July Monarchy Quotes

“All rights, all power, all ability, are suddenly expressed in terms of money. In order to be understood, everything has to be reduced to this common denominator. From this point of view, the whole previous history of capitalism seems no more than a mere prelude.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art: Volume 4: Naturalism, Impressionism, The Film Age

“The July Monarchy was the start of France’s Steam Age, a period when steam technology, much of it imported from England, began to transform perceptions of space and time (the steamboat and the railroad), material culture (the powerloom for weaving cloth), and the circulation of words and images (the mechanized printing press). The number of steam engines in France rose from six hundred in 1830 to five thousand in 1847, and contemporaries were powerfully aware of the changes they portended. Indeed, the July Monarchy has never received sufficient acknowledgment for setting the stage for the major economic boom of the 1850s and 1860s, for which the Emperor Napoleon III was happy to take credit. Nevertheless, in two fundamental ways, France before 1848 was more like it had been at the end of the eighteenth century than like it would be by the beginning of the twentieth.”
― Robert J. Bezucha, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848

“In 1872, when he was over fifty, Gustave Flaubert recalled the heady atmosphere of his youth in Rouen during the July Monarchy:
"I don’t know what the dreams of today’s students are, but ours were superbly extravagant—last expansions of the romanticism reaching us and which, compressed by the provincial milieu, produced a strange effervescence in our brains . . . enthusiastic hearts longed for dramatic amours with gondolas, black masks, and highborn ladies fainting in postal carriages in the middle of Calabria.”
― Robert J. Bezucha, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848