| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biography. By Hugh Brogan. (London: Profile, 2006. xii, 724 pp. £30.00, ISBN 978-1-86197-509-6.)

During the winter and spring of 1859, in the throes of his last illness, Alexis de Tocqueville sought relief for his ravaged lungs in the villa Montfleury in Cannes. In Hugh Brogan's superlative biography we can follow the dying historian as he traveled the course of those final months. He burst into sobs at the arrival of his dearest lifelong friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont. He made unreasonable demands on his overburdened wife, Marie. He read Edward Gibbon with wondrous amazement and worried about his unfinished history of the French Revolution. From John Stuart Mill he received a copy of On Liberty; "in the field of liberty we will always march forward shoulder to shoulder," Tocqueville wrote in grateful response (p. 627). And weeks before the final, devastating crisis he made his confession, received the Eucharist, and reconciled with the Catholic Church. One of the achievements of this biography is that it reveals how in the circumstances and manner of Tocqueville's death all the great themes of his life were thoroughly comprehended.

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