If you missed it, last week I released an episode of @TheSiecle about attempts at revolution in 1820s France, led by a coalition of veterans and student activists. Students can be radical in any age, but I wanted to talk the 1820s grievances a bit... 1/ http://thesiecle.com/episode23/ 

2/ The young Parisian students of the 1820s were dealing with a sense that the entire society was stacked against them — and not just because France was governed by an old-fashioned restored monarchy, instead of by a republic or a modern Napoleonic empire.

3/ A pamphlet from a few years later perhaps exemplifies these complaints of the young: James Fazy’s 1828 “On Gerontocracy, or the Abuse of the Wisdom of Old Men in the Government of France.”

4/ The target of Fazy’s ire was “this turbulent generation of ’89” — that is, 1789, the generation who were young-ish adults when the French Revolution broke out. Napoleon was 20 in 1789; Lafayette 32; King Louis XVIII 34. In the 1820s, this generation was still running things.

5/ The “Generation of 89” wouldn’t let go of power. In 1818, just 15% of departmental prefects were over the age of 50. By 1830, 55% were. And this was at a time when 2/3 of France’s population was under 40. (Today it’s about 47%.)

6/ France’s constitution at the time restricted the ability to vote to the very wealthy — but also to the old. You had to be 40 years old to vote. (Adding insult to injury for left-leaning youth, aristocrats got an exception and could serve in the Chamber of Peers at age 25.)

7/ Fazy’s pamphlet “On Gerontocracy” acidly characterized France’s ruling elite as “7,000 or 8,000 asthmatic, gouty, paralytic” men, and attacked the fixation of both sides of the era's political disputes with “these ruins of a stormy age in the past.”