Louis XVIII has not been restored to the throne
of his ancestors: he has simply ascended the
throne of Bonaparte.

JOSEPH DE MAISTRE

Restoration periods often strike posterity as tame and colorless. They
usually follow upon an era of profound revolution or of prolonged war,
and they naturally suffer by contrast. Efforts to return to normalcy, to re-
cover a lost stability and to assure order, are not likely to be glamorous.
Yet if they are less spectacular than times of upheaval, they are some.
times equally significant in the development of a nation.

French history from 1814 to 1848 is a case in point. Preceded and
followed by major revolutions and by dramatic experiments in one-man
leadership, that generation seems a dull and prosaic one. Yet specialists
in the era are agreed that few periods have been of greater formative in-
fluence in the shaping of modern France; some of them even consider that
influence more profound than the impact of the revolutionary epoch itself.
This was a time of ferment -- of intense intellectual and literary activity,
of unprecedented richness in social theorizing, of fundamental economic
change. It was a time of experimentation, too; France in these years tried
out a kind of proto-parliamentary system of government and grew so ac-
customed to it that the parliamentary principle was rarely abandoned

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