2/ The Restoration was the regime that took power after Napoleon’s defeat, the “restoration” of the traditional Bourbon kings of France in the form of Louis XVI’s younger brother, King Louis XVIII. As such it was forced to grapple in a major way with its country’s history.
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3/ The Restoration, by its nature, abhorred the French Revolution and Napoleon’s Empire. But the regime was divided about the best policy to handle this unpleasant national history.
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4/ On one hand, King Louis XVIII’s formal policy was dubbed “union et oubli,” or “unity and forgetting” — basically, put the traumas and divisions of the Revolution in the past, focus on what brings the country together, let the past be the past.
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5/ On the other hand, many members of and supporters of Louis’s own regime thought this was stupid and naive. The country didn’t need to forget its past divisions & traumas, it needed to confront them head on, to collectively expiate or atone for the nation’s collective sins.
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6/ So you had Catholic missionaries fanning out about the country, holding revivals where people were asked to repent for their revolutionary sins and come back to God and the Church. They’d hold grand processions through town & erect massive “mission crosses.”
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7/ But a lot of Louis’s officials were horrified by this. They saw these very public mission ceremonies as needlessly riling up the significant number of French people who were still sympathetic to the Revolution, & often tried to curtail the missions in the name of public order.
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8/ The idea of a restored Catholic monarchy grappling with the sins of the French Revolution is specific to one time and place. But LOTS of countries have to grapple with how to handle an unpleasant and divisive national past.
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9/ France itself would find itself in a similar situation repeatedly in the future, including after the Paris Commune, and after the Vichy regime of WWII. In both cases, some people wanted to forget & move on, while others wanted to confront the historic “sin” head on.
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10/ Similarly, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the former countries of the Soviet Union faced a similar dilemma — “oubli” or expiation?
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11/ Of course, this division between oubli and expiation ignores a third group: the people who think the unsavory national history is not actually something to be ashamed of at all. They’re part of why expiation can threaten disorder & unrest.
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12/ Arguably the United States is dealing with a similar debate right now on the question of the country's historic racism. Should these past “sins” be left in the past, or should they be confronted directly and atoned for?
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13/ Supporters of expiation today argue that the “past” isn’t past at all, that it’s still alive and malignant — which is exactly what French “Ultra-royalists” argued in the 1820s, albeit from a very different place on the political spectrum.
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14/ I’m not sure there’s a single right answer to the question of oubli vs. expiation. It may depend on circumstance, and both doubtless have pros and cons. But it’s an interesting prism to view more recent debates and developments!
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15/ In conclusion, subscribe to my history podcast
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16/16 If you have a grounding in the period and want to delve deeper, I highly recommend Kroen’s book, "Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815-1830”. Not necessarily for newbies, though. https://www.amazon.com/Politics-Theater-Legitimacy-Restoration-1815-1830/dp/0520222148/ref=as_li_ss_tl?dchild=1&keywords=politics+and+theater+kroen&qid=1590114714&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thesiecle-20&linkId=6ba64b8ee6f3c7c0597b10a2d134061e&language=en_US …
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17/16 A point I forgot to make: in the Restoration it was absolutely true that attempts by Ultra-royalists to expiate the sins of the Revolution provoked unrest. This was not merely a paranoid fear of officials.
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18/16 Not only did the missionaries rile up hard-core revolutionaries, but they also upset more moderate people who had benefited from the “sins” of the Revolution, such as by purchasing land the Revolution seized from the Church.
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19/16 Similarly, people who were children of the Revolution’s new civil marriages were declared bastards in the eyes of the Church. This sort of thing directly affected lots of people who had merely gone along with the status quo in the “sinful” pst.
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20/16 The broader point is that any attempt at a national expiation is going to necessarily implicate lots of ordinary people who merely went along with the norms now deemed sinful. This might be worth it! But it’s going to provoke backlash. That’s the nature of expiation.
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21/16 But don’t let the fact that the resistance to a policy of expiation is real make it seem like such a policy will never have a popular base. The Restoration missions had lots of participants and helped bring more people to the Church. They just ALSO provoked backlash.
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