July Monarchy
The July Monarchy, officially the Kingdom of France, was a liberal constitutional monarchy in France under Louis Philippe I, starting on 9 August 1830, with the revolutionary victory in the July Revolution of 1830, and ending on 24 February 1848, with the Revolution of 1848. It marks the end of the Bourbon Restoration. It began with the overthrow of the conservative government of Charles X, the last king of the main line House of Bourbon.
Louis Philippe I, a member of the more liberal Orléans branch of the House of Bourbon, proclaimed himself as Roi des Français rather than "King of France", emphasizing the popular origins of his reign. The king promised to follow the juste milieu, or the middle-of-the-road, avoiding the extremes of both the conservative supporters of Charles X and radicals on the left.
The July Monarchy was dominated by wealthy bourgeoisie and numerous former Napoleonic officials. It followed conservative policies, especially under the influence of François Guizot. The king promoted friendship with the United Kingdom and sponsored colonial expansion, notably the French conquest of Algeria. By 1848, Louis Philippe I's popularity had collapsed, and he abdicated following the successful February Revolution, part of the larger revolutions of 1848.
Overview
The July Monarchy is generally seen as a period during which the haute bourgeoisie was dominant, and marked the shift from the counter-revolutionary Legitimists to the Orléanists. The Orléanists were willing to make some compromises with the changes brought by the 1789 Revolution. For instance, Louis-Philippe was crowned "King of the French", instead of "King of France": this marked his acceptance of popular sovereignty.Louis-Philippe, who had flirted with liberalism in his youth, rejected much of the pomp and circumstance of the Bourbons and surrounded himself with merchants and bankers. The July Monarchy, however, ruled during a time of turmoil. A large group of Legitimists on the right demanded the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. On the left, Republicanism in France||republicanism and later socialism remained powerful forces. Late in his reign Louis-Philippe became increasingly rigid and dogmatic and refused to remove his deeply unpopular President of the Council François Guizot. The situation gradually escalated until the Revolutions of 1848 resulted in the fall of the monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic.
During the first few years of his reign, Louis-Philippe took actions to develop legitimate, broad-based reform. The government found its source of legitimacy within the Charter of 1830, written by reform-minded members of Chamber of Deputies and committed to a platform of religious equality among Catholics and Protestants; the empowerment of the citizenry through the reestablishment of the National Guard, electoral reform, reform of the peerage system, and the lessening of royal authority. Louis-Philippe and his ministers adhered to policies that seemed to promote the central tenets of the constitution. However, the majority of these policies were veiled attempts to shore up the power and influence of the government and the bourgeoisie, rather than legitimate attempts to promote equality and empowerment for a broad constituency of the French population. Thus, though the July Monarchy seemed to move toward reform, this movement was largely illusory.
During the years of the July Monarchy, enfranchisement roughly doubled, from 94,000 under Charles X to more than 200,000 men by 1848. But, this number still represented only roughly one percent of population and a small number of those men of eligible age. The extended franchise tended to favor the wealthy merchant bourgeoisie more than any other group as the right to vote was related to payment of a certain level of taxes. Beyond resulting in the election of more bourgeoisie to the Chamber of Deputies, this electoral expansion meant that the bourgeoisie could politically challenge the nobility on legislative matters. Thus, while appearing to honor his pledge to increase suffrage, Louis-Philippe acted primarily to empower his supporters and increase his hold over the French Parliament. The election of only the wealthiest men tended to undermine any possibility for growth of a radical faction in Parliament, and effectively served socially conservative ends.
The reformed Charter of 1830 limited the power of the king, stripping him of his ability to propose and decree legislation, as well as limiting his executive authority. However, Louis-Philipe believed in a kind of monarchy in which the king was more than a figurehead for an elected Parliament, and as such, he was deeply involved in legislative affairs. One of his first acts in creating his government was to appoint the conservative Casimir Pierre Perier as the premier of his cabinet. Perier, a banker, was instrumental in shutting down many of the republican secret societies and labor unions that had formed during the early years of the regime. In addition, he oversaw the dismemberment of the National Guard after it proved too supportive of radical ideologies. He conducted these actions with royal approval. He was once quoted as saying that the source of French misery was the belief that there had been a revolution. "No Monsieur," he said to another minister, "there has not been a revolution: there is simply a change at the head of state."
Perier and François Guizot, then Minister of the Interior, enforced the conservatism of the July Monarchy. The regime acknowledged early on that radicalism and republicanism threatened it, as they undermined its laissez-faire policies. In 1834 the Monarchy declared the term "republican" illegal. Guizot shut down republican clubs and disbanded republican publications. Republicans within the cabinet, such as the banker Dupont, were all but excluded by Perier and his conservative clique. Distrusting the National Guard, Louis-Philippe increased the size of the army and reformed it in order to ensure its loyalty to the government.
Two factions always persisted in the cabinet, split between liberal conservatives such as Guizot and liberal reformers such as the journalist Adolphe Thiers, the latter never gained prominence. Perier was succeeded as premier by Count Molé, another conservative. Thiers, a reformer, succeeded Molé but was later sacked by Louis-Philippe after attempting to pursue an aggressive foreign policy. After Thiers the conservative Guizot was selected as premier.
In particular, the Guizot administration was marked by increasingly authoritarian crackdowns on republicanism and dissent, and an increasingly pro-business policy. This policy included protective tariffs that defended the status quo and enriched French businessmen. Guizot's government granted railway and mining contracts to the bourgeois supporters of the government, and contributed some of the start-up costs of these enterprises. As workers under these policies had no legal right to assemble, unionize, or petition the government for increased pay or decreased hours, the July Monarchy under Perier, Molé, and Guizot generally proved detrimental to the lower classes. Guizot's advice to those who were disenfranchised by the tax-based electoral requirements was "enrichissez-vous".
Louis Phillipe was pushed to the throne by an alliance between the people of Paris; the Republicans, who had set up barricades in the capital; and the liberal bourgeoisie. However, at the end of his reign, the so-called "Citizen King" was overthrown by similar citizen uprisings and use of barricades during the February Revolution of 1848. This resulted in the proclamation of the Second Republic.
After Louis-Philippe's ousting and subsequent exile to Britain, the liberal Orléanist faction continued to support a return of the House of Orléans to the throne. But the July Monarchy proved to be the last Bourbon-Orleans monarchy of France. The Legitimists withdrew from politics to their castles, leaving the way open for the struggle between the Orléanists and the Republicans.
Background
Following the ouster of Napoleon in 1814, the Coalitions restored the Bourbon Dynasty to the French throne. The ensuing period, the Bourbon Restoration, was characterized by conservative reaction and the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic Church as one of the main powers in French politics. The relatively moderate Comte de Provence, brother of the deposed-and-executed Louis XVI, ruled as Louis XVIII from 1814 to 1824 and was succeeded by his more conservative younger brother, the former Comte d'Artois, ruling as Charles X from 1824. In May 1825 he had an elaborate coronation in Reims Cathedral which harkened back to the pre-revolutionary monarchy.Despite the return of the House of Bourbon to power, France was much changed from the era of the ancien régime. The egalitarianism and liberalism of the revolutionaries remained an important force and the autocracy and hierarchy of the earlier era could not be fully restored. Economic changes, which had been underway long before the revolution, had progressed further during the years of turmoil and were firmly entrenched by 1815. These changes had seen power shift from the noble landowners to the urban merchants. The administrative reforms of Napoleon, such as the Napoleonic Code and efficient bureaucracy, also remained in place. These changes produced a unified central government that was fiscally sound and had much control over all areas of French life, a sharp difference from the complicated mix of feudal and absolutist traditions and institutions of pre-Revolutionary Bourbons.
File:1841 portrait painting of Louis Philippe I by Winterhalter.jpg|thumb|Portrait of Louis Philippe I by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 1841. The Louis Philippe I, King of the French, is depicted at the entrance of the Gallerie des batailles which he had furnished in the Château de Versailles.
Louis XVIII, for the most part, accepted that much had changed. However, he was pushed on his right by the Ultra-royalists, led by the comte de Villèle, who condemned the doctrinaires' attempt to reconcile the Revolution with the monarchy through a constitutional monarchy. Instead, the Chambre introuvable, elected in 1815, first banished all National Convention who had voted for Louis XVI's death and then passed similar reactionary laws. Louis XVIII was forced to dissolve this Chamber, dominated by the Ultras, in 1816, fearing a popular uprising. The liberals thus governed until the 1820 assassination of the Duke of Berry, nephew of the king and known supporter of the Ultras, which brought Villèle's Ultras back to power. His brother Charles X, however, took a far more conservative approach. He attempted to compensate the aristocrats for what they had lost in the revolution, curbed the freedom of the press, and reasserted the power of the Church. In 1830 the discontent caused by these changes and Charles' authoritarian nomination of the Ultra Jules, prince de Polignac as minister culminated in an uprising in the streets of Paris, known as the 1830 July Revolution. Charles was forced to flee and Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, a member of the House of Orléans branch of the family, and son of Philippe Égalité who had voted the death of his cousin Louis XVI, ascended the throne. Louis-Philippe ruled, not as "King of France" but as "King of the French".