The Amorous Restoration: Love, Sex and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century France by Andrew J. Counter (review)

"Literature" appears nowhere in the title of Counter's engrossing study of imbricated matters of sexuality and politics under the Bourbon Restoration. Nevertheless, Counter's method is to study the culture through its textual productions, to"follow the reading habits of the literate Restoration public" (30). Counter posits that Restoration writers were highly sensitive to the "chronological oddness" (251) of their particular era, which saw a wide spectrum of political and social views; from the ultra-conservative, backward-looking aristocrat at one extreme; to the more liberal, modern, capitalist bourgeois at the other (with, of course, plenty of overlap and contradictions in between). Drawing from contemporary queer theory, Counter adapts Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's concept of "unrationalized coexistence" to characterize this messy period of conflicting values. He argues that writing about love and sex was one important way that Restoration authors explored the tensions, or"motleyness of mores" (7), that lay across the political and social spectrum. The material studied includes fiction, lyric poetry, political and historical writing, and journalism, with an interesting mix of high and low genres. For instance, Counter highlights stylistic points in common between novels by Chateaubriand, Stendhal, and Duras on the one hand; and racy oeuvres galantes sold in the heterogeneous commercial space of the Palais-Royal (where both sex and books were for sale), on the other. Focal points include the debate surrounding the institution of marriage (companionate or venal?); competing tropes of impotence, sterility, and asceticism versus a cult of motherhood and domesticity; recycled (and tellingly re-imagined) Revolution-era libelles about the Bourbon kings' sexuality; and the role of gossip in the production of the famous Olivier romans à clef. Some of Counter's efforts to draw analogies between Restoration-era and twenty-first-century events feel a bit strained, and likely to become dated more quickly than other parts of the book. For instance, a reference to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion on Romer v. Evans (1996) is appended to a discussion of politically-tinged readings of the nineteenth-century mal du siècle. However, Counter's project of "recovering the queer past" (18), including discourse surrounding the public-yetprivate outing of the aristocratic Astolphe de Custine, rightly claims a central place in his discussion of sex and politics during the fraught years between Waterloo and the July Revolution. The Amorous Restoration combines lucid analysis with provocative—often juicy—subject matter. It is a welcome contribution to the field of nineteenth-century French studies, which too often glosses over, or hurries past, its supposedly-retrograde first decade-and-a-half. As Counter convincingly demonstrates, the Restoration's very contradictions and tensions, played out across its literary productions, make for compelling reading.