Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, was born on 29 July 1805 in Paris, into the French aristocracy at a time when the country's political landscape was still reshaping itself in the aftermath of revolution. His noble title — comte de Tocqueville — situated him within a class whose fortunes and assumptions the century would continue to test, and it was from this vantage point that he would pursue his multifaceted intellectual and public life.

Educated at the Lycée Fabert and subsequently at the University of Paris, Tocqueville went on to occupy a remarkable range of professional roles. He worked as a jurist, a politician, a diplomat, a historian, a sociologist, a philosopher, and an opinion journalist, composing his writings in French throughout his career. His work drew on these overlapping disciplines to examine political and social institutions with analytical precision. He was awarded the Montyon Prize in recognition of his contributions and was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honour, two distinctions that reflected the regard in which his contemporaries held his output.

Among his published works, The Old Regime and the Revolution, which appeared in 1856, stands as a substantial contribution to historical and political thought. In it, Tocqueville examined the structural conditions that preceded and shaped the French Revolution, tracing the continuities between the ancien régime and the revolutionary period that followed it. The work demonstrated the range of inquiry that characterized his career, drawing on history, political science, and sociological observation in equal measure.

Tocqueville's health declined in the years following the publication of that work, and he traveled south in search of a more favorable climate. He died on 16 April 1859 in Cannes, on the Mediterranean coast of France, at the age of fifty-three. The Library of Congress records him under the authorized label "Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1805–1859," a designation that continues to index the breadth of writing he produced across the course of his working life.