Alexis de Tocqueville, it’s fair to say, is more often cited than read. His oeuvre is enormous; the commonly used quotations—typically taken from Democracy in America, with a few, perhaps, coming from The Old Regime and the Revolution—provide an easy shortcut. More rarely, one will encounter a comment extracted from his remarkable Recollections—in particular, describing his walks through Paris, when he was in Parliament, during the 1848 Revolution. But if one considers the whole of his work, available in a prestigious French Pléiade collection and running to thousands of pages, an infinitely complex personality reveals itself.
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