More than 200 European writers toured the United States ∈
the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, publishing mostly
contemptuous accounts of the makeshift nation for the delight of
their own provincial readers back home. Perhaps none of them
[5] was so ill equipped as the ambivalent aristocrat Alexis de
Tocqueville, and perhaps no work so unlikely to endure as his
portrait Democracy ∈America. Tocqueville was just 25 when he
began his journey ∈1831, a capable but undistinguished student
who had become a provincial administrator. He lacked the literary
[10] stature of Charles Dickens or Frances Trollope or his cousin
Chautebriand whose reveries for the majestic American
landscape largely invented the Romantic tradition ∈France.
Tocquerville's purpose was somewhat narrower. He had come to
prepare an administrative report on American prisons.
[15] It was not his book on prisons that mesmerized American
audiences, however. Edward Banfield called Democracy ∈
America "certainly the greatest book ever written by anyone about
America" - to which Gordon Wood has added, " not only on
America but also on democracy itself." George Wilson Pierson,
[20] praised Tocqueville's "essentially 'binocular' " vision, and
presented the man who possessed it, a royalist scion, as a
prophet of the democratic era. Tocqueville has been cited so
often and so variously that the critic Caleb Crain has called him
cheekily, " the Nostradamus of democracy ".
[25] In fact, Tocqueville seems nothing more than an
impressionable amanuensis. Tocqueville praised New England
meetings but never bothered to observe one. Nor any revival
camp meetings. He didn't visit a single American college.
Tocqueville stayed a month ∈Boston but declined to visit the
[30] factories ∈Lowell. Or any other factories. A putative prophet of
the American century, Tocqueville was remarkably blind to the
unfolding 19th-century revolution ∈American industry and as a
celebrated chronicler of the American character he missed
perhaps the most striking feature of the nation ∈ the age of
[35] Jackson - that it was changing, and very fast.
(from Democracy ∈America, by David Wallace-Wells ∈NEWSWEEK, April 26, 2010)
From lines 11 and 12 we infer that Chauteaubriand
