Towards the end of his life, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote his nephew Hubert about the projects ongoing at Tocqueville, the ancestral family home located not far from Cherbourg which he, despite being the youngest son, had inherited in 1836. “For the first time,” he remarked, “I have undertaken to put a little order into all the old papers” documenting the family history. He discovered that his family had centuries ago “served as godfathers” for “a very large number of inhabitants of the village” leading him to think on the “sweet and paternal relations” that once existed binding lord and peasant to one another through place and mutual obligation: 

I have encountered the line of our fathers through nearly four hundred years, always finding them again in Tocqueville, and their history mingled with that of the whole population that surrounds me. There is a certain delight in thus treading on the ground that our ancestors inhabited, and in living in the midst of people whose origins are mingled with our own.

Tocqueville, seemingly in a wistful spirit, did not close the letter without advising his nephew to soon go about marrying. Though well-known, and rightfully so, for his friendships, Tocqueville counseled that “There is nothing solid and truly sweet in this world but domestic happiness.”

One might reasonably conclude these are the reflections of a man who, suffering bouts of illness that increasingly left him unable to work, felt his death approaching, but Tocqueville had always possessed not simply a love of home but a feeling for what home represented. In his early years, as a young lawyer, he and his friend and intellectual collaborator Gustave de Beaumont took up the study of English history. The Norman conquest, the Hundred Years War, and the Middle Ages—which he could have said, with Francois Guizot—were the “heroic age of France,” had infinite interest for him, inspiring fanciful visions of medieval Normandy. (This interest would later take clearer form in his Ancien Régime and the Revolution.) 

Despite therefore having made his name as a traveler who saw democracy in America and would later describe himself as “half Yankee”; despite being an aristocrat dedicated to the “providential fact” of a democratic future; despite having married an Englishwoman, Tocqueville was a Frenchman with a keen sense of home, patriotism, and noblesse oblige. “A man above all owes himself to his homeland … [and] he [must] always be ready to consecrate, if need be, his time, his fortune, and even his life to the service of the state and king,” as he wrote in a letter.

It is commonplace to emphasize the liminal, dual, dichotomous, sometimes seemingly contradictory, nature of Tocqueville’s life and work. Tocqueville seems to have lived and thought in the tension between poles. Many studies speak of his “strange” or “aristocratic” liberalism, of his position poised “between two worlds” and thus his unique ability to theorize—from the Greek theoria or seeing—the differences between aristocracy and the emerging democratic future. Jeremy Jennings contributes to this tradition in his new Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America. When I teach Tocqueville, I ask students to read him but also to think with him, to explore with him, and allow their minds to learn from how he thinks. Jennings uses the idea of traveling with Tocqueville in much the same way, and it is fitting. Neither a straightforward biography nor a travelog or history of his travels, Travels with Tocqueville presents his political thought as an ongoing journey best chronicled by examining the interaction of his penetrating intellect with the world around him. While Jennings selectively cites and discusses other scholarly literature on Tocqueville, that is not his principal goal; the principal goal is telling the story of the “journey of Tocqueville’s mind.”

In Tocqueville’s case, this journey was one for which both physical journeying and immersion, on the one hand, and intellectual exploration of the sort that could be done from an armchair or quiet library on the other, were each necessary and by themselves insufficient conditions to produce great work. Born to his aristocratic Norman family, a nephew of the great Chateaubriand (who himself made a literary career out of the theme of travel to America), Tocqueville pursued a law career in Versailles and Paris, before the 1830 French Revolution prompted him and his friend Beaumont to escape French domestic politics for the New World. Tocqueville often used metaphors drawn from art and painting. He wrote that to offer an “image” of democracy, he had to voyage to America.

His nine-month trip led him to cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, as well as to the frontier in Michigan and rapidly growing Ohio. It was then from the other side of the Atlantic, through reflection and research, he had to discern how best to depict what he saw. Similarly, to accurately convey the conditions of England, Algeria, Germany, or Italy—all of which he traveled to and wrote on, but not in book form—he had to see and reflect on them. This included “historical” travel: to reveal the sources of the French Revolution in the Ancien Regime, he immersed himself in the regional archives of Tours, in the Loire Valley. Tocqueville’s projects then were deep yet panoramic, and Jennings takes on this subject in his own panoramic style. 

It would not seem obvious that there needs to be another book on Tocqueville’s travels; George Pierson, Leo Damrosch, and others have produced similar books. But in taking on this project, Jennings does readers of Tocqueville—at some 400 pages, and going into great detail, it will most especially interest those already familiar with Tocqueville—a service. Tocqueville did not intend Democracy in America to be a light travelog of the sort other Frenchmen and Englishmen were writing on America in his day, which is why it took several years after his 1831 journey for him to publish Volume I (1835) and Volume II (1840).

He continued to explore America long after he left, though one of the upshots of this book is to de-center America in Tocqueville’s thought. America was essential, even central, but not the sole object of his penetrating mind. The book moves chronologically through his life, organizing chapters according to the places—America, Canada, England, Ireland, Switzerland, Algeria, Italy, and Germany, and again back to America and England, and eventually to Cannes where he died—that grounded his thought. It is not a straightforward biography however because of Jennings’s expert grip of Tocqueville’s theory, and his interweaving of the theory with the history; as the reader journeys with him and Jennings abroad and back to France in between, the reader can feel the gears of Tocqueville’s mind turning, working to order discrete facts into “idées mères” (mother ideas) and visions of the whole. The reader also gains a sense of where his lively, restless intellect might have yet carried him further abroad—to India, or to Russia, both of which he contemplated visiting and writing on—were it not for financial and physical constraints.

As a result, with Jennings’s help, sometimes the reader can also feel for his body. Thanks to our ready images of the American frontier, it is relatively easy to visualize the demands of his nine months traveling through North America. Though he and Beaumont often went by steamboat, they also traveled by stagecoach, horseback, or canoe. During the winter of 1831, one of the coldest on record in American history, Tocqueville nearly died of a fever along the edge of the frontier, far from any doctor. But travel within Europe could be just as difficult. Jennings cuts no corners describing the physical demands and the extreme wear and tear it sometimes took on both Tocqueville and his wife, Mary. (While on the one hand, she journeyed successfully with him to Algeria, her poor health, which sometimes required Tocqueville to bathe and clothe her, and push her in a wheelchair, cut short their trip to Germany. Tocqueville, feeling three months in the country insufficient to write on it, subsequently abandoned his planned project on it.) As one concrete example: The trip from the Tocqueville chateau to Paris itself took over two days by uncomfortable stagecoach over bad roads, with all the attendant delays of weather.

By the end of Tocqueville’s life, however, Napoleon III had opened the Cherbourg–Paris railroad line. This turned a taxing but relatively short trip into an easy seven- or eight-hour affair with lunch included. This trip today takes about three hours. It is a good (and for us today, humbling) reminder that for all the limitations imposed by his health problems, Tocqueville was adventurous. He was sometimes remarkably hardy and far more intrepid than his constitution (or his doctors) might suggest, or than most scholars today are expected or required to be.

In Jennings’s telling, it also becomes clear Tocqueville was as restless as the Americans he famously called restless. His impatience was well-known to his friends, and in a world where traveling often entailed weeks or months away at a time, he would eagerly embark to Algeria or to England, and scintillated by his new environs, he was eager to stay for long periods and drink in deeply the world around him.

That said, when abroad, he thought always of France. Eventually, Tocqueville would long for home, though upon returning it would take time to adjust to the quiet, tranquility, and “a thousand sweetnesses, not previously seen” of a “way of life that nevertheless always feels the same.” Tocqueville’s personal disquiet—his restless mind, as Peter Augustine Lawler phrased it—was therefore not limited to his Pascalian sense of faith and doubt. We can add restlessness and rest, adventure and the desire for home, to the list of Tocqueville’s dichotomies. His desire to travel lay in conflict with “his feeling of loneliness when traveling and his desire to be home among familiar surroundings and those he loved,” in Jennings’ words. He told his friend Kergolay, he “did not write one page” of Democracy ” without “thinking about [France] and having her, so to speak, before my eyes.” 

This returns us to the beginning of this review, to the idea of return implied by the idea of departure, and to the subject of home. Tocqueville commented in Democracy in America that Americans travel abroad with hearts “inflated with pride” in their country; their pride in their homeland is easily offended, though they also attempt to fit in with European, aristocratic society. At home in America, Americans are constantly on the move, with little in the way of law or custom to fix families to an ancestral home, such as the Tocqueville chateau, or to demand an individual’s loyalty to one place. The restlessness that produces exploration and innovation, on the one hand, and that leads Americans to sign short leases and prefer industry to farming, among other things, means that “the idea of instability possesses” the mind; “in democratic centuries, what is most in motion amid the motion of all things is the heart of man.” At the same time, however, one’s home—one’s point of departure—matters. “The man is so to speak a whole in the swaddling clothes of his cradle,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy; people, as well as “Peoples,” “always feel the effects of their origins. The circumstances that accompanied their birth and served to develop them influence the entire course of the rest of their lives.”

What then of the idea of home, and in Tocqueville’s words, our points of departure? What then of those ideas and places that, even if not home, have shaped us? One such “return” is the subject of Jennings’s penultimate chapter, in which he highlights Tocqueville’s writings on America post-1840 (those interested should see the co-edited volume on this subject by Jennings and Aurelian Craiutu, to whom Travels is dedicated), and his final trip across the channel to England. Just as Tocqueville told his nephew that he found special solace in his ancestral home and the recovery of his family history, so too did he find ways to “revisit” America and England.

It may be a surprise then to suggest that Tocqueville was—despite his deep loyalty to his ancestral home in Normandy, his French patriotism, and his appreciation for America and England—in a sense homeless. Yet he understood himself as a man without a party who aimed to look “beyond the parties.” An aristocrat committed to and living within a democratic age, he felt at home neither in the conservative world of his parent’s generation nor in the democratic future he worried would lead to soft despotism or socialism. Having claimed to have lost the faith of his fathers, Tocqueville concerned himself all his life with the status and health of the Catholic Church, involving himself in his later years with liberal Catholic reformers. He died, not in Normandy among the memories of his family, but in a rented house in Cannes. There is a semi-tragic sense of restlessness and metaphorical, if not strictly literal, homelessness about him.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons he is well-understood, as Jennings suggests, not only as a traveler but as a guide who, finding himself adrift “in the middle of a rapid river” alongside co-travelers distracted by “debris we still perceive on the bank,” aimed to work with them to master the tide and progress, if not to home, then to waters “regular” in their “movements.” A metaphor, used in Democracy’s Introduction, fitting for a man who nearly died in the Ohio River and returned to France to share what he had seen. Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America invites reflection therefore on what it is to travel and theorize a “new political science for a world altogether new.” By implication, Jennings also invites reflection on the significance of home and our points of departure, on our loves of the new and of the old, and on the quest for rest in a restless, rapidly shifting world.