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    The Tocqueville Conversations

    The Tocqueville Foundation, Le Figaro and The Atlantic Council are co-organizing the "Tocqueville Conversations", bringing together politicians, intellectuals and civil society actors from both sides of the Atlantic.
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    The Prince's Roundtable on Philanthropy and Prince's Prize

    The Prince’s Prize for Innovative Philanthropy is a global initiative jointly developed by the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation and the Tocqueville Foundation.
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    The Tocqueville Challenge

    The Tocqueville Challenge reflects the mission of the Tocqueville Foundation to foster community engagement while strengthening youth service, building capacity in citizen society organizations and promoting social innovation.
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    The Tocqueville Prize

    This international prize for political literature is awarded every two years at Château de Tocqueville to a person whose work is in line with the vision and values defended by Alexis de Tocqueville. It was created in 1979 by Alain Peyrefitte.
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The Tocqueville
Conversations

Co-founded by the Tocqueville Foundation and Le Figaro, and co-organized with the Atlantic Council and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, the Conversations is an international intellectual conference. 

Each year, at the Château de Tocqueville, 200 speakers and participants from all over the world debate the challenges that our democracies are increasingly facing. 

DISCOVER

WHAT IT IS ?

An international conference on the defense of Democracy and its values.

The Tocqueville Foundation, Le Figaro, The Atlantic Council and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom are organizing the « Tocqueville Conversations », bringing together politicians, intellectuals and civil society actors from both sides of the Atlantic.

The Tocqueville Conversations were born out of the convergence of four key elements: an acute political understanding of the depth of the crisis Western democracies are facing, both in the US and in Europe; a urgent civic need to move beyond the dogmatic comfort governing elites have entertained, to address our problems and look for solutions; the renewed awareness of the immediate relevance of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great liberal thinker of the Democratic age, who analyzed masterfully both the conditions, realities and risks inherent to Democratic systems, on both sides of the Atlantic; and lastly, the foresight of the Tocqueville Family, who saw in advance the symbolic significance of holding our Conversations at The Tocqueville Château, where the great thinker wrote his Magnus Opus, Democracy in America.

Our goals

  • Create an indispensable rendezvous at the Tocqueville Chateau, to contribute to the protection and strengthening of our democracies.
  • Create an international Tocquevillian network dedicated to reinvent the transatlantic relationship with strong partners, strong democratic values and robust civic life.
  • Get out of the failing opposition between « good globalists » and « evil nationalists » (or vice versa), by outlining the contours of a new social and political consensus that protects the nation, reshapes Europe and defines areas of cooperation on a wider international scale.
  • Address the reality of problems that the popular rebellions reveal (disruption of globalisation, rise of inequalities, challenge of immigration, tension between islamic fundamentalism and modernity, crisis of identity…), and face the challenges of a world in disorder. 

WHAT IT IS ?

2019 : The Future of Nations

The Tocqueville Foundation, Le Figaro and The Atlantic Council are organizing the second edition of the « Tocqueville Conversations », bringing together politicians, intellectuals and civil society actors from both sides of the Atlantic.

Their joint enterprise will bring speakers for a taboo-free discussion at the Tocqueville Château, a symbolic place where the great work of the Normand philosopher of democracy in America was written. Who could be a better “intellectual sponsor” than this visionary, freedom-loving aristocrat who foresaw the inevitable advent of the democratic age, but identified, earlier than most, some of the perils that would weigh on it ?

Our discussion will break down in roundtables.

Tocqueville Conversations 2022

The Russian Question: the West facing Putin

Our next Conversations were held in a political and geopolitical context radically different from our three previous editions. Since we first launched our conferences, the deep democratic crisis in Europe and the United States has been the focus of our attention. But with the total war launched by Vladimir Putin’s regime against his Ukrainian neighbor, Ukraine, Europe, the whole democratic world and its geopolitical balance are brutally threatened and disrupted. We find ourselves confronted to a war which, from one moment to the next, can jump over the fragile fence of the Ukrainian borders, and reach the West. We are, as in 1914, on the brink of confrontation. Ukraine is fighting for us against a regime that has shown its true face and no longer hides the fact that its enemy is both Ukrainian and Western. Moscow sees itself fighting a civilizational war against the West. What are the causes of this catastrophe? What does Putin want? What are the motives and goals of the violent national-imperialism that he embodies? Is it a relapse of communist totalitarianism or a much older despotic and imperial operating mode? Do we have a responsibility, as the Kremlin keeps saying, accusing the West of having encircled it? Or was it our strategic blindness to the reality of the Russian threat and our series of renouncements in response to its repeated aggressions that have led to disaster? What will be the political and geopolitical consequences of the extraordinary Ukrainian resistance that is unfolding before our eyes? What is at stake in this battle? How does it concern us? And what answers should the Western democracies give to this existential challenge? How can we get out of the war and how can we build peace and security in Europe and more generally in the new world in which we have been thrown without being fully aware? Could this crisis, as dramatic as it is, be the occasion for a salutary leap forward for our Western societies, which had perhaps forgotten the tragedy of history and the price of freedom?

DAY ONE

Friday, July 8th

Opening by Mr Alain Juppé, former French Prime Minister

Roundtable 1 – Anatomy of the Russian Invasion

Roundtable 2 – The West: anatomy of a strategic blindness

Roundtable 3 – Ukraine: Awakening of a Nation, lessons from a resistance

Conversation – Anatomy of a crisis: Views from China and Latin America

DAY TWO

Saturday, July 9th

Opening by Christoph Franz, Chairman of Roche, and US Ambassador in France Denise Bauer 

Roundtable 4 – Western democracies’ response to the war

Conversation between General James Mattis & Admiral Edouard Guillaud – The Future of the Alliance

Roundtable 5 – Neither peace nor war, propaganda vs. truth

Conversation between Laure Mandeville and Mikhaïl Khodorkhovsky 

Roundtable 6 – Russia-Europe, How do we get out of the 100 years’ war ? 

Download the full program

Conversations 2022

Our speakers

James Mattis

Former US Secretary of Defense

Jim Mattis was raised in Southeastern Washington and graduated from Central Washington State College.

He served over 40 years in the Marine Corps as an infantry officer, plus duty in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and as Commander of U.S. Central Command comprised of 250,000 U.S. and allied troops in combat across the Middle East and South Asia.

Retiring in 2013, he was a Davies Family Scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Subsequently he served as the 26th Secretary of Defense from January 2017 through December 2018.

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Garry Kasparov

Human Rights Foundation

Chairman

Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, in the Soviet Union in 1963, Garry Kasparov became the under-18 chess champion of the USSR at the age of 12 and the world under-20 champion at 17. He came to international fame at the age of 22 as the youngest world chess champion in history in 1985. He defended his title five times, including a legendary series of matches against arch-rival Anatoly Karpov. Kasparov broke Bobby Fischer’s rating record in 1990 and his own peak rating record remained unbroken until 2013. His famous matches against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996-97 were key to bringing artificial intelligence, and chess, into the mainstream.

Kasparov’s outspoken nature did not endear him to the Soviet authorities, giving him an early taste of opposition politics.  The world’s top-ranked player in his twentieth, Garry abruptly retired from competitive chess in 2005 to join the vanguard of the Russian pro-democracy movement.  He founded the United Civil Front and organized the Marches of Dissent to protest the repressive policies of Putin's government. In 2012, Kasparov was named chairman of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, succeeding Vaclav Havel.  His US-based non-profit Kasparov Chess Foundation promotes the teaching of chess in education systems around the world.

Garry has been a contributing editor to the Wall Street Journal since 1991 and he is a regular commentator on politics and human rights.  He is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Oxford-Martin School with a focus on human-machine collaboration.

In 2017, Kasparov founded the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), an American political organization promoting and defending liberal democracy in the U.S. and abroad. He serves as chairman of the group. Kasparov is also a Security Ambassador for the software company Avast.

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Alain Juppé

Former French Prime Minister

Alain Juppé was born on August 15, 1945 in Mont-de-Marsan in the Landes region of France, and after obtaining an agrégation in Classics at the ENS, he entered the IEP in 1964 and graduated from the Ena in 1972. He first established himself politically in the capital alongside Jacques Chirac, of whom he was Minister of Budget, then Prime Minister.

In 2006, he was re-elected as mayor of Bordeaux (re-elected in the first round of the last municipal elections in March 2014). At the same time, he served in the Fillon government as head of several important ministries: Ecology (2007), Defense (2010-2011) and Foreign Affairs (2011-2012).

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Benjamin Haddad

LREM

Member of the French Parliament

Benjamin Haddad is an expert on European politics and transatlantic relations. Prior to joining the Atlantic Council, he was a research fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington DC. He has advocated for transatlantic unity in the face of Russian aggression, for greater European responsibility and for European investment in strategic issues. His book "Paradise Lost: Europe in the World of Trump" argues for greater European unity in a world of new challenges and threats.

He published in Foreign Affairs, The American Interest, Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Politique Etrangère and is a frequent guest on France 24, BFM, CBC, CNN, Fox News and NPR.

In 2017, Haddad was the Washington DC representative of Emmanuel Macron's En Marche movement. A graduate of Sciences Po Paris, where he earned a master's degree in international relations, and of HEC with a master's degree in financial economics, Haddad taught international relations at Sciences Po.

​He was elected member of the French Parliament for the majority party "La République en Marche" in Paris in June 2022.

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Pascal Bruckner

Philosopher

Novelist and philosopher, Pascal Bruckner is the author of a rich body of work of about thirty titles, which has earned him numerous awards (Medicis Prize for Essay, Montaigne Prize, Renaudot Prize), no less numerous translations abroad and screen adaptations. His latest titles include: Une brève éternité, philosophie de la longévité (Grasset, 2019), Un coupable presque parfait, la construction du bouc-émissaire blanc (Grasset, 2020) and Dans l'amitié d'une montagne : petit traité d'élévation (Grasset 2022).

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Constantin Sigov

Philosopher

The Ukrainian philosopher Constantin Sigov, who heads the European Center at Mohyla University in Kiev, was associate director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris from 1992 to 1995. He contributed to the establishment of the European Vocabulary of Philosophies (Paris, Seuil/Le Robert, 2004) and founded the publishing house Duh i litera (Spirit and Letter) in Kiev, which published authoritative Ukrainian translations of such great thinkers as Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas and François Furet. A friend of Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, he had them at the University of Kiev. For his tireless activity as a bridge builder between cultures, Constantin Sigov was decorated by France with the rank of Officer of the Order of Academic Palms. In 2014, he supported the Maidan Revolution, of which he was a leading voice. His personal work as a thinker, which occupies a major place in the Slavic world, meets a lively international echo.

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Hubert Védrine

Former French Foreign Affairs Minister

Hubert Védrine is the founder of Hubert Védrine Conseil, a consulting firm specialized in international, economic and geopolitical issues. He is currently President of the Institut François Mitterrand.

Prior to that, Hubert Védrine was Minister of Foreign Affairs under the government of Lionel Jospin, from June 1997 to May 2022. From 1996 to 1997, he was a partner in the law firm Jeantet et Associés. He was a member of the Conseil d'Etat as maître des requêtes in 1986/1988 and in 1995/1993, then in 2002/2003. Since 2003, he has been leading a seminar at Sciences Po on the perception of threats in international relations.

From 1981 to 1995, he was diplomatic advisor and spokesman at the French Presidency and from 1991 to 1995, Secretary General. Prior to that, he was a civil administrator in the Ministry of Culture from 1974 to 1981. In 2020, he was appointed by France to participate in the group of personalities in charge of a reflection on NATO in 2030.

He is the author of numerous books, including Face à l'Hyperpuissance (2003, Fayard), Continuer l'Histoire (2007, Fayard), updated in 2008 and translated into English under the title History Strikes Back. In 2009, Le Temps des Chimères (Fayard), in 2012, Dans la mêlée mondiale (Fayard), in 2014 La France au défi (Fayard), in 2016 Sauver l'Europe (Editions Liana Levi). In 2018, he published Comptes à rebours (Fayard). In March 2019, a reissue of Sauver l'Europe is published; the essay is then rewritten and updated, its title Face au Chaos, Sauver l'Europe. In October 2019, he published with his son Laurent Védrine Olrik, the unauthorized biography (Fayard). In June 2020, he published an essay on the pandemic, Et après? (Fayard), reissued in an expanded version in the fall of 2021. In February 2021, he published a Dictionnaire amoureux de la géopolitique (Plon, Fayard). In February 2022, he will publish Une vision du monde in the Bouquins collection. Mr. Védrine also has a degree in history, and is a former student of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA).

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Gabrielius Landsbergis

Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lithuania

Gabrielius Landsbergis is a Lithuanian politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the 18th Government of the Republic of Lithuania led by the Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė. He is a Member of the Seimas for Centras- Žaliakalnis constituency, and a former member of the European Parliament. He was a member of Group of the European People's Party (Christian Democrats). Landsbergis was elected as the Chairman of the Homeland Union in 2015.

He is the grandson of Vytautas Landsbergis, a prominent Lithuanian politician, who was one of the founders of Sąjudis and the Chairman of the Reconstituent Seimas of Lithuania after its independence declaration from the Soviet Union.

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Laure Mandeville

Senior reporter

Le Figaro

Laure Mandeville has been a senior reporter at Le Figaro for 31 years. She was the Washington bureau chief of Le Figaro from December 2008 to August 2016. Laure Mandeville joined the foreign service of Le Figaro in 1989 to cover the end of communism. She covered the post-Soviet world for 20 years. She was Moscow bureau chief from 1997 to 2000. She also covered Islam in Europe from 2001 to 2008. Laure Mandeville holds a degree in Russian and Polish languages and civilizations from the University of Toulouse, a diploma from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris and a DEA in Soviet studies. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard University, as a Fulbright and Sachs scholar. Laure Mandeville is the author of Qui est vraiment Donald Trump, Les Equateurs, 2016, of La reconquête russe, Grasset, 2008, which received the Louis Pauwels Prize and the Ailleurs Prize in 2009, as well as of L'Armée russe, la puissance en raillons, Ed n°1, 1994. She is a regular guest on C'est dans l'air, LCI and France 24. She also publishes in Politique internationale, La Revue des deux Mondes, the Wall Street Journal and The American Interest. Laure Mandeville is an associate member of the Atlantic Council think tank.

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News

Find out more about the Conversations

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"The Future of Nations" - 2019 edition

You can find the program in French here, and in English here.

But in 2019, we wanted to address the crisis of democracy from a different perspective, by focusing our gaze on « The Future of Nations ». For years, nations seemed condemned to become ever weaker. The nation was a dying concept, destined to melt away. 

Read more

Tocqueville Conversations
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"The future of Democracy in America" - 2021 edition

3rd Edition,  September 17-18, 2021

Please find the programme of the 2021 edition of the Conversations in English here, and in French here.

The replay of the conferences is also available on our Youtube channel by following this link for the French version, and this one for the English version.

Read more

Tocqueville Conversations

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DISCOVER

Our partners

Fondation Entreprendre

Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco

United Way

Conseil départemental de la Manche

It is an international grant-making prize awarding and operating foundation, registered in France under.

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