Paris Between Empires 1814-1852

"The book began when Jed, my co-author, stumbled into a tiny bookshop near the Luxembourg Palace in Paris and found an antique and expensively bound collection of pamphlets which all had to do with this thing called the Dendera Zodiac. He headed to the Louvre, where he quickly found the zodiac installed in a chamber off the main Egyptian Hall, where it can still be seen today. The Dendera Zodiac is an ancient bas-relief temple ceiling adorned with mysterious symbols of the stars and planets as well as hieroglyphics. It was first discovered by the French during Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt and was brought to Paris in 1821. The zodiac appeared to depict the night-time sky from a time predating Biblical Creation, and therefore cast doubt on religious truth. So in our book we set out to tell the story of this incredible archaeological find and its unlikely role in the fierce disputes over science and faith in Napoleonic and Restoration France. While we were unearthing this story we used newspapers, journals, diaries, pamphlets, and other documentary evidence to help us find our way. The five books I have chosen were also extremely helpful and gave a real insight into this fascinating but little known episode in history. Historians who like to write about 19th-century French history often focus on the same things: the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic era are at one end of the timeline and the establishment of the Second Republic at the other. People focus on these two periods for obvious reasons, because there is so much politically going on. But what gets missed is the Bourbon Restoration, in between. When we were doing preliminary research for our book, we found there weren’t too many books available to us to put that era in context, but this is one of them. The Restoration, which begins in 1814, is marked by two interesting things. The first is the union of monarchy and the Catholic Church. Napoleon opened the door to this union by making various deals with the Vatican in the first years of the Consulate. When the Bourbons returned to power, this alliance between Church and state deepened considerably. The second interesting aspect of this period is its approach to history. The reactionary tenor of the period can be seen in the government’s imposition of an official policy of what was called ‘oubli’, or forgetting, of the past Napoleonic era. All relics of the time, like books and uniforms, had to be burned. Press censorship was extremely oppressive and history was essentially rewritten to minimise the effects of the prior period’s very real and sweeping social and political changes. What was really useful for us was how much detail there was about the era in the book. You get the sense that anyone involved in politics had to be very slippery in order to survive. Mansel is very good on the period’s political animals, like Joseph Fouché, whose résumé included stints as Napoleon’s minister of police as well as a powerful position under the Bourbons. These intrigants really were a breed apart, exceptionally self-seeking and opportunistic. Power moved from faction to faction, and if you were too closely linked to one faction it could work against you when that faction fell out of favour."