Tocqueville Alexis De Tocqueville Was an Aristocratic

Tocqueville Alexis de Tocqueville was an aristocratic young Frenchman with vaguely liberal sentiments who wondered if the new democracy in the United States had any ideas that could be applied to France and other European countries. His real audience was therefore the middle and upper classes in Europe, although his book never became a popular classic or standard university text there like it did in the United States.

Indeed, few people in Europe today have probably ever read it, while the book is still being discussed widely in the U.S. 180 years later. Tocqueville was very mindful of the fact that the French Revolution had failed and ended up in the dictatorship of Napoleon, following by the restoration of the absolutist Bourbon monarchy after 1815. In 1830, a year before Tocqueville came to America, the last of these had been overthrown but democracy was still a new and uncertain form of government at that time, even in the United States.

Universal suffrage for all white males with no property requirements was still a relatively recent development in America, as were mass political parties, and he hoped that some form of this new democracy could be established in France, which it finally was in 1871. Tocqueville was certainly correct that government and administration was far more decentralized in the United States than Europe, and that the citizens took more individual initiative in organizing social and political institutions.

Unlike France, where the power of the kings had always been hereditary and absolute, with armies of bureaucrats, police and officials constantly issuing directives and regulations and reporting back to the central government, the federal government in Washington had far fewer powers. To Europeans, government and public administration had always seemed chaotic and anarchic in the United States, but Tocqueville was right in pointing out that this had never been the case, and that power was simply more widely diffused.

State and local governments, including New England townships, were accustomed to handling their own affairs with minimal interference from the outside, although in the treatment of slaves and racial and religious minorities, this was at best a mixed blessing. In part, this was because the Americans had made a virtue out of necessity in that the country's territory was vast and its transportation and communications very primitive, so state and local governments simply had to assume most of the authority.

This was less a factor in the 20th Century when the country became more unified because of highways, railroads and mass communications, and the powers of the federal government expanded exponentially. He was also accurate in his observation that capitalism had gradually replaced feudalism in France, and that it was also expanding in America, although naturally the old aristocratic planters in the South felt threatened by this -- as their counterparts in Europe always had.

Tocqueville also underestimated that power that money would have over the political process and overestimated the effect that democracy would have on equalizing property, incomes and economic status. All of that became very clear in the U.S. By the end of the 19th Century and it still is today, but when Tocqueville was writing in the 1830s the power of big banks and corporations was not nearly as great as it became after the Civil War.

For Tocqueville, the bourgeoisie meant a class or relative small-scale lawyers, merchants and manufacturers rather than the industrial and financial magnates that came into being much later. He saw large numbers of small farmers and mechanics who had won the right to vote, acting against what appeared to be a much weaker upper class, at least outside of those regions controlled by the Southern planters.

In addition, the common people in America were well armed and did not have the feudal habits of deference and obedience that the lower classes had in Europe. They regarded their state and local governments as representative of their interests and would not stand for any type of despotism or authoritarian rule.

Tocqueville was correct in pointing out that the feudal system of aristocratic landholders and state-supported churches had always been weaker in America than in Europe, and that the 1776 Revolution had doomed them to extinction in most parts of the country. This had caused the people to become more individualistic, acquisitive and materialistic, especially when the expanding frontier seemed to offer unlimited opportunities to the enterprising that simply did not exist in Europe. In general, European observers have always tended to disparage the U.S.

As crude, backward, uncultured and uncouth, lacking any real intellectual or artistic life, and certainly Tocqueville shares those views to some.