Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a French aristocrat and magistrate who spent nine months touring the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, officially to report on its penitentiary system. He later sat in the Chamber of Deputies and served briefly as foreign minister of the Second Republic in 1849. His last major work, The Old Regime and the Revolution, turned the same comparative method on France's own past.