Abstract

The counter-revolutionary iconoclasm, carried out in the name of the law and order, and not of regeneration, is often the blind spot of the studies on iconoclasm. Yet, the most iconoclastic moment of the French XIXth century was the Restoration. This regime proceeds to a methodical, systematic iconoclasm, consisting in purifying the public place of all the napoleonic and revolutionary political signs, with the exception of the "monuments of art". This iconoclasm tends then to become expiatory, in the name of a repair of revolutionary past. Restoration France invents as such a memory iconoclasm, different from an iconoclasm of sovereignty, but also from the traditional "damnatio memoriae". This article deals with the « eye of the counter-revolution », in search of banned signs, the frontiers between public and private space, the rituals adopted to stage or on the contrary hide the destructions. Iconoclasm, aiming at averting a civil war, also tends to reactivate it by other ways.