Louis-Philippe I of the French July Monarchy

“ Here is a sawyer, a cabinet-maker, a cobbler, and such sort, all food for the guillotine for attempting to do no more than has been most treacherously perpetrated by the present King of the French and the ex-Queen of Spain. How is it that LOUIS-PHILIPPE feels no touch of sympathy for that pusillanimous scoundrel—Just? He is naturally his veritable double; but then Just is only a carpenter, LOUIS-PHILIPPE is King of the French! ”

“ King Louis Philippe, though sober-minded, wished to exercise a personal influence on the policy of the cabinet, so that there were then two schools, represented respectively by Thiers and Guizot, one of which held the theory that “the king reigns but does not govern”; while the other maintained that he might exercise a personal influence, provided that he could rely on a ministry supported by a majority of the Chamber of Deputies. But the weak point in the July Monarchy was above all the question of the franchise. ”

“ In July, 1830, an uprising of the upper tier of the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class—the aristocracy of finance—overthrew the Bourbon throne, or landed aristocracy, and set up the throne of Orleans, a younger branch of the house of Bourbon, with Louis Philippe as king. From the month in which this revolution occurred, Louis Philippe's monarchy is called the "July Monarchy." In February, 1848, a revolt of a lower tier of the capitalist class—the industrial bourgeoisie—against the aristocracy of finance, in turn dethroned Louis Philippe. ”

“ The throne of the Bourbons is overthrown. Louis Philippe finds himself, as by magic, King of the French. He exchanges his ducal coronet for a royal crown. He enters the regal mansions of the Tuileries, Versailles, Saint Cloud, and Fontainebleau the acknowledged sovereign of thirty millions of people. All the proud dynasties of Europe recognize him as belonging to the family of kings. Eighteen years pass away, crowded with the splendor, cares, toils, and perils which seem ever to environ royalty. ”

“ There, Madame, you see the precarious state of the sham Legitimacy at home; abroad its position is no more assured. If Louis-Philippe's Government had felt that the Revolution of July cancelled the earlier transactions, that a new national constitution entailed a new political right and changed social interests; if it had shown judgment and courage at the outset of its career, it could, without firing a single cartridge, have endowed France with the frontier which has been taken from her, so keen was the assent of the peoples, so great the stupefaction of the kings. ”

“ LOUIS PHILIPPE I., king of the French (1773–1850) , was the eldest son of Louis Philip Joseph, duke of Orleans (known during the Revolution as Philippe Egalité) and of Louise Marie Adelaide de Bourbon, daughter of the duc de Penthièvre, and was born at the Palais Royal in Paris on the 6th of October 1773. ”

“ Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity, which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in their civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.
Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his family was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy of admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. ”

“ The July revolution in Paris and the declaration of the new king, Louis Philippe, that France, as a Liberal monarchy, would not only not intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, but would not permit other powers to do so, aroused great hopes among the oppressed peoples, and was the immediate cause of a revolution in Romagna and the Marches. ”

“ But in return for that, let Louis Philippe do us one single favor—which is to remain a citizen-king; for it is because he is becoming every day more and more like an absolute king that we must complain of him. He is certainly perfectly honorable as a man, an estimable father of a family, a tender spouse and a good economist, but it is vexatious to see how he allows all the trees of liberty to be felled and stripped of their beautiful foliage that they may be sawed into beams to support the tottering house of Orleans. ”

“ Did ever his Barricade Majesty himself, in all his dreams of a dynasty, pretend that any unalterable principle, or fundamental law of France, had turned the tide of succession from the heir-presumptive of Charles X., and forced heralds upon the backward trail of genealogy, till they could again descend, and so find the hereditary king of the French in the son of Egalité? Louis Philippe was not legitimate, in any reasonable sense of the word; and, could he have made such men as Chateaubriand regard him as other than a usurper, he would not be at Claremont now. ”

“ They know well, and are daily reminded of it, that all the power and all the strength that possession can give are vested in the existing dynasty; and though much deeply-rooted feeling exists that is inimical to it, yet so many of all parties are firmly united to prevent farther anarchy and revolution, that the throne of Louis-Philippe perhaps rests on as solid a foundation as that of any monarch in Europe: the fear of renewed tumult acts like the key-stone of an arch, keeping firm, sound, and in good condition, what would certainly fall to pieces without it. ”

“ Louis Philippe had been placed upon the vacant throne, not by the voice of the French people, but by a small clique in Paris. There was danger that allied Europe would again rouse itself to restore the Bourbons. Louis Philippe could make no appeal to the masses of the people for support, for he was not the king of their choice. Should he do any thing indicative of friendship for the Bonapartes, it might exasperate all dynastic Europe; and should the French people learn that an heir of the Empire was in France, their enthusiasm might produce convulsions the end of which no one could foresee. ”

“ LOUIS PHILIPPE AT THE HÔTEL DE VILLE. PREFACE.
It would be difficult to find, in all the range of the past, a man whose career has been so full of wonderful and exciting vicissitude as that of Louis Philippe. His life covers the most eventful period in French history. The storms of 1789 consigned his father to the guillotine, his mother and brothers to imprisonment, and himself and sister to poverty and exile. ”

“ The spirit of the people had come up to that point at which monarchy must either assume the form of absolutism, and rule by fear alone, or must yield to the upward pressure of the people, and its possessors seek to escape the opposing principle which they could not withstand. Louis Philippe tried the former—it was too late—the army, that last hope of tyrants, the sword and the bayonet hired to defend the throne became the people's support—failing in the effort to fix his power by blood, Louis Philippe fled to save his life ”

“ Immediately after the withdrawal of Louis Philippe from the Hôtel de Ville, Lafayette and his friends drew up a programme, or social contract, in which they endeavored to reconcile republican institutions with the forms of a monarchy. Lafayette himself took this contract to the Palais Royal, and submitted it to the duke. He gave it apparently his candid consent. There were, however, Legitimists as well as Republicans who had no faith in this union. The Abbé Gregoire is reported to [Pg 283] have exclaimed in disgust, "Good God, are we then to have both a republic and a king?" ”

“ Again we see the duke, on the recovery of a large portion of his estates, enjoying the elegant retreat at Twickenham, fêted by the nobility of England, and caressed by the aristocracy of Europe.
Again the kaleidoscope of changeful life is turned. The Empire falls. The Bourbons are restored. Louis Philippe returns to the palaces of his fathers. In rank, he takes his stand next to the throne. In wealth, he is the richest subject in Europe. At one moment he is caressed by Royalty, hoping to win his support, and again he is persecuted by Royalty, fearing his influence. ”

“ Louis Philippe, in opening the Parliament on July 23, 1831, accordingly announced the early destruction of the barrier fortresses, as a proof that the four Powers had abandoned the system established against France in 1815. In point of fact the apprehensions of her aggressive spirit had been intensified by the Revolution of July and, in deciding to demolish some of the frontier defences of the Low Countries, the Powers had not been actuated by any desire to propitiate the new régime. ”

“ A few adventurers gathered round him, eager to take the one chance in a thousand of his success. Accompanied by some of these, in 1836, he appeared before the French troops at Strasburg, expecting to be acclaimed Emperor and to march triumphantly to Paris. He did go to Paris, escorted by policemen; but his attempt seemed so foolish that Louis Philippe merely paid his passage to America to be rid of him.
The Prince soon returned to Europe and settled in London, where he lived the fast life of the average nobleman. In 1840 he set out on another expedition against France. ”

“ The country was in no state to be governed by a child; and what then was left for us, but to take a king from the same race which so for many ages has possessed the throne of France. Louis-Philippe est roi, parcequ'il est Bourbon."
"Pardonnez-moi," replies another, who, if he could manage it without disturbing the tranquillity about him, would take care to have it understood that nothing more legitimate than an elective monarchy could be ever permitted in France,—"Pardonnez-moi, mon ami; Louis-Philippe est roi, quoiqu'il est Bourbon." ”

“ The candidate for whose success Louis Philippe was in reality most anxious, and whose selection Sébastiani instructed both Bresson and Talleyrand to advocate cautiously, was Prince Charles of Naples. This young prince was a Neapolitan Bourbon, a brother of the Duchesse de Berri and a nephew of the French queen, Marie Amélie, and Louis Philippe was always as desirous as any king of the old régime to promote the aggrandizement of his family. ”

“ Society is wonderfully quick to repair the breaches in its walls made by gallant assaulters, and the heroes who have been foremost in the attack find that their bravely made passage has closed behind them, and that they are left to be broken and starved into submission. So it was after 1830. Louis Philippe was at heart a Royalist who had little understanding of the Revolution. His great achievement was to keep on his throne for eighteen years by encouraging the moneyed middle class, thus laying the foundation of French industrial prosperity. ”

“ Whatever his father had been, Louis Philippe was far from being a wicked man. Whether teaching school in Switzerland, or giving French lessons in America, he was the kindest-hearted and most inoffensive of gentlemen. The only trouble with this reign was that it was not heroic. The most emotional and romantic people in Europe had a common-place king. Only once was there a throb of genuine enthusiasm during the eighteen years of his occupancy of the throne, and that was when the remains of their adored Napoleon were brought from St. ”

“ If in this matter Louis Philippe had seemed to sacrifice the international position of France to dynastic interests, his attempt to re-establish it by allying himself with the reactionary monarchies against the Liberals of Switzerland finally alienated from him the French Liberal opinion on which his authority was based. When, in February 1848, Paris rose against him, he found that he was practically isolated in France. ”

“ According to this theory, the excesses of the First Revolution, due in part to the passions engendered by a long course of misgovernment, in part to wild speculations and experiments, produced an anarchical spirit which has frustrated every subsequent attempt to establish a solid government of any form, including the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe, patterned on the English model—the resemblance being in fact that of a castle of cards to its Gothic prototype—which offered the proper compound of liberty and authority in sufficiently balanced proportions. ”

“ King Louis Philippe said one day to Marshal Gerard: "Had they listened to the Duke of Doudeauville, and not broken up the National Guard of Paris, the revolution would not have taken place."
The great lord, good citizen, and good Christian, who, at periods most disturbed by changes of regime, had always been as firm in the application of his principles as he was moderate in his actions and gentle in his method, made himself as much respected under Louis Philippe as under the Restoration. During the cholera, he set the example of absolute devotion and was constantly in the hospitals. ”

“ The queen was the daughter of that King of Naples who was driven from his Continental dominions by the French, and took refuge, with his family and court, in Sicily. Here the king, Louis Philippe, then poor and in exile, married her; and the match is understood to have been one of affection on both sides. The thirtieth anniversary of their union has just expired, and they are at the summit of human power, with a most interesting family of seven children, and, as is known to every body, with the warmest attachment to each other. ”

“ Had he not been born, and had the double abdication still become indispensable, Louis Philippe would to-day be more firmly seated on his throne than any monarch in Europe; for in him would be found resolved the great problem of the union of fact and of right, of legitimacy and of force.
Had he not bean born, ... but he has been born, he is growing to manhood, and in him are being developed all the characteristic signs of the rejuvenescence of his race. In this age of tribulations and of wonders, who may venture to sound the abyss of the future? ”