In April 1794, within three days, the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris sent a young noblewoman's father, mother and grandfather to the guillotine. The grandfather was Malesherbes, a former minister of Louis XVI who had volunteered to defend the king at his trial. The young woman, Louise Le Peletier de Rosanbo, and her husband, Hervé de Tocqueville, were in prison themselves, and they were freed only after Robespierre fell that summer. Their son Alexis de Tocqueville was born in 1805 into a family that stayed loyal to the Bourbon kings. He spent his working life on a question that history had put to families like his: the old society of ranks was gone and would not come back, so could the equal society that replaced it be free?
At sixteen Tocqueville lost the Catholic faith he had been raised in, reading in his father's library in Metz, where Hervé served as prefect — the government's administrator of the department. Decades later, in a letter of 1857 to Sophie Swetchine, a Russian-born Catholic convert and close friend, he compared the experience to an earthquake and wrote that the problem of human existence never stopped troubling him. How much of that faith he kept afterwards is still argued over. Religion stayed in his political thinking, which treated it as something a free people needs.
In 1830 a revolution in Paris replaced the Bourbons with Louis-Philippe, and Tocqueville, a junior magistrate at Versailles, took the oath to the new king reluctantly. With a fellow magistrate, Gustave de Beaumont, he obtained leave to study American prisons. They landed at Newport on 9 May 1831 and sailed from New York on 20 February 1832, having used the prison errand to study a whole society.
Democracy in America, whose first volume appeared in 1835, told French readers that equality of conditions — the wearing away of inherited rank — had been advancing for seven hundred years and could not be stopped. What remained open was whether equal people would live in liberty or in a new kind of servitude. America showed the free version: townships that governed themselves, juries, a free press, churches kept apart from the state, and citizens who formed associations for every purpose. It also showed the dangers: a majority that tyrannised over opinion, and citizens who withdrew into private life. The second volume, in 1840, described the despotism he feared most, a mild government that provides for everything and keeps its citizens in permanent childhood without ever needing to be cruel.
The book made him famous at twenty-nine, and the Académie française elected him in 1841. By then he sat in the Chamber of Deputies for Valognes in Normandy and became a firm supporter of the French conquest of Algeria. After his first visit, in 1841, he wrote that burning harvests and taking women and children prisoner were regrettable necessities of that war, though he also charged the French army with fighting more barbarously than the Arabs. His writings on Algeria were little read until an edition by the critic Tzvetan Todorov in 1988. Scholars still disagree whether his colonialism contradicts his liberalism or follows from it.
On 27 January 1848 he warned the deputies that revolution was coming; within a month the monarchy fell. He helped draft the Second Republic's constitution, spoke that September against writing a right to work into it, and served as foreign minister from June to October 1849. When Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte seized power on 2 December 1851, Tocqueville was among the deputies detained at Vincennes. Released, he left politics and worked in the archives at Tours. The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) argued that the centralised state the revolutionaries were proud of had been built by the kings before them. He died of tuberculosis at Cannes on 16 April 1859, with the book's second volume unfinished. His Recollections of 1848, written in 1850–51 for himself alone, appeared only in 1893, published by his great-nephew Christian de Tocqueville.
John Stuart Mill, the English philosopher, reviewed both volumes of Democracy and carried the tyranny of the majority into On Liberty. By 1900 the book was little read in France. Readers came back to it from the 1930s, and after the Second World War the sociologist Raymond Aron presented Tocqueville as one of the founders of sociology. The historian François Furet later built on his reading of the Revolution.