It wouldn't be a Patricia Mainardi book if it weren't full of smart observations for historians who like to think about art. Husbands, Wives, and Lovers represents something of a surprise for readers already familiar with Mainardi's work. The result is a very fine book that links the legal reforms of the Revolution with gender and generational conflicts of the nineteenth century. It's hard to escape the conclusion that the Restoration represented a breathing space, an imposed pause, until the debates launched by the Revolution could be resumed.īy focusing our attention elsewhere, specifically the pleasures and resentments of conjugal life and their cultural representations, Patricia Mainardi shows us a Restoration teeming with conflict and intrigue. Its leading political personalities are so bland, so inept, so retrograde (think of Charles X), that it's difficult to take them seriously. For drama, it paled in comparison with the Napoleonic era that preceded it and the Revolution of July 1830 that brought it down. It used to be that no one cared much about the Restoration. Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France
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