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With his lifelong examination of the relation between freedom and equality in modern societies, Alexis de Tocqueville is the most widely shared icon of Franco-American political culture. Indeed, his work has enjoyed classical status in America and is frequently cited by scholars, pundits, and politicians, both liberal and conservative. But to cite Tocqueville is not necessarily to understand him. Until now, his American readers have not been in a position to recognize the extent to which, even when his ostensible subject was America, Tocqueville was engaging in hotly contested debates about French society and politics.

Francoise Melonio's Tocqueville and the French allows for a clearer understanding of Tocqueville's writings by supplying their missing French context, from the time he wrote Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution to the present. The subject of much praise when they first appeared, his books were relegated to obscurity in France from 1880 to 1950. Amid modem developments in the social sciences, he was reduced to an outmoded harbinger of the republican struggle. Today, Tocqueville's status in French intellectual circles has again been transformed. His foretelling of the dangers of nationalism, rampant socialism, and modern individualism has elevated him to the level of prophet.

Melonio suggests that the very disparity of responses to Tocqueville over the years compels us to reevaluate both the meaning of his work and French history. The French nineteenth and twentieth centuries cannot be interpreted as a linear progression from the Revolution to the present, but rather as a series of historical cycles in which the same questions haveconfronted thinkers again and again. With its contextualization and interpretation of his works -- and a new foreword for American audiences -- Tocqueville and the French will compel the attention of historians, sociologists, politic