ABSTRACT
The connection of the Aristotelian mesotês categories to ‘right’ and ‘left’, the new political terms of direction carried out during the first ‘constitutional’ phase of the French Revolution, was only slowly revived at the end of the Napoleonic era. At the beginning of the Restoration period, the paralysis of political life still continued. The representatives of the Chamber of 1814 coming from the Empire ‘were so strongly accustomed to bowing to the emperor’s will that differing opinions were not outwardly recognizable in elections, although these took place openly’.1 However, after the turmoil of the Hundred Days, this changed rapidly. The new political geography that developed in the first year of the Revolution found its mirror image in the parliamentarian seating order (Figure 4.1). Already before 1820, there was a differentiation between the ‘extrême
droite’, the ‘droite modérée’ and the ‘centre droite’ and the ‘centre gauche’, the ‘gauche modérée’ and the ‘extrême gauche’.2 The wing terms ‘extrême droite’ and ‘extrême gauche’ found entry into dictionaries such as those of the 1830s.3 They have remained firmly anchored in the political language until today as neutral terms, as pejorative foreign terms (of the oppositional camp)4 and even – yet more rarely – as positive self-designations.5 Apart from this, the term ‘extrémités’ continued to exist. The French parliamentary minutes of the nineteenth century are full of ‘rumeurs aux extrémités’, ‘murmures aux extrémités’ and ‘exclamations négatives aux extrémités’.6
