Discourses on Europe and their political value in Restoration France

The chapter focuses on the different political uses of discourses on Europe in French debates during the Restoration. In the first years, from the Congress of Vienna to the second Bourbon dynasty's second return to the throne, both the opponents and the defenders of the French Revolution used different depictions of Europe to justify their political stances. The moderate-royalists imagined the material reorganization of Europe on principles of legitimacy and religion; the Ultra-royalists painted Europe as governed by chaos, arguing that only Catholicism, aristocracy and the value of the family could restore peace and morality; the liberals talked about a set of free nations and representative governments; for Bonapartists, instead, Europe was a continent set along the path to freedom, which the Allied Powers (especially England) wanted to bring back to a new slavery. Around the various and antithetical discourses on Europe the battle for or against the French Revolution was fought. But a few years later, during the Greek independence war against the Ottoman Empire, these different depictions of Europe seemed to lose importance: in front of Muslim enemy, both the Christian religion and the right of nations to self-determination contributed to development of the idea of Europe's superiority over the rest of the world.