Alexis de Tocqueville : A Life

by Hugh Brogan

• ISBN13: 9780300136258
• ISBN10: 0300136250
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2008-04-01
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the greatest political thinkers of all time. Born a French aristocrat, he lost nearly his entire family in the Reign of Terror, and he spent most of his adult life struggling for liberty under the unsuccessful regimes of nineteenth-century France. At age twenty-five he travelled to America and encountered democracy for the first time. This firsthand experience contributed to his incisive writing on liberty and democracy. Theancien regimelaunched the scholarly study of the French Revolution, andDemocracy in Americaremains the best book ever written by a European about the United States. This is a brilliant account of his life.

Author Biography

Hugh Brogan held the R. A. Butler Chair in History at the University of Essex and since retiring has had a research professorship there. His books include The Penguin History of the United States and biographies of John F. Kennedy and Arthur Ransome.

Table of Contents

Maps	p. ix
Young Tocqueville
Noblesse	p. 1
Royalists	p. 19
A Sentimental Education	p. 37
First Flight	p. 63
Pupillage	p. 76
July	p. 102
Upheaval	p. 128
A Voyage Out	p. 148
A Republic Observed	p. 179
Writing Prisons	p. 214
Between Books	p. 235
Writing America	p. 253
Fame	p. 283
Into Politics	p. 312
Writing Democracy	p. 340
Deputy	p. 375
February	p. 407
June	p. 430
Retrospection	p. 465
December	p. 502
Writing History	p. 525
Writing Revolution	p. 556
Retreating	p. 585
Cannes	p. 619
Epilogue	p. 640
Notes	p. 645
Bibliography
Abbreviations	p. 686
Primary sources	p. 686
Other printed works	p. 688
List of illustrations	p. 692
Acknowledgements	p. 693
Index	p. 697
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