evidence: 9 Alexis de Tocqueville’s Perspective on American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) Alexis de Tocqueville was born in Normandy, France in 1805, and visited the US only once, for about eleven months in 1832-33. The purpose of his trip was to study how Americans treated their prisoners, which was far more humanely than they were treated in Europe. After he wrote that book, he turned his general observations about the US into a much broader book for a wider audience: a study of democracy in the US and its lessons for the democratic revolution that he believed was inevitable in Europe. As he said in his introduction, "A new science of politics is necessary for a new era," and his book became the seminal work in the field of democratic theory.