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Medieval churches—embodied by French Romanesque and Gothic edifices—have an unexpected status in modern culture. They are visible as monumental reminders of the medieval past, but their true role is little understood. In fact, they were vibrant creators of culture and politics in their own time, and the origin of a dynamic cultural meme in the modern world. Misunderstanding of medieval culture began in the Renaissance. Unlike “Romanesque”—a term invented at the beginning of the 19th century— Renaissance writers coined the word “Gothic” as a pejorative descriptor for medieval architecture (considered “barbarous”), a term that quickly came to designate medieval culture in general. Only during the Bourbon Restoration (1814-1830), when French thinkers sought to reconstruct a heroic past to repair the rupture with French history wrought by the Revolution, did the “Gothic” Middle Ages experience revival and respect. Historians like Michelet and Guizot; writers like Hugo, Chateaubriand, Vigny; philosophers like Cousin, Royer-Collard, de Biran conceived new ways of looking at French history, where the Middle Ages inspired a new hybrid called “medievalism.” Medievalism enabled the transformation of “Gothic” into the modern meme “Goth,” with its overtones of apocalypse and mysticism. This seminar will trace the culture, history, and politics underlying the evolution of Romanesque and Gothic from the 11th to the 14th centuries. This medieval scenario will then serve as a backdrop against which to view the politics, history, and culture of the Bourbon Restoration when the reinvention of the Middle Ages by history and literature inspired a trajectory of national consciousness from abjection to the sublime.