The period of the restored Bourbon kings and the Monarchy of July may be defined as that of the decisive appearance of the bourgeoisie on the historical stage. With the fall of Napoleon the industrial period of history begins. Confining our attention to France, we observe that the new division of the national property which had been made during the Revolution, and which it had been Napoleon's economic mission to vindicate to the rest of Europe, now began to produce its natural consequences. All restrictions had been removed from industry and commerce; monopolies and privileges had been abolished; the confiscated lands of the Church and estates of the nobility, broken up and sold to the highest bidder, were now in the hands of at least twenty times as many owners as before. The result was that capital, free, floating capital, now began to be the moving power of society and consequently the object of the desires of the individual. After the Revolution of July the power of wealth gradually supersedes the power of birth and takes the power of royalty into its service. The rich man is received into the ranks of the nobility, acquires the privileges of a peer, and, by utilising the constitution, manages to draw ever-increasing profit from the monarchical form of government. Thus the pursuit of money, the struggle for money, the employment of money in great commercial and industrial enterprises, becomes the leading social feature of the period; and this prosaic engrossment, which contrasts so strongly with the revolutionary and martial enthusiasm of the foregoing period, helps, as background, to give the literature of the day its romantic, idealistic stamp. One only of its eminent authors, one of the greatest, Balzac, did not feel himself repelled by the period, but made the newborn power of capital, the new ruler of souls, money, the hero of his great epic; the other artists of the day, though it was often the prospect of material gain which inspired their labours, kept in their enthusiasms and their works at as great a distance as possible from the new reality. The decade 1825-35, the most remarkable and most fertile period from the literary point of view, was from the political, colourless and inglorious. Its focus is the Revolution of July, but this Revolution is a solitary blood-spot amidst all the grey.