The Amorous Restoration

Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Andrew J. Counter

New work on a neglected period of literature
Explores texts from a variety of genres, placing literary works within a new historical and intellectual context
Brings unfamiliar authors to light, including many women writers

The Amorous Restoration

Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Andrew J. Counter

Description

When Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814, and again in 1815, France embarked upon a period of uneasy cohabitation between the old and the new. The writers of the age, who included Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Mme de Duras, agreed that they lived at a historical turning point, a transitional moment whose outcome, though still uncertain, would transform the French way of life--beginning with the French way of love. The literary works of the Bourbon Restoration ceaselessly return to the themes of love, sex, and marriage, partly as vital cultural questions in their own right, but also as a means of critiquing the deficiencies of past regimes, negotiating the politics of the present, and imagining the shape of the political future. In the literature of the Restoration, love and politics become entwined in a mutually metaphorical embrace.

The Amorous Restoration, the first book in English devoted to literary and cultural life under the last Bourbon kings, considers this relationship in all its richness and many contradictions. Long neglected as a drab historical backwater, the Restoration emerges here as a vibrant era, one rife with sharp cultural and political disagreements, and possessed of an especially refined sense of allusion, discretion, and even humour. Drawing on literature, journalism, political writing, life writing, and gossip, The Amorous Restoration vividly recreates the erotic sensibilities of a pivotal moment in the transition from an amorous old regime to erotic--and political--modernity.

The Amorous Restoration

Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Andrew J. Counter

Introduction: Love, Sex, Politics
1. Impediments: Critiques of Marriage in Restoration France
2. Good Breeding: Romanticism, Aristocracy, and Reproduction
3. Gallantries: Literature of Sexual Worldliness under the Restoration
4. Olivier in the Closet: Gossip, Scandal, and the Novel in the 1820s
5. The Sexual Monster: Celibacy and the Anticlerical Imagination
6. 1830: The End of an Eros?: Nodier and Fourier on the History of Sexuality
Coda: Secret Love Affairs of the Bourbons
Bibliography
Index

The Amorous Restoration

Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Andrew J. Counter

Author Information

Andrew J. Counter is Associate Professor of French at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College. He has previously held positions at King's College London and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and studied French at Christ's College, Cambridge. He works on all aspects of nineteenth-century French cultural life. His first book, Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge, and the Family appeared with Legenda in 2010.

The Amorous Restoration

Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France

Andrew J. Counter

Reviews and Awards

Co-winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies (2016)

"The Amorous Restoration combines lucid analysis with provocative-often juicy-subject matter. It is a welcome contribution to the field of nineteenth-century French studies, which too often glosses over, or hurries past, its supposedly-retrograde first decade-and-a-half. As Counter convincingly demonstrates, the Restorationâs very contradictions and tensions, played out across its literary productions, make for compelling reading." --French Review

"In The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France Counter reprises his demonstrated excellence in research and writing. A springboard for intriguing notions regarding the political and sexual intersections of Restoration culture and their expression in narratives of the period, the book is a joy to read: exceptional and often humorous, drawing on an eclectic array of sources, including libelles, pamphlets, journalistic articles, medical treatises, memoires, and correspondences alongside a refreshing look at the standard literary corpus of the period plus several less common titles. The Amorous Restoration is a must read. ... The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex, and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France is an indispensable resource for all nineteenth-century French scholars and for many cultural historians of early nineteenth-century France." --David A. Powell, Nineteenth-Century French Studies

"The Amorous Restoration is an exceptionally well-documented resource for literary scholars and historians alike in its delineation of the complex intersection of love and politics during the Restoration. Moreover, Counter's study performs what he describes as characteristic of the Restoration, not only in terms of perpetuating gossip, as he jests, but also in terms of the bookâs fascinating convergence of a diverse wealth of materials." -- Anne Marcoline (University of Houston-Clear Lake), European Romantic Review

"This is an impressive and meticulously researched historical study of the intersections of sexuality and politics during the Restoration ... this thoughtful study will significantly enrich understandings of both this period and the wider literary culture of nineteenth-century France." --Miranda Gill, French Studies