In a quiet corner of Père Lachaise Cemetery stands the tomb of two men: Pierre Jean de Béranger and Jacques Antoine Manuel. Neither man is particularly well-known today but the two were famous in their time. Béranger was a songwriter who was known as “the national poet” in the early nineteenth century; he was also a hero of the left during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Manuel, his best friend, was a member of the liberal opposition during the Restoration and one of its chief orators in the Chamber of Deputies until 1823, when he was expelled from the Chamber...

The uses of affection and mobilization of personal ties to practice politics emerged in part from long-standing traditions that dated back to at least the sixteenth century. Throughout the Old Regime, ruling elites relied on social relationships to access power. Love also had a public role as the bond of the hierarchical corporate order and as an element in the language of politics. In practice, however, the nature of politics during the Old Regime imposed considerable emotional constraints. In the eighteenth century, the culture of sentimentalism came to challenge this emotional regime. Sentimentalists maintained that love was an essential element...

When Joseph de Maistre coined the term “individualism” in 1820, he described the problem as being political in nature. He stated that the ideological tensions in France had led to “the profound and terrifying division of souls, this infinite division of doctrines, this political Protestantism which is pushed to the most absolute individualism.”¹ Here, de Maistre managed to get in a dig at Protestantism, with its stress on an individual’s relationship with God and the necessity of reading the Bible for oneself. Only Catholicism could hold society together. But the major problem for him was the clash of ideologies. The...

So wrote François Guizot to Victor de Broglie in September 1832.¹ Although the two men were best friends, their correspondence was rarely affectionate. But in the fall of 1832, France was undergoing a political and social crisis. Cholera was ravaging the population and Casimir Périer, the man whose strong leadership had stabilized France after 1830, had died of it in May. For Broglie and Guizot—men whose fathers had both been guillotined during the Terror—the specter of political instability was always unsettling. The anxieties of the moment led Guizot to reflect on his relationship with Broglie. According to him,...

If patterns of epistolary communication highlight a series of understandings about the workings of friendship, social network analysis offers another perspective. Looking at the networks of Chateaubriand, Guizot, Béranger, and some of the women to whom they were close illuminates crucial structural differences between men and women’s ties. This chapter focuses on two moments in time—the 1820s and the 1840s—to show the degree to which political affiliations shaped social ones. In the Restoration, politics had a profound effect on men’s personal ties, as factional allegiance was a force for both cohesion and division. But in the July Monarchy,...

Filed among Guizot’s personal papers are letters from other prominent politicians of the July Monarchy, such as Molé and Thiers. Guizot’s relationships with these men were never easy; they were his rivals for power, and if he occasionally allied himself with one of them, he was more commonly their adversary. Unlike the letters he wrote or received from his friends, any correspondence occurred for very specific purposes, such as to obtain information or to seal an alliance. Consider, thus, an exchange from February 1836 between Thiers and Guizot, in which two master politicians navigated postrevolutionary politics using sentiment. The letters...

Because women could not vote or hold office during the post-revolutionary political regimes, they could not serve as proxies or allies in the way that male friends could. Yet despite this, many of the women studied here performed vital functions within the political system throughout the period of parliamentary monarchy. This chapter concentrates on three of these roles: helping politicians get along with one another, ensuring that factions remained united, and forming alliances. While none of these functions was an easy task in the fractious political climate of the time, politicians of the new parliamentary system needed to find ways...

In establishing a social order based on individualism and in giving birth to ideological conflict, the Revolution led the citizens of early nineteenth-century France to be fearful of a lack of social cohesion. Politics was divisive, especially for men, and public life was an arena of suspicion and anomie. As a result, trust and loyalty had to be understood as coming from the private realm. Ultimately this problem made friendship central to the political culture of the early nineteenth century. Imagined as a refuge from public life, friendship could build durable bonds of affiliation and reestablish trust, both of which...