RESTAURATION. – Commonly, by r. one means the period that followed the collapse of Napoleon. It was not, however, a pure and simple return: in fact, conservatism and r. do not entirely coincide, because during the period of r., alongside the reactionary tendencies that wished to make tabula rasa of the recent past, there emerged forces that felt the need to accept from the Jacobin-Napoleonic experience whatever was ‘useful’ or ‘necessary’.
Indeed, the most perceptive politicians opposed a blind and violent reaction. Metternich himself felt (at least in certain intentions) more a “moderator” of the emerging forces and new aspirations than a systematic opponent. Louis XVIII, if he “granted” the Constitution from above (that is, did not accept 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 the status of 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 as well (such as Tuscany), the commercial code, the mortgage system, the abolition of feudalism and of municipal statutes, the regulations governing the admission of testimonial evidence, and the release of fideicommissary property were retained. In the Papal States, Consalvi (v.), although anti-liberal, was 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 was unable to resolve the conflict between restoring the past and accepting the principles of nationality and liberty, the period nevertheless possessed considerable dialectical force, and its men displayed an inclusive understanding of many problems (financial, diplomatic, judicial). In many men of the period there was also, after so many disasters, a revival of sincere religious anxiety or refined ethical sensibility, even though it was often harmful to religion that some of them attempted to subject the Church to instrumentum regni. The policy of the Holy See nevertheless achieved undeniable advantages insofar as it succeeded, also through concordats, in definitively defeating certain attempts to establish national Churches, which had caused so much concern in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The conflict of the r. was between moderates and reactionaries (as can be seen in the Congress of Vienna itself); when the struggle shifted between reactionaries and liberals, this meant that new forces had entered the field which brought an end to the very concept of r. But the central moment of the r. was entirely dominated by a broad controversy between the legacy of the ‘Enlightenment’ and the flourishing of spiritualistic-idealistic Romanticism, “between the divine right theorized in the modern age in support of the absolutism of centralized 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 established from the beginning of the ages” (Bulferetti).
Romanticism (v.) developed through its own particular dialectic and that, rather than coinciding entirely with the r., it coincided with it only temporarily (cf. E. Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, Tübingen 1925, pp. 589–92), even though it elaborated the ideas that grosso modo supported the “restorationist” controversies.