Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE CAREER OPEN TO TALENTMoreover, a culture as profoundly formed by court and aristocracyas the French would not lose the imprint. Thus the marked preoccupationof French prose literature with subtle psychological analyses ofpersonal relationships (which can be traced back to the seventeenthcenturyaristocratic writers), or the formalized eighteenth-centurypattern of sexual campaigning and advertised lovers or mistresses, becamean integral part of 'Parisian' bourgeois civilization. Formerlykings had official mistresses; now successful stock-jobbers joined them.Courtesans granted their well-paid favours to advertise the success ofbankers, who could pay for them as well as of young bloods who ruinedtheir estates by them. Indeed in many ways the Revolution preservedaristocratic characteristics of French culture in an exceptionally pureform, for the same reason as the Russian Revolution has preservedclassical ballet and the typical nineteenth-century bourgeois attitudeto'good literature' with exceptional fidelity. They were taken over by it,assimilated to it, as a desirable heritage from the past, and henceforthprotected against the normal evolutionary erosion by it.And yet the old regime was dead, even though the fishermen ofBrest in 1832 regarded the cholera as a punishment by God for thedeposition of the legitimate king. Formal republicanism among thepeasantry was slow to spread beyond the Jacobin Midi and some longdechristianized areas, but in the first genuine universal election, thatof May 1848, legitimism was already confined to the West and thepoorer central departments. The political geography of modern ruralFrance was already substantially recognizable. Higher up the socialscale, the Bourbon Restoration did not restore the old rdgime; or,rather, when Charles X tried to do so he was thrown out. Restorationsociety was that of Balzac's capitalists and careerists, of Stendhal'sJulien Sorel, rather than that of the returned emigre dukes. A geologicalepoch separates it from the 'sweetness of life' of the 1780s to whichTalleyrand looked back. Balzac's Rastignac is far nearer to Maupassant'sBel-Ami, the typical figure of the 1880s, or even to Sammy Ghck,the typical one of Hollywood in the 1940s, than to Figaro, the nonaristocraticsuccess of the 1780s.In a word the society of post-revolutionary France was bourgeoisin its structure and values. It was the society of the parvenu, i.e. the selfmademan, though this was not completely obvious except when thecountry was itself governed by parvenus, i.e. when it was republican orbonapartist. It may not seem excessively revolutionary to us, that halfthe French peerage in 1840 belonged to families of the old nobility,but to contemporary French bourgeois the fact that half had beencommoners in 1789 was very much more striking; especially when they183