The Bourbon Restoration was the period of French history between the fall of Napoleon I and the First French Empire in 1814 and the July Revolution of 1830. Upon Napoleon's abdication in 1814, the late King Louis XVI of France's brother was crowned Louis XVIII of France, and France maintained many of Napoleon's reforms, although it refused to adopt any further reforms. Louis XVIII's gentle reign ended with his death in 1824, and his brother became Charles X of France. Charles, who led the Ultra-Royalists as Duke of Artois, was a proponent of an absolute monarchy, and he attempted to censor the liberal and moderate opposition. Charles X and his premier Jules de Polignac oppressed the opposition and the bourgeoisie, reducing interest on government bonds to the chagrin of the bourgeoisie and to the benefit of the aristocracy; he also disbanded the French National Guard in 1827. In 1830, the implementation of the Four Ordinances led to the July Revolution, and Charles was overthrown and replaced by Louis Philippe I and the liberal July Monarchy.
Political factions[]
Left-wing[]
The Republicans were a liberal political faction of Bourbon Restoration-era politics, led by Jacques-Charles Dupont de l'Eure. In 1816, the Republican-Bonapartist coalition won 7.8% of the vote and 20/258 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, but they disappeared by the 1817 election. The Republicans remained a radical element in Restoration-era politics, helping to form the Charbonnerie secret society, and, during the July Revolution of 1830, making up the armies of workers and sans-culottes on the streets of Paris who, alongside the Bonapartists, erected 4,000 barricades and engaged in street warfare with the military. The Doctrinaires appointed commissioners, men of business and finance, to provide leadership to the decentralized resistance during the revolution, as they sought to prevent the revolution from becoming a republican revolution. The regular bands of street fighters were soon overshadowed by the reconstituted, bourgeois National Guard led by the elderly Marquis de Lafayette, which took over the leadership of the revolution. The Republican masses were disappointed in Louis Philippe I's accession to the throne, as they had fought and died for a republic, but they were persuaded by Lafayette to accept Louis Philippe as "King of the French" after he agreed to several proposed reforms, and to serve as a constitutional monarch.
Center[]
The Bonapartists were supporters of the exiled Napoleon I at the start of the Bourbon Restoration era. King Louis XVIII's decision to downsize the military (which, by 1814, had subscribed to a "stab-in-the-back" theory, opining that it was the politicians at home who had robbed them of victory in the Napoleonic Wars) and end new hires for the civil service led to many people supporting Napoleon's return to France in 1815. Every army sent to block the road to Paris went over to Napoleon, forcing King Louis XVIII to flee to the Netherlands. After the Hundred Days and the Battle of Waterloo, however, the Bonapartists were subjected to a "Second White Terror", with 300 Bonapartists being lynched in southern France and many prominent officials assassinated. During the July Revolution, old Napoleonic veterans assumed command of the street defenses on their local blocks, using their natural authority to direct the revolution on the streets. Many of them believed in the "stab-in-the-back" theory and that the Bourbons had failed to uphold France's national honor.- The Liberals were a classical liberal faction of Restoration-era politics, led by Jacques Laffitte. In September 1817, after the Count of Artois' leaked memos to the Allies suggested that King Louis XVIII's government was a foreign-imposed government, liberals were emboldened to re-enter the political scene, and the liberals won a working majority in that year's parliamentary elections. Many of them were old Bonapartists, unreconstructed Republicans, or left-leaning constitutional monarchists, who would form the Doctrinaires. In 1818, the center-left Liberals, including the Marquis de Lafayette, were swept into power at the expense of the center-right Doctrinaires. In March 1819, the Liberal government created freedom of the press, although there were limits in the domains of defamation, libel, pornography, and attacks on the King. In September 1819, 35 of the 55 open seats in that year's election went to unabashed liberals, including Abbe Henri Gregoire, a former member of the National Convention, regicide, and supporter of Black civil rights. Gregoire's presence in the Chamber ended the rise of the left. On 13 February 1820, after Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry was murdered at the opera by a fanatical Bonapartist, the Ultras accused his death of being part of a liberal conspiracy, leading to new restrictions on civil liberties, a pullback on freedom of the press (censoring liberal journalism), and the adoption of the conservative "Law of the Double Vote" in 1820. A Liberal conspiracy broke out with plans to combine an Army mutiny and demonstrations in Paris in August 1820, but men who got cold feet leaked the plans, and the uprising was called off. By the year's end, the Ultras were back in power. Radical Frenchmen who had gone to Italy and joined the Carbonari later returned home and created a secret society of cells, due-paying members, and armed members, deciding that extralegal action was justified due to the Ultra resurgence. Lafayette's chateau was one of the centers of organizing for the Charbonnerie, but a lack of strong leadership and the plans for a revolt being leaked before the November 1821 launch date led to the Charbonnerie uprising being called off. The Liberals mistakenly supported Richelieu's resignation with the belief that an Ultra government would discredit itself. The Liberals were dismayed by the success of the French invasion of Spain, as the army had never mutinied or revolted, and the army had always been counted on as one of the key disgruntled parties that could be recruited to topple the Ultras. Instead of being the backbone of liberal revolution, the army instead suppressed one. In the November 1824 elections, three-fifths of deputies were nobles, and only 19 were liberals.
- The Doctrinaires were a conservative-liberal and pro-constitutional monarchy faction of the Restoration era, led by Pierre Paul Royer-Collard. King Louis XVIII was aware of the impossibility of turning the clock back to 1788, and, while he supported royal sovereignty, the divine right of kings, and the continuity of the Bourbon dynasty, on 2 May 1814, he concluded that France must have a liberal constitution protecting freedom of worship, freedom of speech and the press, equality before the law, and the continuation of the Napoleonic Code as a free gift from the King to his subject, meaning that they were not natural rights that the King was bound to preserve. Of the 143 peers created by King Louis XVIII, 103 of them were former peers of Marshals under Napoleon, and Louis also co-opted the Bonapartist civil service. The moderates blamed the failure of the Restoration on the reactionism of the Ultras. After Talleyrand's resignation in 1815, Armand-Emmanuel de Vignerot du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu was appointed to replace Talleyrand, and he signed humiliating peace terms with the Allies, which would have France revert to its 1790 boundaries, agree to a 150,000-strong Allied occupying army to be paid for by France, a 700-million franc indemnity to be repaid to the Allies, and the full repayment of France's debts. In October 1816, after King Louis XVIII dissolved the Chamber and held new elections, the more moderate Doctrinaires were swept into power, and they agreed on a constitutional monarchy, the Charter of 1815, rights for Frenchmen, and moving on from an angry past to a hopeful future. However, poor weather led to bread riots in market towns, and January and June 1817 saw rashes of riots. Many in France blamed the occupying forces for the skyrocketing prices and food instability, and Richelieu's government strengthened France's international standing by prioritizing repaying the indemnity and France's debts through cutting expenditures and raising taxes. The government partnered with banks in London and Amsterdam to help pay off French debts, strengthening the worth of French bonds. In 1817, the Doctrinaires and the liberals won a working majority in the Chamber of Deputies, the Doctrinaires being led by the King's "son", Elie, Duc Decazes. In September 1818, Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria met with the French government to finally settle their differences and bring France back into the "great power" fold; France paid 250 million francs to the Allies in exchange for the Coalition withdrawing from France and welcoming France into the Concert of Europe. In 1818, the center-left Liberals swept the center-right Doctrinaires from power, forcing Richelieu's resignation. After the radical Liberals' resurgence in 1819, Ducaze passed the "Law of the Double Vote" to increase the size of the Chamber of Deputies by 173 seats, voted on only by electors who paid the highest amount of taxes each year; two-fifths of the Chamber would be elected by super-rich landowners who could also vote in regular elections. The failed Charbonnerie insurrection of 1821 led to Richelieu being forced to resign as Prime Minister. However, the liberals experienced a resurgence in September 1827 after a massive voter registration drive added 20,000 more voters to the rolls, and the liberals partnered with the Dissident Ultras in deposing Prime Minister Villele. A new caucus of deputies formed back around the center, with the large influx of liberals allying with the Ultras. The centrist Jean-Baptiste Gay de Martignac was appointed Prime Minister by a reluctant Charles X, and liberal pamphlets began calling for Duke Louis Philippe to replace King Charles X as king. However, in 1829, Charles X replaced Martignac with the reactionary Jules de Polignac and did not recall the chambers until March 1830. The Doctrinaires also opposed King Charles' 1830 invasion of Algeria due to their concern that Charles would use the war to boost his personal popularity and enable him to attack the charter of government. When the Doctrinaires warned him that the government could not function without King Charles' cooperation, King Charles prematurely dissolved the Chamber two days later. Ahead of the election, the liberals were ahead of the Royalists in terms of organization, and their leading apparatus was the Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera club, run by a central committee in Paris that included Laffitte, Lafayette, and Francois Guizot. While it resembled the old Jacobin network, it was mostly focused on electoral organizing, hosting dinner and parties for its candidates in a bid to re-elect them, and holding training sessions to instruct electors on the rules of voting to prevent the Ultras from disqualifying them. The Liberal presses also printed out claims that national lands would be re-confiscated, tithes and feudal dues would come back, and the Church would receive massive payoffs should the Ultras return to power. The invasion of Algeria was launched in late May, just before the elections of early June, and the Liberals claimed that such an invasion would lead to folly. In July, the liberals won a smashing victory. When the Royalists announced the Four Ordinances on 26 July 1830, workers hearing Le Monitor (the government paper containing the published ordinances) being read aloud at the Palais-Royal grew angry, as did bourgeois voters who had gathered at the Hôtel de Ville for a local election. The people most agitated were those who worked in the publishing industry, whose press freedoms were about to be curtailed. At the top, publishers met with each other to discuss the fate of their businesses; journalists met to discuss literary responses to the crisis; bankers and financiers were angered at the arbitrary whims of the Bourbon dynasty's impact on their businesses; the bourgeois business interests (represented by the Aide-toi societies) grew angry at the new electoral law which would cut them out of voting; and workers figured out how they were going to feed themselves amid the crisis. The moderate Casimir Perier, who feared popular revolution just as much as he feared reactionism, met with like-minded colleagues while the radical Laffitte was out of town and sought to avoid a revolution. The Doctrinaire papers refused to print during the July Revolution, saying that it would be hypocritical for them to illegally print while they protested the King's illegal actions, leading to four more radical papers printing a statement of resistance drafted by Adolphe Thiers. The prosperous, respected bourgeoisie launched their own revolution in the homes and salons of prominent politicians, bankers, and businessmen, while, in the streets, a massively decentralized, spontaneous uprising of working-classes, the old sans-culottes (students, shopkeepers, craftsmen, and printers) and veterans occurred, and the latter revolution would take leadership of the revolution through building barricades and fighting against the government's 10,000 soldiers and policemen in the streets. Ultimately, the Doctrinaire leadership persuaded Duke Louis Philippe of Orleans to accept the office of Lieutenant-General, giving the Revolution a leader.
- The Orleanists was a liberal and pro-constitutional monarchy faction of the Restoration era that emerged during the July Revolution. In the midst of the Revolution, the Doctrinaire leader Adolphe Thiers, speaking on behalf of his fellow moderate liberals, met with the Duke of Orleans' sister Adelaide d'Orleans and, through her, persuaded her brother Louis Philippe I to accept the title of Lieutenant-General. The reluctant Louis Philippe I accepted the title and, while he agreed to King Charles X's orders to announce his abdication, he refused to accept Charles' order to announce Charles' grandson's accession to the throne as Henri V. Louis Philippe then ordered the 20,000 radical street fighters of Paris to march on Charles X's residence at Rambouillet, supposedly to clear them out of Paris to ease his takeover, and he then warned Charles X to leave the country or face a mob as his brother Louis XVI had done. Charles X left for the coast with his royal guards, and, over the next few days, the inner circle of the liberal opposition, now the "Orleanist" faction, rejected demands for a constitutional convention and instead decided to make revisions to the existing Charter in August 1830, while adding the Marquis de Lafayette's liberal suggestions to the new Charter. The Charter was no longer presented as a gift to the King, and it dropped the double vote, reduced the property requirements for voting, and doubled the existing franchise. The King's powers were limited, and the right to initiate legislation and impeach ministers of state was given to the deputies. However, many were disappointed by how little the revolution had gained for the men and women who had fought and died in the streets, and won the revolution with their blood. Lafayette promised further reforms in time, causing the crowds to disperse. On 7 August 1830, a final amendment was added at the last minute, to finally establish the tricolor as the national flag of France, and the deputies called Louis Philippe to the throne as a constitutional monarch after he agreed to the terms; the Deputies voted 219-33 (with 150 not showing up) in favor of Louis Philippe's accession, while the Peers voted 89-10 (14 abstentions and 200 peers not showing up). The Radicals reluctantly supported him, and the old Conservatives did not show up.
Right-wing[]
- The Ultra-Royalists were the reactionary faction of Restoration-era politics, led by the Count of Artois (the future King Charles X), brother of King Louis XVIII. The Count of Artois and his fellow absolutists opposed King Louis XVIII's refusal to return the national lands - lands confiscated from the nobility and church and sold during the French Revolution - as they stubbornly wished for everything they once held to be returned to them in full. Artois was also angered at the monarchy's tepid reprisals, revenges, and assertions of absolute power as Louis XVIII retained many Bonapartist politicians and civil servants in his new regime. The absolutists continued to seek the return of their confiscated lands and assert their aristocratic privileges, angering the common people. The Ultras blamed the failure of the Restoration on the fact that they had not sufficiently purged and punished the enemies of the crown. After the Battle of Waterloo, 1.2 million foreign troops looted, pillaged, requisitioned, and stripped France clean, and unreconstructed Royalists and hardcore Catholics, furious that their countrymen had gone back to Napoleon, engaged in a "Second White Terror" in southern France, taking part in 300 grisly murders and multiple assassinations of prominent officials. In the August 1815 election to the new Chamber of Deputies, in which only 75,000 men in a kingdom of 30 million people could vote, voted overwhelmingly for the hardcore Royalists, who were said to be "more Royalist than the King", and acquired the nickname "Ultras". The "Incredible Chamber", as Louis called it, set up laws allowing for punitive attacks on their enemies, limits on the freedom of press, special courts that would deal with accused Bonapartist collaborators, and a law that amnestied actions from the past, while exempting the Bonapartists. In September 1816, the King dissolved the Chamber at Talleyrand's advice rather than let the Ultras default on France's debts, which would prevent France from ever becoming a great power again. In October 1816, new elections saw voters who had abstained the first time around came out in force, and many of those who had voted the first time stayed at home. In the place of the Ultras, the moderate constitutionalists, the Doctrinaires, were swept into power; only 90 of the 238 deputies could be called "Ultras". Artois later sent memos to the Allies warning them that, once they withdrew their troops, France would fall back into Revolution; the leak of these memos made it seem as if the government was a foreign-imposed government. The Ultras attempted to transform the army back into the walled-off domain of the aristocracy, but, in 1818, the government passed laws which retained conscription as a viable tool of recruitment, meritocracy, and created a reserve army of veterans, troubling the Ultras, as every veteran had been a veteran of Napoleon's army. In 1819, King Louis XVIII rebuked Artois' protests over France's liberal reforms by insisting that he needed to be a king for all people. After the Duke of Berry's assassination in 1820 and an abortive liberal uprising attempt that same year, the Ultras returned to the ascendancy. In November 1820, the Ultras exploited the Law of the Double Vote to sweep the Liberals into irrelevance, and 1820-1821 saw the conservative powers of Europe crack down on liberalism everywhere. After Richelieu's resignation in 1821, the Ultras would come to power for the next nine years. Joseph de Villele, an economist-politician affiliated with the Ultras, became the new Prime Minister, keeping the threat of liberal revolution at bay for six years through refusing to commit to the return of confiscated emigre lands, and invading Spain in the "Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis" intervention to bring an end to Spain's Trienio Liberal. Patriotism in France exploded as the French rallied around the triumphant crown. In November 1824, three-fifths of deputies elected were nobles, half of them were former emigres, and only 19 were Liberals, and the Conservatives deemed it the "Restored Chamber", which was more right-wing than the "Incredible Chamber". By then, King Louis supported monetary recompensation for lost emigre property, but King Louis lamented that his brother Artois had not predeceased him, as the far-right sought the complete return of confiscated emigre land. The crown passed to Artois, who was recreated as "King Charles X". Charles had an Ultra-Royalist "Regained Chamber" to work with at the start of his reign, and he supported the social and political re-Christianization of France, triggering brewing paranoia that the King planned to make France bend a knee to the Pope, and angering the atheists of Paris. In response to this, holy relics were trashed, holy water was spoiled, and churches were vandalized by anti-clericals, leading to Charles overracting on 20 April 1825 by having the chambers pass a law on sacrilege to raise the punishments for these random acts of petty vandalism, imposing the death penalty. Protestant churches were exempted, meaning that freedom of religion had essentially been abolished. Charles also oversaw monetary indemnities, but this led to a split between Ultra-Royalists and the more moderate defectors. On 29 May 1825, Charles X held his official coronation, and he critically took the ceremony back to the cathedral at Reims rather than in the capital of Paris in a major snub to Paris. Additionally, Charles prostrated himself before the Archbishop in a sign of France's return to reconstructed Catholicism, while the Archbishop denounced the charter of government and freedom of worship. Charles' return to Paris was met unenthusiastically, and he was nicknamed "Charles the Simple" after a deposed Carolingian king. Charles, made to look the fool by the daily press, was checked in his retaliation by the moderate Chamber of Peers, who had been created during Decazes' years of liberalism. In April 1826, the peers proposed a bill to rebuild the fortunes of the aristocracy and essentially recreate the three estates. The bill passed through the Deputies but was rejected by the Peers, preventing Charles from shredding the charter of government. Charles turned his wrath on the press, which he claimed had been abusing its freedom and had egged the Peers into rejecting the "Rights of the Eldest" bill and cheered them on, and he passed the "Love and Justice Bill" to increase stamp duties and make publishing out of reach for all but the wealthy, imposed fines on publications that went against the government, and investigated the political leanings of both owners and editors of journals. The bill was presented on 17 April 1827, but the Peers voted down the bill. On 29 April 1827, when King Charles X reviewed the 20,000-strong National Guard at the Champ de Mars, he found the crowds ominously quiet, and, during the review, voices from among the ranks of the bourgeois and republican-dominated National Guard began to call "Down with the Jesuits!" and "Down with the King!" Men refused to remove their hats, and troublemakers refused their orders to pipe down, leading to scuffles among the ranks. While only a few dozen made a scene, King Charles reacted by ordering the complete disbanding of the Paris National Guard a day later, breaking one of the last chains of time from the French Revolution. The National Guardsmen were allowed to keep their guns and ammunition, however. A month later, Villele introduced a measure to consolidate the voting power of the richest landowners in France and cut out the bourgeoisie from suffrage by tying electoral suffrage to jury duty, which was restricted to high taxpayers. A few canny liberals and defectors embraced the bill before undertaking a massive effort to register as many of their friends possible to register for jury duty. Over the summer of 1827, close to 20,000 names were added to the list. Villele then suggested that the King dissolve the Chamber and hold a new vote in November 1827 to renew the Chamber for five years, and he had the King create 76 new peers to prevent the Chamber from challenging the King's will. In the subsequent election, a tidal wave of new liberal members came flooding in, combining with hard-right Ultras to oppose Villele's pragmatism. On 5 January 1828, Villele was forced to resign. Throughout 1828, Charles was challenged by his ministry and chambers, who reinstated freedom of the press, emboldening critics of Charles. In the spring of 1829, Charles X lost faith in Martignac's ministry and, after the chambers went into recess in July 1829, he turned out the Martignac government and returned Jules de Polignac's far-right government to power, even in spite of its lack of support among both the deputies and peers. Charles appointed staunch loyalists to his ministries, and he did not recall the chambers until March 1830. King Charles decided to drum up support with a "patriotic war" against Algiers. 37,000 men and 100 warships were sent to besiege and capture Algiers, leading to liberal opposition due to its expensive nature and the clear attempt by King Charles to cloak the regime in the cape of glory to permit further attacks on the charter of government. Ahead of the June 1830 elections, the official government paper printed an official appeal from the King to support Royalist candidates during the election, calling the Liberals "enemies of public tranquility" and calling for electors to hasten to their colleges and let a single sentiment move them and a single flag rally them. This shattered the fantasy that the King was above and beyond politics, but this failed to move any people, and stiffened the opposition. The ministry decided to postpone elections in 20 departments which were the strongest bases of opposition, pushing them back to 12 and 19 July 1830, and hoping that the friendly departments voting first would create a wave of momentum and depress turnout for the later elections. The postponed elections were announced on 18 June 1830, the same day that the French invasion force landed in Algeria. On the 23 June 1830 elections, almost all of the Liberals were re-elected in the Royalist-friendly districts. On 3 July 1830, the second round of voting elected Royalist candidates, but not enough to offset the damage of the 23 June elections. On 4 July 1830, Charles X demanded answers from his ministry and refused to let the opposition seize control of the government. Shortly after, King Charles announced the annexation of Algeria on the Dey's capitulation, and the victory proved popular in the streets. However, the 100 postponed departments went 89-11 to the liberals, giving the liberals a majority of 270-145. In the third week of July 1830, the ministry began to plan a royal coup, drafting "the Four Ordinances": the Chamber of Deputies would be dissolved before it could be seated, new elections would be held on 6 and 13 September, a new electoral law would ensure that only the top 25% of taxpayers would be able to vote (excluding the window and door tax, in order to exclude the bourgeoisie), and freedom of the press was suspended. On 25 July 1830, De Polignac summoned the editor of the government newspaper Le Monitor and handed over a sheet containing the Four Ordinances, telling the editor to post them the next morning with an editorial defense. On 26 July 1830, the Four Ordinances was published, and they were sent off to subscribers and to public spaces to be read aloud. During the "Three Glorious Days" of the July Revolution, Auguste Marmont was assigned to lead 10,000 troops to put down the revolution, but many of his soldiers refused to fight the Parisian mob, with whom they had much more in common than with their aristocratic officers, and many companies sent out never came back, instead offering their services to the revolutionaries and switching sides. The Ulta-Royalists fell from power with Charles X's abdication, and almost every Ultra refused to turn up to the vote to name Louis Philippe I as King.
- The Dissident Ultras, also known as the Defectors, were the moderate faction of the Ultra-Royalists, who pulled back to the center rather than risk another French Revolution. They supported King Louis XVIII's indemnity repayment of 900 million francs to the emigres, and 20,000 families filed 700,000 individual claims, leading to the payments of 600,000 francs. In 1827, the far-right Ultras sided with the Liberals in deposing Villele's goverment.
Gallery[]
France in 1815.
| Kingdom of France | ||
|---|---|---|
Preceded by: First French Empire |
1814; 1815-1830 | Succeeded by: July Monarchy |