In the span of time that bridged the ancien régime and the Restoration, the absolute monarchies made way for bourgeois liberal aspirations, the cities opened their walls to the increasingly broad horizons of trade and industry, and society witnessed a gradual conversion of rural into urban communities and the birth of new social classes linked to the categories of work. The court, as a stable socio-economic system, began to be replaced by processes of liberalization in the professions and respec...