Tocqueville, Alexis de

De la Démocratie en Amerique. Paris: Charles Gosselin, 1835, 1840

4 volumes, 8vo (8 1/4 x 5 1/4 in.; 210 x 134 mm). Handcolored folding lithographed map after Tocqueville by Benard, half-titles with those in first and third volumes bearing the author's inscription; first two volumes browned, two quires in vol. 4 lightly browned, some light marginal spotting. Contemporary dark-green half-calf, gilt; expert restoration to spines.

Acquisition: Ursus Rare Books

Clark 3:111(1); Howes T278; Sabin 96060, 96061

first two volumes browned, two quires in vol. 4 lightly browned, some light marginal spotting. Contemporary dark-green half-calf, gilt; expert restoration to spines.
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First edition of both parts, presentation copy, inscribed by the author  on the half-titles of volumes one and three: "À Eugène Stoffels un de mes plus anciens et meilleurs amis. J'espere qu'il considérera ce livre comme un nouveau témoignage d'une affection que ne diminuent point les années. AT" in volume one; and "À Eugène Stoffels, l'un des hommes que j'estime le plus et aime le mieux, Al deTocqueville" in volume three.

Eugène Stoffels was perhaps Tocqueville's closest friend.  At the age of fifteen Tocqueville joined his father, the Comte de Tocqueville, in the town of Metz when he met Stoffels.  Their friendship lasted throughout Tocqueville 's lifetime and ended only at Stoffel's death in 1852.  "More than a hundred letters from Eugène Stoffels are preserved in the de Tocqueville Archives" (André Jardin, Tocqueville A Biography, 1988, p.58).  Stoffels "was one of those intermediaries whom Alexis, in his anxious and mistrustful shyness, would always need.  In return de Tocqueville, in the midst of the agitation of his political career and his literary successes, would never forget the modest friend in Metz, whose letters always gave him great pleasure" (Ibid 59).  There is one extraordinary surviving letter from Tocqueville to Stoffels written in 1835 in which Tocqueville describes the underlying reasons for his trip to America.  "For almost ten years now I have been thinking some of the things I have set forth to you.  I went to America only to clarify my thoughts on these matters.  The penitentiary system was an excuse: I used it as a passport that would allow me to go everywhere in the United States … I didn't go there with the idea of writing a book at all, but the idea of the book came to me.  I said to myself that a man is under the same obligation to offer up his mind in the service of society as he is, in the time of war, his body" (Tocqueville, Oeuvres Complètes XIII, 1: 373-75).

One of the most penetrating political and social analyses of the United States ever written, De la démocratie en Amérique is based on Tocqueville's travels through America in 1831 and 1832 with Gustave Auguste de Beaumont. Charged by the French government to study the prison system of the United States, the two magistrates made a sweeping tour of the west and south after completing their penal studies in the east, visiting Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington, D.C.