Malicious Memories: Restoration Politics and a Prosopography of Turncoats

One appeal to historical memory consists of reminding people of what they would prefer to forget. During the Restoration (1814–30) the struggle for the authority of dominant memory undermined the stability of the restored monarchy. Grub Street’s contribution to collective memory was the conceit of a Dictionnaire des girouettes. A girouette (weathervane) is in politics a synonym for turncoat. The dictionnaires were collective biographies of turncoats, with Talleyrand as the supreme exemplar. The justification given by Constant, MolÈ, Pasquier, and many others for their service to successive regimes expressed the political ethic of the July Monarchy elite: the best should govern, regardless of the political system they represent.