Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French aristocrat, magistrate and politician whose family had barely survived the Revolution. In 1831 he spent nine months traveling through the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, officially to study American prisons, and the two volumes of Democracy in America that resulted, in 1835 and 1840, remain the most penetrating analysis of democratic society ever written by an outsider. He sat in the Chamber of Deputies, served briefly as foreign minister in 1849, and withdrew from public life after Louis Napoleon's coup to write The Old Regime and the Revolution, left unfinished at his death from tuberculosis.