The brooding presence of Edmund Burke can hardly be overlooked in the first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Ancien Régime and the Revolution. His opinions, judgments, and very words serve as bookends to the first part of that work and to the volume as a whole. It is clear that Tocqueville found great value in a witness who was, so to speak, present at the creation. And such a witness he was! A man of long experience, with powers of close observation, and distant enough from the scenes of action not to be entangled in the factional maneuverings that beset the French both before and during the dismantling of their state. Tocqueville would expect Burke's understanding of contemporary events to be as discerning as one might hope for – comparable in value, albeit for different reasons, to the firsthand observations of Arthur Young. It is no less clear, however, that Burke served Tocqueville as an exemplary case of contemporary ignorance and bewilderment about the Revolution.