It is some time now since history could still be credibly defined as the propaganda of the victors. Nowadays the victims and losers in great events command at least as much interest among historians and their readers as those who vanquished them. In fact, the more triumphalist older narratives were, the more resolute historians have become in turning them upside down. Thus, in the field of the French Revolution, a leading growth area since the crumbling away of the old classic interpretation has been in all aspects of resistance to the revolutionary tide. The Church-and-King rebellion in the Vendée, once seemingly as inexplicable to most historians as to Jacobin contemporaries, has now been pored over minutely and analysed; and in the 1990s Jean-Claude Martin, the foremost historian of that episode and a contributor to this collection, even became director of the most prestigious French centre for revolutionary studies. But when researchers turned their attention to the unsuccessful enemies of the revolution and its legacy, their most demanding challenge was to deconstruct classic interpretations of a different sort, the work of generations of partisans undisturbed in their convictions and conventions over many decades of scholarly neglect, and far closer to memory than to history.

This collection is a good example of that process. The product of three international conferences between 2007 and 2009, it brings together twenty-three papers (three in Italian, the rest in French) on aspects of counter-revolutionary political culture in Latin Catholic Europe since the challenges to Church and Monarchy of the 1790s. The majority of the contributions are about French legitimism, but one of the main aims is to compare it, and the varied, sometimes surprising, ways in which it manifested itself, with parallel movements in Italy, Spain and Portugal. All these movements saw liberalism and republicanism as their deadly enemies. All were suffused with nostalgia for pre-revolutionary days when monarchs had supposedly been absolute and a benign Church met the spiritual needs of their peoples. But whereas they all derived inspiration from the revived Church militant of the nineteenth century, their energies were too often dissipated when confronted with the problems posed by post-revolutionary monarchy. In none of these countries was there an unbroken and uncontested line of monarchical legitimacy over the nineteenth century. French monarchists were split by the Revolution of 1830, then by the problem of confronting Napoleon iii, not to mention the idiosyncracies of Chambord, the last legitimist pretender. In Spain the Carlist schism served to undermine the legitimacy of all monarchs until far into the twentieth century. In Portugal the reactionary activities of Dom Miguel, second son of João vi, first blocked the liberal policies of his father, and then, on the latter's death, provoked a split with his elder brother Dom Pedro, the legitimate heir left in Brazil. After several years of absolutism, liberal forces loyal to Pedro drove Miguel into exile, whence he plotted endlessly against the rule of his brother's heir, Dona Maria ii. The Italian situation was even more complicated. Here, subjects loyal to their own local dynasties resisted the claims of the House of Savoy to take over the whole peninsula and Sicily, and by implication abhorred the secularisation of the papal states. The French term ‘blancs’, deriving ultimately from the Vendée rebels fighting under the white flag of the Bourbons, is applied in this collection to all these groups, although some outside France might have been happier to be called ‘noirs’. Despite the conservatism of their loyalties, the social policies that they embraced were sometimes surprisingly radical, if only in order to secure a reliable popular base. But that base was always fragmented, and in that lay the ultimate weakness of ‘white’ resistance to political change in the cases examined here. Generally speaking, ‘white’ strength lay in the countryside rather than towns, but there were surprising pockets of urban regret for imagined former days. That of the Parisian Faubourg Saint-Germain comes as no surprise, but there were ‘white’ enclaves in improbable cities of a very different reputation, like Lyons, Toulouse or Limoges. Even rural conservatism could be highly regionalised, as in the Miguelism of the Douro, or the often scattered mountainous strongholds of Carlism in northern Spain. Inevitably geographical fragmentation weakened the support which followers of the wronged ‘anointed of God’ could offer to their figureheads at the national level. Despite the isolated efforts and impeccably ‘white’ credentials of an adventurer like Henri de Cathelineau, prepared to man the counter-revolutionary barricades wherever they appeared, there never really developed a ‘white’ international of co-operation – although Simon Sarlin, who contributes a piece on Cathelineau, thinks more research on this theme might be fruitful. The tightest bond between the various conservatisms of southern Europe was the thread of Bourbon dynasticism unevenly interwoven among them, symbolically important perhaps to embattled royals, but remote from the preoccupations of their scattered followers. The source of the popular loyalties which they attracted lay in alienation from the modern world, less on account of the quarrels of opposed royal siblings than in resentment of changes inexorably forced from outside upon the patterns of their everyday lives.