Tocqueville, Napoleon, and the Writing of Biography in a Democratic Age

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville developed an important insight into the writing of biography. How deeply can a single individual influence the course of history? Tocqueville argued that the answer to the question depended on the position of both the authors and readers of the biography. In hierarchical, ‘aristocratic’ societies, in which a small number of individuals possess enormous authority and freedom of action, biography tends to become coterminous with history itself. In egalitarian, ‘democratic’ societies, it becomes far more circumscribed. In this chapter, the author explores how this distinction played out in the writing of one of the greatest historians of the age—Tocqueville himself—with respect to one of the most consequential individuals in all history: Napoleon Bonaparte.