Reading #5: The Bourbon Restoration: The Charter of 1815, Tocqueville, Stendhal, and Gautier on Géricault

I've been travelling for the past week, and will be continuing through the weekend, so I've had little time to give as much attention to the blog as I'd like. This, in combination with the readings apparently rousing little interest, has kept the Shadow School forum pretty dead, but in case any of you are still following along, we're moving on to the 5th reading, pages 119-155.

This reading addresses the fall of Napoleon, and the restoration of the Throne to King Louis XVIII. After the successive convulsions of the Revolution, the Terror, and the Empire, many hoped that the introduction of a Constitutional Monarchy would maintain peace and stability while at the same time recognising that the vast changes of the past thirty years could not be entirely undone. This hope unravelled very quickly. On the one hand, the concessions to Republican government were minuscule and mostly insignificant, and the fact that the Monarchy was imposed at gunpoint by the allied European powers created a resentment that further fueled the opposition of the left. On the other hand, aristocrats and monarchists returning from exile refused to accept even these token nods toward representative government, resulting in the emergence of the Ultras, or Ultra-Monarchists, who were so hard-line that Louis XVIII faced opposition not only from the left but also subversive plots and rebellions by those who considered the King not to be monarchist enough. At the same time, the pervasive, centralizing bureaucratic system begun during the Revolution and solidified by Bonaparte remained in place and steadily increased in power, resulting in huge increases in the literacy rate and the expansion of a bureaucratic middle class.

The texts in this reading are dry and legalistic, admittedly; it was a period in which law and bureaucracy  were battlefields on which the future of France was being fought, and beneath the surface of a cynical and petty age cultural and political revolutions were preparing to burst forth. 

• The text from Rousseau addresses the issue of sovereignty: is the King a representative of God and of the 'spirit of the nation' (as Hegel was alleging around this time) to whom his subjects owed unconditional loyalty? Or does he receive his power from his country's citizens, to whom he owes his loyalty?
• The Constitutional Charter of 1815 was the first document limiting the power of the Monarchy; note, however, the language of the Preamble, in which it is made clear that the King voluntarily cedes some rights to his subjects, but is not required to do so by any legal or natural order. How else does this ambivalence come through in the text?
• Tocqueville's painstaking investigation of American government and society was the first systematic analysis of a functioning modern democracy, at a time when Democratic principles were not yet universally understood or supported. In France, the route of the Revolution ensured that for many people Democracy was associated with instability and class warfare. What do his observations and comparisons say about the political atmosphere and conditions in France?
• Stendhal (aka Henri Beyle), whose book on Racine and Shakespeare was a key influence on Romanticist dramatic theory, had been a mid-level bureaucrat in the Napoleonic government, who was eventually dismissed under suspicion of collaborating with the underground Carbonari, and insurrectionary group that began as an anti-Napoleonic movement in Italy (where Beyle was stationed) but soon spread throughout Europe as a network of insurrectionary secret societies. One of the innovators of the Realist novel, Stendhal applied his uncompromising psychological observation and deeply cynical social sensibility to the culture of the competing ruling classes of the Restoration: the re-patriated Church, the resurgent Aristocracy, and the ascending upper bourgeoisie, rich but untitled, who were profiting from the industrial revolution which was now beginning to take hold and transform French life.
• Thédore Géricault--like Stendhal, Madame de Staël, and Benjamin Constant (who I was not able to include in the reader)--was exploring ways to escape the dominant modes of French culture, and to bring together art, literature, and politics in ways different than Classicism, which had been virtually official forms for two generations in the visual arts and well over a century in literature. Géricault's Raft of the Medusa was a groundbreaking rejection of Classicism. It portrays a moment from a sensational scandal in which incompetent political appointees ran the ship Medusa aground, piled over 100 passengers onto a poorly constructed raft with almost no food or water, then cut the moorings to the officer's boats and left those on the raft to drift for over a week; by the time they were rescued they had degenerated into murder, cannibalism, only 10% of the passengers surviving. Not only was the subject matter a direct indictment of the Restoration government, but it presented this indictment directly and in gruesome detail, not (as Classicism would demand) in the guise of a scene from Greek or Roman  mythology. The scene was grimly contemporary, the dead painted from corpses and body parts transported by Géricault in his studio, and the composition and colour were slaps in the face of the Classical ideas of symmetry and contraint.