托克维尔（Alexis de Tocqueville，1805—1859），法国历史学家、社会学家。其主要代表作有《论美国的民主》第一卷（1835）、《论美国的民主》第二卷（1840年）、《旧制度与大革命》。托克维尔曾担任法国外交部长，这段参政的经历使其能够更真切的观察和思考旧制度与大革命之间的关系。
Most of the institutions that I have just described have since been imitated in a hundred different places but at that time they were peculiar to France and we shall soon see how great an influence they exerted over the French Revolution and its aftermath.
But how had these modern institutions managed to establish themselves in France on the ruins of the feudal society?
It was a task requiring patience, skill and some length of time rather than strength and brute force. At the start of the Revolution almost nothing of the old administrative structure had been destroyed in France; a new framework had, as it were, been built beneath it.
There is nothing to indicate that the government of the Ancien Regime had pursued a thoroughly planned strategy laid down in advance in order to effect this difficult operation. It had simply surrendered to that inner feeling which carries any government towards its aim of running everything itself-a feeling which always remained the same despite the diversity of its agents. It had allowed the former government their anti-quated names and honours while gradually removing their authority from them. It had not driven them out from theirspheres of influence but had edged them out. Exploiting the inertia of some and the egoism of others, it had replaced them; taking advantage of all their faults and never trying to reform them, only supplanting them. It had in the end substituted for almost all of them one single agent, the Intendant, whose title did not even exist when they were born.
Judicial power alone had embarrassed the government in this undertaking but, even there, the latter had ended up by seizing the reality of power while leaving behind only the shadow to its opponents.
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