Tocqueville’s engagement with military issues takes place, so to speak, on two fronts, the theoretical and the practical. In the third part of the second Démocratie, he devotes the last five chapters to the military question. There, he examines how democratic societies position themselves in relation to war, what the army looks like and how it functions in such societies. On the practical front, Tocqueville dealt with two warlike episodes in which his homeland was directly involved, namely the Crimean War (1854–1856) on the one hand and the war of conquest in Algeria on the other.