By 1820 it was not necessary to read J.B. Say to understand what the new structure of life was supposed to be. It was only necessary to perceive how odd the Bourbon court looked grafted back onto la Grande Nation. Those ex-Revolutionaries and ex-Napoleonic officials who, now out of jobs, began to form themselves into a party and to call themselves liberals were anxious to interpret their accomplishments to a wide audience. The reforms of 1789, which the restored monarch made no attempt to undo, had won out, they said. Privilege was at an end. Liberty, according to the liberals, was the liberty to excel. Napoleon himself was made into the prime example. A rosy legend soon surrounded his memory, according to which he had risen from obscurity by his own talent and exertion to rule Europe and to protect the Revolution from its enemies. The message was spread not only through learned treatises and newspaper articles but also through popular fiction, the reminiscences of army veterans, vivid printed portraits and battle scenes. Stendhal's Julien Sorel was not the only young man who devoured avidly the stories of Napoleon's exploits.

It is true that Stendhal in The Red and the Black pilloried Restoration society for its clericalism and its conservatism. The only avenue open to success under the restored Bourbons, he implied, was within the hypocritical and obscurantist Catholic hierarchy, and even here arbitrary obstacles of birth and wealth blocked the ambitions of the self-made.