The transmission of wealth between generations was not only a narrative commonplace in nineteenth-century France, but also a topic of considerable cultural anxiety and intense political debate. In this study, Andrew J. Counter draws on a wealth of previously unexplored material to show how the theme of inheritance in literature and beyond acquired ethical, historical and ideological connotations, and was vital to nineteenth-century French conceptions of the family and of the legacy of the Revolution.
Weaving together fiction, drama, legal texts, historiographical thought and political...

When Louis XVIII returned to the throne in 1814, and again in 1815, France embarked upon a period of uneasy cohabitation between the old and the new. The writers of the age, who included Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and Mme de Duras, agreed that they lived at a historical turning point, a transitional moment whose outcome, though still uncertain, would transform the French way of life--beginning with the French way of love. The literary works of the Bourbon Restoration ceaselessly return to the themes of love, sex, and marriage, partly as vital cultural questions in their own right, but...