[1815 - 1848] Restoration and the July Monarchy

The year is 1815. The cannons have fallen silent. The ground at Waterloo is still soaked in blood, and the great, terrifying, brilliant eagle of Napoleon has finally been caged on a desolate island in the South Atlantic. Into this void, a king returns to France. But this is not a triumphant homecoming. It is an awkward, hesitant affair. King Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, arrives not in a blaze of glory, but in the baggage train of the victorious foreign armies. He is old, immensely overweight, and crippled by gout; a man who has spent over two decades in exile, waiting. The Paris he returns to is not the city he left. A generation has been born and raised knowing only the Revolution and the Empire. They sing the *Marseillaise*, not royalist anthems. Their fathers are the new Napoleonic elite—generals, administrators, and landowners who bought up church and aristocratic property. And they are all watching this new king, wondering if he has come for revenge. Louis XVIII, for all his faults, was a pragmatist. He understood he could not simply turn back the clock to 1788. He granted a Charter, a constitution of sorts, that preserved many of the Revolution’s gains: equality before the law, a two-house parliament, and the property rights of those who had benefited from the Revolution. Yet, this was a deeply unequal peace. To vote, you had to be a man over 30 and pay 300 francs in direct taxes—a sum so high that it limited the entire electorate of France to fewer than 100,000 people in a nation of nearly 30 million. The real drama, however, wasn't with the king, but with those who returned with him: the *ultras*, or ultra-royalists. These were the aristocrats who had fled the Revolution, and they had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. They wanted their lands back, their privileges restored, and their enemies punished. A "White Terror" swept through the south of France, a brutal wave of score-settling and murder against suspected Bonapartists and republicans. It was a clear sign that the ghosts of the past were not at rest. Life in Restoration France was a study in contrasts. In the gilded salons of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, aristocratic women in high-waisted, corseted gowns whispered of the old days, while their husbands schemed for a return to absolute power. But just a few streets away, the new heart of France was beating. In the financial districts, bourgeois men in sober dark suits, the bankers and industrialists, were quietly accumulating immense fortunes. This was the world Honoré de Balzac would so brilliantly capture in his novels—a society obsessed with money, status, and the desperate climb up the social ladder. When the pragmatic Louis XVIII died in 1824, the crown passed to his brother, Charles X. And with Charles, the mask of compromise fell away. He was a true believer, an *ultra* to the core. He believed he was appointed by God, and he acted like it. He compensated former émigrés for their lost lands to the tune of a billion francs, a staggering sum paid for by the new bond-holding bourgeoisie. He reinstated the dominance of the Catholic Church in education and, in a ceremony of almost medieval strangeness, had himself anointed with holy oil at Reims, even performing the ancient royal ritual of touching the sick to cure them of scrofula. The breaking point came in July 1830. In a breathtaking act of royal arrogance, Charles X issued the Four Ordinances, dissolving the newly-elected chamber of deputies, severely censoring the press, and rigging the voting system to ensure only his wealthiest supporters could vote. Paris exploded. For three days—the *Trois Glorieuses* of July 27th, 28th, and 29th—the city became a battlefield. This was not a revolution of grand armies, but of the people. Students, shopkeepers, and laborers tore up the cobblestones, felling trees and overturning carriages to build hundreds of barricades. The tricolor flag, banned under the Restoration, reappeared, a splash of defiant red, white, and blue against the gunpowder smoke. The iconic painting by Eugène Delacroix, *Liberty Leading the People*, captures the spirit perfectly: a cross-section of society, from the street urchin with pistols to the intellectual in his top hat, led by the allegorical, bare-breasted figure of Liberty herself. The royal troops, hesitant to fire on their own people, eventually melted away. Charles X, seeing his authority evaporate, abdicated and fled to England. The senior line of the Bourbon dynasty would never rule France again. But what would replace it? Another republic? The memory of the Terror was still too raw. Instead, the powerful liberal politicians and bankers who had financed the opposition found a candidate: Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans. He was a cousin of the deposed king, but his father had voted for the execution of Louis XVI, and he himself had fought for the revolutionary armies. He was presented as the perfect compromise. He accepted the throne not as King of France, but as "King of the French," a monarch by the will of the people, not by the grace of God. This was the beginning of the July Monarchy, an 18-year reign that belonged entirely to the bourgeoisie. Louis-Philippe cultivated the image of a "Citizen King." He abandoned royal pomp, dressed in the dark suit of a businessman, and was often seen walking the streets of Paris carrying his own umbrella. The government’s unofficial motto, attributed to the politician François Guizot, was *Enrichissez-vous!*—Enrich yourselves! And enrich themselves they did. This was the great age of early industrial capitalism in France. The first major railway line was built, connecting Paris to Saint-Germain in 1837. By 1848, over 1,800 kilometers of track crisscrossed the country. Coal production doubled. Factories, belching black smoke, sprang up around cities like Lyon and Paris. The stock market boomed. At night, the main boulevards of Paris were now illuminated by gaslight, making them safer and turning them into centers of a bustling nightlife of cafés and theaters. Yet, this prosperity was a thin veneer. The franchise was widened, but only slightly, to about 240,000 voters. The vast majority of the population—the peasants in the countryside and, more dangerously, the growing urban working class—were completely excluded from power. They were the ones who toiled for 14 hours a day in the new factories, who lived in squalid, overcrowded slums where diseases like cholera could kill thousands in a matter of weeks, as a devastating 1832 epidemic proved. Beneath the calm surface of the July Monarchy, the pressure was building once more. Secret societies flourished. Socialist ideas began to take root. Rebellions, like the 1832 uprising immortalized in Victor Hugo’s *Les Misérables*, were brutally crushed but showed the deep discontent. The "Citizen King" grew older, more conservative, more out of touch. The system he represented, a monarchy run for the benefit of a wealthy few, had created vast new wealth but also vast new misery. By 1848, the hunger for change—for a real voice, for a fair share—was becoming unbearable. The stage was set for another Parisian explosion, one that would sweep the King of the French from his throne and plunge France, and all of Europe, into a new revolutionary fire.