alexis de tocqueville democracy in america 1835