Malicious memories: Restoration politics and a prosopography of turncoats

One appeal to historical memory consists of reminding people of what they w ould prefer to forget. During the Restoration (181430) the struggle for the authority of dominant memory undermined the stability of the restored mona rchy. Grub Street's contribution to collective memory was the conceit of a Dictionnaire des girouettes. A girouette (weathervane) is in politics a syn onym for turncoat. The dictionnaires were collective biographies of turncoa ts, with Talleyrand as the supreme exemplar. The justification given by Con stant, Mole, Pasquier, and many others for their service to successive regi mes expressed the political ethic of the July Monarchy elite: the best shou ld govern, regardless of the political system they represent.