The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counterrevolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.
