1815 saw the old monarchies of Europe restored. In France, the series of Louis resumed, when Louis XVIII ascended the throne (1815-1824; the hiatus in the numbering between Louis XVI and XVIII was due to a crown prince who had died in captivity). Louis ‘restored’ the ancien régime in more ways than one. Not only was the dynasty restored to the throne, and the King restored to his old position and prerogatives – the ravages of the intervening period were patched up, brought back to an old condition: in one word – restored. Public spaces were stripped of their revolutionary names, statues removed or reinstated, and on the spot where Louis XVI and Marie- Antoinette's guillotined corpses had been thrown into a common mass grave, a chapelle expiatoire or ‘penance chapel’ was built. The abbey church of St. Denis, which for centuries had been the burial place for French Royals, had been turned into a stable during the revolution – under Louis XVIII, it was brought back to its former state, with handsome new grave monuments for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. Restoration was a return to the past, an attempt to remedy the ravages of time and to undo the damages of the intervening years. Louis XVIII's brother and successor, Charles X (1824-1830), went so far as to re-instate royal rituals of medieval vintage such as bestowing a magically healing touch on scrofula patients. Yet in this very urge towards conservation and restoration, the newly reinstated monarchy showed its historicism – that is to say: the fact that its dynastic sense of family history had itself entered into the nineteenth-century climate.

In Prussia, too, the Romantics continued their historicist influence even now that Napoleon was gone, and the tide of revolution and innovation had turned. The cult of medieval castles, chivalric heroes etc. had been in fashion in romances from the 1770s onwards both in English and in German letters (indeed, this was the tradition from which Walter Scott had emerged); as a result, ruins and historical sites now gained a ‘romantic’, symbolic interest which they had not had heretofore.