Il viaggio di Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne nell'America di Lincoln. Riflessioni sui vizi e le virtù della democrazia.

In June 1864, the young French liberal Ernest Duvergier de Hauranne (1843-1877), raised in a family respectful of the parliamentary traditions of the Orleanist monarchy, began a journey to the United States. During the eight-month travel – in the midst of the civil war and the presidential elections that would reconfirm Lincoln as president - he travelled throughout the United States and Canada heading to Cuba and the West Indies. The American itinerary, which caused him a lung injury and a premature death at the age of thirty-four, was documented in the letters and notes, published in twelve articles in the "Revue des Deux Mondes", and collected in 1866 with the title Huit mois en Amérique (1864-1865).Thirty years after Tocqueville's "first" Démocratie en Amérique, Duvergier de Hauranne returned to examine the American institutional model without, however, making an explicit comparison with France. Despite the liberal openings of the Second Empire, the persistence of the censorship suggested the young political analyst to stay prudent and not openly condemn that political regime, in contrast with what overtly emerges in the writings published in the last period of Napoleon III's "personal government", where he openly defended representative democracy and freedom as signs of progress and natural condition for all civilized nations.