As Benjamin Constant had distinguished between two types of freedom – the freedom of the Ancients and that of the Moderns – before him, Tocqueville distinguishes between two types of unfreedom, and accordingly also of despotism, which functions as a concept for this unfreedom. Although he, in contrast to Constant, refrains from using chronological terminology and prefers to differentiate between a cruel and a gentle despotism (“despotisme doux”), these two forms can still be assigned to historical epochs, with the cruel despotism not, as was the case in Montesquieu’s undifferentiated treatment in De l’esprit des lois, primarily assigned to the Orient in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular, but to the Roman Empire after Augustus – which, as Tocqueville approvingly remarks in relation to a 1856 article by Ampère published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, prepared the tyrannical despotism of other empires.