His grandfather was guillotined in the Revolution, and his young parents awaited their turn from a prison cell as his fathers hair turned white overnight. Robespierre was finally removed, and they were pardoned, but not before many of their friends were dead.
So this was the house Tocqueville was raised in. He received the best of everything, and a great classical education. But he never knew his father not to nap between three and four in the afternoon. The executions had taken place every day at 3:30.
These were his motives to understand people and politics, and not to be wrong. That, and he loved France. He came to America to find why democracy worked here when it worked almost nowhere else. He spent nine months here and never returned. His books are written in French. For the French. He was Catholic, but saw that it was Anglo-Protestants who laid the egg of democracy and wealth.
But the reasons liberals must destroy Tocqueville are more legion. A few:
The American has nothing to forget, nor does he need to unlearn, as so many Europeans have to, the lessons of his early education.
If I am asked how we should account for the unusual prosperity and growing strength of this nation, I would reply that they must be attributed to the superiority of their women.
How can liberty be upheld in great matters amongst a multitude which has not learned to make use of it in small ones?
The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.
We Europeans have made some odd discoveries. According to some of us, a republic is not the reign of the majority as has been supposed up until now; it is the reign of the strenuous supporters of the majority. In governments of this type, it is not the people who are in control but those who know what is best for the people.
Equality is a slogan based on envy. Nobody is going to occupy a place higher than I.
To combat the evils of equality, there is but one effective remedy, namely political freedom.
Democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom, but for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, and invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.
Philosophic systems that destroy human individuality will have secret attractions for men who live in a democracy.
The man who asks anything of freedom other than itself is born to be a slave.
Every central government worships uniformity. Uniformity relieves it from an inquiry into an infinity of details.
In the United States, it was never intended for a man in a free country to do anything he liked; rather, social duties were imposed upon him more various than anywhere else.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in it’s powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends his arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious independence and entire political freedom and am drawn to the thought that if a man is without faith, he must serve someone and if he is free, he must believe.
If their system (atheist) could be of some use to man, it would be in giving him a modest opinion of himself. But they do not demonstrate such a truth and when they think they have done enough to prove they are brutish, they seem as proud as if they had demonstrated that they were gods.
Great men and great words are timeless. Tocqueville will be with us when his biographer Brogan will be long gone.
One more thing. He year he spent in America, he was 26.