8/23/2023 0 Comments Congress of vienna italy 1830Past events appeared to inhabit greater or lesser distances from us. Nevertheless, the vocabulary of this durée, as Bergson called it, or inner time, was often spatial. Time appeared to Kant to be the framework in which we experienced ourselves, the ‘form of inner sense’. 1 I am defined by my history, you by yours but our different trajectories inhabit a common temporal dimension sharing a single chronology. Romantic writers and thinkers tried to find common structures in what Reinhart Kosellek neatly calls ‘history in the singular and histories in the plural’. Romanticism, constantly investigating interiority alongside our consciousness of things, was preoccupied with the extent to which one could be mapped on to the other, the inner on to the outer, the flow of consciousness on to history. Time restored, le temps retrouvé, is a topic that lends itself both to philosophical and to historical treatments: we can either consider it as raising questions about time, and what time is or it can make us wonder about differences in the way time was experienced at a particular period of history. These drew on th e Romantic interest in the way in which future and past could be interrelated in a creative way, so that the restoration of lost values could be as radically revisionary as any model of revolution, with conflicting opportunities for imagining new forms of integration or confusion. This paper examines current images of a restored Europe running counter to the official political outcome of the Congresses. Literature written at the same time, though, questioned and experimented with what could count as a restorative experience. What was restored at the Congress of Vienna and its successors was the sovereignty of European nations, although of course what was to count as a nation was in the gift of the ruling powers-especially England, Austria, Russia and Prussia. Historically, Restoration during the Romantic period followed the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic imperium. For the Romantics, the idea of Restoration could signify simultaneously historical events and moments of consciousness.
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