Biographical Dictionary

Note: Five people who appear in Recollections could not be identified: an M. Beaufort, owner and printer of an opposition newspaper; a General Bourrely, a Colonel Parson, a Captain Paulin, and a soldier by the name of Trainel. Tocqueville mentions them only in appendix 3.

ABDUL-MEDJID (1823–1861) became sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the tender age of sixteen, immediately following a humiliating defeat of the empire at the hands of Egypt. He was erudite, engaged, and an admirer of French culture. In his short life Abdul-Medjid instituted significant reforms to modernize his empire, aided by progressive ministers such as the grand vizier Reshid Pasha. In 1842 he reorganized the army and introduced conscription; next he abolished the Turkish slave markets, circulated paper money, and established new civil and criminal codes based on the French models. Many of his efforts were designed to integrate Christians and ethnic minorities with the Turkish Muslim majority in the hope of fashioning a more durable Ottoman state. When Tocqueville was minister of foreign affairs for France, Abdul-Medjid won his admiration by refusing to give up revolutionary refugees from Hungary and Poland to the autocratic governments of Austria and Russia, which surely would have executed them.

RHEINHOLD OSCAR, BARON D’ ADELSWARD (1811–1898), an army officer seriously wounded in Africa, ran in 1848 for a seat in the Constituent Assembly on a republican platform, but once elected, he sat and voted with the conservatives. He admired General Cavaignac and was one of the first to suggest him as chief of the executive in 1848. Adelsward supported the expedition to Rome, and after popular protests against the expedition in June 1849, he proposed a directive that constrained the National Assembly and the minister of foreign affairs—Alexis de Tocqueville—to pursue the interventionist policies initiated by the Constituent Assembly.

JEAN-JACQUES AMPÈRE (1800–1864) was the son of the Lyonnais doctor and mathematician André-Marie Ampère, for whom the unit of electric current known as an ampere is named. Jean-Jacques himself was an Academician, a romantic poet, and professor of linguistic and literary history at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. He wrote an important history of Rome and toured Greece, Mexico, and the United States in the company of Prosper Mérimée, the famous author and historic preservationist. When in Paris, Ampère liked to frequent literary salons such as the one hosted by Juliette Récamier, with whom he was infatuated. When Tocqueville published his first volume of Democracy in America in 1835, the romantic writer Chateaubriand (who was the brother of Tocqueville’s guillotined uncle) took him to Mme Récamier’s salon, where he met Ampère. They became lifelong friends and correspondents.

ALEXANDRE-PHILIPPE ANDRYANE (1797–1863) was a disciple of the Italian Carbonaro Philippe Buonarroti and with him tried to incite the Italians to revolt against their Austrian oppressors. He was captured and sentenced to death, but Emperor Francis of Austria commuted his sentence to imprisonment in the Spielberg, a Moravian fortress. Andryane was released in 1832 and wrote a memoir of his experience similar to that of the revolutionary playwright Silvio Pellico, who had languished in the Spielberg dungeons for eight years. Lamartine designated Andryane undersecretary of the minister of the interior in the provisional government, but Ledru-Rollin—in charge of that ministry—quickly had him sacked. Andryane later served in Napoleon III’s army.

ÉTIENNE ARAGO (1802–1892), like his older brother the renowned scientist and astronomer François Arago, was a Montagnard. When the July revolution broke out, he was working as the director of a theater and sent his troupe—equipped with the arms they usually used as props—onto the barricades. After the February 1848 revolution, François joined the provisional government, while Étienne accepted the directorship of the postal service. Following the election of Louis-Napoléon as president, the younger Arago won election to the Constituent Assembly and used his seat to denounce the new executive’s every move. When Louis-Napoléon’s increasing power made France too dangerous for him, Arago fled to Belgium and on to England, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. He returned to France in 1859 and briefly reentered politics in 1870 as the mayor of Paris.

FRANÇOIS-NOËL BABEUF (1760–1797), known as Gracchus, was a radical whose early communist doctrine, babouvisme, influenced Karl Marx. He began his career as a law expert responsible for overseeing peasants’ payments to their noble landlords. Disgusted with the injustices of the feudal system, Babeuf founded a left-wing journal and began calling himself Gracchus after the Roman statesman murdered by the Senate in the second century BC for trying to transfer wealthy landowners’ property to the poor. Babeuf argued for the common ownership of property, state-organized labor, and equality of wages. Along with Philippe Buonarroti, Augustin Darthé, and others, Babeuf schemed to overthrow the five directors then governing France to institute a temporary dictatorship in the name of the people. This plan cost him his head in 1797. Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals,” published in 1828, gave an enormously influential account of the events and motivations of the French Revolution.

ARMAND BARBÈS (1809–1870) colluded with Louis-Auguste Blanqui against the July Monarchy. Their plotting culminated in the insurrection of May 12, 1839, for which both he and Blanqui were arrested and imprisoned at Mont Saint-Michel. King Louis-Philippe commuted Barbès’s death sentence to life in prison at the intercession of Alphonse de Lamartine and Victor Hugo. The revolution of 1848 intervened to set Barbès free, allowing him to resume his conspiratorial activities. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly, where he sat with the extreme left. But his parliamentary career was short-lived; leading a march on the Hôtel de Ville after the invasion of the Assembly on May 15, 1848, he was again arrested and imprisoned for life. Napoleon III pardoned him in 1854. Barbès chose to live out the rest of his years in the Netherlands, dying weeks before the fall of the Second Empire.

JULES BAROCHE (1802–1870) was an accomplished lawyer elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1847, where he joined his friend Odilon Barrot in the ranks of the center left. After the revolution, Baroche argued that executive powers should be reserved to the president alone rather than extended to the Constituent Assembly. Little surprise, then, that Baroche was a favorite with Louis-Napoléon. The prince-president appointed him chief prosecutor of the Paris Court of Appeals in 1849. As first vice president of the National Assembly in 1849 and minister of the interior in 1850, Baroche worked to consolidate the presidential power. He was president of Napoleon III’s Council of State in 1852 and senator from 1864 until his death.

PAUL-FRANÇOIS-JEAN-NICOLAS, VICOMTE DE BARRAS (1755–1829), was a member of the Convention, which was France’s legislative assembly from September 1792 to October 1795, and sent King Louis XVI to the scaffold. He was also the most powerful of the five directors who ruled the country beginning in 1795, until his popularity was eclipsed by that of his former ally, the young general Bonaparte. By comparing Armand Marrast to Barras, Tocqueville alludes to the director’s decadent lifestyle, which made Barras a symbol of governmental corruption and helped speed his downfall.

FERDINAND BARROT (1806–1883) followed in his brother Odilon’s footsteps as a lawyer and politician. He was elected to the Chamber in 1842 as a member of the center left, devoting himself chiefly to Algerian affairs. After the election of Louis-Napoléon as president in 1848, Ferdinand Barrot became his general secretary, then rose to minister of the interior for a few months in 1849 and 1850.

ODILON BARROT (1791–1873) was a lawyer who entered politics in 1815 to protest against the Bourbon Restoration. He was a lifelong constitutional monarchist but became leader of the dynastic opposition by resisting Guizot’s repressive measures. He inadvertently contributed to the fall of the constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe by helping to organize the banquet campaign of 1846–48, which united representatives of all the opposition parties (center left, dynastic left, and republican) in a push for expanded suffrage and parliamentary reform. Like Tocqueville, Barrot advocated bicameralism for the new constitution. In December 1848 Louis-Napoléon named Barrot prime minister, only to dismiss him a year later. Tocqueville was minister of foreign affairs in the second Barrot cabinet.

JULES BASTIDE (1800–1879) belonged to the small number of Catholic republican politicians who were contemporary with Alexis de Tocqueville. He took over Le National from Armand Carrel in 1836 but clashed with his secular colleagues and abandoned them in 1847 to coedit La Revue Nationale with the Saint-Simonian Joseph Buchez. Bastide won election to the Constituent Assembly in 1848. Armand Marrast, then president of the Assembly and no fan of Bastide, reportedly said that since Bastide was an étranger aux affaires (stranger to business), he was well suited to manage the country’s affaires étrangères (foreign affairs). Bastide accordingly served as minister of foreign affairs in the provisional government until Drouyn de Lhuys replaced him at the end of 1848.

CLÉMENTINE DE BEAUMONT (1809–1886), a granddaughter of the marquis de Lafayette, married Tocqueville’s best friend, Gustave de Beaumont, in 1836. One of her cousins married Charles de Rémusat, and another married Francisque de Corcelle. Clémentine completed her husband’s effort to publish Tocqueville’s oeuvre after both men had died.

GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT (1802–1866) met Tocqueville when they were both young lawyers at the Tribunal of Versailles, and they became best friends. Together they petitioned to visit the United States, ostensibly to produce a report of its prison system but also to determine whether its democratic institutions and society might offer any lessons for their own unstable government. While Tocqueville wrote his now famous Democracy in America based on their voyage, Beaumont chose to focus on American slavery in a novel called Marie, or Slavery in the United States. Like Tocqueville, Beaumont believed in a moderate republic and sat with the center left in the Chamber of Deputies and the Constituent Assembly. He was a member of the constitutional commission, but his travels as France’s representative to London and Vienna prevented him from making many contributions. Beaumont retired from political life after Louis-Napoléon’s coup, helped manage the release of Tocqueville’s final book, The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, and ministered to his dying friend.

MARIE-ALPHONSE BEDEAU (1804–1863) was a general with long service in Algeria, even briefly presiding as governor-general there in 1847. He happened to be in Paris in February 1848 and led a column of soldiers against the revolutionaries. Lamartine, then head of the provisional government, insisted that Bedeau take command of the Army of Paris. The general reluctantly accepted on the condition that the government pledge not to indict any army officers for political reasons. In April he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, where he consistently voted with the far right. On May 15, 1848, Bedeau failed to adequately protect the invaded Assembly. But during the June Days he faithfully defended the Hôtel de Ville despite a bullet to the thigh. When Bedeau recovered, he returned to the Assembly and became its vice president. Louis-Napoléon had Bedeau arrested along with most of his fellow legislators on the occasion of the 1851 coup; after brief imprisonment, the general took refuge in Belgium until he received amnesty in 1859.

JOSEPH BEM (1795–1850) was a Polish general who led a small army to heroic victories against the Austrians in the Hungarian revolution of 1848–49. The invading Russians finally crushed Bem’s army, however, and Bem escaped to Turkey only after faking his own death. There, he converted to Islam and became the governor of Aleppo under the name Murad Pasha.

PIERRE-ANTOINE BERRYER (1790–1868), like his father, was a formidable legitimist lawyer. The two worked together to defend Michel Ney, a Napoleonic marshal accused of playing a treasonous role during the Hundred Days and ultimately executed for it. Berryer also represented the abbé Lamennais, accused of seditious writings related to religious liberty in 1826, and Louis-Napoléon, after his attempted coup in 1840. Berryer sat in the Chamber of Deputies beginning in 1830, in the Constituent Assembly after the revolution, and in the National Assembly. Arrested at the time of the coup, he busied himself with his law practice until his admission to the emperor’s Legislative Assembly in 1863.

ADOLPHE-AUGUSTIN-MARIE BILLAULT (1805–1863) was a lawyer and, beginning in 1837, a member of the Chamber of Deputies. Though he refused to take part in the banquet campaign and sat with the right after the revolution of 1848, he was no conservative ideologue. For instance, he aligned himself with the Montagnards by regarding the right to work as a basic safety net owed to the people. Billault later became one of Napoleon III’s most valuable agents, serving as minister of the interior in 1854.

JACQUES-ALEXANDRE BIXIO (1808–1865), though a qualified doctor, never practiced his profession. Instead, he contributed to scientific almanacs, dabbled in the secret operations of the Charbonnerie, and associated himself with several leftist journals. Bixio served two terms as a moderate republican deputy in 1848 and 1849. He was shot in the chest during the June Days after taking command of the troops of General Bedeau, similarly incapacitated by a bullet to the thigh. But Tocqueville was mistaken in describing Bixio’s wounds as fatal. He survived and became minister of agriculture and commerce in Louis-Napoléon’s first cabinet, though his appointment lasted a mere eight days.

LOUIS BLANC (1811–1882) was one of the leading socialist thinkers of nineteenth-century France. As an impoverished young man, he rejected the royalist sentiments of his family and acquired a brilliant reputation as a left-wing journalist. He wrote so well that the newspaper Le National published a series of his articles verbatim, even though his views were much more radical than those of its founder, Adolphe Thiers. In 1839 Blanc wrote The Organization of Labor to expound his theories on communal property and worker cooperatives. Refusing election to the Chamber of Deputies, Blanc instead participated in the banquet campaign. Enormous popular support propelled him to a seat in the provisional government following the 1848 revolution, and he managed to create the Luxembourg Commission to enact some of his ideas on labor reform, including the National Workshops. However, Blanc’s conservative colleagues feared any infringement on the traditional right to property, so they chose Marie, the minister of public works, to organize the workshops. Offering two francs per day, they quickly attracted more than one hundred thousand enlistees. The government was unable to use or pay all of these workers, so in June it made moves to dissolve the workshops—helping to spark the June Days. Meanwhile, Blanc was accused of having fomented the May 1848 attack on the Constituent Assembly. Though innocent, he was forced in August 1848 to flee to England, where he developed a friendship with the philosopher John Stuart Mill and completed an epic history of the French Revolution.

ADOLPHE BLANQUI (1798–1854), the conspirator Louis-Auguste Blanqui’s older brother, was a left-leaning economist. In 1833, he succeeded Jean-Baptiste Say to the chair in political economy at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. His reputation grew with the publication of Histoire de l’Économie Politique en Europe in 1837, which earned him a seat the following year at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Here he found intellectual affinities with Tocqueville, also newly elected. In 1846, he joined Tocqueville in the Chamber of Deputies. Blanqui advocated free trade and a more equal distribution of wealth. In 1848, the Academy charged him with visiting France’s major manufacturing regions to assess the condition of the working classes at the very time Tocqueville was challenging socialists in the National Assembly.

LOUIS-AUGUSTE BLANQUI (1805–1881) was a revolutionary socialist and conspirator who spent thirty-three years in French, Corsican, and African prisons. He joined the French Carbonari as a nineteen-year-old and fought against the regime in 1830. Along with Barbès, he was thrown into the dungeons of Mont Saint-Michel for a failed attempt to replace the July Monarchy with a socialist republic (May 12, 1839), but he was freed for health reasons in 1844. He was one of the architects of the May 15, 1848, attack on the Assembly, for which he served a ten-year sentence. Free once more, Blanqui—now known as “the martyr”—rose to even greater status in revolutionary milieus. Victor Hugo describes him in his memoirs from the years 1848–51 as an enigmatic figure clothed in rags, already old at age forty, quietly demanding Lamartine’s head. In 1871 the martyr again attempted a coup on the legislature and was this time imprisoned until 1879. He spent the remainder of his years editing the newspaper Ni Dieu Ni Maître.

LORD JOHN ARTHUR DOUGLAS BLOOMFIELD (1802–1879) was the British envoy to St. Petersburg beginning in 1844. He assumed the post of ambassador to Berlin in 1851.

PIERRE-MARTINIEN TOUZÉ BOCAGE (1797–1863), known as Bocage, was a Parisian actor who directed the Odéon Theater from 1845 to 1848. According to Le Moniteur Universel, Bocage contributed to the theatrical flavor of the revolution of 1848 by shouting, “To the Hôtel de Ville!” on February 24, prompting Lamartine to leave the Chamber for the City Hall in order to declare the provisional government.

ERNEST SAIN DE BOISLECOMTE (B. 1799) was a diplomat called on by Lamartine to serve as envoy to Naples and Turin in 1848 and to the United States in 1850. He drew a comparison between American and Old World tensions in his 1862 book, Of the American Crisis and That of European Nations.

LOUIS-NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE. See NAPOLEON III

MICHEL DE BOURGES. See LOUIS-CHRYSOSTOME MICHEL

ARMAND-FRANÇOIS, COMTE DE BRICQUEVILLE (1785–1844), was a cavalry colonel of the First Empire and a fierce enemy of the Bourbon kings. Like Tocqueville, he came from noble Norman stock and represented La Manche in the Chamber of Deputies. Indeed, he was related to the Tocquevilles as brother-in-law to Alexis’s brother Hippolyte. Bricqueville never fully recovered from the wounds he suffered at Waterloo and died shortly after being carried to the Chamber to demand the stately burial of his fellow Bonapartist the marshal Bertrand.

VICTOR, DUC DE BROGLIE (1785–1870), was the scion of an aristocratic family with a long history of public office. The elder duc de Broglie was guillotined when his son was only nine years old, but Victor escaped to Switzerland with his mother and three sisters. When the Terror subsided, the young de Broglie returned to France and in 1815 married Albertine de Staël, daughter of the famous author. De Broglie felt that a constitutional monarchy was the best form of government for France. He thus heartily welcomed the reign of Louis-Philippe, twice presiding over his Council of State and serving him as minister of education and then minister of foreign affairs. The revolution of 1848 struck him as a turn in the wrong direction, and he retreated to private life, with the exception of one 1849 term in the National Assembly, which he used to help Thiers and Barrot fight against, respectively, the socialists and the ultramonarchists.

PHILIPPE-JOSEPH-BENJAMIN BUCHEZ (1796–1865) was trained as a doctor, but his great interest in social reform led him to circulate among the Freemasons, the French Carbonari, and finally the Saint-Simonians. In 1830 he had a religious epiphany and became a devout Catholic. He wanted to reconcile his new religion with Saint-Simon’s vision of an egalitarian society based on scientific industry. Together with Prosper Charles Roux, he wrote the enormous Parliamentary History of the French Revolution to show that Christianity was the foundation of modern democratic ideas. Buchez ran for the Constituent Assembly and was elected its president in 1848. Unfortunately, his response to the May 15 storming of the Assembly outraged both members of the extreme left, who thought he had sprung a trap for them, and members of the right, who felt that he had not taken adequate precautions. Buchez did not win reelection and disappeared from politics.

LOUIS-JOSEPH BUFFET (1818–1898) was a conservative deputy who succeeded Jacques-Alexandre Bixio as minister of agriculture and commerce in 1848, only months after entering politics. His career was interrupted by Louis-Napoléon’s coup and would not recommence until the emperor relaxed his authoritarian grip on the government in 1863. Buffet rose to eminence as minister of finance in 1870, president of the National Assembly in 1872, and, after six reelections to that post, headed the government as minister of the interior.

THOMAS-ROBERT BUGEAUD, MARQUIS DE LA PICONNERIE (1784–849), joined the army under Napoleon I, fought for him in Poland and Spain, then retreated to his family’s estate in Périgord when the empire fell. King Louis-Philippe called Bugeaud out of his early retirement and charged him with the protection of the duchesse de Berry during her incarceration. In her name Bugeaud dueled with and killed the deputy François-Charles Dulong, who had publicly exposed him as a mere prison guard. He was elected a legislative deputy in 1831 and remained one for the rest of his life, despite constant criticism in the press and although Prime Minister Molé stationed him in North Africa beginning in 1836. If Bugeaud’s legislative career was undistinguished, his military one was both remarkable and brutal. He helped capture the Algerian emir Abd el-Kader and rout the Moroccans at the battle of Isly. He oversaw Algeria as governor-general from 1840 to 1847, returning to Paris in time to fight the revolutionaries. He died of cholera a year later.

ÉTIENNE CABET (1788–1856) was one of the most radically left-wing deputies of the July Monarchy. Accused of treason, he was obliged to flee in 1834 to England, where he came under the influence of the utopian socialist Robert Owen. Cabet embedded his doctrine of equitable distribution of work and rewards in a novel, Voyage to Icaria (1839), which became a bestseller among the Parisian working classes and allowed him to found an Icarian socialist commune in the United States. The commune saw various incarnations in Texas, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and California before dying out in the 1870s.

HIPPOLYTE CARNOT (1801–1888) was the son of Lazare Carnot, the great engineer of the French Revolutionary Army; his brother was Sadi Carnot, the father of thermodynamics. Hippolyte was a devotee of Saint-Simon and a republican deputy. As minister of education in the provisional government, he worked to make education free, mandatory, secular, and open to girls as well as boys. He was accused of inserting socialist principles into his school manuals, however, and was forced to withdraw from the cabinet in July 1848. Carnot sat in every incarnation of the Legislative Assembly from 1839 until his death. He lived long enough to see his son Sadi elected the fourth president of the Third Republic in 1887.

VICTOR-BONIFACE, COMTE DE CASTELLANE (1788–1862), was named governor of Lyon and marshal of France in 1852. Previously, he had fought for Napoleon I across Europe and in Russia. He served the Bourbon and Orleanist monarchies in Spain, Algeria, and the Pyrenees. Retiring in 1848, he remained inactive only until Louis-Napoléon called him back to the military the following year.

LOUIS-MARC CAUSSIDIÈRE (1808–1861) was a factory worker in Saint-Étienne who made his political debut by joining in the 1834 Canut revolts in Lyon. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison but had served only three when Prime Minister Molé pardoned him. Caussidière subsequently became a traveling wine and liquor salesman, a profession that accorded nicely with his second job, recruiting subscribers for the left-wing newspaper La Réforme. In 1848 the enterprising revolutionary fought on the Paris barricades and succeeded in seizing the police headquarters. Ledru-Rollin persuaded the provisional government to retain Caussidière as prefect of the police, but he lost this post, as well as his newly acquired seat in the Constituent Assembly, when he involved himself in the May 15 and June insurrections. Caussidière fled to England and reportedly established a successful business selling wine to the British aristocracy.

LOUIS-EUGÈNE CAVAIGNAC (1802–1857) was the son of Jean-Baptiste Cavaignac, a provincial commissioner censured but never held accountable for his cruel imposition of revolutionary law in the Basque Country. The young Cavaignac joined the army under the July Monarchy and was sent to Algeria, where his leadership in the brutal razzias ordered by Bugeaud led to his appointment as governor-general. Returning to Paris in 1848, Cavaignac was made minister of war and led a repression of the Paris workers so ruthless that it earned him the epithet “Butcher of June.” The Constituent Assembly reacted to the unrest by declaring a state of siege, dissolving the provisional government, and replacing it with Cavaignac as chief executive on June 28. The general lost the presidency to Louis-Napoléon in the popular election that December. When Louis-Napoléon declared himself emperor in 1852, Cavaignac refused to swear allegiance to him and was thereafter denied a seat in the legislature.

ERNEST DE CHABROL-CHAMÉANE (1803–1889) had known Tocqueville from childhood but became his roommate and friend when they were both apprentice magistrates at Versailles. Chabrol took Gustave de Beaumont’s place as deputy public prosecutor, then went on to become a lawyer for the cour royale of Paris and the author of the Dictionary of Common Legislation. He received some of the most perceptive letters that Tocqueville wrote during his American travels.

HENRI D’ARTOIS, COMTE DE CHAMBORD (1820–1883), was the last descendant of the elder Bourbon line, and after 1844 the legitimist heir to the throne under the name Henri V. Exiled in Hradschin, Austria, from the age of nine, the count was nourished on romantic myths of his divine right. He had no sense of modern French politics and ignored Tocqueville’s 1852 letter encouraging him to embrace a representative assembly and a free press. Tocqueville wrote the letter in the vain hope that the count could be a viable opponent to Louis-Napoléon, who was then angling to crown himself emperor. The comte de Chambord’s outdated ideas also made him miss a second political opening when Napoleon III fell in 1870. Refusing to abandon the ancestral white banner of the Bourbons, the count lost the support of the legitimists and all prospect of a third restoration.

FRANÇOIS PALASNE DE CHAMPEAUX (1797–1850) was a confidant and private secretary to Alphonse de Lamartine beginning in 1838. In 1850 he traveled with the poet to Constantinople but fell ill and died as their ship was docking in Malta.

NICOLAS-ANNE-THÉODULE CHANGARNIER (1793–1877) was a legitimist general who began his military career as a bodyguard to Louis XVIII and gained distinction for his service in North Africa. He replaced General Cavaignac as governor-general of Algeria in 1848 but was called back to France after only a few weeks to represent the Seine département in the Constituent Assembly. Cavaignac gave him command of both the National Guard and the Army of Paris, and despite his monarchist sentiments, Changarnier vowed to protect the Second Republic. He successfully defended the republic against the insurrection of June 13, 1849, but was relieved of his command in January 1851 after leading the Assembly to deny the president some of his expenses. Changarnier opposed Louis-Napoléon’s coup in December and was exiled to Belgium. Granted amnesty in 1859, the general returned to France and was an active member of the conservative party in the Assembly from 1871 until he died of a stroke.

CHARLES ALBERT (1798–1849) ruled Piedmont-Sardinia from 1831 until his defeat at the hands of the Imperial Austrian Army in 1849. During his reign, he crushed Mazzini’s 1833 conspiracy but agreed to a constitutional monarchy and established the Satuto Albertino, which took its cue from the constitution King Louis-Philippe promulgated in France. After losing his war on Austria at the 1849 battle of Novara, Charles Albert gave his throne to his son, Victor Emmanuel.

CHARLES I (1600–1649) succeeded his father, King James VI, to rule England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1625 until he was beheaded for using the authority of the Crown in his own interest—or more specifically, for refusing to grant the ever greater constitutional powers demanded by Parliament.

CHARLES X (1757–1836) was born Charles Philippe, comte d’Artois. Despite his devout Catholicism, the young count was a hedonist who racked up enormous gambling debts. When Napoleon I surrendered and Charles’s moderate brother Louis XVIII regained the throne, Charles joined the ultraconservatives in opposing him. Louis XVIII succumbed to gout and gangrene in 1824, leaving the crown to Charles. The new King Charles X immediately set about weakening the constitutional charter to which his brother had adhered, granting power to the clergy and favors to the aristocrats. Popular discontent reached a fever pitch in 1830, when the king emitted four ordinances suppressing the freedom of the press and restricting electoral eligibility. Adolphe Thiers called for revolt in Le National and was heeded by the Parisian workers. Charles X fled to England and abdicated in favor of his grandson, but the Chamber of Deputies instead gave the throne to Louis-Philippe of the Orléans family.

PHILIPPE-AMABLE ARTHUIS DE CHARNISAY (1798–1890) was the mayor of Charnisay (now Charnizay), located in the Indre-et-Loire département, and a deputy public prosecutor for the Court of Appeals at Orléans before becoming subprefect of Cherbourg in 1849, serving until 1851.

JEAN-BAPTISTE-ADOLPHE CHARRAS (1810–1865) was a colonel who had fought in Africa with General Lamoricière. As a moderate republican, he welcomed the revolution of 1848 and successfully sought a seat in the new Constituent Assembly. He despised Louis-Napoléon and tried to forestall the coup with a measure to guarantee armed defense for the Assembly. The motion failed, partly because of Michel de Bourges’s assurances that a coup was unlikely. When the coup indeed occurred, Charras was exiled to Belgium and then Switzerland, where—to the relief of Napoleon III—he died.

CHARLES-LOUIS CHASSIN (1831–1901) was a republican historian who as a young man studying law in Paris protested the sanctions suspending Professor Jules Michelet’s lecture course. As a result, Chassin was charged with plotting against the state and incarcerated. The charges were later dropped, and Chassin went on to write a number of historical works.

FRANÇOIS-RENÉ, VICOMTE DE CHATEAUBRIAND (1768–1848), was a writer whose melancholic style ushered in the French romantic movement. His older brother, Jean-Baptiste Chateaubriand, married the sister of Louise-Madeleine de Tocqueville, Alexis’s mother. He became a regular guest of the Tocqueville family after Jean-Baptiste and his wife were guillotined and their two orphaned sons—François-René’s nephews—were placed in the Tocquevilles’ care. Chateaubriand’s father was a sea merchant who made his money in the slave trade, and young François spent his summers running wild with his sister in the half-ruined Château de Combourg. In 1791 he made a six-month visit to the United States to avoid the French Revolution. His travels among the Native Americans inspired Atala, a tragic novel that would later color Tocqueville’s own expectations for America. Returning to France from England in 1800, Chateaubriand began to write poignantly on the power of Christianity to shape culture and morals. His Genius of Christianity (1802) earned him a diplomatic office under Napoleon I, but he soon quit, disgusted with the emperor’s wanton execution of his political enemies. Under the Bourbon monarchy, Chateaubriand reentered diplomacy, serving as ambassador to Berlin, London, and Rome, as well as minister of foreign affairs from 1822 to 1824. He saw constitutional monarchy as an unworkable amalgam of authoritarian and democratic institutions and withdrew from politics after the July revolution. Unhappily married, Chateaubriand carried on a long liaison with Juliette Récamier, whom he cared for even when she became blind. He died in the turmoil of the Second Republic, leaving behind Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, a romanticized autobiography.

PAUL-EMILE CLAMORGAM (also CLAMORGAN) (1796–1876), a liberal lawyer who belonged to an old bourgeois family, was Alexis de Tocqueville’s electoral agent in Valognes, Normandy. He was an adroit campaign manager and kept his deputy abreast of the provincial news and shifting views of his constituency. The local press exerted considerable influence on voting behavior in nineteenth-century France, so Clamorgam also acted as Tocqueville’s public-relations officer, editing his speeches and disseminating them to the papers. The two men were good friends, and despite his views on political cronyism, Tocqueville rewarded Clamorgam by securing him the post of tax collector in Valognes. The only blemish to their friendship came in 1848, when Clamorgam strongly favored Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte for president, while Tocqueville stood by General Cavaignac. Tocqueville mistakenly concluded that his electoral agent had deserted him, but realizing his error, he made up with Clamorgam via an apologetic letter.

MATHIEU-LOUIS-DÉSIRÉ COMBAREL DE LEYVAL (1808–1869) was a deputy of the center left beginning in 1839 and won reelection to the Constituent Assembly. His conservatism and his support for Louis-Napoléon helped him retain a place in the president’s Legislative Assembly as well. However, Combarel’s campaign for the Legislative Corps in 1852 was sabotaged by the government, which had chosen Francisque-Rudel Dumiral as its official candidate.

VICTOR CONSIDERANT (1808–1893) was educated as a civil engineer but abandoned his profession to become the leading disciple of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. He wrote a manifesto called Social Destiny and established the journal La Démocratie Pacifique to advocate a complete reorganization of industry and property rights. Elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 and a member of the constitutional commission, Considerant clashed with Tocqueville and the conservative majority over the “right to work,” which he felt should be granted in the new constitution. After the June 13, 1849, demonstration, Considerant took refuge in Belgium and then sailed to Texas, where he founded a socialist commune in 1855. The commune crumbled within two years, and Considerant retreated to a private farm in San Antonio. Though he eventually returned to France, he was by then too disillusioned to reenter politics.

ATHANASE COQUEREL (1795–1868) was a Protestant pastor elected to the Constituent and National Assemblies during the short four years spanned by the Second Republic. He sat with the center and supported General Cavaignac.

CLAUDE-ANTHIME CORBON (1808–1891) was the son of laborers in the Haute-Marne département of France. He worked in a weaving factory until he moved to Paris to compose pages in a printing shop and learn the trade of woodcarving. In 1848 he and two friends founded the paper L’Atelier, which advocated the reconciliation of democracy and Catholicism. The renown that this journal brought Corbon propelled him to the Constituent Assembly, where he sat with the moderates, fought the abrupt dissolution of the National Workshops, and advocated labor protections.

CLAUDE-FRANÇOIS-PHILIBERT TIRCUY DE CORCELLE (also CORCELLES) (1802–1892), known as Francisque de Corcelle, maintained a close though sometimes turbulent friendship with Tocqueville beginning in 1835, when he wrote a review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America for the Revue des Deux Mondes. In his youth, Corcelle was a French Carbonaro and also followed Lafayette in opposing the Bourbon Restoration. He moderated his views as he aged and secured election to the Chamber of Deputies the same year that Tocqueville did, in 1839. Tocqueville and Corcelle were never in closer contact, or more at odds with each other, than during the Rome affair in 1849 after Louis-Napoléon sent French troops to restore the papacy. As minister of foreign affairs, Tocqueville was sympathetic to the reforms the Roman republican movement led by Giuseppe Mazzini had attempted to promote. He instructed Corcelle, whom he had named as France’s official envoy to Italy, to encourage Pope Pius IX to make democratic reforms. However, Corcelle’s devout Catholicism made him reluctant to confront the pope, who made few concessions. Corcelle and Tocqueville remained friends until the latter died in 1859.

LOUIS-MARIE DE LAHAYE, VICOMTE DE CORMENIN (1788–1868), opposed the July Monarchy as a deputy and as the author of several eloquent prorepublican pamphlets. The Second Republic established, he presided as vice president of the Constituent Assembly and president of the constitutional commission. Cormenin voted with the left against the prosecution of Louis Blanc and for the abolition of the death penalty but rallied to Louis-Napoléon when the prince-president declared himself emperor. He is remembered as a father of French administrative law and a benefactor of aging women, beggars, and factory workers.

JULES CHARLES CONWAY DE COTTE (1807–1859) was an officer called to lead a brigade of the Army of Paris in order to keep the city’s streets clear during Louis-Napoléon’s coup d’état. He later became aide-de-camp to the emperor.

AMABLE-GASPARD-HENRI, VICOMTE DE COURTAIS (1790–1877), was a radical republican who sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1842 to 1848. He was called to command the National Guard in April 1848. When pro-Polish rioters stormed the Chamber on May 15, Courtais berated them loudly but failed to restore order. He was relieved of his command and sent to the countryside to protect him from his fellow deputies, who now considered him a traitor.

ISAAC MOÏSE CRÉMIEUX (1796–1880), known as Adolphe, was an accomplished lawyer, a leader of the French Jewish community, and a left-leaning deputy. When revolution broke out, Crémieux went to the Chamber to recommend the regency of the duchesse d’Orléans but found that a republic had already been declared. Named minister of justice in the provisional government, Crémieux fulfilled his responsibilities with what his critics derided as undue moderation. He resigned over the accusation of Louis Blanc and took a seat in the National Assembly, where he submitted an unpopular bill to reestablish divorce. Crémieux would strongly oppose Louis Napoléon’s banning of the revolutionary clubs and consequently suffer brief imprisonment after the coup of 1851.

ÉDOUARD DAMESME (1807–1848) was a brigadier general who had served in Algeria. He died of injuries suffered as commander of the Garde Mobile on the left bank of the Seine during the June Days.

NAPOLÉON, COMTE DARU (1807–1890), was a soldier and right-leaning politician. He represented La Manche alongside Tocqueville in the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies and served as vice president of the latter beginning in 1850. Daru spoke out against Louis-Napoléon’s coup. After a brief imprisonment, Daru removed himself from politics until 1869, when he defeated Tocqueville’s nephew René to represent La Manche in the Legislative Corps.

PAUL-HENRI, VICOMTE DARU (1810–1877), the younger brother of Napoléon Daru, similarly prefaced his tenure as a conservative deputy (1842–48) with military service in Africa. After the revolution of 1848, however, he left politics for a career in industry.

JOSEPH DEGOUSÉE (1795–1862) was a soldier of the Napoleonic Wars who after the emperor’s fall entangled himself in a poorly concealed plot to overthrow the Bourbons known as the Affair of the Patriots (1816). Degousée escaped punishment and could be found fighting on the barricades in the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. In 1848 Degousée was elected to the Constituent Assembly and given the role of quaestor, an officer responsible for keeping order in the Assembly. When Degousée failed to win reelection, he devoted himself to engineering artesian wells.

CHARLES-ÉDOUARD DELARUE-BEAUMARCHAIS (1799–1878), grandson of the famous playwright Beaumarchais, entered the military as an orderly for King Louis-Philippe in 1832. By 1852 he had risen in rank to colonel and then brigadier general.

HENRI DEMBINSKI (1791–1864) was a Polish general with experience fighting against imperial Russia in the Polish and Lithuanian revolts. Lajos Kossuth made him commander in chief of the Hungarian revolutionary forces in 1849. When victory proved impossible, Dembinski joined Bem and Kossuth in fleeing to Turkey. He moved to Paris in 1850.

ALEXANDRE DESTUTT DE TRACY (1781–1864) was the son of Antoine Louis Claude, a philosophe of the Enlightenment. The younger Destutt de Tracy was educated for a military career and fought in Italy, Spain, and Russia. Achieving the rank of colonel, he retired from the army in 1818 to devote himself to science. Four years later he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, where he joined his father’s good friend the marquis de Lafayette on the benches of the far left. He voted to abolish the death penalty, the hereditary character of the upper legislative chamber, and slavery in the colonies. He also opposed the colonization of Algeria and, reelected to the Constituent Assembly, astonished his own family by supporting the banishment of the Orléans family. Barrot recruited Destutt de Tracy as minister of the navy and the colonies in Louis-Napoléon’s first cabinet. Destutt de Tracy would have the satisfaction of seeing the end of slavery in the French colonies under his watch. He quit politics after the prince’s coup.

AUGUSTE DORNÈS (1799–1848) succeeded his friend Armand Marrast as editor in chief of the liberal journal Le National. Like Marrast, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly beginning in 1848 and served with Tocqueville in the constitutional commission. Dornès was shot in the groin while trying to calm the rioters of the June Days; the wound refused to heal, and he died the following month.

ÉDOUARD DROUYN DE LHUYS (1805–1881) was a powerful French diplomat. He took over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from Jules Bastide in Barrot’s first cabinet and gave General Oudinot his instructions for the invasion of Rome. When Tocqueville replaced him in the second Barrot cabinet, Drouyn de Lhuys became ambassador to London. His career only accelerated with the ascent of Napoleon III, and he dominated French diplomacy as foreign minister from 1852 to 1855 and again from 1862 to 1866. He finally retired in alarm over the Austro-Prussian tensions that would lead to war and the fall of the Second Empire.

CHARLES-MARIE-TANNEGUY, COMTE DUCHÂTEL (1803–1867), followed in his father’s footsteps as a favorite of Louis-Philippe. He served the constitutional king first as a member of the Council of State and subsequently as minister of commerce and minister of finance. A member of the center right, Duchâtel was a believer in Malthusian economics and a friend of François Guizot, with whom he helped launch The Globe and in whose cabinet he served as minister of the interior. Duchâtel opposed electoral reform in the years leading up to 1848, declaring, “The country is satisfied.” Faced with the fall of the monarchy and Guizot’s growing unpopularity, Duchâtel departed for England for a few months; he never returned to politics.

AURORE DUDEVANT, NÉE DUPIN (1804–1876), known as George Sand, was a well-known romantic novelist, populist political thinker, and femme fatale. She spent her childhood with her grandmother in the bucolic Berry region, which formed the backdrop for the rustic novels that she wrote at the height of her career (1845–49). Sand was married to Casimir Dudevant at the age of eighteen and had a son, but her mundane life disappointed her. After a passionate affair and a confrontation with her husband, she arranged to spend part of every year in Paris. There she had a string of lovers, beginning with Jules Sandeau, with whom she wrote articles for Le Figaro, and including Michel de Bourges, Prosper Mérimée, Alfred de Musset, and Frédéric Chopin. Her first book, a protest against nonconsensual marriage written under the nom de plume George Sand in 1832, brought her instant celebrity. Besides her novels, Sand wrote for political journals. She underwent considerable political evolution over the course of her life, moving from the moderate to the republican left and then mellowing to a gentle conservatism. While these phases were linked to her various lovers, Sand always felt great sympathy for the poor and actively participated in the June 1848 insurrection.

JEAN DUFAURE was one of the many Frenchmen who revolted against Louis-Napoléon’s coup. He was sheltered from the president’s police by a carpenterinnkeeper named Bertrand Fournier, but Fournier was caught and charged for his generosity.

JULES ARMAND STANISLAS DUFAURE (1798–1881) was a lawyer and legislator known for his caustic rhetoric. He used his brief tenure as minister of public works in 1839 to speed the development of the French rail system. Though he backed the creation of the Republic, Dufaure proved very conservative as a representative in the Assembly. He vigorously opposed socialism and argued for the prosecution of Louis Blanc and Marc Caussidière for their role in the storming of the Assembly on May 15, 1848. Dufaure again had a place in the cabinet as minister of the interior under Cavaignac and then Louis-Napoléon but quit politics when the latter declared the Second Empire. Dufaure occupied himself with his law practice until 1871, when Thiers named him minister of justice.

CHRISTIAN-LÉON DUMAS (1799–1873) served as an aide-de-camp to Louis-Philippe when the latter was still a duke. In 1837 Dumas was sent to Algeria; on his return to France, he was named a colonel. He won election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1845 and remained there until 1848, invariably supporting the government’s initiatives.

JEAN-BAPTISTE DUMOULIN (1786–1856) was a glove maker from Grenoble who had helped arrange Napoleon I’s return from Elba and became the emperor’s aide-de-camp. Dumoulin was one of the “scoundrels” Tocqueville observed carrying an enormous tricolor flag into the Chamber of Deputies on the day the Second Republic was proclaimed.

ANDRÉ-MARIE DUPIN (1783–1865) was a lawyer and veteran conservative of the Chamber of Deputies, serving as the body’s president eight times under the July Monarchy. Dupin most often spoke in favor of checking democratic freedoms. On the day of the February revolution he was calling for the regency of the duchesse d’Orléans even as partisans of a republic streamed into the Hôtel de Ville. Despite the collapse of the monarchy, Dupin remained in the Constituent Assembly to lead the royalist party. He was forced to retire amid general reproach when he refused to denounce Louis-Napoléon’s coup; however, Napoleon III called him back as chief prosecutor of the Cour de cassation (the highest appellate court in France) in 1857.

PROSPER DUVERGIER DE HAURANNE (1798–1881) was a journalist and legislator whose views did not fully align with either the conservatives or the opposition. An early friend of Guizot’s, Duvergier supported King Louis-Philippe against the republicans and did not welcome the fall of the monarchy to the Second Republic. Yet he was one of the most vocal critics of Guizot’s cabinet (1840–48) and a proponent of the banquet campaign for electoral reform that created the conditions for revolution. In the Constituent Assembly, Duvergier sat with the monarchists and voted conservatively on every measure. He was exiled in 1851 along with many of his colleagues but received amnesty within a few months.

FRANCIADE-FLEURUS DUVIVIER (1794–1848) fought in North Africa in the 1830s and wrote openly about his experiences, which did not ingratiate him with Louis-Philippe. The provisional government recognized his talent, however, and made him a general of the Garde Mobile. Duvivier protected the embryonic republic against unrest despite his belief that some of its leaders, especially Blanc and Ledru-Rollin, were sabotaging his work. Duvivier resigned his command in April 1848 to sit in the Constituent Assembly as a moderate republican but did not have time to make any substantial contribution before the June Days. Called on to help repress the insurgents, Duvivier received a fatal bullet to the foot.

EUGÈNE-CHARLES-MARIE DES ESSARTS (1802–1869) was a counselor at the Court of Appeals in Caen whose moderate republicanism won him a place in the Constituent Assembly from April 1848 to May 1849, representing La Manche. Failing to win reelection, he became presiding judge at Caen.

EUGÈNE was Tocqueville’s manservant. Little is known about him, but Tocqueville felt attached to him and paid him a generous salary. He fought with the National Guard during the June Days of 1848.

PHOCION EYNARD (1796–1861) was a brigadier general who had seen action at Waterloo, in Spain, and in Algeria. On December 17, 1851, he succeeded General Pierre Carlier as the officer responsible for administering the state of siege in the central département of Allier following Louis-Napoléon’s coup.

FRÉDÉRIC-ALFRED-PIERRE, COMTE DE FALLOUX (1811–1886), was a zealous royalist who began his career in the legislature only a year before the revolution of 1848. He supported the election of Louis-Napoléon, who then made him minister of education and religious affairs. Falloux’s ardent Catholicism guided his political agenda. He is remembered for the Falloux Laws of 1850 and 1851, which mandated universal primary education, which was achieved via a mixed system of public secular schools and private Catholic schools. The laws also automatically qualified all clergy to teach. Falloux wrote in support of a theocratic government and in 1871 tried to reconcile the legitimists with the doctrinaires to restore a monarchical government. His Memoirs of a Royalist was published posthumously in 1888.

LÉONARD-JOSEPH-LÉON FAUCHER (1803–1854) was a moderate liberal journalist who opposed the cellular system of imprisonment Tocqueville and Beaumont advocated. His economic treatise on English industry was widely read after its 1845 publication. In 1846 Faucher’s advocacy for free trade earned him a place in the Chamber of Deputies; he was reelected to both the Constituent and National Assemblies. Faucher revealed his strong conservative streak as minister of the interior under the prince-president Louis-Napoléon, arguing for restrictions on the right to assemble and on the freedom of the press.

HENRI FERAY (1812–1870) was a colonel and the son-in-law of General Bugeaud. During Louis-Napoléon’s coup, he ordered that the members of the Constituent Assembly who were hostile to the president be corralled and guarded in the barracks at the quai d’Orsay. He gave the deputies Barrot, Berryer, Dufaure, and Broglie his own rooms. Although Rémusat’s memoirs confirm Feray’s reputation as a gambler, he was later promoted to general.

CARLO FILANGIERI, PRINCE DI SATIERNO (1784–1867), was born near Naples but received his military education in France and first distinguished himself in Napoleon’s army. In 1831 the extremely unpopular ruler of the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, Ferdinand II, invited him to command his royal army. Filangieri accepted and led the army in a skillful but grisly repression of the Sicilian revolution of 1848.

CHARLES FOURIER (1772–1837) was an early French socialist who, though solitary and obscure during his lifetime, inspired dozens of utopian experiments in both France and the United States. His father was a well-to-do textile merchant, and he himself worked as a clerk and cloth salesman. Nevertheless, Fourier conceived a deep disgust for the textile trade after observing merchants systematically cheating their clients. He came to see all merchants as parasites who lived at the expense of both the consumer and the laborer. Fourier dreamed of a France reorganized into phalansteries—agricultural and industrial cooperatives that assigned work based on individuals’ natural passions and rewarded them according to their contributions. Phalansteries would not only rid society of usurious middlemen but also spur productivity and put an end to poverty. Fourier churned out an enormous number of books and pamphlets on this topic, including Theory of the Four Movements (1808) and Domestic and Agricultural Association (1822). The ailing socialist died too soon to see the communes erected by his disciples Victor Considerant and Albert Brisbane.

BERTRAND FOURNIER was an innkeeper and carpenter of Nérac, a commune in southwestern France. He was arrested on January 2, 1852, for harboring Jean Dufaure, an insurgent who had revolted against Louis-Napoléon’s coup.

FRANZ-JOSEPH I (1830–1916) became emperor of Austria and king of Hungary following the 1848 abdication of his childless uncle, Ferdinand I. The young ruler inherited an empire rocked by revolution, and with the help of his adviser Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg, he instituted a reactionary program both at home and abroad. In 1851 Franz-Joseph irrevocably spoiled hopes that he would institute a liberal regime by reneging on his promise to draw up a constitution. His rule was filled with power struggles in Hungary, Italy, Prussia, and the Balkans; indeed, he lived long enough to declare war on Serbia in 1914, sparking World War I.

FRIEDRICH WILHELM IV (1795–1861) reigned as king of Prussia from 1840 until his death, though a stroke in 1857 clouded his mind and left his brother, Wilhelm I, in control of the kingdom. Friedrich Wilhelm IV was a romanticist infatuated with the chivalrous ideals and divine sovereignty of the German Middle Ages. This made him conservative, and while he conceded the German liberals a United Diet to deliberate on loans and taxes, he prevented it from meeting regularly. In 1848 the revolution in France sparked off a similar one in Germany. The king tried to calm the tension by convening the Frankfurt parliament, which was the first freely elected legislature in Germany. When this body offered to crown Friedrich Wilhelm IV kaiser of Prussia, he refused, saying he would not “accept a crown from the gutter,” but only from the German princes. These he tried to unify in a German federation in 1849–50, but when the emperor of Austria objected at being excluded, Friedrich Wilhelm IV gave up his efforts. He spent the rest of his reign undoing his earlier concessions, restricting suffrage, and converting the first chamber of the parliament into a house of aristocratic landowners.

FUAD EFENDI (1815–1868), also known as Fuad Pasha, was a protégé of the Ottoman statesman and grand vizier Mustafa Reshid Pasha. He proved his diplomatic mettle in 1849 by averting armed conflict with Russia, which demanded that Sultan Abdul-Medjid hand over political refugees of the Hungarian Revolution. Fuad Efendi persuaded Czar Nicholas I that although Turkey would not surrender the revolutionaries, it would make sure to keep them far from Russia. His skillful negotiations earned him the post of foreign minister in 1852, a post he used to pivot Turkey away from Great Britain and toward France. Abdul-Medjid’s successor made Fuad Efendi grand vizier in 1861.

ZACHARIE GALLEMAND (1796–1866) was a landholder, a lawyer, and, beginning in 1842, a municipal councilor of Valognes, the district Tocqueville represented in the Chamber of Deputies. Gallemand faithfully supported Tocqueville, and as Tocqueville prepared to write a book on the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, he helped him resolve his questions about the economic impact of feudalism’s fall.

LOUIS-ANTOINE GARNIER-PAGÈS (1803–1878) and his half brother Étienne grew up devoted to each other. When they discovered that they were the children of different fathers, they decided to adopt a double last name. Étienne, who was one of the most courageous republicans of the July Monarchy, succumbed to a heart ailment in 1841. After his brother’s death, Louis took his place in the ranks of the republicans but focused on economic rather than electoral policy. Louis became minister of finance in the provisional government in March 1848, inheriting a serious fiscal crisis from his predecessor, Michel Goudchaux. Among the remedies he adopted was a forty-five-cent tax increase for every franc of direct tax, a measure that proved extremely unpopular among the peasants. Garnier-Pagès firmly defended his actions, and his colleagues chose him for the five-member executive commission that governed France until the appointment of Cavaignac as chief executive. He thereafter returned to the Constituent Assembly and devoted himself to financial policy, but he was not reelected to the National Assembly under President Louis-Napoléon.

ÉTIENNE-MAURICE GÉRARD (1773–1852) was badly wounded while fighting at Austerlitz for Napoleon I, who rewarded him by making him a baron. During the Bourbon Restoration, Gérard joined the liberal opposition in the Chamber of Deputies. King Louis-Philippe made him a general and entrusted him with the Ministry of War for a brief time in 1830 and again in 1834.

ÉMILE DE GIRARDIN (1802–1881) served as a deputy and a representative to the National Assembly, but his true vocation was entrepreneurial journalism. He made his debut with Le Voleur (The Thief), a periodical that printed literary extracts without permission from their authors. In the face of loud complaints of plagiarism, Girardin abandoned Le Voleur to publish a series of other newspapers, along with a volley of almanacs and atlases. Girardin’s masterpiece, however, was La Presse (1836), which revolutionized journalism by slashing the cost of subscription and making up the loss in advertising revenue. Girardin’s competitors greeted the advent of the penny press with outrage, but the intrepid businessman claimed to be expanding the educated citizenry. He was equally opportunistic in the political arena, where he sat first with the conservatives, then with the opposition, and finally with the Montagnards, depending on which group he thought would prevail—and gain subscribers for La Presse.

ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU (1816–1882) made a modest living writing serialized novels and articles for far-right journals until Tocqueville took him under his wing in 1843. Tocqueville was then preparing a study of the influence of nineteenth-century moral ideas on politics for submission to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and asked Gobineau to help him. Although it was never completed, the project launched a prolific correspondence between the two men. Tocqueville made Gobineau the director of his cabinet when he became minister of foreign affairs in 1849, giving his protégé a foundation for his later career as ambassador to Teheran, Athens, Rio de Janeiro, and Stockholm. Tocqueville was dismayed, however, by Gobineau’s 1853 Essay on the Inequality of Races, which argued that the mixing of superior and inferior races led to the degeneration of civilization. This doctrine was indeed to have the pernicious effects that Tocqueville feared, since it supplied pseudoscientific arguments for slavery in America and abetted the rise of Aryanism in Germany. Gobineau did make a significant literary contribution with The Pleiades (1874), a novel recounting the adventures of three aristocrats whose noble passions are incompatible with an increasingly bourgeois and democratic society.

MICHEL GOUDCHAUX (1797–1862) belonged to a family of Alsatian Jews who ran a prominent banking house. He was a republican and fought against the Bourbon monarchy both on the barricades and in the pages of Le National, arguing for state-owned railways and financial justice. In 1848 Goudchaux became minister of finance in the provisional government. He hoped to prove that the Republic would uphold its financial obligations, so he collected a steep tax and paid out the government’s arrears. His scrupulousness did not prevent the bourgeoisie from withdrawing their funds from the banks, however, and a financial crisis ensued. Goudchaux did not support the economic remedies proposed by Louis Blanc and the Luxembourg Commission and submitted his resignation on March 4, 1848. He then won election to the Constituent Assembly as a moderate republican and once again became minister of finance for General Cavaignac after the June Days. In this role, Goudchaux opposed progressive tax schemes and denounced Louis-Napoléon. Elected again to the National Assembly in 1857, he refused to swear allegiance to the emperor and was therefore denied his seat.

WILLIAM RATHBONE GREG (1809–1881) was a wealthy Englishman who abandoned his family’s cotton mills to write essays on economic theory, social philosophy, and theology. In 1853 Greg sought Alexis de Tocqueville’s advice on the best model for parliamentary franchise and ways to prevent electoral corruption. Greg conceived a deep respect for Tocqueville, and after Tocqueville’s death he wrote a long essay praising The Ancien Régime and the Revolution and its author.

HARRIET GROTE (1792–1878) was an English biographer and essayist. She and her husband, the parliamentarian and historian of antiquity George Grote, were leading members of the Benthamite group. This liberal circle embraced the utilitarian philosophy that the right course of action was the one that provided greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. The Grotes were close friends with fellow Benthamites and eminent economists John Stuart Mill and Nassau Senior. Their mutual connection to the Senior family led to Harriet Grote’s acquaintance with Tocqueville in 1834. She found him “a most engaging person” and admired his “candid and unprejudiced mind.” They remained friends and correspondents.

FRANÇOIS GUIZOT (1787–1874) kindled young Tocqueville’s passion for political history in his 1829–30 lectures at the Sorbonne, where he was chair of modern history. Unlike his student, Guizot opposed democracy and favored a constitutional monarchy accompanied by a representative body chosen from the educated elite. He agitated for this system as leader of the doctrinaires during the reign of Charles X and saw his efforts gratified with King Louis-Philippe’s 1830 ascension to the throne. Guizot joined the king’s cabinet, serving as minister of public instruction from 1832 to 1837 (except for a few months in 1836, when the post was given to Privat Joseph Claramont). He shepherded a law through the Chamber mandating a primary school in every commune, although enrollment remained noncompulsory and costly. Following a brief stint as ambassador to England in 1840, Guizot became minister of foreign affairs, but the aging Prime Minister Soult allowed Guizot to head the government in all but name. In 1847 Guizot finally became prime minister in his own right. The historian-politician made himself many enemies during his incumbency by fighting the extension of electoral and parliamentary eligibility. His efforts to quash the banquet campaign of 1848 were disastrous, and King Louis-Philippe dismissed him on February 24—the day of the revolution. Guizot took refuge in England. On his return to Paris the following year, he was refused admittance to the Legislative Assembly and so devoted himself to his memoirs and historical works.

LÉONOR-JOSEPH HAVIN (1799–1868) was the son of Édouard-Léonor Havin, a member of the National Convention who had voted to execute Louis XVI and was consequently exiled when the Bourbons regained power. Léonor and his father returned to France in 1820, whereupon the young man joined the liberal opposition. In 1831 he was elected deputy of Saint-Lô, a district located in the same département as Tocqueville’s own Valognes. Havin sat with the left and called for electoral reform, but like Adolphe Thiers, he preferred constitutional monarchy to republican government. In fact, it was Havin who escorted Mme la duchesse d’Orléans to the Chamber to make her claim for regency. Havin nevertheless accepted the Republic when it was announced and managed to have himself appointed commissioner of the Republic for the provisional government in La Manche, where he was also president of the local general council. Tocqueville, who represented La Manche beginning in 1848, feared that the new commissioner would try to challenge his good name there. His fears were unfounded, since Havin resigned his deputyship and lost the presidency of the general council to Tocqueville in 1849. Havin thereafter devoted his energies to Le Siècle, of which he became editor in chief.

MICHEL-PIERRE-ALEXIS HÉBERT (1799–1887) was trained as a lawyer and joined the doctrinaires in the Chamber of Deputies under King Louis-Philippe. He became a dogged partisan of François Guizot and, appointed minister of justice in 1847, vehemently opposed the banquet campaign, along with any kind of electoral reform. Hébert fled France when his political enemies proclaimed the Second Republic, and though he returned to his law practice, he never again ran for public office.

ELIZABETH ANN HARRYETT HOWARD (1824–1865) was an English actress. She met Louis-Napoléon when he was exiled in London, became his mistress, and helped fund his schemes to return to France and then his campaign for president. Napoleon III richly reimbursed her, giving her the Château de Beauregard, outside Paris.

LOUIS HUBER (1815–1865), known as Aloysius, was a Parisian leather currier whose plot to assassinate King Louis-Philippe condemned him to exile in 1838. The revolution of 1848 left him at large, however, and he immediately joined a radical political club. Huber was a key figure in the May 15 uprising; it was he who announced that the National Assembly was dissolved. Happily, the National Guard suppressed the uprising without bloodshed. Some historians suspect that Huber, who may have been a member of King Louis-Philippe’s secret police, played the role of agent provocateur, rather than revolutionary, in the failed insurrection. In any case, he joined Raspail and Barbès in prison before being exiled a second time.

EUGÈNE JANVIER (1800–1852) was a lawyer best known for pleading Lamennais’s case in the 1831 trial over the democratic and ultramontane material published in L’Avenir. The impassioned plea made by another defendant in the trial, the abbé Lacordaire, won over the public but failed to avert an order to suspend publication of L’Avenir. Despite his defense of Lamennais, Janvier was a monarchist at heart. He sat with the conservative majority in the Chamber of Deputies from 1834 to 1848, all the while strongly supporting King Louis-Philippe and his minister, Guizot. Janvier returned to the Constituent Assembly under the Second Republic but continued to vote with the monarchists. He died shortly after Louis-Napoléon’s coup.

FRANÇOIS-FERDINAND-PHILIPPE D’ORLÉANS, PRINCE DE JOINVILLE (1818–1900), was the third son of King Louis-Philippe. He spent his youth in the navy, digging into his deep pockets to acquire steamships for France. Joinville announced himself a contender in the presidential election set for 1852, and Tocqueville would have reluctantly voted for him, but the prince’s plans were derailed by Louis-Napoléon’s coup, and he joined his family in exile. When the American Civil War broke out, the prince offered his service to President Lincoln. He finally returned to France as a deputy in the Third Republic but seldom spoke and largely abstained from voting.

LOUIS, COMTE DE KERGORLAY (1804–1880), was Alexis de Tocqueville’s cousin, confidant, and often the first to read his work, despite their radically different political convictions. Tocqueville and Kergorlay were born within a year of each other into aristocratic families loyal to the Bourbon kings, but whereas Tocqueville studied law, traveled to the United States, and acquired a strong taste for democracy, Kergorlay attended military school, fought in Algeria as a second lieutenant of artillery, and remained a die-hard legitimist until his death. When Louis-Philippe took the throne in 1830, Kergorlay refused to swear him fealty and consequently had to leave the army. Two years later, Kergorlay helped smuggle into France the duchesse de Berry, who planned to steal the throne back for her twelve-year-old son, Henri de Chambord. The coup was a failure, and Kergorlay was arrested, but Tocqueville helped him get an acquittal. Kergorlay’s scrape led him to focus on marriage and the management of his estate, though he partnered with his fellow legitimist Arthur de Gobineau to launch and direct the Revue Provinciale (1848) and served a term in the 1871 National Assembly.

LAJOS KOSSUTH (1802–1894) was a charismatic Hungarian who led his country’s fight for independence from the Austrian Empire. As a lowly substitute delegate to the national Diet, he was not allowed to voice his radical liberal ideas in the Diet’s debates, but he cleverly wrote them into his colorful records of the Diet’s sessions. After three years’ imprisonment for subversion (1837–40), Kossuth assumed direction of a nationalist paper and gained such a following that Chancellor Metternich tried to recruit him for Austrian public office just to remove him from the press. Kossuth refused and instead became Hungary’s minister of finance, a position he used to provoke Vienna at every opportunity and demand a constitution for Hungary. When the tension erupted into revolution, Kossuth assumed leadership of the Committee of National Defense. He might have succeeded in liberating his country had Austria not called on the Russians for reinforcements. Kossuth fled to Turkey and then to England, where he continued campaigning for Hungarian independence until his death.

DOMINIQUE-HENRI LACORDAIRE (1802–1863) was a gifted orator who found his priestly calling in the pages of Félicité de Lamennais’s Essay on Indifference in Religious Matters. After his ordination, Lacordaire accepted the position of chaplain at the Collège de Juilly, where he met Abbé Lamennais in person. Together with Montalembert, the priests founded the journal L’Avenir (1830–31) to advocate religious and civil liberty. Their activities attracted the displeasure of Pope Gregory XVI, who called them to Rome for chastisement. Lamennais responded with a furious round of essays denouncing the pope, but Lacordaire accepted the censure and turned to a new project: the restoration of a Dominican order in France. The 1848 revolution roused Lacordaire, who won election to the Constituent Assembly as a republican. The priest soon found himself unsuited for parliament and resigned following the May 15 uprising. Lacordaire devoted his remaining years to religious education and briefly filled Tocqueville’s empty seat in the French Academy.

BERTRAND, BARON DE LACROSSE (1796–1865), joined the French navy as an eighteen-year-old and remained its advocate for the duration of his life. He supported both Napoleon I and Napoleon III, fighting valiantly for the first at the battle of Craonne against Prussians and Russians and laboring loyally for the second as minister of public works and adviser on naval and financial matters in his Council of State. The baron de Lacrosse originally entered politics in 1830 as a center-leftist opposed to Louis-Philippe and his doctrinaires. He especially detested Guizot and defied the minister’s wishes in 1846 by securing a large loan for the restructuring of the French fleet. But after the February revolution, he became an unabashed conservative in the Constituent Assembly and always voted with the right.

EDMOND DU MOTIER, VICOMTE DE LAFAYETTE (1818–1890), grandson of the great general and brother-in-law to Beaumont and Corcelle, served a single term in the Constituent Assembly. Unlike his brother Oscar, Edmond mostly voted with the right. He retired from politics after an unsuccessful campaign in 1849 but returned as a senator in the Third Republic from 1876 to 1888.

GILBERT DU MOTIER, MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE (1757–1834), called the “hero of two worlds,” commanded French volunteers in the American Revolution and played a key role in the French Revolution. Born to a family of soldiers, Lafayette was set afire by news of the rebelling English colonies when he was still an adolescent. He recruited a few like-minded friends to sail for the Americas, fought bravely, and then returned to Paris to beg Louis XVI for armed troops to lead against the redcoats. This being granted, Lafayette won the glory he had desired. Back in France, he was appointed to the Estates General as a member of the noblesse, but he voted to give greater power to the Third Estate. When France’s own revolution broke out, Lafayette, newly made commander in chief of the National Guard, found himself responsible for the king’s safety yet sympathetic to the revolutionaries. His calls for constitutional monarchy were drowned out in the unrest. Overwhelmed and increasingly unpopular, the general withdrew to Austria until the empire had come and gone. Lafayette then sat in the Chamber of Deputies off and on beginning in 1818, voting with the left. In 1830, when the Chamber defied Charles X’s move to dissolve it and fighting broke out in Paris, the deputies chose Lafayette to lead the National Guard in their defense. The general did so, and it was he who presented Louis-Philippe to the crowd, wrapping the new king in a tricolor flag on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville.

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE (1790–1869) was a romantic poet remembered for such masterpieces as “The Lake,” “Voyage to the Orient,” and Joceyln, which Tocqueville considered an exemplar of democratic literature. He also wrote prose, including the eight-volume History of the Girondins, published to national acclaim in 1847. At the same time, Lamartine played a prominent political role as the head of the executive commission under the Second Republic. Though elected to the Chamber of Deputies by legitimists, the poet pursued a liberal agenda. He championed the abolition of the death penalty and a pacifist foreign policy with much-admired eloquence but little political acumen.

He tried to recruit Tocqueville and his friend Beaumont to his socialist party in 1836, but they already had doubts about his judgment and refused. Failing to prevent the insurrections of May 15 or of the June Days, Lamartine was divested of his power in favor of a strong new chief executive, General Cavaignac. Lamartine had lost his great popularity by the time he himself campaigned for presidency. He lingered in the Assembly until 1851, rarely voting and barely securing reelection each year. In 1869, two years after being awarded a life annuity for his political service, Lamartine died, still deeply in debt.

MARY ANN ELISA DE LAMARTINE, NÉE BIRCH (1790–1863), married the poet Alphonse de Lamartine in 1820 after renouncing Protestantism. The couple had two children, but neither survived to adulthood. Although Elisa de Lamartine was born in France, she came from an English family and found friendship with Tocqueville’s English wife, Marie.

FÉLICITÉ-ROBERT DE LAMENNAIS (1782–1854) was a Catholic priest whose calls for religious revival and democratic liberty made him beloved among the common people of France. He was an autodidact who gleaned his education from volumes of Rousseau and Pascal in his uncle’s library. His 1808 Essay on the State of the Church called for a reinvigorated, Christian Europe centered on Rome. Napoleon I banned the work, but it launched Lamennais into the public arena. Under the July Monarchy, Lamennais, together with Lacordaire and Montalembert, established the journal L’Avenir to advocate greater liberties of education and press, as well as to aid the oppressed Catholics of Poland. Pope Gregory XVI denounced Lamennais’s writings as too radical, but the priest was in turn angered by the pope’s support for Czar Nicholas of Russia, who had oppressed the Poles. Lamennais joined the Constituent Assembly in 1848 as an anticlerical and antibourgeois democrat and served briefly on the constitutional commission with Tocqueville. After Louis-Napoléon’s coup, the imperial police kept Lamennais under close watch, but they could not prevent a large crowd from forming behind the priest’s funeral hearse when he died in 1854.

LOUIS-CHRISTOPHE-LÉON-JUCHAULT DE LAMORICIÈRE (1806–1865) was a general who became legendary for his role in France’s colonization of Algeria. First sent to North Africa in 1830 as the captain of a light infantry unit, Lamoricière quickly rose in the ranks from colonel to marshal to governor-general. His promotions were a testament to his considerable administrative skills but also to his association with influential Saint-Simonian friends such as Gustave d’Eichtal and Prosper Enfantin. He cemented his fame in 1847 by defeating and capturing Abd el-Kader, emir of the Maghreb. The general returned to Paris in time for the revolution of 1848, in which, attempting to pacify the revolutionaries, he suffered a bayonet wound. During the June Days, he again tried to subdue the insurgents and this time had three horses shot from under him. General Cavaignac made Lamoricière his minister of war. In 1849 Tocqueville made him ambassador to Russia, whose czar was then lending troops to Austria to suppress the Hungarian Revolution. Lamoricière helped defuse a standoff between Russia and Turkey, which was harboring the Hungarian revolutionary leader Lajos Kossuth. The general returned to France in 1850, opposed the 1851 coup, and was exiled for seven years.

VICTOR-AMBROISE, VICOMTE DE LANJUINAIS (1802–1869), was a lawyer and economist who became one of Tocqueville’s closest friends in the legislature. Like Tocqueville, he supported electoral reform but refused to participate in the banquet campaign. When Odilon Barrot offered Tocqueville the position of minister of foreign affairs in 1849, he accepted on the condition that his friend also be invited to join the cabinet. Lanjuinais was appointed minister of commerce and agriculture. He pursued laissez-faire economic policy, fought monopolies, and helped abolish the old practice of quarantining ships from Turkey in the Mediterranean in order to prevent the spread of plague. Lanjuinais openly opposed Louis-Napoléon’s coup and was briefly detained at Vincennes. He returned to parliamentary life in 1863 and continued to weigh in on economic matters until his death.

JULES, MARQUIS DE LASTEYRIE DU SAILLANT (1810–1883), joined the center left in the Chamber of Deputies in 1842 but identified with the monarchists under the Second Republic; he was one of the representatives selected to draft restrictions on universal suffrage in 1850. The marquis de Lafayette was Lasteyrie’s maternal grandfather, making him brother-in-law to Corcelle, Beaumont, and Rémusat.

ALEXANDRE-AUGUSTE LEDRU-ROLLIN (1807–1874) was the radical republican leader of the Montagnards during the July Monarchy and throughout the Second Republic. His calls for universal suffrage during the banquet campaign were very popular, and he was named minister of the interior in the provisional government of 1848. However, Ledru-Rollin failed to win the presidency in December 1848; the socialists, finding him too conservative, instead rallied behind Raspail. In 1849 Ledru-Rollin called for the impeachment of Louis-Napoléon and led a demonstration against the Rome expedition that turned into a failed insurrection in June of that year. He fled to England, where he spent two decades in exile writing revolutionary pamphlets. Ledru-Rollin returned to France in 1870 as a legislative deputy in the Third Republic. He delivered a last speech on universal suffrage before dying of liver disease.

FRANÇOISE-ZOÉ-MATHILDE, COMTESSE DE LEHON (1808–1880), married the Belgian comte Charles de Lehon in 1827 and had three children. She carried on a long-term affair with Charles Morny, a monarchist deputy who became Louis-Napoléon’s minister of the interior immediately following his coup. Morny made one of the comtesse’s sons—Léopold Lehon, rumored to have been fathered by the diplomat Charles-Joseph Bresson—his chief of staff in the ministry.

LOUIS-HONORÉ-FÉLIX LE PELETIER, BARON D’AUNAY (1782–1855), Alexis de Tocqueville’s cousin and political mentor, belonged to a noble family with a long tradition of parliamentary leadership. The family’s ranks were decimated during the French Revolution, some guillotined for their royalism and others assassinated for their Jacobin beliefs. Félix Le Peletier d’Aunay, for his part, was a Bonapartist; he attended military school, volunteered to join Napoleon I’s guard of Paris, and became a prefect in 1808. The baron sat in the Chamber of Deputies beginning in 1827, weighing in most often in opposition to the ultraroyalists. Under the July Monarchy, he drifted toward the conservative party, all the while maintaining friendly neutrality toward Guizot. His austere, honorable character won him six terms as vice president of the Chamber. Le Peletier’s influence helped secure Tocqueville a commission to study the United States penitentiary system in 1831 and eased his admission to the French Academy. Ever a partisan of the Bonapartes, Le Peletier d’Aunay supported Louis-Napoléon’s coup and sat on the emperor’s consultative commission.

PIERRE-HENRI LEROUX (1797–1871) was, in the admiring eyes of Heinrich Heine, “not merely a thinking but also a feeling philosopher.” His views on fraternal association, labor reform, women’s emancipation, and a new humanitarian religion put him at the forefront of French socialism in the 1830s and 1840s, although his own early use of the word socialism described a form of totalitarian communism he abhorred. A child of the Parisian working classes, Leroux worked at a printing press to support his widowed mother and younger brothers. In 1824 he founded his own journal, Le Globe, which began as a literary publication but grew increasingly political. After handing the paper over to the Saint-Simonians in 1831, Leroux embarked on a host of other projects, including the monumental Encyclopédie nouvelle in collaboration with Hippolyte Carnot and Jean Reynaud; major philosophical tracts such as L’Humanité, de son principe et de son avenir (1839); and the Revue Indépendante, meant to combat the Revue des Deux Mondes, the mouthpiece of the liberal majority. Leroux is sometimes criticized for failing to translate his philosophies into political reality, but while his aversion to violence prevented him from participating in the February revolution and the uprisings that followed, he was an active member of the far left in both the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies. Vehemently opposed to Louis Bonaparte and the Rome expedition, Leroux fled to Switzerland after the coup and did not return to France until 1869.

FRANCIS LIEBER (1800–1872) was a German-born jurist, political philosopher, and the first chair of political science at Columbia University. Shot in the neck fighting for Prussia in the battle of Waterloo, he miraculously recovered, but he was twice jailed by the Prussian government for his proreform activities. Having immigrated to Boston in 1827, Lieber met Tocqueville and Beaumont on their 1831 voyage to America. At that time, he was in the midst of compiling his thirteen-volume Encyclopedia Americana, hundreds of whose articles he translated from German or wrote himself. He made a favorable impression on Tocqueville and especially on Beaumont, with whom he struck up a warm friendship. The two Frenchmen chose Lieber to translate their report on the American penitentiary system into English, and Tocqueville later had him contribute articles to his paper, Le Commerce. In 1851 Tocqueville helped Lieber secure the election he so coveted as a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. Lieber’s major works include On Civil Liberty and Self Government and Political Ethics. He is perhaps best remembered for his work on General Order No. 100, a code of law adopted by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War that regulated soldiers’ conduct and later became the basis for international conventions on the treatment of prisoners and civilians in wartime.

LOUIS XIV (1638–1715), dubbed the Sun King, ascended to the throne as a five-year-old boy. He believed absolute sovereignty to be his divine right. After the death of his teacher, Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles in order to check the scheming nobility but also to surround himself with art and music. He revoked the religious protection afforded to Protestants under the Edict of Nantes and made frequent war on his neighbors to expand France’s influence and territory. At the zenith of his reign, France had achieved near hegemony in Europe.

LOUIS XVI (1754–1793), who was somewhat forgotten amid his parents’ grief over the deaths of his two brothers, led a quiet and studious life until his coronation in 1774. As king he surrounded himself with such able ministers as Turgot and Necker. Nevertheless, Louis XVI was unable to appease the middle and lower classes, which suffered from a string of poor harvests and were outraged by the continued extravagance of the aristocracy. Louis XVI’s unpopularity grew after investments in the American Revolution sunk France into huge debt. He and his wife, Queen Marie-Antoinette, were guillotined during the French Revolution.

LOUIS XVIII (1755–1824) was the younger brother of the unfortunate King Louis XVI. He became heir to the throne when his ten-year-old nephew died in prison but could not claim his right until Napoleon I’s fall in 1814. Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his hundred-day campaign interrupted Louis XVIII’s nascent reign, but the king effected a second restoration in 1815. He at first tried to respect the constitutional Charter of 1814, but unable to restrain the vengeful ultraroyalists, he ultimately succumbed to the reactionary politics of the duc de Richelieu and the comte de Villèle. His youngest brother, Charles X, succeeded him in 1824.

LOUIS-PHILIPPE (1773–1850) was known as the July Monarch, the Citizen King, or King of the Bourgeoisie. He gained popularity as the duc d’Orléans during the Bourbon Restoration because of his modest lifestyle and liberal sympathies. He even earned his living for a time teaching French and geography under a false name at a college in Reichenau, Germany. He also spent four years in the United States, where he taught French in Boston, attended John Adams’s inauguration, and visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon. When Charles X was overthrown in 1830, the liberal opposition chose Louis-Philippe as their constitutional monarch. Louis-Philippe at first scrupulously abided by the Charter of 1830 and the parliamentary system it established. He was, however, a remorseless manipulator and constantly reshuffled the cabinet in order to have his way. By the time he finally settled on Guizot as his head of government, Louis-Philippe’s machinations had excited the disapproval of liberal progressives and the working classes; the situation worsened with the economic depression of 1846. When the king recognized the direction the tide was taking and replaced Guizot with Molé in 1848, it was too late to stem the flood. Louis-Philippe abdicated and fled to England, where he died two years later.

GUSTAF, COUNT LÖWENHIELM (LOWENHELM) (1790–1858), was a Swedish soldier and the ambassador to Austria and France. He was an amateur artist and is remembered for his watercolors of the scenes and people he encountered on his travels.

HIPPOLYTE MAGEN (1814–1886) was a socialist journalist who wrote for La Réforme and La Révolution during the Second Republic. He was arrested on the day of Louis-Napoléon’s coup and then sent into a long exile, which he spent in Belgium, England, and Spain. In addition to the texts mentioned by Tocqueville, Magen wrote a History of the Second Empire and a History of the Bonapartist Terror.

BERNARD-PIERRE MAGNAN (1791–1865) was a military man and a Bonapartist member of the Legislative Assembly (1849–51). In cooperation with the duc de Morny, the duc de Persigny, and General Saint-Arnaud, he orchestrated Louis-Napoléon’s December 1851 coup. As a reward, the prince-president made Magnan both a senator and a general in command of the Army of Paris.

PIERRE MAGNE (1806–1879), a legitimist deputy, received his education under the sponsorship of General Bugeaud, to whom he remained loyal throughout his political career. Already rising in the esteem of his colleagues and in the ranks of the government by 1847, he withdrew when the revolution broke out. However, Magne agreed to be undersecretary of finance in 1849, and in 1851 he became minister of public works. Louis-Napoléon reconfirmed his post after the coup (although Magne briefly renounced it in protest of the emperor’s appropriation of the Orléans family property). He became minister of finance in 1855 and again in 1867.

FRANÇOIS-JEAN-LÉON DE MALLEVILLE (1803–1879) became the youngest member of the Chamber of Deputies in 1834. He sat with the center left and delivered a fiery speech on February 8, 1848, defending citizens’ right to assemble in the banquet campaign. But when revolution broke out, Malleville joined the conservatives in the Constituent Assembly. He headed the Ministry of the Interior for nine days in December 1848, quitting after a disagreement with Louis-Napoléon.

PIERRE THOMAS MARIE DE SAINT GEORGES (1795–1870), known as Marie, entered politics by way of the courtroom, where his skillful representation of political defendants made him a sought-after lawyer and a prominent member of the liberal opposition. Marie was elected deputy in 1842, consistently voted against the doctrinaires, and on the day of the February revolution declared the proposed regency illegal. He became minister of public works in the new provisional government; it was he who organized the failed National Workshops, which had originated with Louis Blanc. General Cavaignac gave Marie the Ministry of Justice, which he retained until the election of Louis-Napoléon.

ARMAND MARRAST (1801–1852) had to leave his first profession as a professor of rhetoric when he started to voice his liberal sentiments too loudly. He began writing articles for the democratic journal La Tribune. In 1833 Marrast and his editor, Lionne, stood trial before the Chamber of Deputies as a result of calling the chamber a “prostitute” in one of their issues. Both were arrested in a repressive move against republicans, but Marrast escaped to England. He became editor in chief of Le National upon his return and used the position to campaign for universal suffrage. He was a member of the provisional government—first secretary, then minister of finance—after the revolution of 1848. As mayor of Paris from March to July 1848, Marrast did his best to put down the uprisings of May and June. He chaired the committee on the constitution and was elected president of the Constituent Assembly, where he voted with the moderate majority. He swore in Louis-Napoléon as president but was not elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1849. He left politics after the coup and died penniless and alone.

ÉDOUARD MARTIN (1801–1858), called Martin de Strasbourg by his colleagues in the Chamber of Deputies, actually hailed from Mulhouse. He sat in the Chamber as a radical republican for two terms during the July Monarchy before losing his seat in 1842, whereupon he resumed his career as a lawyer. In 1846 Martin and Adolphe Crémieux successfully urged the Cour de cassation (the highest-level jurisdiction in the French judicial system) to do away with the more judaïco, a humiliating oath that Jews had been required to swear in court. Martin served a single term in the Constituent Assembly, during which he continued to vote with the left.

FRANÇOIS MAUGUIN (1785–1854) began as an ardent liberal but became increasingly conservative over the course of his legislative career, which lasted from 1827 to 1851. He was one of the architects of the July revolution but soon grew disenchanted with it and vied with Odilon Barrot to lead the opposition party. Mauguin’s pugnacity, his arguments for military intervention in Belgium and Spain, and his stance in favor of slavery in the French colonies gradually eroded his popularity. Mauguin was nevertheless elected to both the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies and spoke in favor of the expedition to Rome.

PROSPER MÉRIMÉE (1803–1870) was an author and scholar of antiquities. Fascinated by Russian, Greek, and Spanish literature, Mérimée disguised his first works as translations and published them with clever historical commentary that fooled the academics of his time. Encouraged by his successful début, Mérimée made the circuit of Paris’s literary salons, forming friendships with Jean-Jacques Ampère and Stendhal but finding fault with Hugo, Baudelaire, and Chateaubriand. In 1833 he had a short, disastrous affair with George Sand that elicited a round of malicious gossip in the literary world. He went on to write a historical novel, a number of masterful short stories, and two famous novellas: Colomba (1840) and Carmen (1845, the basis for Bizet’s opera). Besides his literary contributions, Mérimée produced meticulous accounts of his discoveries as general inspector of historical monuments for the French Admiralty. He was also an old friend of the Spanish Countess of Montijo and her daughter, who married Napoleon III. At the empress Eugénie’s insistence, the author traveled with the imperial court and became a senator, though he always maintained an ironical detachment from the courtly scene.

LOUIS-CHRYSOSTOME MICHEL (1797–1853), called Michel de Bourges, was George Sand’s judicial-separation lawyer and, for a couple of years, her lover. He was also a republican politician remembered for his 1851 speech to the National Assembly in which he assured his fellow deputies that the French people would prevent Louis-Napoléon from attempting a coup d’état.

ROBERT MONCKTON MILNES (1809–1885) was an English member of Parliament from 1837 to 1863. He initially identified with the Tories but defected to the liberals over the Corn Law controversy, which centered on grain tariffs that were exacerbating the Irish famine. A cultured man, Milnes wrote a number of popular ballads, but he was first and foremost a patron of literature. His star-studded parties brought together such figures as Prosper Mérimée, George Sand, Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, and of course Alexis de Tocqueville. Milnes obtained a stipend for Alfred Lord Tennyson and introduced the English public to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although few of his contemporaries knew it, Milnes also cultivated an exceptional collection of erotic books that is now housed at the British Library.

HONORÉ-GABRIEL RIQUETI, COMTE DE MIRABEAU (1749–1791), was a masterful statesman who dominated the National Assembly during the early years of the French Revolution. He was the profligate son of the marquis de Mirabeau, who had him imprisoned in the Château d’If just to keep him away from his creditors. During a brief reprieve from his cell, Mirabeau met Sophie, the young wife of the marquis de Ruffey, and ran away with her to Holland—earning him another three years in the dungeons of Vincennes. Finally freed in 1782, the count campaigned to sit with the nobility in the Estates General. Although his bid was rejected, his talent as a speaker won him a place with the Third Estate. Mirabeau used his great intelligence to argue for a more just and representative monarchy, all the while angling to establish himself as intermediary between the National Assembly and the king. He at last managed to become president of the Assembly but retained the seat for only two weeks before dying in 1791. He was buried in the Panthéon as a national hero but disinterred a year later when it was discovered that he had agreed in 1790 to act as secret counselor to King Louis XVI in exchange for the payment of his debts.

LOUIS-MATHIEU, COMTE MOLÉ (1781–1855), a relative of Tocqueville’s and a close friend of Chateaubriand’s, was already a veteran parliamentarian and unshakeable monarchist by the time he spearheaded the conservative party in 1848. He served Napoleon I as councilor of state and minister of justice, Louis XVIII as minister of the navy, and Louis-Philippe as prime minister from 1836 to 1839—though in this last office Molé was allowed to do little beyond relay the decisions of the king. Molé harbored a bitter enmity for his fellow conservative Guizot, who replaced him as prime minister. By the time Louis-Philippe dismissed Guizot (February 23, 1848) and called on Molé to form a new government, he was about to abdicate. As a right-wing member of the Constituent Assembly, Molé openly supported the presidency of General Cavaignac. He opposed Louis-Napoléon’s coup but later supported the empire.

JEAN-BAPTISTE POQUELIN MOLIÈRE (1622–1673) was a French actor and playwright whose works, such as The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and The School for Wives, are hailed as comedic masterpieces. He was adored even during his own day despite his risky satire of religion, gender norms, and the bourgeoisie.

CHARLES-RENÉ, COMTE DE MONTALEMBERT (1810–1870), was one of the first and most impassioned disciples of the priest Félicité de Lamennais, with whom he and Dominique Lacordaire founded the liberal Catholic journal L’Avenir in 1830. In his articles, he railed against the monarchy’s monopoly on education. When he was only twenty-one years old, Montalembert founded a Roman Catholic school, only to have it shut down by the police. The Chamber of Peers, to which his father had belonged, consented to hear his case and let him go with a nominal fine. Montalembert’s renown continued to grow until he was the leader of the liberal Catholic movement. Once elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1848, however, he was led by his fear of mob rule to vote conservatively. He supported Minister of Public Education Falloux’s effort to institute a mixed system of secular and Catholic schools and also backed Louis-Napoléon’s election, only to find himself nearly the only member of the Legislative Corps willing to oppose the emperor’s repressive laws. Montalembert retired from politics in 1857 but never stopped calling for a free church in a free state.

MARTHE-CAMILLE-BACHASSON, COMTE DE MONTALIVET (1801–1880), inherited a seat in the Chamber of Peers from his father. And just as the old count had been minister of the interior for Napoleon I, so Montalivet became minister of the interior under King Louis-Philippe. He tried and failed to persuade the king to institute electoral reform and to dismiss his prime minister, Guizot, whose uncompromising conservatism was feeding the republican fire.

CHARLES-AUGUSTE, DUC DE MORNY (1811–1865), was the illegitimate son of the comte de Flahaut and Queen Hortense (married to Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland), making him the half brother of Louis-Napoléon. Stylish and shrewd, he amassed a sizable fortune from extracting sugar from beets and speculating in other industries with the financial support of his wealthy mistress, Mme de Lehon. First elected deputy in 1842, he confined himself to questions of finance and industry until he sensed the imminent power play of his half brother and joined with the duc de Persigny, Saint-Arnaud, and Magnan to organize his coup, a stunt that earned Morny the post of minister of the interior. Still, Morny was at heart a businessman, and after six months in the cabinet, he gave up his post and returned to his lucrative investments. Morny retained his seat in the Legislative Corps, however, and used his considerable influence to advocate the shift toward a more liberal empire.

NAPOLEON I (NAPOLEON BONAPARTE) (1769–1821) was a military genius who toppled the Directory to become first consul (1799) and then emperor (1804–14). A series of victories over the British, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians, the Spanish, and the Portuguese placed most of Europe under his control. He consolidated his empire under the Napoleonic Code and a system of public education. It all came crashing down, however, when Napoleon’s invasion of Russia ended in catastrophe and his enemies allied to seize Paris. Napoleon escaped captivity on the island of Elba to rule for another hundred days, but the British defeated him at Waterloo, and he died a prisoner on a lonely island in the South Atlantic.

NAPOLEON III (LOUIS-NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE) (1808–1873) was the son of Louis Bonaparte, Napoleon I’s younger brother. He grew up in Switzerland, believing himself the rightful heir to his uncle’s empire. After adventures among the Carbonari in Italy, the young prince twice attempted to usurp King Louis-Philippe’s throne. His efforts earned him exile to Brazil and then imprisonment in France, from which he escaped after six years by disguising himself as a bricklayer. Bonaparte saw his chance for power in the revolution of 1848. Carried by the revival of the Napoleonic legend, he trounced General Cavaignac in the elections for the presidency of the Republic. The National Assembly refused to amend the constitution to allow for his reelection, so he dissolved it on December 2, 1851, instituted an authoritarian regime, and a year later proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III. The emperor pursued an agenda of economic development and modernization at home, helped Italy throw off Austrian occupation, and lent a hand to the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War, against Russia. He even allowed for a number of liberal and parliamentary reforms in the late 1860s. However, his luck turned sour with a catastrophic expedition in Mexico and then the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, which ended with his capitulation and the declaration of the Third Republic.

FRANÇOIS-MARIE-CASIMIR DE NÉGRIER (1788–1848) enlisted in the light infantry at the age of seventeen and fought in Napoleon I’s campaigns in Prussia and Spain. Allowed to remain in the army under the Restoration, Négrier served expertly in Algeria and became a general. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly and designated a quaestor in 1848. At the same time, he accepted a division in the National Guard, which he led against the insurgents on the right bank of the Seine during the June Days. Négrier was shot and killed during a charge.

LOUIS D’ORLÉANS, DUC DE NEMOURS (1814–1896), was the second son of King Louis-Philippe. At the outbreak of the February revolution, the duc de Nemours orchestrated the king’s escape and then accompanied his sister-in-law, the duchesse d’Orléans, to the Chamber of Deputies. Some of the deputies wanted to appoint him regent, but both he and the duchess were forced to flee when a mob of armed republicans stormed the building.

COUNT KARL VON NESSELRODE (1780–1862) was the son of a Russian ambassador and himself joined the diplomatic service of Czar Alexander I. Nesselrode was promoted to chancellor of the Russian Empire under Nicholas I. His recommendation that the czar assist Austria in suppressing the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 strengthened Russia’s image as a formidable force in Europe, but his provocation of the Ottoman Empire helped bring on the ruinous Crimean War. Nesselrode’s name is associated with a number of desserts, including Nesselrode Pudding, a creamy chestnut concoction originally served to the count by his French chef.

NICHOLAS I (1796–1855) became czar of Russia when his brother Alexander I died of typhus in 1825. While Alexander had been torn between his humanist beliefs and Russia’s autocratic tradition, Nicholas suffered no such doubts. He focused his attention on stamping out corruption in the Russian bureaucracy and refused to make any significant reforms to serfdom. Nicholas I also waged expensive military campaigns against the Ottoman Empire, and when the 1848 revolutions racked Europe, he used his vast army to crush insurrections in Poland and Hungary. With the help of his chancellor, Count Nesselrode, he tried to expand Russia’s influence through alliances with Austria and Prussia (Friedrich Wilhelm IV was his brother-in-law), but both powers abandoned him in the disastrous Crimean War (1853–56). Nicholas I died of pneumonia after a string of defeats, and his successor had to accept very unfavorable terms to end the war.

CONSTANTINE HENRY PHIPPS, LORD NORMANBY (1797–1863), was a British Whig who filled a host of administrative and parliamentary offices during his lifetime, including those of governor of Jamaica, Home Secretary, and from 1846 to 1852 ambassador to France. As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1835, Normanby attracted Protestant ire and Irish respect by removing partisan magistrates from the courts and appointing Catholics to influential government posts. His term as ambassador to France proved equally controversial, since his close relationship with Adolphe Thiers aroused the suspicion of King Louis-Philippe and his minister, François Guizot. Guizot reportedly said of Normanby that he was a “good boy, but he does not speak our language.” In 1848 Normanby helped to mediate Franco-Anglican policy toward Italy, but he kept a diary that, when published in 1857 as Year of Revolution, was criticized by Louis Blanc, then in exile in London, for being blind to the revolution’s significance. As Tocqueville notes, Normanby had special access to Louis-Napoléon’s ear thanks to a friendship he cultivated with the prince-president’s English mistress, Miss Howard. In 1849 that influence helped the ambassador protect the Hungarian general Lajos Kossuth and position France with England to prevent a Russo-Turkish war.

HÉLÈNE-LOUISE-ELISABETH, DUCHESSE D’ORLÉANS (1814–1858), was a pious German princess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and the niece of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. This made her a suitable wife for Ferdinand Philippe, King Louis-Philippe’s son, who was next in line to rule the July Monarchy but destined to die prematurely in a carriage accident. In 1838 the duchess gave birth to Louis-Philippe-Albert d’Orléans, who would become the comte de Paris. When revolution broke out ten years later, King Louis-Philippe named little Philippe his heir before fleeing to England. On the fateful day of February 24, the duchess visited the Constituent Assembly to defend her son’s claim and propose herself as his regent, but the Chamber was invaded by a mob of revolutionaries, so the duchess took Philippe and her younger son, Robert, duc de Chartres, back to Germany.

LOUIS-PHILIPPE-ALBERT D’ORLÉANS, COMTE DE PARIS (1838–1894), became the Orleanist heir to the French throne when his grandfather King Louis-Philippe abdicated in 1848. His mother, the duchesse d’Orléans, went to the Hôtel de Ville to claim his right and her own as regent but departed for Germany when it was clear that a republic had been established. Philippe was eighteen when he, his brother, and his mother moved to England to live with the aging former king and his wife. Bored with his studies, the count went to the United States in 1861, took an interest in the abolitionist cause, and fought for the Union under General George McClellan. His experiences furnished the basis for his well-researched History of the American Civil War, published in seven volumes. Back in England, Philippe married his cousin and had a large family with her. The downfall of Napoleon III finally permitted Philippe to return to France, where he received a cordial but distrustful welcome from Adolphe Thiers. The Orleanist heir recognized that he did not have the same following as the Bourbon pretender, Henri, comte de Chambord, so he renounced his claim in his cousin’s favor.

NICOLAS-CHARLES-VICTOR OUDINOT DE REGGIO (1791–1863) fought in the Napoleonic Wars as a cavalry officer and then participated in the conquest of Algeria, eventually climbing to the rank of general. As a deputy beginning in 1842, he focused mostly on military matters. The provisional government of the Second Republic gave the general command of the Army of the Alps, and Louis-Napoléon tried to make him minister of war, but Oudinot relinquished the first and refused the second. The following year, however, he led an expeditionary force to besiege Rome, crush the infant Roman Republic, and restore Pope Pius IX to power. On the day of Louis-Napoléon’s coup, Oudinot tried to rally the National Guard against him, but he was captured and interned with his fellow deputies in the barracks of the quai d’Orsay and subsequently retired from both political and military life.

ALPHONSE-GABRIEL-VICTOR PAILLET (1796–1855) proved his great talents as a lawyer in cases like the 1836 trial of Giuseppe Fieschi and his accomplices, who had attempted to assassinate King Louis-Philippe. As a deputy beginning in 1846, Paillet sided with the monarchists, but he contributed little to the great political debates of the day. However, he and another legitimist lawyer, Pierre-Antoine Berryer, played key roles defending the Orléans family in court when Louis-Napoléon moved to nationalize their property in 1852. Three years later, rising to address the jury in another case, Paillet succumbed to a fatal attack of apoplexy.

LORD HENRY JOHN TEMPLE PALMERSTON (1784–1864) was a long-lived English Whig who was serving his second term as British foreign secretary when Tocqueville was minister of foreign affairs in France. Palmerston’s Tory opponents criticized him for encouraging revolutionary movements in Europe. Palmerston indeed believed in an Italian federation and thought the Austrian emperor should withdraw his troops from the Piedmont, but for Austria’s own good and for the peace of Europe rather than for the political liberty of the Italians. And when Austria was heavy-handedly repressing Hungary’s revolution, Palmerston kept England far out of the fray. His policy toward France was to protect any regime that seemed durable, deter it from involving itself in war, and try to cooperate with it so long as British interests were served. Palmerston gained popularity by welcoming the defeated Hungarian general Lajos Kossuth to Britain. He would later serve two terms as prime minister.

HIPPOLYTE PASSY (1793–1880) was a French economist who served as minister of finance three times: in the short-lived cabinet of his friend Thiers (1836), in the Soult ministry (1839–40), and under Barrot in Louis-Napoléon’s first cabinet (1848–49). His interest in economic policy was ignited by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which Passy read during his voyage to the Caribbean after fighting a losing battle for Napoleon at Waterloo. On his return to France, Passy entered the Chamber of Deputies and immediately took charge of its budget reports. He supported free trade, proposed plans to gradually grant freedom to slaves in the French colonies, and fought the colonization of Algeria, which he believed would burden France economically. Though he backed Louis-Napoléon’s candidacy for president, he frowned on the coup and retired from political life. Passy wrote a number of treatises for the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, including On the Causes of the Inequality of Riches (1848), and he advised Tocqueville on the economics of property ownership when the latter was working on The Ancien Régime and the Revolution.

CHARLES-PIERRE-PAUL PAULMIER (1811–1887) was sent to the Chamber of Deputies in 1846 to represent Calvados, a département in lower Normandy. He failed to win reelection to the Constituent Assembly after the February revolution but regained the National Assembly as a monarchist the following year. Paulmier showed himself sympathetic to Louis-Napoléon and served in his legislature; however, after the fall of the Second Empire, he aligned himself with the moderate republicans of the Senate.

NICOLAS-LUCIEN-ÉMILE PÉAN (1809–1871), the son of a baker in Orléans, worked as a lawyer and wrote for Le National before successfully running for the Constituent Assembly in 1848. He actively resisted Louis-Napoléon’s coup and thus was one of the 1,545 political opponents expelled from the country in 1852. Péan took refuge in Belgium until the general amnesty of 1859.

PELLAGOT, a colonel in the twelfth legion of the gendarmerie, appears to have lived in Belgium until Louis-Napoléon rose to power. He enforced the state of siege in the département of Lot in southwestern France, where he issued warrants for the arrest of political insurgents and anyone who abetted them.

SILVIO PELLICO (1789–1854) was an Italian playwright and the author of My Prisons, a memoir of his experiences in the dungeons of Milan, Venice, and the Spielberg Castle, where he was incarcerated for his activities with the Carbonari. Published in 1832, the memoir aroused sympathy for Pellico’s cause and also served as a model for the memoirs of his friend and fellow prisoner, Alexandre-Philippe Andryane.

JOSEPH PERRIER was a businessman of Marne, where he belonged to the Society of Agriculture, Commerce, Science, and Art. In 1825 he founded the house Joseph Perrier Sons and Company in Châlon-sur-Marne, which continues to make and sell excellent champagne.

VICTOR-FIALIN, DUC DE PERSIGNY (1808–1872), received a military education but was dismissed from the army for insubordination. He thereafter devoted himself to the imperialist cause, editing a journal, recruiting followers, and taking a hand in every Bonapartist plot. When captured, he loudly defended the imperial dream and received a twenty-year prison sentence; however, he was soon released due to poor health. In 1848 Persigny threw himself into Louis-Napoléon’s election campaign and became the president’s aide-decamp and a deputy in the Legislative Corps. He was also (unsurprisingly) one of the chief architects of the 1851 coup and afterwards only continued to climb the ranks as minister of the interior and ambassador to London; the emperor made him a duke in 1864.

CHARLES-IGNACE, COMTE DE PEYRONNET (1778–1854), was an ardent royalist who joined King Charles X’s cabinet as minister of the interior in 1830. Like the prince de Polignac, Peyronnet was convicted of high treason for abetting the July Ordinances, which dissolved the Chamber, suspended the liberty of the press, and finally sparked the revolution. He was granted amnesty after six years of incarceration.

KARL LUDWIG, BARON VON DER PFORDTEN (1811–1880), was chief minister of Bavaria under King Maximilian II beginning in 1849. His dream was to create a league of German states in order to balance powerful Prussia and Austria, but failing this, he helped steer Bavaria toward alliance with Austria against Prussia—an unfortunate choice, given the rise of the clever Prussian politician Otto von Bismarck.

PIERRE-MARIE PIÉTRI (1809–1864), a self-declared republican, was appointed commissary of the provisional government in Corsica in 1848. He represented Corsica to the Constituent Assembly and loyally voted with his party until Louis-Napoleon emerged as a candidate for president; thenceforward, Piétri was a Bonapartist. His role in the coup assured him the prefecture of the Haute-Garonne département and, later, a part in the annexation of the Duchy of Savoy, in the French Alps.

PIUS IX (1792–1878) succeeded Pope Gregory XVI as head of the Catholic Church and temporal ruler of the Papal States in 1846. The Italians welcomed him as a liberal pope, since he was willing to grant political amnesty and create an elected advisory council. However, the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848 forced Pius IX to go still further, creating a bicameral parliament checked only by his veto. As the kingdoms of Sardinia and Piedmont struggled against Austrian occupation, Pius IX strove to remain neutral, but many considered his inaction a betrayal. Faced with a radical ministry and hostile people, the pope fled south to the Kingdom of Naples with the help of the French ambassador, the duc d’Harcourt. In April 1849, General Oudinot led French troops to subdue the revolutionaries in the Papal States. President Louis-Napoléon organized a second expedition in June, which successfully restored Pius IX, who from then on opposed any form of constitutional government or hint of nationalism. It was not until 1870 that Victor Emmanuel II managed to seize Rome and make it the capital of a united Italy.

CHARLES-IGNACE PLICHON (1814–1888) excelled as a lawyer, leading Guizot to entrust him with a mission to North Africa in 1841. In 1846 he, Lanjuinais, Tocqueville, and two others formed the parliamentary commission sent to Algeria to study the situation and propose future policy. Attracted by the teachings of the socialist Saint-Simon as a young man, Plichon was a champion of Catholicism and protectionist trade policies in Napoleon III’s Legislative Corps from 1857 to 1870 and in the Senate from 1871 until his death. He served as minister of public works for a few months in Émile Ollivier’s cabinet (1870).

JULES-ARMAND, PRINCE DE POLIGNAC (1771–1847), was an ultraroyalist who served as squire to the comte d’Artois. He and his wife had lost a great part of their fortune in the French Revolution and fled to Russia, where Catherine the Great gave them land. Polignac surreptitiously returned to France in 1804 and joined Jean-Charles Pichegru and Georges Cadoudal in a conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon I. All three were captured, and Pichegru and Cadoudal were guillotined, but the tearful pleas of Polignac’s wife saved him from death; he was merely imprisoned until the invasion of the allied armies in 1814 afforded him the chance to escape. Polignac won election to the Chamber of Deputies under King Louis XVIII and was named ambassador to London. Under the comte d’Artois’s reign as King Charles X, Polignac became prime minister (1829). He organized the expedition to Algiers and advised the king to enact the restrictive ordinances that set off a new revolution in 1830. Under the July Monarchy he was arrested, imprisoned, and then exiled from France.

AUGUSTE-JOSEPH-MELCHIOR DE PORTALIS (1801–1855) was the nephew of the comte de Portalis, who had been a member of Napoleon I’s Council of State and served as chief judge of the Court of Appeals. Auguste was trained as a lawyer and received his first court appointment in 1823 as substitute prosecutor in the Meaux tribunal. He soon lost the post, however, for supporting a provisional government that was supposed to unseat Charles X. Portalis was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1831 as a member of the radical left, and after the revolution of 1848 he was made chief prosecutor of Paris. It was therefore his task to conduct the judicial inquiry into the May 15 storming of the Constituent Assembly. Portalis’s insistence that Louis Blanc be included among the indicted was unpopular with Minister Barrot, and he was forced to resign that June. Portalis became vice president of the Constituent Assembly in 1848, voting mainly with the left and strongly opposing Louis-Napoléon’s policies. He quit politics after he failed to be reelected in 1851.

PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON (1809–1865) was a socialist philosopher who incensed his contemporaries by declaring that “property is theft.” He did not mean that no one should own land or goods; rather, he believed that the absolute right to exploit one’s property—especially by gathering interest on it without putting it to any productive use—was fundamentally unjust. Born to a luckless barrel maker in Besançon, Proudhon found work in a printing shop and met the local socialists who were eager to print their theories, including Charles Fourier. In 1840 he wrote his provocative book What is Property?, followed by the still more daring sequel, Warning to Proprietors (1842). In Lyon, Proudhon fell in with a group of working-class activists called the Mutualists, and in Paris he met Karl Marx. He incorporated some of their philosophies into his economic theory, which nevertheless remained more libertarian than either communist or anarchist. It is worth noting that Marx later criticized Proudhon in a scathing essay titled Misery of Philosophy: A Response to the Philosophy of Misery of M. Proudhon (1847). Proudhon remained aloof from the fighting of the revolution of 1848 but seized the opportunity to join the Constituent Assembly, where he advocated heavy property taxes and the creation of an exchange bank—neither of which received any support among his fellow legislators. Louis-Napoléon imprisoned the philosopher for three years and then censored him so aggressively that he fled to Belgium, where he continued his solitary battle for a new social order.

JOSEPH RADETZ VON RADETZKY (1766–1858), affectionately called “Vater Radetzky” by his soldiers, was a hero of the Austrian Imperial Army. He played a decisive role in the Napoleonic Wars and attained the rank of chief of staff, although stubborn army convention defeated all his attempted reforms. He was called out of semiretirement to command the Army of Italy in 1831 and again to lead the Austrian army against the Piedmontese and Sardinian forces in 1848. Radetzky crushed the Italian Revolution in two decisive battles, one at Custoza (July 1848) and the other at Novara (March 1849). The Austrian emperor made him governor-general of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, where he ruled with iron-fisted paternalism and meted out punishment to former revolutionaries until 1857. The general died in Milan, having served Austria for more than seventy years, forever memorialized by Johann Strauss’s Radetzky March.

PRINCE LÉON RADZIWILL (1801–1882) belonged to an aristocratic Polish-Lithuanian family. He became an aide-de-camp to Czar Nicholas I; his wife, the Moscow beauty Sofya Urusova, also joined the imperial court as maid of honor and perhaps as a mistress to the czar. Nicholas I sent Prince Radziwill to Constantinople to demand that the Ottoman sultan surrender the Hungarian revolutionaries who had fled to him for protection.

JACQUES-LOUIS-CÉSAR-ALEXANDRE, COMTE DE RANDON (1795–1871), served as a sublieutenant in Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia. His loyalty to the Bonapartes forced him to retire after Waterloo, but he was called up again under the July Monarchy and sent to Algeria in 1838. In 1851 he briefly sat as minister of war, but during the coup he ceded the ministry to General Saint-Arnaud and himself became governor-general of Algeria, where he was an effective administrator. The comte de Randon returned to France in 1859 to serve as a senator and again as minister of war, but his career began to wane as his health declined.

FRANÇOIS-VINCENT RASPAIL (1794–1878) arrived in Paris in 1816 to study natural science and law. He became an accomplished scientist, inventing a simple microscope and a camphor-based health treatment, writing texts on organic chemistry, and testifying as a toxicologist in a famous murder trial. However, Raspail was also a die-hard republican and could not resist the chance to conspire with the Charbonnerie. He was badly wounded on the barricades of the July revolution, and the new monarchy offered to decorate him for his service, but he refused in the name of égalité. Raspail recommenced his republican propagandizing, which kept him in and out of prison; in one case, he was acquitted of a crime only to be condemned for the comments he made during his legal defense. Unsurprisingly, Raspail was at the head of the revolution of 1848 and, with Blanqui and Barbès, organized the May 15 insurrection. This earned him four years in prison and two years of exile in Belgium. Returning to France in 1859, Raspail was elected as a left-wing deputy in 1869 and 1876, with a year-long interlude in prison for incendiary passages in his Almanac and Meteorological Calendar (1874).

CHARLES-FRANÇOIS-MARIE, COMTE DE RÉMUSAT (1797–1875), was in many ways a kindred spirit to Tocqueville and a colleague at both the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and the Académie française. Educated as a lawyer, he was also an aristocratic man of letters who wrote memoirs and treatises on theology, philosophy, and political history. Rémusat loyally supported Thiers and served in his 1840 government as minister of foreign affairs, although without making any memorable decisions. Rémusat then followed Thiers into the moderate opposition party but always regretted the fall of the constitutional monarchy and continued to vote fairly conservatively as a member of the center left in the Constituent Assembly after 1848.

MUSTAFA RESHID PASHA (1802–1858) occupied the position of grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire six times beginning in 1839. He spearheaded the modernization of Turkey via the Tanzimat Reforms, which standardized taxes, organized a secular educational system, and set forth a new civil code. Reshid Pasha was fluent in French and promoted closer relations with Britain and France in his foreign policy.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS-PAUL DE GONDI, CARDINAL DE RETZ (1613–1679), was a Catholic priest and master of courtly intrigue. He planned (but never carried off) an assassination of Cardinal Richelieu, who was working to undermine the French aristocracy in favor of an absolute monarchy. Retz helped lead the nobility in the Fronde des nobles, a rebellion against Louis XIV’s mother and regent, Anne of Austria, and her head minister, Cardinal Mazarin. The rebellion eventually exhausted itself, and though Retz managed to become archbishop of Paris, he never ingratiated himself with Louis XIV. Retz’s memoirs, written during the last years of his life, describe his part in the Fronde.

ARMAND-JEAN DU PLESSIS RICHELIEU (1585–1642) relinquished his military career to become a bishop in order to maintain his family’s eminence in the church. Ferociously intelligent, he schemed and maneuvered until he had won a place in King Louis XIII’s council. He quickly extended his influence over all of France and instituted a three-point program to weaken the aristocracy, destroy the Huguenots, and fight the house of Austria. In addition, Richelieu strengthened the country’s commercial and naval industries. After Richelieu’s death, his protégé, Cardinal Mazarin, replaced him as chief minister to the king.

JEAN-CHARLES RIVET (1800–1872) was a close friend to Tocqueville, who wrote the third installment of Recollections at a house built on land belonging to Rivet in Versailles. Rivet joined Tocqueville in the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, where he firmly opposed the initiatives of Guizot. After the revolution of 1848, Rivet represented the Rhône département in the Constituent Assembly. He voted with the conservatives in favor of granting executive powers to General Cavaignac, against the right to work, and in favor of the Rome expedition. The Assembly named him to the Council of State, but the 1851 coup drove Rivet to withdraw from politics and devote himself to the administration of western France’s railroad network.

MAXIMILIEN-FRANÇOIS-MARIE-ISIDORE DE ROBESPIERRE (1758–1794) was a revolutionary Jacobin nicknamed “the Incorruptible” for his unshakeable commitment to an egalitarian and republican France. He defended the rights of Jews and black slaves and fought for universal suffrage. Unfortunately, after the revolution Robespierre used his authority as a member of the Committee of Public Safety to participate in a violent purification campaign. During the so-called Reign of Terror an estimated 16,500 nobles alleged to be enemies of the republic were guillotined. Robespierre was shaken by the slaughter but declared it “nothing more than speedy, severe, and inflexible justice”; he remained a high-profile spokesman for the committee and even contributed to the indictments of his former comrades Danton and Desmoulins. Accused of dictatorial ambitions, Robespierre was himself guillotined before a cheering crowd on July 28, 1794.

ÉDOUARD-LÉON ROGER DU NORD (1803–1881) served as a conservative legislator for most of his life, first entering the Chamber in 1834 and then winning reelection to the Constituent Assembly and the Senate. A contemporary portrait of Roger describes him as a scrawny man with an acerbic voice, but his vivacity made up for his poor oratory. He opposed the 1848 revolution and the provisional government that followed but was even less partial to Louis-Napoléon and left politics after the coup. Roger returned only in 1871, when France’s presidency was safely in the hands of his good friend Adolphe Thiers.

EUGÈNE ROUHER (1814–1884) voiced socialist opinions during the revolution of 1848, but once elected to the Constituent Assembly, he opposed the right to work and declined to vote for progressive taxation. He was drawn to Louis-Napoléon and cemented his Bonapartist inclinations during a stint as minister of justice in 1849. Rouher continued to defend the emperor’s every policy as president of the Council of State and then of the Senate, as well as in a variety of ministerial posts. Even after the fall of the empire, Rouher called for Bonapartist rule in the person of the prince imperial, the only son of Napoleon III.

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU (1712–1778) was a Swiss-born philosopher whose ideas rocked Europe and helped motivate the French Revolution. His treatise Social Contract argued that political sovereignty belonged to the people, who then accorded power to a government based on common consent. His autobiography, Confessions, was one of the first great works of its genre. On top of these, Rousseau wrote novels, including the well-known Julie, or the New Heloise and Émile, or on Education, which inaugurated a modern sensibility that recognized children as unique individuals in their own right and sanctioned public displays of emotion.

JEAN-BERNARDIN ROUXEL was an affluent farmer who presided as mayor of the village of Tocqueville. He and Alexis de Tocqueville exchanged letters about events in the capital and about their common acquaintances in Normandy.

PIERRE-PAUL ROYER-COLLARD (1763–1845) was leader of the doctrinaires, a group of constitutional monarchists including de Broglie and Rémusat that formed under the Bourbon Restoration. He taught himself philosophy and became chair of the history of modern philosophy department at the Sorbonne in 1803; there he first met his colleague and longtime political ally Guizot. Elected deputy for the Marne département in 1815, Royer-Collard fought to lower the poll tax, expand public education, and protect the right to petition. As president of the Chamber beginning in 1828, he boldly opposed King Charles X and his lackeys Peyronnet and Polignac. After the July revolution, however, Royer-Collard retreated from the political front lines except in pivotal moments, such as to denounce the 1834 coalition against Molé. He greatly admired Democracy in America, which he confessed to having read five times, and eagerly offered his mentorship to the young Tocqueville. The two men conducted an intense correspondence about individualism, liberty, and democracy.

JOSEPH-MARCELLIN RULHIÈRE (1787–1862) was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general after leading French forces in the Algerian conquest. He was a thoroughly conservative member of the Constituent Assembly and served without great distinction in Louis-Napoléon’s cabinet as minister of war.

ARMAND-JACQUES-ACHILLE-LEROY DE SAINT-ARNAUD (1801–1854), appointed minister of war on October 26, 1851, played a prominent role in Louis-Napoléon’s coup. As a young soldier he had been dismissed more than once for debts and inappropriate conduct, but he fought bravely in the conquest of Algeria and rose to the rank of general. It was in Algeria that he met Tocqueville on a government mission, but the two men failed to strike up any rapport. Even the comte de Morny, Saint-Arnaud’s friend and fellow architect of the coup, made fun of the unscrupulous general when his back was turned. Saint-Arnaud would later command the French forces in the Crimean War.

CLAUDE-HENRI DE ROUVROY, COMTE DE SAINT-SIMON (1760–1825), was a theorist whose unique brand of Christian socialism, characterized by the scientific organization of industry and agriculture, won many converts (including Auguste Comte and Philippe Buchez). He hoped that using modern technology to efficiently allocate production would create a just and peaceful society. Saint-Simon spent much of his life on the brink of bankruptcy and in 1823 attempted suicide—but only succeeded in blinding himself in one eye.

CHARLES-JEAN SALLANDROUZE DE LAMORNAIX (1808–1867), who succeeded his father as the proprietor of large carpet factories, was interested in questions of industry and patent law. An unsuccessful bid for deputyship in 1842 was followed by a successful one in 1846. Sallandrouze showed himself to be a conservative but freethinking man and was reelected to Napoleon III’s Legislative Assembly from 1851 until his death.

GEORGE SAND. See AURORE DUDEVANT

JEAN-PIERRE SAUZET (1800–1876), known as Paul, the son of a Lyonnais doctor, found his own vocation in law. His clever defense on behalf of Charles X’s minister of justice drew applause from the Chamber of Peers even though it ultimately failed to save Jean de Chantelauze from a sentence to life in prison (which was, however, lifted by a collective pardon in 1836). Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1834, Sauzet allied himself with the constitutional monarchists and accepted the post of minister of justice in Thiers’s short-lived 1836 cabinet. Sauzet continued to sit in the Chamber and indeed served as its president from 1839 until his resignation in 1848.

HENRY-CHARLES-JOSEPH SAVOYE (1802–1896) was born in Bavaria and studied law at Germany’s two oldest universities, Heidelberg and Würtzburg. He immigrated to France in 1832, worked as a German language tutor, and at last received the French citizenship he coveted in 1848. Savoye joined the National Assembly in 1849 as a republican. Only two years later, however, Louis-Napoléon’s coup compelled him to leave France, whereupon he permanently installed himself in London.

FELIX, PRINCE OF SCHWARZENBERG (1800–1852), left the Austrian army for the diplomatic service in 1824 and soon caught the attention of the chancellor, Klemens von Metternich. The prince’s diplomatic career was interrupted, however, when revolution wracked Europe in 1848. Schwarzenberg left Austria to fight in northern Italy under Count Radetzky; wounded, he returned to Vienna. The Austrian imperial court had meanwhile fled to Olmütz, leaving Schwarzenberg in charge as prime minister. He managed to secure Emperor Ferdinand I’s abdication in favor of the more able Franz-Joseph and to replace the newly drafted constitution with a much more authoritarian one. With Schwarzenberg at the helm, Austria suppressed the Hungarian Revolution and maintained its control of the Italian Piedmont.

ANTOINE-MARIE-JULES SÉNARD (1800–1885) was a renowned lawyer and an active opponent of the Orleanist regime. The provisional government named him chief prosecutor of Rouen in 1848, but he resigned the post in order to run for a place in the Constituent Assembly. Sénard presided over the Assembly until Cavaignac gave him the Ministry of the Interior in June 1849. The lawyer’s distaste for Louis-Napoléon led him to quit politics after the presidential election, and he did not return until 1874 as a republican deputy of the Third Republic.

NASSAU SENIOR (1790–1864) belonged to the second generation of British classical economists. He was a professor of political economy at the University of Oxford and published his greatest contribution, An Outline of the Science of Political Economy, in 1836. This work helped establish economics as a hard, deductive science capable of informing political decision making. In it, Senior shrewdly criticized the earlier economist David Ricardo, for example, by defining the value of goods as a function of their utility and scarcity rather than a function of how expensive they were to produce. Senior also developed abstinence theory, the idea of a reward for not spending accumulated capital and therefore the inclusion of capital accumulation as a cost of production. Tocqueville met Senior when he went to England in 1833; at the time Senior was working on a restrictive new British Poor Law (1834). Senior read and critiqued Tocqueville’s manuscript of Democracy in America and submitted it to selected English reviewers. The two men corresponded and visited with each other regularly. Senior kept a journal of his May 1848 visit to the Tocquevilles, which afforded him the opportunity to dine with Victor Cousin and the comte Molé and to discuss the revolution with them.

MARIE-JOSEPH SOBRIER (1810–1854), the son of a Lyonnais grocer, allegedly threw himself into the republican cause after a serious accident caused him briefly to lose his reasoning. He fought on the barricades in the February revolution and was given a place in the Parisian police by his friend Marc Caussidière. Thwarted in his efforts to join the Constituent Assembly in April, Sobrier took part in the May 15 uprising as one of the leading rioters; arrested, he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.

EUGÈNE STÖFFELS (1805–1852) and his brother, Charles, were schoolmates of Alexis de Tocqueville’s. The three met as boys, studying rhetoric at the Collège Royal in Metz, where Tocqueville’s father had been posted prefect in 1817. Belonging to the middle class rather than to the aristocracy, the Stöffels stood out among Tocqueville’s friends. Yet Eugène was one of the very few whom Tocqueville addressed with the familiar tu form, and the two exchanged rich letters until Tocqueville’s death in 1852. Although Charles also corresponded with Tocqueville, his tendency to air long-winded opinions on transcendental Christianity elicited affectionate tolerance rather than true rapport. Tocqueville, for his part, avoided burdening his royalist friend Eugène with his political sentiments, but he poured out his doubts and ambitions, his musings on ethics, and his thoughts on human nature. Eugène gave the name Alexis to his third son, born in 1836, and asked Tocqueville to be the boy’s godfather.

LÉON TALABOT (1796–1863), foreman of the iron works at Condat, was continuously elected deputy from 1836 until the February revolution. He had toyed with Saint-Simonianism in the 1820s but voted with the center left in the Chamber and became close to Thiers.

ADOLPHE THIERS (1797–1877) was a lawyer, historian, and journalist as well as a statesman. He wrote a ten-volume History of the French Revolution (published 1823–27), which young Tocqueville read closely but later criticized as too fatalistic. Together with Armand Carrel and François-Auguste Mignet, Thiers founded the journal Le National in 1830 to oppose King Charles X. He served as minister of the interior and minister of public works under the constitutional King Louis-Philippe. Promoted to prime minister for parts of 1836 and 1840, he mercilessly crushed both legitimist uprisings and left-wing worker insurrections in Paris and Lyon. He was no puppet of the monarch, however, and famously adopted the motto “The king ought to reign and not govern.” During the Second Republic, Thiers was the acknowledged leader of the center left and the chief adversary of the socialists. He formed the Comité de la rue de Poitiers, a group that supported Louis-Napoléon’s candidacy for presidency only because it expected to control him. This proved impossible, and Thiers was exiled from France in 1851, when Louis-Napoléon proclaimed himself emperor. Thiers withdrew from politics to write his exhaustively researched twenty-volume History of the Consulate and the Empire. However, after foreseeing France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, he returned as first president of the Third Republic, at once brutally ending the workers’ insurrection of the Commune and negotiating peace terms with the Germans.

ALEXANDRINE DE TOCQUEVILLE (1803–1883) married Alexis’s brother Édouard. She was the daughter of the baron Ollivier, a prominent banker and peer of France. Alexandrine brought to her marriage an immense fortune, as well as extensive agricultural holdings in the Oise.

ÉDOUARD, BARON DE TOCQUEVILLE (1800–1874), was five years older than his brother Alexis. He embarked on a military career under the Bourbon Restoration but soon gave it up because of his fragile health. After marrying Alexandrine Ollivier, whose father sat on the governing board of the Bank of France, Édouard devoted himself wholeheartedly to the management of his estate and to the education of his five children. He broke with his brother over the coup of 1851 and ran for a seat in Louis-Napoléon’s Legislative Assembly. Losing the election, he soon repaired ties with Alexis.

HIPPOLYTE, VICOMTE DE TOCQUEVILLE (1797–1877), was Alexis’s oldest brother. A confirmed legitimist, he served in the personal cavalry of the Bourbon kings and retired in 1830 to avoid swearing allegiance to the new constitutional king. This did not prevent the vicomte from billing himself as a republican in 1848 in order to become councilor of the département of La Manche. After 1870 he supported the conservative Third Republic, won election to the Senate, and proved a firm guardian of republican institutions.

MARIE DE TOCQUEVILLE (1799–1864) was born Mary Mottley. An Englishwoman brought up in France, she was caring for an ageing aunt when she met Alexis de Tocqueville, then an apprentice magistrate at the Tribunal of Versailles. They married over the objections of Tocqueville’s parents, who must have considered middle-class Marie a poor match for their aristocratic son. Marie proved a faithful helpmate, however; she converted to Catholicism, carefully managed her husband’s estate, and reassured him whenever he doubted himself or fell into a gloom about the future of his country. Although childless and punctuated with disagreements, infidelities on the part of Alexis, and health problems for both of them, the Tocquevilles’ marriage was satisfying, and Alexis seems never to have regretted it.

ULYSSE TRÉLAT (1795–1879) was a republican doctor who specialized in the treatment of insanity. His experience as an army surgeon made him a valuable asset on the barricades of the July revolution. After the February revolution, he sat as a member of the Constituent Assembly for less than a month before his appointment as minister of public works, which saddled him with the thorny problem of the National Workshops. He quickly realized that the workshops were unsustainable and tried to find a way to dissolve them without doing greater harm to their enlistees, but he was hindered by the obstinate Luxembourg Commission and the reluctant Assembly. Falloux accused Trélat of inaction and demanded the creation of a special task force, which opted to shut down the workshops abruptly, prompting Trélat to resign his post in frustration. After the coup, Trélat gave up politics to return to medicine.

ACHILLE-TENAILLE DE VAULABELLE (1799–1879) left his native Yonne as a nineteen-year-old to pursue journalism in Paris. He founded two liberal journals, edited a third, and finally collaborated with Adolphe Thiers and Armand Carrel on Le National. His clearheaded style lent itself well to historical writing, and Vaulabelle’s History of the Two Bourbon Restorations was met with acclaim. In 1848 Vaulabelle won election to the Constituent Assembly and participated in the constitutional commission. He briefly served as minister of education under Cavaignac, using his tenure to reinforce the importance of history and modern languages in French schools.

ALEXIS VAVIN (1792–1863) represented Paris as a member of the liberal opposition in the Chamber of Deputies beginning in 1839. He subsequently sat as a conservative in both the Constituent and National Assemblies but opposed Louis-Napoléon’s coup and retired to private life.

NARCISSE VIEILLARD (1791–1857) was a Bonapartist, having fought for Napoleon I in Russia, Germany, and France. As tutor to Charles-Louis-Napoléon and his younger brother, the future emperor Louis-Napoléon, Vieillard earned the imperial family’s love and respect. He represented La Manche in the Chamber of Deputies concurrently with Tocqueville, who admired his moderate republicanism. Despite his intimacy with and support for Louis-Napoléon, Vieillard believed the prince would remain faithful to the republic and indeed was one of the few senators to vote against the reestablishment of the empire in 1852.

LOUIS-LUDOVIC VITET (1802–1873) held various administrative offices, including that of inspector general of historical monuments, before entering the legislature in 1834. It was he who submitted the famous proposition of the quaestors on November 6, 1851. This measure, also supported by Jean-Baptiste Charras and others, would have provided military protection to the Constituent Assembly against the eventuality of a coup d’état. The proposition was defeated by the republicans, in part owing to the reassurances of Michel de Bourges, who claimed that the people of France constituted an “invisible sentinel” standing guard over the Second Republic. Vitet, himself a monarchist, replied that the problem lay in the fact that the so-called sentinel was already intimately entangled with Louis-Napoléon.

ALEXANDRE-FRANÇOIS-AUGUSTE VIVIEN DE GOUBERT (1799–1854), known as Vivien, began his career by following in his father’s footsteps as a Parisian lawyer. He joined the opposition to the Bourbons, and once Louis-Philippe ascended to the throne, Vivien received the title of prosecutor general at the Court of Amiens. Vivien was named chief of police in 1831, when his predecessor, Jean-Jacques Baude, failed to quell riots on the anniversary of the death of the duc de Berry. However, his own command was just as short-lived because the monarchy suspected him of hesitating to put down republican riots in April of that year. Vivien’s political life had just begun, however. He joined the Chamber of Deputies in 1833, served as minister of justice under Thiers in 1840, sat as a conservative in both the Constituent Assembly and on the constitutional commission, and was minister of public works for General Cavaignac. Vivien gave up this last post when Louis-Napoléon gained the presidency, and he left politics for good after the coup.

FRANÇOIS-MARIE AROUET VOLTAIRE (1694–1778) was a philosophe of the French Enlightenment who employed his prodigious wit to denounce despotism, cruelty, and wanton violence. His satire Candide is still widely read, but he also penned a number of histories, plays, philosophical treatises, and even poems. During Tocqueville’s lifetime, a popular saying emerged regarding the French Revolution: “C’est la faute à Voltaire! C’est la faute à Rousseau!” (Voltaire and Rousseau are to blame!).

LOUIS, COMTE DE WOLOWSKI (1810–1876), who had been a student in France, fought for the Polish nationalist cause. He escaped execution at the hands of the Russians by acquiring French citizenship in 1834. A moderate republican, Wolowski used his seat in the Constituent Assembly to oppose Louis Blanc’s socialist proposals and to remind his fellow deputies of Poland’s plight. After the coup, Wolowski devoted himself to teaching economics and to the creation of the Crédit Foncier, a lending institution that soon monopolized mortgage-backed loans in France. The Crédit Foncier increased the availability of credit in France, thus helping to prevent further financial crises like that of 1847.