Gustavef de Beaumont’s Marie, ou de l’esclavage aux États-Unis (Marie, or Slavery in the United States), written by Tocqueville’s close friend and traveling companion after their joint visit to the United States in 1831–32. It is a hybrid work—a sentimental novel wrapped around a political and sociological study of race, slavery, and democracy in Jacksonian America.wikipedia+3
Beaumont takes as his core story the doomed love between a young French visitor, Ludovic, and Marie, an apparently white American woman who is discovered to have African ancestry. The revelation of “black blood” triggers social ostracism, legal disabilities, and violence, showing how racial prejudice functions even where slavery itself is not directly at issue.searchworks.stanford+2
Around this romantic plot, Beaumont weaves documentary-style chapters and appendices on:
The legal and social position of free Black people in the North and South.
The connection between prejudice against Black Americans and against Native Americans (including a Cherokee subplot).cambridge+2
Mob violence and race riots (notably the New York riots of 1834), which he treats as an early warning about “the tyranny of the majority” in a democracy.thenewatlantis+1
Crucially, “slavery” in Beaumont’s title names not only chattel slavery but the deeper, more enduring bondage of racial prejudice and public opinion, which he argues will outlast formal emancipation.cambridge+1
From their American journey came three major works: their co‑authored On the Penitentiary System in the United States, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Beaumont’s Marie. Tocqueville devotes a famous final chapter of volume I of Democracy in America to race and slavery; Beaumont, in Marie, makes that question his exclusive focus and pushes the analysis further into sentiment, character, and everyday prejudice.ebsco+3
Modern scholars argue that Beaumont is remarkably prescient: he anticipates that, even after slavery ends, racial hierarchy will persist through social stigma, segregated institutions, and the weight of public opinion. In that sense, Marie speaks directly to post‑Civil Rights debates about structural racism and the limits of legal reform in changing hearts and mores.iris.unito+2
The book is available in modern English translation, often under the title Marie, or Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America. Notable editions include:searchworks.stanford+1
Johns Hopkins University Press (Barbara Chapman translation), which presents the novel plus Beaumont’s documentary essays and an introduction situating it alongside Tocqueville.ebsco+1
Various academic reprints and online PDF or ebook versions through university libraries and scholarly sites.evidentia+2
In practice, you are most likely to find it by:
Searching library catalogs (WorldCat, university libraries) under “Beaumont, Gustave de – Marie, or Slavery in the United States”.searchworks.stanford+1
Looking at major academic presses’ backlists (especially Johns Hopkins) or used‑book sites for the Chapman translation.ebsco+1
Several factors seem to explain its relative neglect:
Genre problem: It is a hybrid of sentimental novel and political treatise, which made it easy for literary critics to dismiss as didactic fiction and for political theorists to overlook as “just” a novel.iris.unito+2
Tocqueville’s overshadowing fame: Democracy in America quickly became canonical, while Beaumont’s work was read, if at all, as a secondary companion to Tocqueville rather than as an original contribution.hoover+2
Language and availability: For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, Marie was hard to obtain and not widely translated, so it never entered classroom canons in the way Democracy in America did.iris.unito+2
In recent decades, however, political theorists and historians of race have “rediscovered” Beaumont, treating Marie as an early and sophisticated analysis of racism within a democratic society and a useful counterpart to Tocqueville’s more institutional focus.thenewatlantis+2