Restoration and Resilience: The Last Bourbons and the Revolutionary Past

Abstract

As early as 1795, immediately after the death of the young Louis XVII in his Parisian prison, the comte de Provence, brother of the late Louis XVI who had been executed in 1793, was hoping the course of history would prove him right. He opted to call himself Louis XVIII, a title which was made official nineteen years later when he became king. Proclaimed in the Déclaration de Vérone on 8 June 1795, in the midst of the Revolution, such an act implied that the Revolution was not happening, had never happened, and would never happen again. Our paper explores this new and ambivalent kind of resilience by examining three decisive moments during the reigns of Louis XVI’s two brothers, Louis XVIII (1814-1824) and Charles X (1824-1830): the First Restoration and the Hundred Days, with their curious institutional novelties and changes of hands; the early Second Restoration, when the game between the old and the new world seemed on and then over; and the first years of Charles X’s reign, when the tensions returned with a vengeance, probably climaxing in 1825 with the Compensation Act, known as “le milliard des émigrés.”