Alexis De Tocqueville Continuity And The French Revolution

This investigation will focus on the question of “How were the ideological foundations of the 1790s French monarchy challenged by political Enlightenment philosophers and writers?” The French monarchy was controlled by an authoritarian regime which created political and economic issues in its society of the 18th century. Montesquieu, John Locke, and Rousseau were political philosophers who successfully expressed their writings and ideas to the public who then were able to challenge the despotic influences that governed France. Due to the inclusion and close evaluation of these philosophers it was determined that Enlightenment and Utility: Bentham in French, Bentham in France by Emmanuelle De Champs and The Oxford History of the French Revolution by William Doyle are valuable sources to the investigation. Both sources state how these thinkers represented enlightenment in legal thought as well as the works of these writers and the influence these works had. This information should act as the focus of the investigation and aid in answering the question.

The French Revolution has been studied since its end in an attempt to determine and understand the causes of it and its duration. Different schools of history attempt to provide different explanations, such as Marxist schools examining whether the French Revolution amounted to a class struggle or the ‘maximalist’ school in which the cultural transformation of French society is examined, including attitudes about monarchy, privilege and religion. This essay will contend that fundamental divisions of attitudes towards privilege began the revolution, with disagreements about religion and the Catholic Church making the revolution longer in duration. Monarchy is linked to privilege as the King was part of the privileged Second Estate. Thus, the revolution as a

Another significant problem which Tocqueville analyzed in his “Democracy in America” is the weaknesses of democracy and the relations between equality and liberty, which is the issue of continuing relevance.

Beginning in 1789, the French Revolution was a time of rebellion, passion, betrayal, death, violence, and perseverance. Before 1789, King Louis XVI was taxing his poorest people heavily, whilst the rich were hardly taxed at all. The socioeconomic system in place at the time, known as the ancien regime, ruthlessly upheld the status quo. When the tension in France rose to a boiling point, fiery, young rebels to rose up against the Monarchy, the Ancien Regime, and the Clergy. These revolutionaries desperately wanted change, and they had three main principles around which their movement centered: Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. Liberty is the freedom to do as one pleases so long as one’s actions do not unjustifiably harm others. Equality is being considered the same. Fraternity is a sense of brotherhood and companionship. The goals of the French Revolution were initially achieved with alacrity, however they were abandoned with relative quickness as malcontented leaders quested for, and abused, power and authority.

Alexis de Tocqueville was born on July 29, 1805, in Paris, France. He was a historian, political scientist, and a politician, but he is best known as the author of Democracy in America. He began his political career as an apprentice magistrate, a role he was easily able to enter into due to his father’s role in French government. In the role of apprentice magistrate, Tocqueville witnessed the constitutional upheaval between the conservatives and liberals in France. With the inevitable decline of the aristocratic privilege on the horizon, he began to study the English political development. For Tocqueville, the July Revolution of 1830 and the resulting kingship of Louis Philippe of Orleans helped

Consequently, the Enlightenment ideals of reason, coupled with the value of a popular government and a set of unchallenged rights were the leading factors in the beginnings of the French Revolution. The French, whose lower-class citizens had been living in stark oppression from those in power, knew only too well how unjust an unchecked political system could become. This time period had become yet another prime illustration of the rich living a lush, comfortable life on the deprivation

1.) Alexis de Tocqueville viewed equality as the greatest political and social idea in his era. He was a French sociologist and political theorist who

During the 19th century, in the age after the French Revolution, the vast majority of political and philosophical thinkers concerned themselves at some point with the issue of tyranny in society. Such writers spanned from Alexis de Tocqueville, to John Stuart Mill, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The interpretations and approaches taken to the subject of tyranny and how to protect against it, though, were as varied as the collection of authors who addressed it. From de Tocqueville’s stringent observations in Democracy in America, the concept of a purely political tyranny is delineated. In contrast, Mill’s essay On Liberty focuses on a particular strain of despotic oppression that threatens the social wellbeing of citizens. Yet another

Tocqueville begins by stating his admiration for the equality he witnessed in America and the belief that Europe is approaching a similar equality. In America, he saw how everything (politically and socially) is either causes the equality or is a result of it. He then goes on to describe the changing situation in France- from patrilineal rule where the source of power was property to the Church's manner of governing where anyone could be a part of the clergy. With the importance of birth lowered, money became more important in determining status so people would seek power through personal property- with this came greater prosperity and enlightenment. Improvements, discoveries and arts all lead to greater equality because they moved forward-

Tocqueville in Democracy in America distinguishes between the tendency of man towards egoism and American self-interest, the structure of the democratic versus the aristocratic family, and the relationship between women and men to point to how individual liberties can complement equality of social conditions in a democracy. His revelations reflect on American values for freedom of expression of the individual and how venerating equality can encourage variety.

Alexis De Tocqueville's seminal text Democracy in America serves as a prime template of rigidly and explicitly examining the dawn of democratic intellectualism and policies of the United States in the early 19th century. What I will argue is that throughout his text, he is most interested in how the themes of freedom or liberty, and equality have evolved and been implemented in American society from political spheres to more common place social spheres on the level of the general population. Alexis De Tocqueville's main argument is how the United States have perhaps best applied a democratic society while avoiding aristocratic or monarchical frameworks, such as many European nations. De Tocqueville's examination and analysis of American society suggests that he is an advocate of how equality and freedom are handled, but also occasionally warns against possible flaws in the system that could revert into a more unbalanced society, economically and socially speaking. Despite these setbacks, De Tocqueville's optimism over equality and liberty in America prevail.

Tocqueville believed that conditions for liberty exists under different social states, both aristocratic and democratic. In an aristocracy, power is held only by the elite, and they govern in ways that benefit them. Under democratic despotism, freedom is equal to servitude to the state and results in people being equal in unfreedom. Essentially, people are equal in the fact that they are all indebted the same amount to the state. Democratic liberty, however, results in equality in freedom. Tocqueville could see the emerging democracy in Western society and believed this was the only true way to real human

Similarly, French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book Democracy in America, a commentary on American life in the early 19th Century, explains equality and its importance in American society. Tocqueville wrote, “as no one is different from his fellows… men will be perfectly free because they are all entirely equal” (Tocqueville 94). While there are a few flaws in Tocqueville’s statement, mainly that not all men were equal in the early 19th Century, as slavery was still legal and practiced, equality was, in some ways, achieved. Coming from a French aristocracy, the fact that all white, landowning men over the age of twenty one could vote, was equality. In an aristocracy, only the aristocrats—the elites— made the decisions that affected the entire nation, even though they represented the minority. When analyzing Tocqueville, looking at his view of

It is necessary to understand de Tocqueville's observation of equality in order to make the distinction of democracy and how freedom relates to it. According to de Tocqueville, democracy

The French Revolution of 1848 was a great disappointment to both Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville. To Marx, the revolution should have been a step along the way to socialism, with the bourgeoisie capitalists overthrowing the previous landed feudal society. In turn, the proletariat would arise and bring both the end of class antagonism and the beginning of the socialist state. To Tocqueville, the revolution was about the reduction in the power of the aristocracy as the lower classes were in ascendance. The resulting broadening of equality would give rise to democracy, with all its hopes and shortfalls. Yet the revolution ended not in socialism or democracy, but with a President who became an Emperor. Marx and Tocqueville may have had different ideas about how and why a society should conduct itself, but both found the outcome of the Revolution of 1848 a misstep on the path of social evolution.