RESTORATION. - Commonly by R. is meant the period that followed the Napoleonic collapse. It was not, however, a pure and simple return: in fact conservatism and R. do not entirely coincide, because in the period of the R., alongside the reactionary tendencies that wanted to make a tabula rasa of the recent past, there enter forces that feel the need to accept from the Jacobin-Napoleonic experience whatever was 'useful' or 'necessary'.
Indeed the most clear-sighted politicians opposed a blind and violent reaction. Metternich himself felt (at least in certain intentions) to be a «moderator» of the rising forces and new aspirations, rather than a systematic opponent. Louis XVIII, while he «granted» the Constitution from above (that is, did not accept a bilateral pact between king and people), opened power to the bourgeoisie, the new force born of the Revolution. Tsar Alexander, who continued the autocratic tradition in Russia, raised Poland to a constitutional kingdom. In Italy, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Napoleonic Code was adopted with only a few modifications. In other states too (as in Tuscany) the commercial code, the mortgage system, the abolition of feudalism and of municipal customs, the rules on the admission of testimonial evidence, and the release of entailed property were maintained. In the Papal State, the work of Card. Consalvi (v.) was, if anti-liberal, also typically anti-reactionary.
If the R. of governments and cabinets failed to fuse the new and the old into a unified whole, precisely because it did not know how to resolve the conflict between restoring and accepting the principles of nationality and liberty, nevertheless there is in the epoch a notable dialectical force, and, in men, a comprehensive sense of many problems (financial, diplomatic, judicial). In many men of the time there is also a reflowering, after so many disasters, of sincere religious anxiety or of refined ethical sensibility, even if it was often harmful to religion that some of these men attempted to subject the Church to an instrumentum regni. The policy of the Holy See, however, obtained undoubted advantages in that it succeeded in definitively overcoming, even through concordats, certain attempts at national Churches, which had given so much concern in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The clash of the R. is between moderates and reactionaries (as is seen in the Congress of Vienna itself); when the struggle shifts between reactionaries and liberals, it will mean that new forces enter the field that put an end to the very concept of R. But the central moment of the R. is wholly dominated by a vast polemic between the legacy of the 'Enlightenment' and the flowering of spiritualistic-idealistic Romanticism, «between the divine right theorized in the modern age in support of the absolutism of centralizing national monarchies and the divine right elaborated in the Middle Ages and romantically idealized; between progress conceived as indefinitely improvable through successive conquests and progress imagined as a return to a truth fully posited from the very beginning of the ages» (Bulferetti).
But it is clear that Romanticism (v.) unfolded through its own specific dialectic and that, rather than identifying itself with the R., it momentarily coincided with it (cf. E. Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, Tübingen 1925, pp. 589-92), even though it elaborated the ideas that grosso modo sustain the «restorative» polemics.
Bibliography3 works
Massimo Petrocchi