A believer in democracy and freedom, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) marked history with his acuteness to detail better and sooner than anyone fighting for the spirit of modern democracy. Yet the importance of his work, rarely read in it's entirety, makes it easy to appropriate in fragments and extracts the posterity of his thought and the orientation of his political arguments. Michel Onfray reveals here the shadows of a complex man, resolute defender of individual freedom, on the simple condition of being a White, Catholic, European, property owner... This conference thus allows a genealogy of widely adopted political ideals, from Aron to Fran�ois Mitterrand, but whose ramifications, often contradictory and ignored, continue to jeopardize the very idea of democracy.