At the end of my previous post, I mentioned that I had just finished reading Travels with Tocqueville by Jeremy Jennings. Before I had read Professor Jennings’s intellectual biography of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), I did not know much about the life or work of this 19th-century French aristocrat beyond his great treatise Democracy in America, which is available here via Project Gutenberg. I knew about this book in particular because I had attended many political philosophy and constitutional law lectures in college and law school, and many of my professors would show off their erudition by quoting often from Democracy in America. (In fact, de Tocqueville’s classic work is to this day still considered to be one of the best-ever books written on democracy, if not the best-ever written on North America.)

But what I did not know is that the United States was not the only place de Tocqueville visited or wrote about. He also visited many other places for prolonged periods of time, including Algeria (twice), England (twice), Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Switzerland, and during each of these extended visits de Tocqueville kept extensive notes of the people he met and the things he learned. I also did not know that de Tocqueville did not travel alone when he visited the United States. He was accompanied by his best friend and trusted companion Gustave de Beaumont, who is deserving of his own biography. (Among other things, Beaumont wrote a fascinating romance novel about a forbidden love affair between an idealistic young Frenchman and an apparently white American woman with African ancestry: Marie, or Slavery in the United States, which is available here (in French).)

So, how can I describe in just a few words all the things I learned from Jennings’s beautiful biography about de Tocqueville’s short life and his various voyages? One of the things I loved the most about de Tocqueville was the meticulous research he would undertake before embarking on a journey, especially his willingness to learn the language of the countries he was about to visit, but I will sum up my admiration of this remarkable French nomad by sharing my favorite de Tocqueville quote, which appears on page 234 of Travels with Tocqueville: “It is a mistake to suppose that events stay in the memory simply because of their importance or greatness: it is more often the little things that make a deep impression on the mind and stay in memory.”