The concept of intermediate powers has an extraordinarily contested history in the post-revolutionary political discourse of France. On the one hand, the stigmatization of intermediary powers was one of the long-term reverberating effects of the French Revolution. Intermediary powers were interpreted in this current of political thought as relics of the Ancien Régime, as distortions of the common will and as threats to the one and indivisible nation. Yet, this pejorative interpretation of intermediary powers was not left unquestioned. As the contemporaries struggled to come to terms with the revolutionary past, the early nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation of voices that called for, if not an actual restoration, at least a reinvention of intermediary powers. Tocqueville’s interpretation of the political and social functions of intermediate powers is embedded in this context of post-revolutionary political thought.