Abstract
The whole nineteenth century can be seen as a century of experiment of political systems and institutions, a span of time where the French population looked for a political identity according to its specific heritage by trying a lot of regimes through different Constitutions. However, no system of this century was really new: they had all been tested during the Revolution, and the memory each one determined the possibility of their reappearance during the nineteenth century. As the dates of the French Revolution are discussed among historians, I choose, for this paper, to settle them from 1789 to 1815. So I shall see the evolution of the nineteenth century from 1815 to 1879 through the perspective of the revolutionary legacy. Thus the main parts of the paper shall be shaped by the four regimes which took place during the period, the Restoration, the Second Republic, the Second Empire and the Third Republic.
