Outrageous Flirtation, Repressed Flirtation, and the Gallic Singularity

In 1831, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville and his best friend Gustave de Beaumont traveled from the France of Louis-Philippe to the America of Andrew Jackson. While their ostensible purpose was to research and write a useful report on prison reform, their actual purpose was to establish some distance between themselves and the new July Monarchy until they could decide how best to further their fledgling legal careers in the challenging political climate of post-revolutionary France. In addition to visiting prisons, speaking to prison wardens, and interviewing prison inmates, then, they also took copious notes on every other aspect of American life that they could observe as they traveled up, down, and around the United States and Canada from New York in the east to Michigan in the west and from Quebec in the north to New Orleans in the south. Shortly after they returned to France in 1832 and co-authored their report On the Penitentiary System in 1833, Alexis de Tocqueville published the two volumes of his famous Democracy in America in 1835 and 1840.