ABSTRACT
Cyclical economic depressions, occurring at roughly ten-year intervals, and always accompanied by peaks of social disturbances, completed a common contemporary view that society was in crisis as a consequence of class tensions. During the Restoration, everyone, whatever their politics, was convinced that 1789 had been a bourgeois revolution, giving political power to wealthy, already established civil servants, professional men, especially lawyers and doctors, many of them substantial landowners. Restoration electoral law ensured that the nineteenth-century ruling elite were based not on quarterings of nobility, but on taxable wealth. Revolutionary and Napoleonic worthies were elected to Restoration assemblies. The most intractable tensions inherited in 1814 from the Revolution lay in attitudes to the role of the Church in French society. The sense of grievance and outrage which the Church had experienced during the Revolution continued to reverberate through the nineteenth century.
