RESTORATION. — Commonly, the term "restoration" refers to the period following the collapse of the Napoleonic era. However, it was not a pure and simple return: conservatism and restoration do not entirely coincide, because during the period of restoration, alongside reactionary tendencies that sought to erase the recent past, there emerged forces that recognized the necessity of accepting from the Jacobin-Napoleonic experience whatever was "useful" or "necessary."
Indeed, the most conscious political figures opposed blind and violent reaction. Even Metternich himself saw himself (at least in certain intentions) as a "moderator" of emerging forces and new aspirations, rather than a systematic opponent. Louis XVIII, though granting a constitution from above (i.e., without accepting a bilateral pact between king and people), opened power to the bourgeoisie, a new force born of the Revolution. Tsar Alexander, who continued the autocratic tradition in Russia, elevated Poland to a constitutional kingdom. In Italy, within the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Napoleonic Code was adopted with only minor modifications. In other states (such as Tuscany), commercial codes, mortgage systems, the abolition of feudalism and municipal statutes, rules on the admission of witness testimony, and the release of fideicommissary goods were maintained. In the Papal States, Consalvi (v.), though antiliberal, was also characteristically antireactionary.
If the restoration of governments and cabinets failed to fuse the new and the old into a unified whole—precisely because it could not resolve the conflict between restoring and accepting the principles of nationality and freedom—nevertheless, the era possessed a notable dialectical force, and among its figures, there was a comprehensive grasp of many problems (financial, diplomatic, judicial). In many men of the time, there was also a revival, after so many disasters, of sincere religious fervor or refined ethical sensibility, even if it was often harmful to religion that some sought to subordinate the Church to the *instrumentum regni*. The policy of the Holy See, however, achieved undoubted advantages by definitively overcoming, through concordats, certain attempts at national churches that had caused so much concern in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The clash of the restoration was between moderates and reactionaries (as seen even in the Congress of Vienna); when the struggle shifted between reactionaries and liberals, it signaled that new forces were entering the field that would bring the restoration context itself to an end. But the central moment of the restoration was dominated by a vast polemic between the legacy of the "Enlightenment" and the flourishing of spiritualistic-idealistic Romanticism: "between the divine right theorized in the modern age to support the absolutism of centralized national monarchies and the divine right elaborated in the Middle Ages and romantically idealized; between progress conceived as indifferent and improvable through successive conquests and progress imagined as a return to a truth fully established from the beginning of time" (Bulferetti).
It is clear, however, that Romanticism (v.) unfolded through its own specific dialectic and that, rather than fully merging with the restoration, it coincided with it momentarily (cf. E. Troeltsch, *Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionsoziologie*, Tübingen 1925, pp. 589-92), even though it developed ideas that broadly supported the "restorationist" polemics.