"Un oubli total du passé" The Political and Social Construction of Silence in Restoration Europe (1813-1830)

This article analyzes the social construction of silence in early-nineteenth-century Europe, focusing on France and the Netherlands. In both countries, the newly installed Restoration monarchies propagated a "politics of forgetting" of the problematic recent past of the revolution and the Napoleonic era as an essential part of attempts to build a stable and legitimate political order. This official forgetting was contested in both countries. On the basis of the "letters of adhesion," the article examines the close interaction between the individual reconstruction of the personal past and social forgetting. Finally, it relates the rise of a historicizing culture in the early nineteenth century to the culture of silence in Restoration Europe.