472 RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE IN FRANCE. 



easily be absorbed into the prevailing style. Other revivals, however, 

 which began to show themselves about the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, were successful in establishing themselves in hostile rivalry with 

 it, because they had genuine currents of opinion at their back. 



CATHOLIC AND ROYALIST REACTION, MEDIEVALISM. Carried out 

 under the influence of the philosophes^ the Revolution had been 

 hostile to revealed religion ; and the persecution which the Church then 

 had to face proved a wholesome discipline, well calculated to rouse 

 her from the lethargy into which she had sunk. A Catholic reaction 

 followed, accompanied by the rehabilitation of Christianity by brilliant 

 writers like Joseph de Maistre, Chateaubriand, and Lamennais, and 

 proved so powerful that Napoleon found it politic to take it under his 

 patronage. This did not, however, prevent Catholicism from assisting 

 the royalist reaction with which it was in closer sympathy. A revulsion 

 in favour of the old historic monarchy, encouraged by the excesses of 

 the Terror and the rigours and exhausting wars of the Empire, for a time 

 at least after the fall of the latter, submerged both Jacobinism and 

 Caesarism. Meanwhile an evolution was taking place in literature. 

 Madame de Stael had revealed Germany to France ; German philosophy 

 and the writers of the " Sturm und Drang " period began to be read ; 

 and about the same time Shakespeare and Ossian, Byron and Sir Walter 

 Scott became popular. The collection of monuments of mediaeval and 

 Renaissance times, gathered from the wreck of palaces and churches 

 by the pious care of Alexandre Lenoir at the Petits Augustins, showed 

 Frenchmen what unsuspected treasures their own early art had produced. 

 Interest was thus aroused in a variety of ways in the first centuries of 

 Christianity, the Middle Ages, Feudalism, and Chivalry, the Italian and 

 French Renaissance, Teutonic lands, modern Greece and the Levant. 

 In a word, interests became more cosmopolitan, more universal, and, 

 at the same time, more personal and vivid. The accepted forms of 

 writing and design, with their sober traditions and conventions, came 

 to be regarded as too cold and formal; every age and clime was 

 ransacked for substitutes more in harmony with the mystic or stirring 

 themes, and the gorgeous tints of mediaeval or Oriental pageantry, which 

 it was desired to express. 



The intensified classicism of the generation preceding the battle of 

 Waterloo was too much bound up either with Revolutionary and Anti- 

 catholic or with Imperialistic ideas to be palatable to the Restoration, 

 which inherited it in an enfeebled form, and did little with it but copy 

 or fitfully continue the works of the Empire. The fall of the imperial 

 regime deprived it of its last support, and left it powerless to compete 

 with the turbulent young rivals of the day. 



