Octavo, 456 pp. First edition of Tocqueville's analysis, an analysis which Tocqueville expected no constituency of the Republic to find sympathetic, of the causes and results of the French Revolution. For Tocqueville, the Revolution represented the triumph of a new set of interests, more egalitarian than those of the monarchy, to be sure, but nevertheless interests vested in class and retrograde in detail, resulting in the formation of the deadening beaurocracy for which France has been famous ever since. A presentation copy, inscribed by Tocqueville: "M. de Pontmartin de la part de M. de Tocqueville." The recipient, Armand Augustin Joseph Marie Ferrard, Comte de Pontmartin, was a journalist and critic known for his legitimist sympathies and his attack on the post-revolutionary order. Tocqueville's rather impersonal inscription might reflect his expectation of harsh treatment at the hands of Count Pontmartin, but in fact Pontmartin's review in L'Assemblée nationale was largely sympathetic, emphasizing the freshness of Tocqueville's ideas and originality of his style. We wrote, “This liberty that he cherishes would be certain to triumph, and this time its triumph would surely be our newest and most beautiful conquest, if all of M. de Tocqueville's contemporaries understood it the way he does.” He produced a series of three Causeries littéraires among some other twenty volumes of work, all published, incidentally, by Lévy Frères, and in his Deuxième série des causeries littéraires (1857), a series of attacks on prominent Liberals which caused some sensation, he dedicates an entire twenty-six page chapter to counter Tocqueville's views in L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution. The most famous of all his books is Les Jeudis de Mme. Charbonneau (1862), which in the guise of a novel offered a series of malicious and witty portraits of contemporary writers. A fine association copy. Light dampstain to the lower margin of the first few dozen pages, not affecting the text, otherwise very good. Bound in contemporary quarter calf and marbled paper-covered boards, with the original wrappers bound in.