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Conservative orators in Restoration France: Bonald vs. Chateaubriand

ABSTRACT Bicameral parliaments are especially apt to demonstrate how different environments and audiences affect political performance. During the Bourbon Restoration in France, the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers both had among their members such influential speakers as Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald or François-René de Chateaubriand, who belonged to the same conservative camp, but their character and style were highly different. Bonald is usually described as a man of abstract theories, for whom parliamentary politics has always remained alien, while Chateaubriand as a forerunner of Romantic literature is thought to have been more at home in political debates as an orator as well. The truth is, however, the exact opposite: Bonald seems to have been more successful in the lower house than Chateaubriand in the upper, which may be explained by their – however reluctant – adaptation to the different circumstances in which they were compelled to act. The first part of the paper describes the context: the chambers with their specific rules and practices as prescribed by the Constitutional Charter of 1814; the second part outlines the personal background of the speakers and their different attitudes towards the idea of parliamentarism based on their biographies and literary works; while the third part analyses their performance, using the transcriptions of their speeches in contemporary sources. The last part offers a brief overview of their later careers to show how their different attitudes towards parliamentary politics led to a more profound estrangement (especially on issues of freedom of speech and censorship), which, in their own judgement as well as in the eyes of the public, would ultimately separate them from each other.