“Scènes historiques” under the Restoration, or the return of the historical repressed

At a time when the restored monarchy was trying to “renew the chain of the times” by concealing the “disastrous errors” of the past, “scènes historiques” came to represent, on an imaginary stage not subject to censorship, the violence of history that the official stage refused to allow to be expressed. Revolutionary violence found in this hybrid genre a paradoxical site of dramatic expression that revealed to the reader that which the theater spectator was not yet allowed to see.