Alexis de Tocqueville: Prophet of Democracy in the Age of Revolution
by Hugh Brogan
Profile Books ₤30, 692 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤24

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French nobleman of intellectual distinction and romantic disposition who visited America only once - between May 1831 and February 1832 - to study the country’s prison system. Yet, according to Hugh Brogan, his powers of observation and description were so acute that he succeeded in writing the greatest book ever written about the US.

Brogan’s claim about Democracy in America seems a bold one, until you stop and try to think of a better book about the US. Many of Tocqueville’s startling observations about the informality and dynamism of American society, the pervasive influence of religion and the vulgarity of mass culture, seem just as germane today. It is certainly striking to see how frequently Tocqueville’s insights are still cited by contemporary politicians and columnists. Being quoted more often than read is a sure sign that a book has attained classic status.

However, as Brogan makes clear in his masterful - if overly detailed - biography, Tocqueville was very much a Frenchman of his time and class, who wrote Democracy in America for a French readership. His analysis of America’s infant democracy was as much a subjective political tract as it was an objective scholarly study. America was a new prism through which to view France, shedding fresh light on his country’s politics. Tocqueville wanted his compatriots to learn from the political possibilities emerging on the other side of the Atlantic while avoiding the “tyranny of the majority”.

Brogan argues that the greatest event of Tocqueville’s life occurred before he was even born: the French Revolution of 1789. His family was briefly imprisoned during the revolutionary upheaval, an experience that turned his father’s hair white at the age of 21. The shadow of the Revolution stretched over the rest of Tocqueville’s life. He was a nobleman who believed that France had been tragically mistaken in marginalising his own kind. “He was one of the defeated class and could not forget or pardon the defeat,” as Brogan puts it.

On his visit to America, Tocqueville was astonished to discover that the lower orders were capable of running a country. “One thing is incontrovertibly demonstrated by America which I had doubted until now: it is, that the middle classes can govern a State. I do not know if they could emerge with honour from really difficult political situations. But they are equal to the everyday business of society. In spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education, their vulgarity, they can demonstrably supply practical intelligence, and that is enough,” he recorded in one of his notebooks.

Even when fully converted to the virtues of American democracy, Tocqueville remained decidedly sniffy about its drawbacks. He may have become democratic by intellect, but he always remained aristocratic by instinct. “Democratic nations cultivate the arts which serve to make life comfortable, in preference to those which try to make it beautiful,” he later wrote.

For Tocqueville, America was one big morality play that could teach others useful lessons. But he remained acutely conscious of the differences between America and his own country. For him, there was no universal blueprint; the point of departure for any society was vital. The French tended towards periodic displays of “heroic virtues” rather than the “peaceful habits” he so admired in the Americans. Even so, he argued that France should strive for a more representative democracy.

“The democratic will is volatile; its agents, vulgar; its laws, imperfect. I admit all this. But if it is true that soon there will be no middle way between the empire of democracy and the yoke of one man, ought we not try rather for the former than submit voluntarily to the latter? And if it were necessary to accept complete equality, would it not be better to allow ourselves to be levelled in liberty rather than under a despot?”

The acclaim that greeted the publication of Democracy in America eased Tocqueville’s career in politics. He became an active, improving conservative even if he called himself a liberal. He briefly served as foreign minister but his career never reached the heights that he considered appropriate to his talents. As a politician his instincts always collided with his ambition, Brogan observes, and he could renounce neither.

The crumbling of his political fortunes enabled Tocqueville to return to writing. He devoted much of his latter years to studying his own country’s history, publishing The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, a work no less insightful than Democracy in America even if lesser known. In this book, Tocqueville argued that in 1789 the French had aspired to both liberty and equality but had subsequently been forced to choose between the two and opted for equality. For Tocqueville, this was the wrong choice: liberty was always the more valuable principle. “A good government’s greatest care should be to accustom the people, little by little, to do without it,” he wrote.

Tocqueville’s critique of his own country seems as resonant today as when he wrote it, helping to explain the febrile mood in the country ahead of April’s presidential elections.

The French nation, he concluded, was disobedient by nature, and yet more tolerant of the arbitrary, even violent, rule of a prince than the free and lawful government of its leading citizens; its people were led by a thread when no one resisted, but were ungovernable as soon as someone set the example of resistance: “Never so free that one need despair of enslaving it, never so enslaved that it cannot break its yoke.”

John Thornhill is the editor of the FT’s European edition