France, and patronized men of genius wherever he met with them.

Yet the nation's fidelity to the White Flag was not very deep-rooted.
Grateful though the population had been for the return of peace and
prosperity, a lurking reminiscence of Napoleonic splendours combined
with the bourgeois' Voltairian scepticism to rouse a widespread
hostility to Government and Church, as soon as the spirit of the
latter ventured to manifest again its inveterate intolerance.
Beranger's songs, Paul-Louis Courier's pamphlets, and the articles of
the _Constitutionnel_ fanned the re-awakened sentiments of revolt; and
Charles the Tenth's ministers, less wisely restrained than those of
Louis XVIII., and blind to the significance of the first barricades of
1827, provoked the catastrophe of 1830. This second revolution
inaugurated the reign of a bourgeois king. Louis-Philippe was hardly
more than a delegate of the bourgeois class, who now reaped the full
benefits of the great Revolution and entered into possession of its
spoils. During Jacobin dictature and Napoleonic sway, the bourgeoisie
had played a waiting role. At present they came to the front, proudly
conscious of their merits; and an entire literature was destined to be
devoted to them, an entire art to depict or satirize their manners.
Scribe, Stendhal, Merimee, Henry Monnier, Daumier, and Gavarni were
some of the men whose work illustrated the bourgeois _regime_, either
prior to or contemporaneous with the work of Balzac.

The eighteen years of the July Monarchy, which were those of Balzac's
mature activity, contrasted sharply with those that immediately
preceded. In spite of perceptible social progress, the constant war of
political parties, in which the throne itself was attacked, alarmed
lovers of order, and engendered feelings of pessimism. The power of
journalism waxed great. Fighting with the pen was carried to a point