Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

THE WRITING OF DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA44 Before writing Democracy in America, Tocqueville took a trip to America of a little more than nine months in the company of his friend Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866). Like Tocqueville, Beaumont was a magistrate; the two had studied law together and served on the same court at Versailles.45 In 1829 they both attended Guizot’s lectures on the “history of civilization in France,” a statement of the historical liberalism Tocqueville himself was to maintain.46 Then, in 1831, they came to America as collaborators in a grand project to see “what a great republic is,” as Tocqueville put it in a letter to another friend.47 Tocqueville was drawn to America to observe the future society of “almost complete equality of social conditions” toward which he believed Europe was moving inexorably. Although he said later that he did not go to America with the idea of writing a book, it seems clear that he and Beaumont went with a large joint project in mind, for both refer to it in contemporaneous letters. They also had a definite smaller project to study penal reform in America, which Tocqueville described as a “pretext” for the voyage.48 But on returning to France he and Beaumont made good on the pretext and wrote a book, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France, which appeared soon after, in January 1833.