page_title: Reactionary
section_title: Restoration of the French monarchy
hierarchical_section_title: Reactionary / History and usage / Restoration of the French monarchy
caption_attribution_description: Depicted people&#58; &#32;Louis XVIII and Napoleon II In spite of the "Bears grease" (by which Russian support is meant), the French king Louis XVIII is not able to put on Napoleon's boots. Napoleon's son stands ready to catch the Bourbon crown if it might fall. In the background, a guillotine topped with a liberty cap appears out of the fog.
context_page_description: In political science, a reactionary or reactionist is a person or entity holding political views that favour a return to a previous political state of society that they believe possessed positive characteristics that are absent in contemporary society. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a past status quo.
  The word reactionary is often used in the context of the left–right political spectrum, and is one tradition in right-wing politics. In popular usage, it is commonly used to refer to a highly traditional position, one opposed to social or political change. However, according to political theorist Mark Lilla, a reactionary yearns to overturn a present condition of perceived decadence and recover an idealized past. Such reactionary individuals and policies favour social transformation, in contrast to conservative individuals or policies that seek incremental change or to preserve what exists in the present.
  Reactionary ideologies can also be radical, in the sense of political extremism, in service to re-establishing past conditions.
context_section_description: With the Congress of Vienna, inspired by Tsar Alexander I of Russia, the monarchs of Russia, Prussia and Austria formed the Holy Alliance, a form of collective security against revolution and Bonapartism. This instance of reaction was surpassed by a movement that developed in France when, after the second fall of Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration or reinstatement of the Bourbon dynasty, ensued. This time it was to be a constitutional monarchy, with an elected lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. The Franchise was restricted to men over the age of forty, which indicated that for the first fifteen years of their lives they had lived under the ancien régime. Nevertheless, King Louis XVIII was worried that he would still suffer an intractable parliament. He was delighted with the ultra-royalists, or Ultras, whom the election returned, declaring that he had found a chambre introuvable, literally, an "unfindable house".
  It was the Declaration of Saint-Ouen that prepared the way for the Restoration. Before the French Revolution, which radically and bloodily overthrew most aspects of French society's organisation, the only way constitutional change could be instituted was by extracting it from old legal documents that could be interpreted as agreeing with the proposal. Everything new had to be expressed as a righteous revival of something old that had lapsed and had been forgotten. This was also the means used for diminished aristocrats to get themselves a bigger piece of the pie. In the 18th century, those gentry whose fortunes and prestige had diminished to the level of peasants would search diligently for every ancient feudal statute that might give them something. The "ban," for example, meant that all peasants had to grind their grain in their lord's mill. Therefore, these gentry came to the French States-General of 1789 fully prepared to press for the expansion of such practices in all provinces, to the legal limit. They were horrified when, for example, the French Revolution permitted common citizens to go hunting, one of the few perquisites that they had always enjoyed everywhere.
  Thus with the Bourbons Restoration, the Chambre Introuvable set about reverting every law to return society to conditions prior the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, when the power of the Second Estate was at its zenith. It is this which clearly distinguishes a "reactionary" from a "conservative." The conservative would have accepted many improvements brought about by the revolution, and simply refused a program of wholesale reversion. Use of the word "reactionary" in later days as a political slur is thus often rhetorical, since there is nothing directly comparable with the Chambre Introuvable in the history of other countries.
caption: Caricature of Louis XVIII preparing for the French intervention in Spain to help the Spanish Royalists, by George Cruikshank
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