To modern ears, the report on the American penitentiary system sounds callous and ignorant about the psychological suffering of the inmates. In between a whirl of parties and dinners, they somehow found time to visit Niagara Falls, sleep in log cabins in the depths of Indian country, pose as prospective settlers in Detroit, endure shipwreck on the Ohio, witness the depredations of slavery in Baltimore and, of course, inspect prisons. In any case, the two young noblemen had a ball.

The real reason was that both men needed to lie low for a while following renewed political turbulence in 1830. The official reason for the trip was to study the penal system in America and report back on its viability for France. He was 25 when, in 1831, he set out with his close friend Gustave de Beaumont on the famous nine-month journey through America. Astonishingly perceptive and intellectually honest about political life, the great prophet of modern democracy remained 'a noble to the end of his days, and cannot be understood unless this is recognised'. Tocqueville never forgot his heritage and, according to Hugh Brogan, 'was never able to shake off a certain nostalgia for this lost world'.

His parents narrowly escaped with their lives, but the ordeal turned his father's hair white at the age of 21 and wrecked his mother's health for good. Ten members of his immediate family were imprisoned during the reign of terror and six of them executed. Despite a happy and indulged childhood, the legacy of the French revolution cast long shadows over his life and work. The youngest son of a distinguished aristocrat, Tocqueville was born in 1805. The Washington Post compared citing the French writer to citing the Bible, and the New Republic, in editorial desperation, was driven a while back to impose a three-year ban on Tocquevillia of any kind. So ubiquitous and revered is he in American intellectual life that no major political speech is considered complete without a quotation from his work. Scores of writers, film-makers, philosophers and politicians have retraced Tocqueville's steps in order to look in the mirror that he first held up to American society 150 years ago and to discover if the image it reflects is still a true one. For Americans themselves, Tocqueville's star has never faded. Unfashionable in Britain and entirely out of vogue until recently even in France, Tocqueville's Democracy in America made him a household name in the mid-19th century and is still regarded by many scholars as the greatest work on America ever written.

De tocqueville books