ABSTRACT
The political history of the Restoration era is best understood as two Europe-wide cycles of confrontation between conservative rulers and a mixed liberal-radical opposition. The first cycle ran from 1816 to the early 1820s and featured a double combat among members of the government over the precise nature of the post-revolutionary order. The late 1820s saw the re-emergence of a considerably more powerful and effectively organized oppositional movement, producing a second cycle of confrontations, the revolutions of 1830, and the more peaceful reform movement of 1828-32 in the British Isles. These brought the continent-wide domination of conservative regimes, and hence the era of the Restoration, to an end. The subsequent two decades would see political life moving in new directions. In 1830, Marie Henri Beyle published his novel, The Red and the Black. The story The Red and the Black tells is of an age of epigones, of people living in the shadow of the past.
