ABSTRACT
Intellectual and cultural life presented a very different spectacle from the slow evolution of population, agriculture, and manufacturing. The Napoleonic regime had imposed a stifling conformity on writers and artists; the Restoration, despite the maintenance of some restrictions, permitted lively debate. Restoration government officials worried that the priests' attacks on purchasers of former church lands and on soldiers who had served in the Napoleonic armies. The animated debates of the Restoration period might not have posed a real threat to political stability if a government open to compromise had been in power. The revival of Catholicism found a genuine echo in some parts of French society. Catholic preachers, adopting revivalist techniques first seen in the "Great Awakening" movement in the United States after 1800, held fifteen hundred meetings between 1815 and 1830 that inspired at least a temporary return to religious observance.
