According to several consistent statements, Tocqueville was not a believer in a religious sense (e.g. OC XV, 2, 29; for details, see Goldstein 1975 and Hidalgo 2006, Chap. 5 ). He vividly describes the loss of his Catholic convictions, which he suffered as a teenager, in a letter to Sophie de Swetchine (see Sect. 17.13) and at the same time confesses to her how much he suffered throughout his life, having lost his metaphysical certainties at an early age (OC XV, 2, 315). The “universal doubt” that Tocqueville confesses in this context and which, subjectively, seems to have been primarily triggered by the reading of the works of Voltaire and Rousseau plunged him both personally and in terms of his predictions for modern society into deep despair. Privately, he considered the Christian or Catholic-Jansenist faith, which his tutor, the Abbé Lesueur, had introduced him to, as a gift from God, which was denied to him (Jardin 2005, 57 f.). However, as a theorist of democracy, he interpreted the noticeable socio-psychological loss of significance of religion in the age of equality (DA II, Part 1, Chap. 2) as a development that prepared citizens for despotism: