Re-inventing the Ancien Régime in Post-Napoleonic Europe

Abstract

‘Revolution’ as a historical category has received continuous academic interest and scrutiny, whereas the regime invented by the French Revolution has received less sophisticated theoretical analysis and unpacking. The term ancien régime was created in the moment of its death. The subsequent restructuring and politicization of this concept during the post-Napoleonic era remains largely unstudied. It is the argument here that the world after 1815 created a number of ‘new old regimes’. These political systems, which made reference to ancien régime inheritances, were not straightforward reflections of a ‘real past’. They were malleable discourses that could be calibrated to corroborate the competing claims made by conservatives, radicals and liberals about how post-Napoleonic Europe was to be organized. The ‘new old regime’ of the nineteenth century, though historically grounded, was instrumental in design and made little effort to resurrect the ‘real past’ to which it purportedly made constant reference. The battle to define the ‘new old regime’ was not a rear-guard action but lay at the very heart of European politics after 1815. The forces of nationhood, constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, liberalism and democracy unfurled by the twin titans of revolution and Napoleonic conquest were not guaranteed to win the day. Dynasticism, aristocratic hierarchy, military glory, religious revival, village communalism and regionalism continued to prosper during the first half of the nineteenth century.

I

‘Revolution’ as a historical category has received continuous interest and academic scrutiny over the past two centuries. The culmination of this process was reached in 1989 when Alain Rey published an exhaustive study entitled ‘Révolution: Histoire d'un mot’. ¹ Rey, in roughly four hundred pages, exhaustively traced the semantic shifts and new meanings which this term acquired from the eighteenth century onwards. Surprisingly, the regime invented by the French Revolution has received less sophisticated theoretical analysis and unpacking. The ancien regime, paradoxically, was conceived the moment it died. Only its expiry was recorded; its birth went unnoticed. ²

The reason for this is that the concept was a polemical label with which the new political elites of Revolutionary France consigned the immediate past to oblivion. ³ The corrupt composite and particularist structures that had governed and ordered the European world since the baroque era were to be wiped away, replaced with a regenerated vision of humanity. The reforms of the 1790s sought to establish a tabula rasa that mirrored the state of nature. It was hoped that, from this purified point of departure, an efficient and enlightened political society would spring forth. Since the 1960s and 1970s, revisionist historians across Europe have battled against this dismissive and uncomplimentary vision of the pre-1789 world. ⁴ We now possess a much more nuanced view of the political institutions and culture, which characterized the European mainland since the end of the Thirty Years’ war.

It is not the intention of this article to seek out the ‘real’ ancien régime, there are many fine studies which have profitably pursued this elusive subject. ⁵ William Doyle, T.C.W. Blanning, Franco Venturi, Michel Antoine and more controversially J.C.D. Clark, to name a small fraction, have done their best to understand the absolutist world of the eighteenth century on its own terms. ⁶ It would be a step too far to argue that the ancien régime was entirely a ‘construct’ or merely a ‘form of representation’. The argument presented here hinges on the simple fact that words, and the concepts they describe, are distinct entities. They have interesting and unstable relationships. ⁷ Neologisms demarcate the conceptual anxieties, priorities and intellectual battlegrounds of any age. Some historians still tend to assume that the relationship between ‘word’ and ‘concept’ is linear.

For example, several decades ago, the Italian intellectual historian Diego Venturino presented an elegant argument in which he claimed that the composite noun ancien régime had been chosen in preference to the more precise alternative ancien gouvernement. ⁸ According to Venturino the politicians of the Constituent Assembly did not want to compromise the monarchy, or its bureaucracy, in their rejection of the pre-1789 world. Therefore, they chose a broader, less compromising, expression to describe the social, cultural and political world they wanted to transcend. ⁹ For Venutrino this expression allowed deputies to denounce the mind-set, rather than specific individuals or institutions. While this strikes one as compelling, it is marred by a small problem. There is little evidence that the term ‘gouvernement’ was considered seriously as an alternative to the notion of ‘régime’. It seems, to me at least, that from the very beginning the revolutionary rejection of the past was not a compromise solution, but quite the opposite, a complete caesura with all that had gone before. The only redeemable past which the men of 1789 invoked was the Greco-Roman classical world, which was shrouded safely in millennial mists. ¹⁰

The conclusion to be drawn is that, whatever the ancien régime may have been, it had existed for centuries without needing a term to describe it. Only with its political implosion did a neologism become necessary. It was vital to label the ‘thing’ that was being rejected. The revolutionaries of the 1790s conceptualized in very superficial terms the socio-political order they had supplanted. Subsequently, the Napoleonic Empire would claim that it had harnessed and synthesized the best elements of the world pre- and post-1789. ¹¹ It was only in the nineteenth century that a vigorous debate on what the ancien régime had been, and, more importantly, how its legacy could shape contemporary politics, emerged. ¹² It is the argument here (and it makes no claim to being definitive but rather is part of a larger ongoing project) that the world post-1815 created a number of ‘new old regimes’. These political systems, which made reference to ancien régime inheritances, were not straightforward reflections of a ‘real past’.

They were malleable discourses that could be calibrated to corroborate the competing claims made by conservatives, radicals and liberals about how post-Napoleonic Europe was to be organized. The ‘new old regime’ of the nineteenth century, though historically grounded, was instrumental in its purpose, and made little effort to resurrect the ‘real past’ to which it purportedly made constant reference. As Marc Bloch joked in his Historian’s Craft:

So it was that the periods which were the most bound by tradition were also those which took the greatest liberties with their true heritage. It is as if, in a curious compensation for an irresistible creative urge, they were naturally led, by the sheer force of their veneration of the past, to invent it. ¹³

Much of the inspiration for what follows comes from Marxist historians and in particular from Arno Mayer’s controversial book The Persistence of the Old Regime, published in 1981. ¹⁴ In this highly original and heterodox study Mayer stated with conviction that:

It is the thesis of this book that the ‘pre-modern’ elements were not the decaying fragile remnants of an all but vanished past the very essence of Europe’s incumbent civil and political societies. This is not to deny the growing importance of the modern forces that undermined and challenged the old order. But it is to argue that until 1914 the forces of inertia and resistance contained and curbed this dynamic and expansive new society within the anciens régimes that dominated Europe’s historical landscape. ¹⁵

The main problem with Mayer’s work is that it was a product of the growing insecurities of the 1980s. Historians of the Marxist tradition increasingly needed to explain why history had not gone according to plan. It was for this reason that they explained the failure of their prophetic vision of modernity through recourse to an ancien régime roadblock that impeded all progress. The monarchical and aristocratic foundations of nineteenth-century Europe were too deep for the bourgeois revolutionaries and socialist proletariat to uproot. ¹⁶ The persistence of the ancien régime highlighted how society had failed to evolve as it ‘should’ have done.

Mayer’s surprise, when confronted by the immobility of the nineteenth century, has been blunted by the revisionist scholarship of the past decades. ¹⁷ Despite this, his argument remains persuasive, even if the agenda behind it does not. Many of the cultural, social and political edifices, which the revolutionaries of the 1790s and the imperial administrators of Napoleonic decades had sought to demolish, were still standing in 1815. The biggest problem with Mayer’s work lies in his historical materialistic approach to the evidence and that, equally, his periodization of 1848–1914 examines the wrong half of the century. ‘Social progress’ may have been slow, even after 1848, but mentalities after these European revolutions had evolved dramatically, even among arch-reactionaries.

Another body of theory that has proved useful in the study of post-revolutionary Europe has been the late Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of ‘invented traditions’. This doyen of the British Marxist school stated that many of the rituals, practices and symbols of the nineteenth century were a complex mélange of historic symbolism and practical innovation. As he put it:

Invented tradition is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. ¹⁸

Europe after the French and Industrial revolutions experienced bewildering economic, social, political or cultural change. Essentially, for Hobsbawm, a world in flux needed new rituals, ceremonies, flags and music that could disarm the instability which the putrefaction of the old order had unleashed. For this historian, ‘invented tradition’ had the conservative and authoritarian function of maintaining the cultural hegemony of elites over the masses. Perhaps more unwisely, Hobsbawn concluded that: ‘Insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of “invented” traditions is that continuity with it is factitious’. ¹⁹

The conclusion that new ritual practices were meant to stabilize and harmonize society can be cherished. However, the notion that nineteenth-century elites and government created such cultural artefacts out of nothing is going too far. The dynastic, chivalric, liturgical and aulic culture of the ‘real ancien régime’ provided a potent arsenal of symbols and practices which nineteenth-century statesmen and politicians could deploy in support of their agendas. Nothing after all is made out of nothing.

Another neglected historical dimension lies in the failure to consider the protagonists of post-Napoleonic Europe from a strong comparative perspective. The statesmen who triumphed after 1815, due to life experiences that were parallel, shared a common political outlook and engaged with their immediate past, in remarkably similar ways. As Karl Mannheim, long ago, and Alan Spitzer, more recently, have shown, the idea of ‘generation’ remains important, though under-appreciated, in the study of history. ²⁰ Individuals, or rather groups, born at specific moments in history, and with a common social milieu, carried much baggage. The religion, culture and education imparted by their parents and grandparents gave them a common point of departure.

Yet, human beings do not simply replicate each other; there is significant divergence between past and present generations. New circumstances and different experiences mean that ‘age groups’ have very different perceptions of historical time and its significance. This is what art historian Moritz Pindar defined wittily as the ‘non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous’. ²¹ ‘Generation Units’, as Mannheim defined them, experience history differently from ‘real’ time. ²² The ‘new old regime’ fits this model very well. ‘Generational history’ can make an important contribution when it comes to understanding the elites of post-Napoleonic Europe. These men came to maturity during the 1790s; their ancien régime heritage had been utterly shattered by the French Revolutionary Wars. These events and collective traumas of invasion united them in exile. One clear repercussion of the forced migration of elites was that many of these grandees were not native to the dynasties and states they served. They fought Napoleon not to restore their lost homelands; instead, they struggled to create polities where the blows of revolutionary innovation would be cushioned by the legacy of the ancien régime.

For these men there was no going home. ²³ The Revolution and Napoleonic wars had destroyed the micro-principalities and peripheries of their birth. Restoration in these provinces was simply an impossibility. It is easy to forget that Metternich and Stein were born in almost the same place, within the archbishopric-electorate of Mainz. ²⁴ Their forced migration propelled them to very different corners of the defunct Holy Roman Empire. Both, in admittedly different ways (especially when it came to the notion of Germany), sought a future that would resolve the tension between the heritage of the ‘old order’ and the needs of the ‘new world’. ²⁵

Equally, Hardenberg, from electoral Hannover, and the Corsican Pozzo di Borgo (who had been the Bonaparte family attorney during the 1780s), had left their homelands because of Revolutionary strife. ²⁶ They had entered Prussian and Russian service, respectively, not to resurrect the real ancien régime they had left behind, but to establish some sort of synthetic world where their ancestral traditions could be accommodated. The same was the case for Prince Adam Czartoryski, whose native Poland was partitioned no fewer than three times during the eighteenth century. ²⁷ As for so many fellow Poles, service abroad was the only viable option in order to survive and maintain influence. He served Alexander I as loyal cosmopolitan minister, while, at the same time, he aspired to re-establish Poland as a Constitutional Monarchy under Russian protection. ²⁸ As a realist he understood that the old Commonwealth/Noble Republic would not rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the past.

The best, and perhaps most striking, example was the Greek diplomat Ioannis Kapodistrias, who rose to become Russian foreign minister. ²⁹ His career was enmeshed deeply in his ‘Generation Unit’s’ unfolding history. His native Ionian Islands were annexed by the French in 1797 as part of the peace agreement signed at Campo Formio. A Russo-Turkish expedition eventually ‘liberated’ these Islands three years later and brought Kapodistrias into the orbit of Romanov Russia. ³⁰ This geo-political coincidence was to have momentous consequences. Without the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars this provincial doctor might well have lived all of his days in insular obscurity. ³¹ Like many of his contemporaries, the storms of Revolution and Restoration catapulted him unexpectedly into the limelight.

He would spend his career in a desperate effort to serve his Tsarist master efficiently while at the same time trying to ‘re-conceive’, rather than ‘resurrect’, a Greece fit for modernity. ³² He would eventually pay with his life for the delicate attempt to balance Greek independence against service to Russia. Kapodistrias knew that no return to an authentic or old Greek regime was possible (one had never existed). The new Hellenic state that eventually emerged, after his assassination in 1831, was an eclectic mix of classical antiquity, constitutionalism and monarchy. ³³ This hardly constituted a return to the pre-1789 world, but rather it established a new past for the Greeks. The ‘generational baggage’ of maturing during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic squalls would weigh heavily on the political elites who ruled Europe after Vienna.

II

The battle to define the ‘new old regime’ was not a rear-guard action but lay at the very heart of European politics after 1815. The forces of nationhood, constitutionalism, parliamentarianism, liberalism and democracy unfurled by the twin titans of revolution and Napoleonic conquest were not fated to win the day. Dynasticism, aristocratic hierarchy, military glory, religious revival, village communalism and regionalism continued to flourish during the first half of the nineteenth century. ³⁴ Admittedly there was a paradox at the heart of this process. Conservatives appealed to an old order they had significantly re-imagined, while at the same time claiming they were reinstating it. Such behaviour may strike us as bizarre, yet at the heart of this lay the power of ‘visionary politics’. The manufactured golden age became a historical reality that needed to be realized. Invention, reality and action became one. While such political imaginings made absolute sense to many of the statesmen of the Restoration era they commanded far from universal adherence.

Many alternatives were open to nineteenth-century political actors. For liberals like Guizot, Thierry and Constant the interrupted process of enlightenment and the resumption of the onward march of civilization were of paramount importance. ³⁵ For mystics, future Christian socialists and radical clergymen, the abandonment of religious faith unleashed by the revolutionary decades had created a dysfunctional and highly unstable society. ³⁶ The regeneration of Christianity, as an antidote to the political strife left in the wake of the French Revolution, became a major battleground in the early nineteenth-century world. For conservatives and theocrats, like Louis de Bonald, only political and religious society, working in unison, could create a civil society strong enough to avoid the re-emergence of the disasters of the late eighteenth century. ³⁷ The religious community of the ancien régime was re-imagined as the vaccine that would protect against the evils of individualism and factionalism which had infected the social body down to its marrow.

However, ‘religious society’ as recast by de Maistre and Bonald had little sympathy, or engagement, with the ‘real’ Gallicanism and conciliar traditions of the past centuries. ³⁸ Theirs was a romantic vision of community, clergy and papacy working harmoniously to curb the selfishness of the revolutionary individual and the excesses of centralizing government. Despite its reactionary language and traditionalist leanings, it was modern both in its populist anti-democratic content and character. These arguments find their parallels in the Iberian context, where Spanish bishops and theologians also defended traditionalism and the community of the faithful as the bedrock on which a restoration settlement could be established. Thus laying much of the groundwork for Carlist thought in the subsequent decade. ³⁹

The most nebulous alternative vision of perceiving the ‘new-old world’ was conceived by Talleyrand, with his brilliantly ambiguous idea of legitimacy, better translated as legality. ⁴⁰ For the elites of Vienna the new order needed to be built on lawfulness rather than abstraction or usurpation. ⁴¹ There were a large number of alternative ‘new ancien regimes’, each stressing different priorities, available to political players during the early nineteenth century. Whether they rejected or cherished the legacy of the old order they could not ignore it. Civilization, Christianity and legality were all historical processes that needed to engage with their immediate pasts. To a considerable extent, it was the conservative failure to delineate a clear and compelling political tradition that created our modern political world. This was not for want of trying.

During the Congress of Vienna the ancien régime very much played the role of Banquo’s ghost at the victor’s feast. The monarchs and plenipotentiaries who gathered in the Habsburg capital were, literally, assailed by petitioners demanding nothing short of pure and simple Restoration. Castlereagh, Metternich, Alexander I and Talleyrand could not swing a cat without hitting the feisty spirits of the ancien régime. Like Lazarus, emissaries from the Ecclesiastical-Electors of the Holy Roman Empire, the Republic of Genoa, the Swiss Lord-Abbot of St Gallen and the unpronouncable Prince of Truchsess von Waldburg-Zeil-Trauchburg, demanded nothing short of resurrection. ⁴² For them the past was very much the future.

Naturally, the victors of Leipzig had little or no intention of losing the gains made under the Napoleonic period. The Revolutionaries and Napoleon, as Tocqueville stated in his final masterpiece, had accomplished many of the objectives of enlightened absolutism. ⁴³ State power had increased at the expense of intermediate powers, the noble privilege and Church immunity. Kings and emperors had no wish to lose these hard-fought victories. Equally, they did not want to clothe themselves in the mantle of revolution either, which denied their legitimacy and divine election. ⁴⁴ Decades of Revolution had shown that the public and its Habermasian sphere was a powerful political barometer, which rulers could only ignore at their peril. ⁴⁵ The protagonists of Vienna needed to harness the support of their conservative constituencies in order to win the battle for survival. The banquets, feasts, balls and illuminations that took up so much of the Congress’ time were not mere trivialities. ⁴⁶ These spectacles were a complicated attempt to choreograph and display the ‘new old order’ for a conservative public. The great medieval joust hosted in the Hofburg’s Spanish Riding School allowed the grandees of Europe to pose as medieval knights and damsels, heralding the birth of a new age of chivalry. The Napoleonic ogre and revolutionary hydra had been defeated by Christian kings and knights of old. The past had restored the future.

Vienna afforded the Tsar an important staging ground where he could unbridle his mystical and diplomatic ambitions. ⁴⁷ He proposed the organization of a great trans-Christian crusade against the demonic forces of revolution. ⁴⁸ It was not so much this hyperbole that failed to impress Metternich and Castlereagh, but rather it was the ‘fine print’ that in the end proved problematic. ⁴⁹ The Holy Alliance showed that Europe’s Christian heritage could be rebranded, not just to assert Russia’s military and diplomatic hegemony, but also to create a new diplomatic forum within which the great powers could concert and discuss matters relating to the security of the continent. ⁵⁰ At such summit meetings, starting with Vienna, for the first time in centuries Catholic royal orders of chivalry were awarded to protestant generals and protestant chivalric awards adorned the chests of Catholic ministers. Such ecumenical displays of royal patronage proclaimed flamboyantly that the past could be remoulded to suit the needs of the present. Europe’s chivalric and noble past was deployed to legitimize a system of regular international conferences which was almost without precedent.

Brian Vick’s recent study has highlighted that the Congress of Vienna was not solely about high politics and international relations. ⁵¹ Its proceedings were influenced by the desire of the statesmen present to satisfy opinion back in their home countries. A much wider European public than was hitherto realized were fascinated, for divergent reasons, by the negotiations and events that were taking place at the heart of the Habsburg Empire. The many pamphlets and periodicals published across Europe provide evidence that clever publicists were involved in sophisticated attempts to lobby their government. They wanted their say on how the heritage and precepts of old regime Europe was to be interpreted and refashioned.

Friedrich Carl von Savigny provided the most articulate analysis of the future of Europe’s past in his 1814 pamphlet ‘The Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence’. ⁵² This Prussian jurist argued with gusto, and venom, that law codes were foreign to justice, good practice and went against the grain of the historical development of Europe’s peoples. As he put it in a memorable passage:

One may seek to destroy all links with our history and begin a new life, but such an enterprise is an illusion. It is impossible to reduce to nothingness the viewpoints and culture of jurists living today. Equally, it is impossible to transform existing juridical relationships. Upon this double impossibility are founded the indissoluble organic links that exist and unite generations and centuries, between which one observes constant evolution, there are no endpoints or beginnings. ⁵³

In many ways, this gradualist approach could be seen as the manifesto for the Restoration era. Savigny, like so many contemporaries, was reacting against the chauvinism of French universalism and imperialism. ⁵⁴ The Holy Roman Empire was gone, but its legacy was valued, if not entirely rescued, by Germans at this time. Superb studies, by William Godsey, Brenden Simms and Abigail Green, have highlighted that post-1815 the jury was out on how the new Germany was to be imagined. ⁵⁵ Nationhood, Federalism, Statehood and supra-national Empire were among the many possibilities under scrutiny and which found adherents. The micro-dynastic states that made up the German Confederation were an interesting balancing act in which Nation, Empire and State were all kept in equilibrium by a delicate set of compromises. ⁵⁶

Too often Savigny has been dismissed as a reactionary obscurantist, yet his was a practical view that sought to incorporate ancien régime legal practices and experience into the present. His was an eloquent call for practice to determine theory and not vice versa. His pamphlet, like so many writings of this time, was a nuanced appeal for evolution not revolution. Where codes already existed, they could be tempered by practice, where they did not, customary law could be improved through trial and error. ⁵⁷ The state, or nation, was a living body with few redundant organs. The revolutionary surgeon’s scalpel became the assassin’s knife in von Savigny’s clever intellectual hands.

The triumph of Napoleonic reforms, especially the code, was not a straightforward process. ⁵⁸ Indeed, in Spain, exactly at the same time as Savigny published his pamphlet, articles sixty-five to sixty-nine of the conservative Manifiesto de los Persas condemned the codification of laws in much the same language. ⁵⁹ In the Iberian Peninsula in particular these foreign legal innovations had the potential to unsettle and destroy those regional customs, traditions and especially fueros that were such an integral part of social equilibrium in Spain. The Restoration allowed for notable revisionist critique of French legal reforms, and the old customary law codes found their defenders. The vindication of the specificity of local experience came to be the rallying point of the defenders of the ‘new old order’. For example, Count Monaldo Leopardi, the father of the famous poet Giacomo, dreamt of an Italy where the culture and daily rhythms of his native Marche would remain undisturbed by progressive government of any kind. ⁶⁰ He was one of those great paradoxes of the early nineteenth-century world. A man who could write ‘not all rebellions are revolutions but all revolutions are rebellions’, while at the same time encouraging the development of steam power and introducing vaccinations into his estates. ⁶¹ Such contradictory trends posed serious headaches for rulers who now faced the difficulty of managing enormous cultural diversity on a European continent that, thanks to the Napoleonic episode, was more interconnected than ever before.

III

The renewed struggle, between the twin legacies of the ancien régime and revolution, found its most extreme flashpoint when it came to the vexed question of constitutionalism. This debate was especially toxic in France. The Cadiz Constitution of 1812 and the Norwegian, Dutch and Polish Constitutions of 1814 all showed that the fundamental changes of 1789 were irreversible. Yet, the specific arrangements contained in these statutes were considered either too radical, as in the Cadiz case, or too sui-generis to be replicated elsewhere. It was in Bourbon France that a replicable Charte, which spoke to the Zeitgeist of the age, was created. As the work of Markus Prutsch has shown, this document was to prove inspirational across the continent, especially in Bavaria and Baden, which also adopted similar arrangements. ⁶²

The Verfassungs adopted in these states marked yet another fault line in the relationship between tradition and innovation. They made reference to the contractualism of German political thought dating to the Holy Roman Empire, while at the same drawing inspiration from the legacy of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. ⁶³ While broadly similar, Baden’s svelte charter was different from Bavaria’s chunkier contract, which still upheld some noble privilege. ⁶⁴ At the heart of the charter’s adoptability was its protean character. The document, as Pierre Rosanvallon has illustrated shrewdly, contained a vast number of ambiguities and contradictions. ⁶⁵ The brilliance of the Charte was that it allowed individuals of different political persuasions to read into the document their own worldviews. ⁶⁶ The Ultra Royalists could, and did, interpret it as the foundational text for a ‘new old regime’.

This document was a royal gift, or octroi, rather than a constitution based on national sovereignty, ⁶⁷ implying that the fundamental law of the realm emanated from God and the Crown rather than the assembled Nation. This was not a case of mere semantics. The location of sovereignty was of the utmost importance in the context of the political culture of post-revolutionary Europe. Sovereignty was vested in the crown, but legislative power was shared with two chambers. ⁶⁸ The aristocracy’s loss of seigneurial privilege was unalterable. In his St-Ouen declaration of 2 May 1814 Louis XVIII had declared: ‘properties will be sacred and inviolable; the sale of national lands is irrevocable’. ⁶⁹ The king accepted that the lands of the church and nobility, confiscated by the revolutionaries, were gone forever. This, however, did not mean that these two estates would not find accommodation in the new order of things.

In compensation for their losses during the 1790s, the high nobility was rewarded with a chamber of peers. Here the most meritorious aristocrats would share legislative (though not budgetary) power with their wealthy counterparts in the chamber of deputies. ⁷⁰ New nobilities were an essential part of the ‘fabrication’ of the new old order. Ronald Mousnier and William Beik have described the ancien régime as a society of orders. ⁷¹ While this concept, fashioned in 1970s and 1980s, has proved useful in terms of historical sociology, it would have meant little to the men and women of the eighteenth century. Nobility, as Hamish Scott and others have shown, varied enormously in terms of political power, ceremonial prestige, privilege and wealth. ⁷²

The nineteenth century, through the Napoleonic invention of the Imperial nobility, would show itself highly impatient and unsympathetic to the old seigneurial nobility. ⁷³ Mere hobereau and former szlachta, on the surface at least, seemed little better than the bourgeoisie or peasants. Gradually, between 1815 and 1848, throughout Europe these ‘lords of the manor’ shed their juridical and seigneurial privileges. ⁷⁴ The Prussian Junkers and Austro-Polish landlords of Galicia did this with ill grace and only when forced to do so by the 1848 revolutions. ⁷⁵ Elsewhere the transition was more peaceful. Nobility in the post-Napoleonic world came to mean titles and prestige rather than seigneurialism. The elder Tocquevilles, who for centuries had borne no titles, became vicomtes and departed for the chamber of peers in Paris. ⁷⁶ The partitioned grandees of Poland abandoned, with some regret admittedly, the concept of a noble republic of equals. Their meaner Polish szlachta cousins receded into obscurity, while higher up the social ladder the Potockis, Radziwiłłs, Jabłonowskis, Czartoryskis and Zamoyskis continued to be regulars at European courts and proudly bore their non-Polish titles. ⁷⁷

The nineteenth-century European nobility for the first time in its history started to overcome the boundaries that geographic fragmentation had thrown up. The battle against revolution bred solidarity and encouraged the creation of a socio-political aristocracy fit to meet this challenge head on. This was a trans-national endeavour. Privileges were no more, but after 1815 the titled elites believed that they were the custodians of the ‘true’ spirit of an ancien régime they had both imagined and forgotten. These titled individuals who proudly wore gilded court and military uniforms were a notable re-invention of a previous model. ⁷⁸ Throughout the century an ongoing attempt to stay near to the levers of power was maintained. Injections of new blood came to be seen as necessary, although the arrival of a Jewish aristocracy in the Hapsburg Empire (and elsewhere) was not without controversy. ⁷⁹ The titled nobility of this period was a significant re-formulation of the elite political culture that had characterized the early modern world.

Restoration France was the trendsetter in this field. It re-invigorated Napoleon’s fusion of honour and virtue. The institution of ‘majorat’ was refashioned so as to preserve ‘inheritance entail’ for the eldest sons of peers. ⁸⁰ As Philip Mansel has observed, access to the royal court was now contingent on state service, rather than aristocratic pedigree. ⁸¹ Even the most inveterate reactionaries like Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald and Renée de Chateaubriand did not advocate a complete retour en arrière. For example, the old parlements, provincial estates or Gallican church found no new advocates who lobbied for their resurrection. ⁸² Despite their rhetoric of restoration, arch-conservatives could be surprisingly fresh in their approach to political problems.

One of the old-new problems that emerged during the first few years of the French Restoration was a renewed struggle between crown and nobility. ⁸³ In 1816 the king had appointed a moderate ministry to restrain the excesses of the ultra-royalist chamber of deputies elected after Napoleon’s hundred days. ⁸⁴ The Ultras, extremist royalist nobles, prided themselves in being ‘plus royaliste que le roi’. The most articulate partisan of this party, was Chateaubriand, who in his pamphlet the ‘Monarchie selon la charte 1816’, provided one of the most compelling arguments that government should be bound by the wishes of a parliamentary majority. According to him:

It follows, that under a constitutional monarchy, it is public opinion that is the source of legitimacy for the ministry, principium et fons, In consequence it[s power] derives from this [source]; the ministry must emerge from [the] majority of the chamber of deputies, because the deputies are the principal agents of public opinion. ⁸⁵

Despite his conservative agenda, Chateaubriand advocated the modern principle of a government’s parliamentary accountability. Ultimately, the chamber’s large ultra-royalist majority made them the perfect representatives of the ‘new old regime’. ⁸⁶

Thus, in this way a complete return to the past was avoided while the spirit of the ancien régime was maintained. The problem for conservatives, like Chateaubriand, was that they were very vague and inconsistent when it came to defining the key concepts of their political culture. Their approach to theory was essentially reactive. Opportunistically, they coated their factional self-interest in theoretical drag ex post facto. The slogans of tradition, legitimacy and order all remained rather nebulous when it came to ultra-royalist political thought. This was to prove a decided disadvantage when it came to confronting their liberal opponents. Intellectuals like Constant, Guizot and Royer-Collard, during the 1820s, built up a formidable conceptual and historical arsenal with which to counter their enemies. They were highly articulate, and when it came to debate they ran rings round the Ultras. These liberal politicians, in many ways, invented the wicked depraved pre-1789 world so familiar to the popular imagination today. As Guizot put it in his fourteenth lecture on the ‘History of European Civilization’:

Upon the continent, the progress of civilization has been much less complex and complete [when compared to England]. The various elements of society – the religious and civil orders – monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, have developed themselves, not together and abreast, but in succession. Each principle, each system has had after a certain manner, its turn. ⁸⁷

Guizot lamented that, unlike England in 1688, mixed government had not come into being in France peacefully. Freedom of the individual was still constrained by monarchical, aristocratic and ecclesiastic shackles that dated from before 1789. Few ultra-royalists felt the need to defend or propagate a positive public image of the ancien régime that they had internalized in their youth. This left the stage free for others to describe how dark and dismal life had been pre-1789. ⁸⁸ France was not the only place in Europe where conservatives were struggling to defend their vision of the old regime. When confronted with the great reform act of 1832, Peelite Tories appealed to something they called ‘old England’. ⁸⁹ Like their French ultra-royalist counterparts, they failed singularly to define what this mythical golden age meant in practice. ⁹⁰

It was Stendland, perhaps, who best epitomised this black legend in his novel The Chaterhouse of Parma. He describes his anti-hero, Count Mosca della Rovere Sorezana in a highly evocative fashion:

Mosca was a man who might have been forty or forty-five. He had large features, no trace of self-importance and a simple, cheerful expression which told in his favour. He would have been very handsome too, had not a quirk of his prince not forced him to wear powder in his hair as a guarantee of his having the right political ideas. ⁹¹

A sparkling conversationalist, sexually licentious, corrupt and venal, Count Mosca, was not just the most attractive character in the novel, he was the incarnation of the ancien régime aristocrat. The clouds of hair powder encountered in the novel are the ectoplasm of the evil ancien régime. The radical Stendhal was not just condemning the corrupt past but he lampooned the equally iniquitous post-heroic present. Mosca was not just a man of pre-1789 values he was the living embodiment of the ‘new old regime’. ⁹² From his exile, the former Emperor also participated with relish in the formulation of a liberal black legend of the ancien régime:

In France the nobles represented the Franks and Burgundians, while the rest of the nation were the Gauls. The feudal regime introduced and established the principle that all lands had a lord. Priests and nobles exercised all political rights; the peasants were enserfed to their domains. The march of civilization and enlightenment liberated the people. ⁹³

Cleverly from Saint Helena, Napoleon actively forgot the authoritarianism of his Empire and reinvented himself as the champion of liberal values. The legacy of Revolution and Empire were the sole defence against a new ancien régime that despite its claims to benignity was anti-historical according to Bonapartists and those who identified with the progress of civilization. In the same way liberals in the chambers accused conservatives not of seeking a harmonious synthesis between old and new but of wanting to plunge France under the shadow of the Bastille.

One of the more interesting figures in this debate was Regnault de Warin, the Girouette (turncoat) par excellence, ⁹⁴ who in 1820 published a ‘dictionary of the ancien régime’. ⁹⁵ After having been a Jacobin, a latter day hagiographer of Louis XVI, an ardent Bonapartist and a Restoration royalist, Warin discovered his inner liberal soul. ⁹⁶ In a confused and disorientating alphabetical compendium, he listed the abuses of feudalism and the old nobility with relish. ⁹⁷ Wisely enough, the institution of monarchy was omitted from his denunciation of the past. This was a wise move because shortly after publication of the dictionary, the duc de Berry was assassinated. The fallout from the murder of this Bourbon prince was significant. The moderate government of Decazes fell and reaction against subversive elements in society followed. ⁹⁸ Despite it stylistic flaws and poor prose Warin’s text seems to have been fairly popular. The liberals triumphed with the advent of the July Monarchy and this regime was very sympathetic to the myth of ‘bad old regime’. In 1832 Warin’s dictionary received a second augmented edition. ⁹⁹ Shortly after this, his hitherto indefatigable pen succumbed finally to the twin pressures of decrepitude and penury.

IV

When it came to ordering peasant communities and managing regional diversity, attempts to salvage and recast elements of the old regime for the new gave rise to decidedly mixed results. Beyond the Olympian summits of the world of political elites, the battle to define the ‘new old regime’ reverberated to the very bottom of the social pyramid. The original research of Bernard Rulof on Languedoc and that of Tracy Dennison on the serfs of Voskashnikovo highlights that peasants and their lords faced dilemmas that were not dissimilar to those confronting their governments. ¹⁰⁰ The feudal past and the modern agricultural present needed to find a new synthesis post-1815. Landowners across Europe desperately tried to manage the transition from paternalism to popular politics as best they could. ¹⁰¹ Noble-funded drinking societies and legitimist rural clubs tried to sacralize the bond between peasant communities and the ‘natural’ leadership provided by local squires. ¹⁰² These appeals to heritage, hierarchy and tradition actually camouflaged political processes that were highly disruptive.

It was the beginning of a long apprenticeship in politics for Europe’s peasants. ¹⁰³ Such politicization was hardly harmonious, as central government’s intrusions de-stabilized the customs and rhythms of rural life. A good example can be found in Sahlins’ study of the guerre de Demoiselles. ¹⁰⁴ Here ‘Charivaris’ and other atavistic forms of resistance were resurrected to fight the very unwelcome forestry codes which struck brutally at the very heart of the peasant community. ¹⁰⁵ Violent clashes between traditional peasants and the might of the state exposed that the understanding of ‘new old regimes’ was contested ground. The stakes in defining how the legacy of the old order shaped the present were high for both conservatives and radicals.

After 1848, some revolutionaries, realizing the growing engagement of the peasantry with politics, refashioned the legacy of the old order and its traditions of peasant communalism to suit more radical objectives. One need only think of Alexander Herzen’s idyllic and highly idealized portrayal of the Russian Mir. For this revolutionary, Russia was not backward but better suited than other European peoples for communism thanks to its traditional rural structures which fostered common ownership and communal self-government. ¹⁰⁶ The peasant communities of the old Mir (or village) made serfs ideally positioned to meet the challenges of modernity head-on. It could be argued that such debates on the role of heritage in organizing peasant communities was another, perhaps more pastoral, form of ‘new old regime’.

Equally, the manner in which respect for regionalism could be reconciled with strong government was an issue that deeply challenged the post-Napoleonic world. Sir John Elliott famously described the style of rulership in the early modern world as one of composite monarchy. ¹⁰⁷ Put simply, in order to incorporate inherited and conquered provinces into their kingdoms, monarchs bestowed significant regional and fiscal privileges and autonomies on their subjects. After the failed Napoleonic experiment of integrating Europe under a unified system of administration, composite monarchies experienced a second lease of life across the continent. The best known examples were Sardinia-Piedmont, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Habsburg Empire.

On the surface this was an old solution to an old problem. Yet the legacy of the Napoleonic wars had deeply changed Europe and created new expectations. Restoration governments had a delicate balancing act to accomplish. ¹⁰⁸ They inherited from Napoleonic France administrative reforms and institutions which far exceeded the ambitions of most enlightened absolutists from the ancien régime. At the same time, French occupation and the imposition of cultural imperialism had awakened a sense that linguistic and cultural groups had their own rights. Managing such diversity in a Europe of powerful, centralized and reforming monarchies could prove insoluble. Indeed, the House of Nassau desperately sought to appeal to a common Burgundian past to justify the Netherlandish present. ¹⁰⁹ A barrage of newspapers, educational policies and administrative reforms failed to convince its Belgian subjects that more united than separated them from their Dutch neighbours. The linguistic and administrative policies of the Dutch United Kingdom could not bridge the deep historic and religious antipathies that divided south from north in the Low Countries. ¹¹⁰ The ghosts of the defunct Austrian Netherlands made the construction of a shared Dutch past unconvincing. In 1831 the Belgians corrected this by rising up in revolution and creating a ‘new old regime’ which fitted their context.

The kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia experienced similar issues. Even its name belied the fact that it was fabricated simply by fusing two Italian provinces whose culture, society and economies shared only a common border. Unlike the Habsburg erblände, which still possessed provincial estates, feudal law and, where pedigree dictated, access to public office, Lombardy-Venetia retained much of its Napoleonic edifice. ¹¹¹ The Habsburgs tried with determination to fuse their dynastic history with the legacy of Napoleon into an eclectic ‘new old regime’. They tried, through strong educational policies (almost a third of the entire Empire’s educational budget), to teach Italians to be Kaisertreue. ¹¹² The Coronation of Ferdinand I in Milan in 1838 marked the pinnacle of the Austrian penchant for inventing traditions en masse. A barrage of spectacles, rituals, traditions, gestures and costumes were created for the occasion. ¹¹³ Despite their ancien régime appearance they owed more to Napoleon than to the history of the Habsburg dynasty. As in the best art forgeries, significant layers of varnish were superimposed in the hope that this fake patina, giving the appearance of centuries of ageing, would fool spectators. It would be harsh to say that this experiment was doomed to failure as the Habsburg deployed very significant resources in trying to accommodate these Italian provinces into their Empire. The cries of ‘viva Radetsky’ of some Lombard peasants during the 1848 revolution highlight that at least some felt loyalty to this newly minted old order. ¹¹⁴

Nowhere more so than in Spain did the quest to accommodate the legacies of antiguo régimen regionalism prove so bloody and divisive. Carlism, and its wars, did not translate straightforwardly into a battle between progressives and reactionaries. ¹¹⁵ Such a description belies the stunning complexities and realities that lay behind so much of both Cristino and Carlist thinking. On the face of it this was a dynastic dispute. Those who supported the French-style Salic law of male succession, imported by Philip V in 1715, bitterly opposed those who defended older Visigothic traditions of female inheritance. ¹¹⁶ It is important to note that both of these positions were historically grounded. They proposed competing visions of how the legacy of the ancien régime could re-structure Spain’s future.

The liberal Cristinos appealed to the heroic example of the Comuneros revolt and Spain’s chequered history of administrative reform, ¹¹⁷ whereas the counter-revolutionary Carlists were an eclectic agglutination of ultramontane theocrats, defenders of regional ‘fueros’, re-interpreters of the leyes fundamentales of the kingdom and admirers of Charles III’s enlightened absolutism. ¹¹⁸ The nation that had most resisted Napoleon’s administrative system tore itself apart over what to retain from the past and what to borrow from their former enemy. Here as elsewhere in Europe the definition of how the heritage of past should shape the future was up for grabs. Carlos María Isidro and his Carlist supports appealed to a romantic social compact symbolized by the Árbol de Guernica. ¹¹⁹ It was a vision of history in which provinces, traditional Cortes and monarchs had reached a mutually beneficial system of regional autonomies (fueros) that were at the heart of their prosperity. It was no straightforward vision of Restoration because, as Alexandra Wilhelmsen has shown, words like reform and renovation were buried deep inside Carlist rhetoric too. ¹²⁰ They did not merely re-present the antiguo régimen but wanted to improve on it.

This struggle in Spain broke the unity of the Vienna settlement (at least temporarily). The liberal powers of the West formed a quadruple alliance in 1834 to resist the Münchengrätz convention of the Eastern Empires. ¹²¹ In the English-speaking world this is a largely forgotten story, hidden beneath an overly simplistic narrative of reaction versus progress. The first Carlist war highlighted the vital importance of mastering the immediate past in order to organize the present. All of Europe watched, and sent money, arms and volunteers to Iberia. As far Russia, Nikolai Gogol nervously joked about the hispanomania of current affairs in his ‘diary of a madman’. ¹²² Such levity tried to distract attention from the fact that Spain was a vital test case when it came to defining which conception of the ‘new old regime’ would win the day. Was it to be the cherished (and unrealistic) conservative polity that tried to reconcile regional diversity with strong government, or was it to be the liberal black legend that had refashioned the ancien régime into an age of corruption and superstition which threatened to plunge European civilization back into obscurantism?

This article is part of a wider and ongoing research project, and its argument, though still evolving, claims to make a contribution to the historiography of the Restoration. Building on the important work of Waresquiel, Broers, Laven and Riall, it seeks to move beyond sterile interpretations that depict Europe at this time as if it were a car in reverse gear. The dichotomy of progress versus reaction, though not without its uses, does tend to make readings of this period overly teleological and laden with anachronistic value judgements. The post-Napoleonic world has been painted, unhelpfully, as a frustrating waiting room before Europe entered a more interesting age of democracy and nationalism. Such a dismissive view caricatures an age that was rich in political thought, strife and cultural innovation. Focusing simply on the struggle against the Revolution after 1815 is to examine only half of the picture.

The ancien régime and its legacy was interpreted and reworked constantly throughout these decades. It was described simultaneously as a model and a ruin – paradoxically invoked by some as a blueprint and by others as a dangerous obstacle to be avoided. Behind these debates nearly all accepted that a complete retour en arrière was impossible. Conservatives, liberals and radicals all fashioned their own alternative versions of new-old regimes that would legitimize their political agenda and strengthen their dreams of a stable future. It could be speculated that many of the challenges and debates of this neglected period find, admittedly imperfect, parallels with our own age. Managing diversity in an interconnected world, finding a stable relationship between popular and elite politics, the desirability of foreign intervention and establishing legitimacy in the realm of international relations are issues that confronted Chancellor Metternich as they today face Chancellor Merkel. The ghosts of the ancien régime made an impressive contribution to the structure and reshaping of politics after 1815. Perhaps we neglect the spirits of the post-Napoleonic age at our own peril.