Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
So last time we did a quick run through the first decade of the Bourbon restoration, covering the reign of Louis XVIII. Today we’ll pick up with the ascension of Louis’ little brother, the reactionary ultra royalist Charles X, and then burn through the first five years of his reign to take us right up to the brink of the Revolution of 1830. Because the thing I’m most excited about doing in this short miniseries is getting into the hour by hour detail of what a rapid fire three day insurrection really looks like on the ground. So these first two episodes are about getting us to 1830 with a basic idea of what the hubbub is going to be about. But the meat of the thing is going to be a practically real time account of the three glorious days.
So, as we saw last week, when the Bourbons returned to France, they reopened a bunch of old questions the revolution had supposedly answered a long time ago. Would the aristocracy regain title to their old lands? What was the proper relationship between the church and the state? Who could vote, and for what, and how often? What about the vast industry of newspapers, periodicals, and pamphlets that had grown up since the Bourbon’s last rule of France? Who should be allowed to publish, what and when? And then their return also created new questions. What was the real balance of power in the restored monarchy? Did the King really rule with all the expansive powers outlined in the charter of government? Or, despite that exact wording, was the King in fact bound by the will of the two legislative houses, the lower Chamber of Deputies and the upper Chamber of Peers? And what about that more ominous will, the general will, who represented it? And how much influence should the nebulous concept of popular opinion play in restoration politics?
For the first decade after the Restoration, King Louis XVIII had tried to respond to these questions from the middle ground, and with an eye on that nebulous popular opinion. He always tried to make the political weight of the monarchy a true center of gravity. Yes, he believed the list of rights in the charter had been his to give his subjects, and that the legitimacy of his rule came from divine right, not by social contract, but he also made sure to never force a constitutional crisis by simply ignoring the wishes of his subjects. For example, on the critical question of whether the King or the Chambers would have the final word on who served in the government ministry, for example, the King never let the issue come to a head, because if a minister really lost the confidence of the chambers, Louis went and found a new minister. Even when his own personal favorite, Élie Decazes, lost the confidence of the Chambers in 1820, the king accepted Decazes’ resignation rather than put down a stubborn foot.
Louis’ awareness of popular opinion also led him to support the basic principle of free speech and let criticism of his regime float freely as long as it didn’t go too far, of course. If a newspaper started getting too obnoxious, the Ministry often found it more convenient to secretly buy out the paper and close it, rather than bring down the legal hammer that might give opponents of the regime a martyr to rally around.
And then, of course, in terms of the broader swings of politics, Louis’ temperamental centrism led him to curb the extremist poll of both the right and the left. When the political environment started out way too far to the right with the Incredible Chamber of 1816, Louis dissolved them and brought everyone back to the middle. When things swung too far to the left by 1820, again, the center reasserted itself and things returned to a middle ground. After the Law of the Double Vote swung things back to the extreme right again by 1824, with the election of the so-called Regain Chamber, well, that’s when Louis’ centrist instincts should have been felt again and the center maybe would have again held, but instead, Louis died and his younger brother Charles ascended to the throne.
As the leader of the ultra royalists, Charles X had no interest in ruling from the middle, but Charles was about to discover that even though he didn’t want to compromise, it was actually way harder to rule by arbitrary fiat than he imagined it would be and he was forced to swallow five years of embarrassing royal weakness before he finally blew his stack and brought revolution back to France.
But when Charles ascended to the throne in September of 1824, he didn’t yet know how much resistance he would eventually face, because in the beginning, he had that ultra royalist Regain Chamber to work with. Remember, that chamber was three-fifths nobles and one-half had been former émigrés, and they all agreed with the basic line Charles had been pushing since the beginning of the Restoration – to re-establish as much as possible the social, political and economic divisions of the ancient three estates. Ever since the Third Estate had gone on strike and turned the Estates General into the National Assembly in 1789, the recognition of the separate and above this, of the aristocracy and the clergy had been denounced, attacked, and then stomped out of existence.
In the heat of revolution, the nobility had been abolished and the Church had been all but secularized and turned into a subservient branch of the state. Charles and the other ultra royalists had been frustrated by King Louis XVIII’s unwillingness to truly restore the ancient order of things. But now he had a free hand and a friendly Chamber of Deputies.
So the first thing Charles started pushing for was a general re-christianization of France, both socially and politically. He himself was ostentatiously pious and deferential to the clergy, which made him an object of fun for the decidedly un-catholic population of Paris, but also a trigger for brewing paranoia that the King planned to make France bend a knee to the Pope.
Charles invited Cardinals back into the Council of State, and then his government started appointing various high ranking ecclesiastics to administrative posts, giving the clergy access to direct state power, power they had not really held since before the Revolution. And in particular, the whole education system was being given back over to the Church and feeding the general anti-catholic paranoia, the Jesuits were being invited back in along with everyone else, despite a royal ban that barred them from France that dated all the way back to the 1760s. Now, we last saw the Jesuits getting the boot from Spanish America, which had, of course, rankled the local Americanos but in the secularized circles of France, the Jesuits represented not the bringers of forbidden knowledge and seditious liberal ideas, but a conspiracy of arch Catholics looking to place France back under the yoke of religious superstition, a yoke that had been tossed aside during the Revolution.
In response to this, there was a little outbreak of pranks and vandalism of churches, trashing holy relics, spoiling holy water, that sort of thing. In response to this vandalism, Charles revealed one of his great character flaws: the tendency to wildly overreact. On April 20, 1825, the chambers passed a Law on Sacrilege, ratcheting up punishment for vandalizing churches, profaning the host, or polluting holy water. The new punishment for these random acts of petty vandalism would be – that’s right, death, which struck a lot of folks as a wee bit harsh. Now, on its own, throwing out the death penalty for relatively minor acts of vandalism was going to cause some angry murmuring but the murmuring got louder when it turned out that the new law on sacrilege only applied to Catholic churches. You could still do whatever you want to do a Protestant church, but it would be death for messing with the Catholics. So the Law on Sacrilege felt like the thin end of the wedge for reversing the principle of freedom of religion that was enshrined in the charter. And it was frankly hard to give Charles and his buddies the benefit of the doubt on something like this, when everyone knew exactly who they were and what they wanted. Before we move on from this, though, I should note that the law as written was never actually applied. No one was put to death for profaning the host, so the whole thing turned out to be a PR blunder that made a lot of people angry, even if nobody ever lost their head for, you know, peeing in the holy water.
With this initial nod to the Catholic church passed, the Chambers turned to the former émigrés and passed the law on indemnity payments, reimbursing the émigrés for all their lost property. Now, if given a truly free hand, Charles would himself have likely demanded full restoration of property. But as we’ve seen roughly twelve dozen times since Episode 1.1 of the Revolutions podcast, the triumph of one party or faction often leads to a split inside that victorious faction and so it was for the ultra royalists. The Regain Chamber quickly split into two camps: the hardliners, the true ultra ultra royalist whose head remained in the clouds, and the defectors, a group willing to at least keep one foot on the ground.
For the defectors, I think it was one thing to make grandiose absolutist claims when they were a minority opposition, quite another to try to follow through with it all now that they were in power. The last thing they wanted was to provoke another revolution, so they pulled back to the center, which is why the ultra ultra royalists dubbed them the defectors. These defectors, working with the more practical Prime Minister Villèle, pushed forward the indemnity payment that had been cooked up first by King Louis XVIII, that national lands would not be restored to their original owners. Those owners would instead submit claims and get paid off according to the validity of said claims. In total, the estimated value of all the lands was reckoned to be somewhere north of 900 million francs, which is how this whole project became known in the press as the “émigrés’ billion”. Over the next few years, 20,000 families would file 700,000 individual claims. And though in the end the émigrés’ billion wound up only being about 600,000 francs, it was still a fairly large diversion of resources for a kingdom in shaky economic health. With the law on the indemnity coming just weeks after the law on sacrilege, everyone was now on notice that the new regime favored the Church and the aristocracy above everyone else, which is to say, the First Estate and the Second Estate above the Third.
The following month, on May 29, 1825, Charles X held his official coronation, and critically, he took the ceremony back to the cathedral at Reims, where French kings had been getting crowned since the 900s. But the cathedral had not hosted a coronation since young Louis XVI back in 1775, which was now fully 50 years ago. Now, there have been two coronations since then, of course, when Napoleon became Emperor and when Louis XVIII had been restored but both of those had taken place in Paris, which now considered itself, in every way, the capital of France. The Parisians were a bit put out by what they now considered a snub, and doubly so when reports started coming back that not only had King Charles prostrated himself before the Archbishop, another sign of the re-rise of unreconstructed Catholicism, but also that the same Archbishop had then gone on to deliver a sermon denouncing both the charter of government and freedom of worship.
When Charles returned to Paris a few weeks later, he was greeted by very subdued crowds and not a little bit of open disrespect. And though Charles was outwardly confident to the point of arrogance, he was also hypersensitive and thin-skinned when it came to criticism. He took every caricature song and scathing, mocking pamphlet as bordering on treason. They called him Charles The Simple, which was both a dig at his intelligence and a call back to one of the old Carolingian kings, one of the ones who had been deposed. Charles’ ego just couldn’t take being made fun of or disrespected, and he certainly did not think his subjects had the right to make him look like a fool, which was now a daily occurrence in the press. He was getting sick of it and he wanted to do something about it.
But then Charles ran into a problem, a problem called the Chamber of Peers. Remember, the Chamber of Peers was the upper house of the French legislature and was supposed to correspond to the House of Lords in Britain. Now, it might seem a little counterintuitive that the upper house would be the ones resisting the King, but remember, a lot of the Peers that had been created were holdovers from the empire. Most of them had been high ranking army officers. And while maybe not the most liberal guys around, they certainly had an esprit de corps built around respect for talent where merit counted for more than birth, and some fundamental grounding in revolutionary principles, that however much those principles were a sham, by the end of Napoleon’s reign, they still had powerful meaning. And then joining those guys were a bunch of Peers who had been created during the years of liberalism under Èlie Decazes. So as Charles entered his second year on the throne, ready to take a reactionary turn, the Chamber of Peers became an anchor that refused to allow the King to make his pivot.
In April of 1826, the Peers took their first stab at open defiance. Prime Minister Villèle presented a bill that was designed to rebuild the fortunes of the aristocracy and further the move towards the re-election of the Three Estates, if not in name, then at least in fact. The French nobility had always had a problem with inheritance, specifically, that estates did not go lock, stock, and barrel to the eldest son, but had to be divided amongst however many male heirs there were. Now, this had been a problem before the revolution and had been the leading cause of the impoverishment of the rural nobility. But the years of revolution now made it virtually impossible to build and maintain an estate that would persist intact through time. Every time a father died, his lands were divvied up between his sons. So Villèle now proposed a law called the Rights of the Eldest, which would have allowed for significantly larger chunks to be passed to the eldest son. Not the whole thing, but a much larger portion. And critically, that those estates could then be entailed – they could not be broken up in the future.
But though the bill passed the Chamber of Deputies, no problem, the Chamber of Peers rejected it, which was a major embarrassment for both Villèles and King Charles. But there was no way for Charles to undo the vote unless he was willing to shred the charter of government, which, yes, he wanted to do, but no, he was not yet ready to do.
It was perhaps because he felt he could do nothing about the Peers that King Charles turned his wrath on the press, who he and Prime Minister Villèle held responsible for the Peers behavior. So far as Charles was concerned, the press was abusing the freedom that they had been so generously granted by the crown. And certainly they had egged the Chamber of Peers into rejecting the Rights of the Eldest and then cheered them on when the Peers had stood firm.
So by the end of 1826, the ministry was floating a new press law that was dubbed the Love and Justice Bill, which is exactly the sort of Orwellian language you want to use when you’re planning on revoking freedom of the press. Because the object was simple: to make it far more difficult to run a newspaper that said anything critical of the regime. Stamp duties would be increased to make publishing financially out of reach for all but the wealthiest owners, and then fines for infractions would be increased to serve as a deterrent to coming anywhere near what the ministry considered the line. And the approval process for new publications would be significantly more rigorous, and investigations would be made into the political leanings of both owners and editors. Without question, the object was to muzzle the press and then keep them muzzled. But again, the Chamber of Peers wasn’t having it. The bill was presented on April 17, 1827, and they voted it down.
Villèle was again embarrassed, and Charles was raging. I mean, what good was it to be King if you couldn’t even muzzle an unfriendly press? It was outrageous. It was in this atmosphere that Charles’ next great wild overreaction played out. Climbing into the wayback machine for just a second, when Charles had re-entered Paris back in April of 1814, he had been greeted by companies of the Paris National Guard who had then escorted him around the city. Each year since then, Charles enjoyed celebrating the anniversary of his return to Paris with a grand review of the National Guard out on the Champ de Mars. The Guard remained now here in 1827, what it had always been since its creation right after the Fall of the Bastille in 1789, a militia of middle class bourgeoisie who felt that they, more than anyone else, represented the spirit of ‘89 and patriotic French nationalism.
Though in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, they had indeed welcomed the Bourbons back as a means of restoring peace, morale and enthusiasm for service had been on the wane for quite some time, and most of the sort of men who served in the Guard were not very happy with the reactionary regime that Charles was trying to run. So though this anniversary review in April of 1827 was supposed to be a remembrance of a happy shared memory, there was very little happiness out there in the ranks.
Now, the Guard was about 20,000 strong, and for the occasion, they mustered out on the Champ de Mars on April 29, 1827. Now, Charles already had a bad feeling about the day when he found the crowds lining the street growing ominously quiet as he approached. When he first left the Tuileries Palace, it had been all “long live the King”, but now, as he approached the Champ de Mars, a stony silence set in. Then, when he actually got down to the review, things started out okay but then voices started calling out from the ranks, they said “down with the Jesuits and down with the King.” Men refused to remove their hats and troublemakers refused direct orders to pipe down, leading to a few scuffles out in the ranks.
But here’s the really important detail. There were 20,000 men out there on the Champ de Mars, and at most, we’re talking about a dozen or two malcontents making a bit of a scene. So in the grand scheme of things, the mildly embarrassing spectacle wasn’t the problem, but rather how Charles reacted. Believing that they all now were really against him, the next day, he got up and ordered the Paris National Guard disbanded. Completely disbanded. You’re done. Go home. Don’t come back. Now, the men may have been getting a little tired of the burden of service and it wasn’t quite as noble a calling as it used to be but still, this was a pretty big slap in the face to wake up to, to be told that this thing, this institution that you do in fact take some pride in, and which represents one of the chains of time that remains unbroken going back to 1789, it was offensive.
However big the handful of enemies Charles had in the ranks on April 29, he had, oh let’s say, 20,000 more by the afternoon of April 30. And then, wait for it, the National Guard was disbanded without the slightest effort to also disarm them. The men were allowed to keep their guns and ammunition and I promise, this will not be the last time we see those guns or that ammunition, which are all now sitting in the homes of 20,000 men whose honor has just been seriously besmirched by the increasingly hated King Charles X.
Then, just a month later, Prime Minister Villèle introduced a measure to further consolidate the voting power of the richest landowners in France, and, with luck, cut out exactly the sort of bourgeoisie who hovered right on the line of suffrage. Again, exactly the sort of guy who might have been serving in the now disbanded Parisian National Guard. The plan was to tie electoral suffrage to jury duty. As with voting, jury duty was restricted to only those who paid over a certain amount in taxes. But for those who just barely crossed the line, jury duty was a time consuming burden that they simply could not afford. And so most tried to avoid it. By explicitly making the electoral lists identical to the juror lists, Villèle figured that most would simply decline participation in both, rather than subject themselves to jury duty. But a few canny liberals, aided by a few canny defectors, noticed a way to exploit the proposal to their advantage.
One frequent complaint for years, and especially since the passage of the Law of the Double Vote, was that qualified voters were being unjustly prevented from casting a ballot. Despite meeting all the qualifications, agents of the government would simply declare them ineligible and tell them to move along. They would be barred from the proceedings. This corrupt maintenance of the electoral rolls had been depressing turnout for years because nobody was allowed to see the rolls, and so it was nearly impossible to win a challenge. But the jury lists, on the other hand, those had to be updated every year, be scrupulously maintained and posted publicly for all to see. If that list became identical to the voting list, a man could not be turned away just because the ministry didn’t like his politics. My name is on the list. I get to vote and I can prove it. So rather than fighting the bill, opponents of the government embraced it and passed it overwhelmingly in May 1827. Then they got going with a massive effort to register to vote as many of their friends as possible. In 1820, the number of voters had peaked at about 110,000. But by 1827, that number had fallen to just 70,000, with most of the losses coming from the liberal opposition. Over the summer of 1827, the registration drive put close to 20,000 names back on the list.
Trying to head off the force he had just accidentally unleashed, Villèle recommended that the King dissolved the Chamber of Deputies entirely and hold a new vote in November, one that would renew the entire Chamber for five years that would hopefully get the vote in before the opposition was able to swamp the polls. He also recommended that the King create 76 new peers to stop the obstinate Chamber of Peers from constantly blocking the King’s will. Combined, the measures should have guaranteed a majority for the government for years to come. To increase the chances of success, Villèle also had the King announce the dissolution on November 5, with elections then scheduled for just a week later. Villèle believed that this wouldn’t give the opposition enough time for them to get their act together, but he drastically underestimated the organization that had already been going on under the radar. The liberal opposition was surprised by the announcement, yes, but they also had mobilization networks ready to go to pack the polls at a moment’s notice. And that’s exactly what they did.
The subsequent election saw, first of all, a 25% uptick in voter turnout, with all of it coming from the opposition side. And then second, when the returns came back, the government did not command a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. A tidal wave of new liberal members came flooding in, and they combined with a rump of hard right ultra ultras who hated Villèle’s pragmatism. And they all voted that they had no confidence in the Prime Minister. So on January 5, 1828, six years after first taking office, Villèle resigned. His plan to pack the Chamber of Deputies with supporters of his government could not have backfired harder.
Upon successfully ousting Villèle, a new caucus of deputies formed back around the center with defector types aligning with the large influx of liberals and cutting out the hardright ultra royalists altogether. From the King’s unhappy perspective, the only way to mollify this group was to elevate some kind of centrist. And so he plucked Jean Baptiste de Martinignac, a man he did not like nor agree with. Anything less, though, would likely have triggered a real constitutional crisis. But Charles was really, really unhappy about what he was being forced to do, especially because his verdict on the revolution, from literally the beginning, was that his older brother, Louis XVI, had made far too many concessions, been far too lenient, and not cracked down hard and fast when he had the chance.
Now, faced with a hostile Chamber of Deputies and a hostile Chamber of Peers, both of them flexing their independent muscle, Charles found himself in the heat of the moment caving rather than fighting. It aided him, especially because pamphlets were now making the rounds, that maybe his enlightened cousin Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orléan, might make an attractive alternative to King Charles The Simple, which was almost verbatim, the kind of pamphlet that had been floating around Paris in 1788 and 1789. All of this ate at Charles because in his mind, it was all happening over again and he was making the same mistakes.
So Charles then spent the rest of 1828 stewing unhappily as his ministry and the Chambers worked together on policies that were not at all to his personal liking. Most egregious was in July, when they re-liberalised the press laws. They abolished the cumbersome permit process for men wanting to start new periodicals, and they did away with special investigations into the individual political leanings of an editor or an owner to determine whether they would be allowed to express their opinion. Critics of Charles were naturally emboldened. Charles himself grumbled. Hunkered down with his inner circle of ultra royalist friends and advisers, he tried to figure out what, if anything, could be done.
In the spring of 1829, the King finally found a piece of legislation he might be able to use to dissolve the unfriendly Chamber of Deputies and form a new government. A piece of legislation that sounded pretty good on the outside, but which contained a poison pill, sure to be rejected by the Chambers that would allow Charles to pounce and say, “look, what can I do? These people won’t work with me. I have to have a new ministry, and I must have new deputies to work with”. The issue at hand was reforming the local administration of the departments, and the legislation stipulated that administrators would now be elected locally by local constituents, rather than appointed by the central government. Like I said, this sounds pretty good, but the poison pill was that suffrage for these local elections would be even narrower than in the regular elections and more or less be made up of the same group who benefited from the Law of the Double Vote. The real object of the bill, then, was to further the longstanding ultra royalist aim to rebuild the wealth and power of the old Second Estate. But the really real aim, as I said, was to get the Chambers to reject the measure so that the king could plausibly throw up his hands and say, “I just can’t work with these people”. The Chambers did indeed reject the proposal in April of 1829, a rejection that allowed Charles to say that he had fatally lost faith in the short lived ministry of Martignac and give the King the opportunity to form a new ministry, a ministry made up of men that he wanted, which is another way of saying men that nobody else wanted.
The King waited until after the Chambers went into recess at the end of July 1829 before making his surprise announcement that he was turning out the Martignac government and bringing in as his new prime minister, his old friend and ultra ultra royalist, Jules de Polignac. It was a shocking turn of events, as it was guaranteed Polignac would not be supported by either the Chamber of Deputies or the Chamber of Peers. Polignac had been born in 1780 into an aristocratic family with close connections at court to Marie Antoinette. Emigrating with his family as a teenager, he had returned to France under the general amnesty offered by Napoleon, but he spent his time acting as an agent of arch aristocratic royalists, still working to bring the Bourbons back to power and he was implicated in a plot to assassinate Napoleon in 1804. After being captured, Polignac then spent the next ten years locked up in prison. And it would appear that those ten years in prison, often in isolation, turned Polignac into a bit of an odd duck. And rumors long swirled around him that he believed he was now taking his orders directly from the Virgin Mary. Though it’s also possible this was just a bit of slander, an extension of the general mockery of the backward piety of Charles’s court.
But it wasn’t just Polignac who would be problematic. In every department, the new minister appointed by Charles seemed designed to be provocative and unwelcome. Most weren’t even particularly qualified for the jobs they were given. But they all shared a loyalty to Charles and his ultra royalist principles. And after five years of being forced to work with men he did not like or agree with, this is what Charles wanted, and he was the King, so he was now prepared to say “this is what you are going to get”. Besides, he didn’t plan to worry too much about the opinion of the Deputies, since for the moment, he had no intention of recalling them from their recess to voice their complaints. Indeed, after they departed Paris in August of 1829, they would not be recalled until March of 1830.
So all of these moves, of course, inflamed popular opinion, and the presses went crazy. But Charles and Polignac had a plan to shore up their position before the Chamber of Deputies was recalled. The always available expedient of starting a nice little patriotic war. A nice little patriotic war would rally the nation behind the King, so that when the deputies did come back to Paris, they would be opposing a strong King, preparing to lead his army into battle and bring back a measure of the old, glorious days of imperial expansion. So next week, Charles will announce his plan to go beat up Algiers, with whom France had been in a bit of a diplomatic kerfuffle with for the past two years. Not that it will stop the Deputies from registering their displeasure when they do reconvene in March of 1830, but Charles will simply use that as an excuse to dissolve them and call for new elections.
King Charles now seemed to be deliberately provoking the constitutional crisis he had spent the last five years avoiding, and it was taken for granted in liberal circles that he was planning a royalist coup d’etat to abolish the charter of government. But before we get into all of that, we will begin next week by catching up with the man who will be the ultimate beneficiary of everything that is about to happen. And that’s the 57 year old first cousin of King Charles. Charles Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans.
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