Alexis de Tocqueville on Pauperism or the Unfulfilled Promises of the Democratic Revolution

Abstract

Alexis de Tocqueville, better known for his analysis of the Ancien Regime and democracy, was also politician and congressman. In 1848, before and after the February Revolution, Tocqueville warned in his discourses in the Assembly about the social and political consequences of the social question. Public intervention to relief the situation of waged laborers should be a priority for the state if the liberal character of the French Revolution was to be preserved. Democracy with its promise of equality and opportunities for all seemed to have failed those who produced social prosperity. In his interventions as in his two memoires on pauperism, Tocqueville calls for a public intervention to deal with the paradox of industrial democracies: the impoverishment of the working class amidst the increase of wealth for the rest of society.