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Gustave de Beaumont's novel, Marie, or, Slavery in the United States, opens with the frank admission that “a single idea dominates the work and forms the central point around which all the developments are arranged.” Beaumont finds in the United States a “double element” — an institution of slavery created and maintained by the state, and a customary practice of racial exclusion and debasement which he finds to be ubiquitous in public life. Beaumont elaborates on the “single idea” that motivates and dominates the text, not with the careful analysis that he so admires in Tocqueville, but with an account of a theatrical spectacle that marks the origin of the work.

A circle of intimate friends provided encouragement, criticism, and help to Alexis de Tocqueville when he was encountering intellectual problems and slipping deeper into deliberate self-isolation. Three men stood out: Gustave de Beaumont, Louis de Kergorlay, and Jean-Jacques Ampère. Tocqueville also listened to and debated with the more distant voices of Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard and John Stuart Mill, whose presence is strongly felt in Democracy in America. Tocqueville turned most often to Beaumont, who tended to see things the same way as he did and shared the same convictions about history, politics, and society. Royer-Collard was the grand old man of French liberalism, whereas Mill was the spirit of English liberalism. Mill and Tocqueville argued about the latter's insistence that a democracy is bound to miss the steady, informed, far-seeing guidance that would be possible with a stable aristocracy. However, it may have been Henry Reeve, the translator of Democracy in America, who made Tocqueville even more thoughtful about the centralizing tendencies of democracy.

Born in Paris on July 24, 1805, to a family from the old French nobility, Alexis-Charles-Henri-Clérel de Tocqueville was brought up on stories of misery and terror. His family was shattered by the French Revolution of 1789; his mother's parents, her sister and brother-in-law, and her grandfather Guillaume-Chrétien de Lamoignon de Malesherbes had been executed during the Terror of 1793–1794. Alexis's father, Hervé de Tocqueville, was imprisoned in the Conciergerie in 1794 at the age of twenty-two. This book is a portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville, his inner life, and the events of his time. It looks at the history and culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and offers interpretations of Tocqueville's character and thought. Drawing on André Jardin's biography of Tocqueville, it examines the French political thinker's politics and his journey with Gustave de Beaumont to the United States, which culminated in the 1835 classic Democracy in America in which he explored the inner workings of democracy that was in effect in America during the period.

Alexis de Tocqueville describes the experience of writing his book Democracy in America as a colossal emotional struggle. He likens its writing to a journey over “un autre terrain,” a journey on which he embarked quite by himself. The difficulty of writing the second volume of Democracy in America was not only due to the pressure of other commitments, including local political life and his responsibilities in the Chamber of Deputies in France. He even suspended his writing for a few days due to fatigue, something he complained to Gustave de Beaumont. Considering what he had to go through to finish the book, it may be considered a heroic feat. It was a product of powerful ambition combined with physical courage, force of will, a great dream, and unwavering self-confrontation.

When he returned to France from his American expedition, Alexis de Tocqueville was not sure about what to write with respect to America. He and Gustave de Beaumont initially planned to write a book together, but abandoned the idea. After brooding about what was to be his book for two years, Tocqueville eventually decided to write the first volume of Democracy in America, finishing it late in 1834. It took him much longer to complete the second volume, mainly because it was far more complex and traversed what he called “un autre terrain.” Democracy in America reflects not only democratic culture and politics in America but also the inner terrain of Tocqueville's psyche. Nevertheless, the experience of writing the second volume was almost entirely different from that of the first. While the first turned out to be, in part, a moral fable, the second was complicated by various changes and disruptions in Tocqueville's personal life, including his marriage to Mary Mottley in 1835 and the death of his mother the following year.

In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont traveled to America ostensibly to study the country's prison system. It is therefore ironic that the book that emerged from that journey, Democracy in America, was about freedom. More specifically, the trip was a way for Tocqueville to extricate himself from the impossible situation he had to face after the Revolution of July 1830 back in France. In short, he wanted to escape. It is unlikely he would have sailed to America if the July Revolution had not put him in a tight spot personally, politically, and vocationally. Just as Tocqueville's discussion of slavery in his book was not compatible with liberty, writing about prisons was certainly not consistent with thinking about America. His journey to America was thus also an intense personal quest and not a quest to examine democracy in its fullest development.

During their journey to America, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were supposed to study the country's prison system as well as democracy in its most advanced development. However, the two men also made unplanned side trips, twice venturing into what Tocqueville called the wilderness. For Tocqueville, this wilderness represents the real America, the edge of civilization. The trips to the wilderness provided images and metaphors for all Tocqueville's writing about America. His American expedition had themes of flight and freedom as well as isolation and solitude, the creative force of nature, and the fragility of civilization—all of which find heightened expression in the literary version of Tocqueville's experience published in 1860, after his death. One of the central questions raised in Tocqueville's book Democracy in America relates to the consequences of wild freedom, or natural liberty, for humanity.