The reading of the political culture of Tocqueville's family, the legal profession, and his personal letters in the last chapter show clearly that he was exposed to the Jansenist tradition. As I have suggested, this tradition was not a hegemonic cultural influence, but was just one part of a spectrum of influences that also includes the Ultra theories of Maistre and the Gallicanism of Bossuet.

Having demonstrated the existence of multiple traditions in the key social spaces Tocqueville moved through, we can look at his use of concepts contextually within the political culture of the July Monarchy. This analysis will bring to the fore when and why Tocqueville uses the Jansenist tradition to buttress his modern republicanism. An analysis that puts Tocqueville in relation to Gallican and Ultramontane visions of Providence makes clear that Tocqueville's use of Providence in the ‘Author's Introduction’ to Democracy in America is best traced to the Jansenist tradition.

There is a small literature on the concept of Providence in Tocqueville's works. Scholars agree that Tocqueville's targets were Ultramontane political theorists such as Joseph de Maistre, and that Bossuet's Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1679) was his main intellectual source.

Given Bossuet's Gallicanism, his continued popularity in the nineteenth century, and the fact that he is today remembered as ‘the theologian of Providence,’ it is not surprising that scholars look to him as a model. Lucien Jaume highlights a particularly strong paraphrase of Bossuet's Histoire universelle in Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution.