Chapter Fourteen explores the relation between poetics and Restoration politics in Germany, France, and Italy. It argues that, similar to earlier aesthetic responses to the failure of the French Revolution, writers sought alternatives to the political and geographic order established at Vienna, imagining works that synthesise the past and the present in order to inspire change. After explaining why the Restoration left Britain largely unscathed, the author looks at examples of literary and political restoration in Novalis, Chateaubriand, Lamenais, and Metternich to show how restoration did not mean a nostalgic return into the past but rather the creation of something new. The chapter then compares the Restoration poetics of Quinet, Hugo and Gautier, suggesting that they advocate the ‘grotesque’ through the recovery of Shakespeare, to imagine a more comprehensive and liberal vision of society than that set forth by Metternich. Balzac’s La comédie humaine serves as a counter-example, ending in a cynicism at odds with the idealism of George Sand. The chapter’s last section compares the political uses of loss, exile, and restoration in two great Italian poets, Foscolo and Leopardi, concluding with a close reading ‘La Sera del dì di festa’ to show how political hope was kept alive.

Italy’s Romantic debate was literary in name only: In Napoleon’s aftermath, Italy had to be reinvented. Chapter 15 reviews Staël’s 1816 Italian articles, which cut to the heart of this debate – hence an immediate impact that dwarfs that of her friends Schlegel and Sismondi. The shape of Europe underlies this discussion, and Staël, with firsthand knowledge from London to Moscow, is in large part responsible for that scope. This chapter retraces the impact of Staël and her writings on every major Italian Romantic, in the highly charged atmosphere of Austrian-occupied Milan after Waterloo. Stendhal’s career as a writer begins in this matrix, a European architecture unthinkable without Staël’s visit. How sweet to see that grand architecture resurface.