André Jardin.  Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Lydia Davis with Robert Hemenway.  (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)

Excerpt:

On 11 Thermidor of the year XIII (July 29, 1805) there was born in Paris “at 987, rue de la Ville-l’Eveque, Roule division… Alexis-Charles-Henri… son of Herve-Louis-Francois-Jean-Bonaventure Clérel, landed proprietor, aged 33, and Louise-Madeleine Le Peletier Rosanbo, aged 33, married in the commune of Males-herbes, department of Loriet.”

 

The certificate of birth, drawn up in the early days of the Empire, still avoids any allusion to the titles of the Ancien Régime, but the family names are enough to suggest the newborn child’s noble descent on both his father’s and his mother’s side.

 

The Clérels are a very old family of the Norman nobility.  One “Guillaume Clarel” fought at Hastings and was in all likelihood the progenitor of the Clarell family in England that can be traced there down into the sixteen century.  There is little doubt, in any event, that this comrade in arms of William the Conquerer belonged to Alexis’s family.  A branch of the Clarels of Clérels, which can be found established in the Caux region as far back as the twelfth century, owned English lands at one time and bequeathed a portion to the powerful Abbey of Jurmièges, with which this feudal family had close ties.  At the end of the fourteenth century, however, the family’s center of gravity shifted further west, with a marriage to the female heir of the house of Rampan, near Saint-Lô.  It was yet another marriage, in 1590, that established a collateral branch of the family in the Cotentin, with its acquisition of the fief of Auville in the parish of Tocqueville,.  There followed legthy disputes with the Leverrier family, who owned the other fief in that parish; in 1661, through an exchange of properties, the Clérels gained possession of the Leverrier land.  And now that they were masters of the entire parish, the Clérels took the name of Tocquville, as the Leverrier fief was called.

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