![]() ![]() Malesherbes was not the only relative who was executed, and Alexis, who was born in 1805, grew up hearing frightening stories of how the revolutionary idealism of 1789 degenerated four years later into the cruel Reign of Terror, when Robespierre's dreaded Committee of Public Safety ordered the execution of thousands of "counterrevolutionaries" (historians believe the total may have been as high as forty thousand). Alexis honored his memory and thought of him as an inspiring role model, not least in resisting the seductions of power. Alexis's mother Louise's grandfather was the truly distinguished Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who as official censor in the mid-eighteenth century had worked to protect great writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, and who said he spent his whole life "in what would be called in other countries the opposition party." Malesherbes died at the guillotine, punished for loyally serving as defense counsel when his king was on trial for his life. On the maternal side were judges and civil servants, ennobled more recently for professional service to the Crown. The Tocquevilles inherited a title gained long ago by military prowess an ancestor had taken part in William the Conqueror's invasion of England. ![]() ![]() Alexis de Tocqueville came from an aristocratic family whose two branches represented both kinds of nobility in prerevolutionary France, the chivalric and the bureaucratic. ![]()
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