Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

So last time we covered the first five years of the reign of King Charles X of France. Finally free of Louis XVIII’s annoying centrism, Charles went into his reign believing that he would be able to pursue an ultra royalist agenda with impunity. Now this seemed like an okay bet in 1824, but as we saw last week, the progression of Charles’ reign was that each new year brought with it stiffer opposition to his program than the year before it. Far from being the absolute monarch he always dreamed of being, Charles found himself checked by the legislative chambers, attacked in the press, and frustrated by his own inability to impose the royal will. Well and truly fed up by the summer of 1829, King Charles X found himself ready to walk down that same trail once blazed by another King Charles, our old dear friend, Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

If you recall from way back in Episode 1.2, King Charles I spent the first five years of his reign getting into repeated fights with Parliament over taxation, the Church, and the all important question of whether the king or Parliament determined who sat in the government ministry – and how Charles I responded. That’s right, he dismissed Parliament in 1629 and refused to recall them, beginning his eleven years of personal rule. Now, here in France, almost exactly 200 years later, King Charles X was ready to do the same thing over many of the same issues. I mean, exactly the same issues, particularly the fight over whether ministers were answerable to the King or to the Chamber of Deputies. 

Now that Charles X was following Charles I is not that surprising. The two men shared a few similarities. They were both younger royal sons who had not been raised to expect to wear the crown themselves. They were both unimaginative and inflexible in their convictions, and they suffered from a lack of healthy self confidence, which led them to hide their fragile egos behind the absolute majesty of the crown. So both wound up convinced that an attack on them personally was an attack on the crown, and an attack on the crown was an attack on them personally. Their inability to compartmentalize the public role of being a King from their individual private life did not lead to healthy emotional reactions. They could not, for example, even fathom that there was such a thing as honest and loyal opposition. 

So, as we saw at the end of last week’s episode, King Charles X set out on this path once walked by Charles I, fed up with everyone telling him he had to compromise and sacrifice his god given royal prerogatives to a bunch of carping deputies, Charles let the Chambers go into recess in August of 1829 and then announced that he was appointing a whole new ministry, led by the unpopular reactionary ultra royalist Jules de Polignac. Also, there is no specific timetable for recalling the Chambers. 

This abrupt change in government triggered widespread panic among the opposition liberals and not unjustified paranoia that the King was about to stage a royal coup d’etat, that he would suspend the charter of government, refused to recall the Chambers and then rule by arbitrary fiat, basically setting up his own version of personal rule. The opposition presses exploded with responses that ran the gamut from sober analysis to wildeyed conspiracy theories and those same papers’ advice about what to do ran the same gamut from well, let’s wait and see what he does to no, we need a preemptive second revolution, and we need it right now. 

The expectation that the King was getting ready to make a decisive move against his enemies was even held by his ultra royalist supporters. The royalist presses painted the opposition liberals as nothing less than neo jacobin revolutionaries who threatened the peace and good order of the kingdom. And the royalists encouraged the King to invoke article 14 of the charter of government, which all sides were now circling around as the clear means by which a royal coup could be affected. So what the heck is in article 14, you say? Well, I quote it now in full, and the key bit comes at the end. Article 14: “the King is the supreme head of the state, commands the land and sea forces, declares war, makes treaties of peace, alliance and commerce, appoints to all places of public administration and makes the necessary regulations and ordinances for the execution of the laws and the security of the state”. 

Interpreted broadly, that final clause of article 14 gave the king two important means of establishing personal rule. First, that if he determined the security of the state was at issue, he could make necessary regulations and ordinances to address the crisis, including, for example, suspending all civil rights. Then, once those rights had been suspended, he could invoke the appointments to all places of public administration and make necessary regulations and ordinances part of the article to govern by executive fiat because any new decree could just be called one of those necessary regulations and ordinances. The important takeaway, though, is that any potential royal coup was not going to suspend the charter, it would instead run right through the charter and from King Charles all the way down, the royalists consistently painted themselves as the defenders of the charter of government against illegal encroachment by radical revolutionaries in the Chamber of Deputies. 

Now, so far I’ve been talking about liberals and the opposition without naming any names or getting too deep into the details – that’s because I wanted to keep things moving through the first two episodes – but now that we’re right on top of 1830, it is time to introduce a few of the key players on the liberal side because though not even they knew it yet, they were in fact about to launch a revolution. You will also notice that I said last time we were going to open this week by bringing the Duc d’Orléans on into the picture, but I made a last minute editorial decision to punt on that until later and instead focus your attention on three guys who are really important as individuals but who also stand in as representatives of different factors in the coming revolutionary equation. Those guys are Jacques Laffitte, Francois Guizot and Adolphe Tierre. 

Jacques Laffitte was the richest and most powerful banker in France. Born the son of a carpenter in 1767, he had come to Paris in 1788 to apprentice in a banking house. He rode out the revolution from behind a desk where his natural financial talents led to successive promotions up the ladder. His fortunes really picked up though, after 1799 when his firm shrewdly backed Napoleon Bonaparte’s Coup of Brumaire, leaving the company very well positioned to make a lot of money during the Consulate and the Empire. By the time Napoleon was crowning himself emperor in 1804, Laffitte was being groomed to one day take over the banking house and in 1808, he completed his rise, became head of the bank and along the way, something of a poster child for the rags to riches life the revolution had made possible. Look at the son of a carpenter who has now become a wealthy and influential banker. 

But though a bonapartist in good standing during the chaotic transformation from collapsing empire to restored monarchy, Laffitte found himself amongst those being courted by the returning Bourbons. A leader of the Paris bankers, Laffitte was definitely a man to be co-opted rather than purged. Now always interested in politics, Laffitte was elected to the first Chamber of Deputies in 1815. And as both a banker and a low born son of a carpenter, he was almost by necessity a liberal politically. He was a constant backer of the liberal swing of restoration politics and as a result, often found his banking interest threatened by ministers who didn’t want him to get government contracts. 

Along with all of his liberal buddies, Laffitte was booted from the Chamber of Deputies in 1824. That was the Regain Chamber election, but he came back when the opposition started flexing its muscle again in 1827. A leader in both political and economic circles, Laffitte stood at the head of a clique of liberal Parisian financiers who were pushing for a dependable constitutional monarchy. Believing King Charles to be a feeble and incompetent monarch, Laffitte directed his time, attention, and most importantly, his money to the cause of the liberal opposition. And Laffitte’s house will become the headquarters of the Orléanist faction of the insurrection when everything goes crazy at the end of July 1830. 

So the banker Lafitte will be providing a lot of the money to underwrite the coming regime change. Providing the ideological ammunition for that regime change was Francois Guizot. Born in Nîmes in 1787, Guizot was the son of a bourgeois Protestant who was executed in the Terror in April of 1794, stamping Guizot early with an aversion to the bloody excesses of revolution. After the death of his father, his mother took him to Geneva, where he was raised and received an education in part inspired by Rousseau. In 1805, Guizot came back to Paris as the teenage tutor of a wealthy family, and after a few years, he made a major splash in the literary scene and became one of the most popular young writers of the day, eventually undertaking a translation of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – so kudos for that. By the time Napoleon fell, Guizot was a highly regarded writer and academic, and as the Restoration settled in, Guizot became the leading intellectual light of the Doctrinaires, those left leaning constitutional monarchists led politically by Élie Decazes. 

In 1819, Guizot founded a new literary journal called The Courier to expound on his liberal constitutional monarchism, and he sparred with ultra royalists on the right and radical republicans on the left. Guizot truly staked out the intellectual underpinnings of a political ideology that would become known as juste milieu – the middle way or the golden mean, always putting yourself between whatever two extremes are out there. If you do that, you’ll always be in good shape. 

After the Doctrinaires lost influence in 1820, Guizot turned his attention back to literary pursuits and, among other things, published a history of the English Revolution covering the reigns of Charles I and Charles II – so kudos for that as well. But by the late 1820s, politics was back on the front burner, and Guizot wrote relentlessly critical articles about the incompetent King Charles. And along with everyone else, Guizot was appalled by the appointment of Polignac. Guizot was, in fact, now convinced that saving the monarchy would mean getting rid of the King. 

At that moment, Guizot’s suspicion that the King might have to go to save the monarchy was shared by a young man who would eventually emerge as one of Guizot’’s great political rivals, Adolphe Tierre. Born in 1797, Tierre completely missed the revolutionary part of the French Revolution, and he grew up under the regimes of Napoleon. Abandoned by a shady father, young Adolphe’s education was bankrolled by wealthy relatives, and he emerged with a law degree and set up a practice in Aix la Chapelle in 1818. 

But Adolphe Tierre came equipped with an uncontainable raw ambition to make a name for himself. At what? At anything. It didn’t matter. He wanted to make a name for himself. And so he moved to Paris in 1821. Upon arrival, he submitted articles to all the best newspapers and soon landed a regular gig at one called The Constitutional, in part for taking a penetrating whack at Guizot and the impotent moderation of the Doctrinaires who were at that moment being swamped by ultra royalist reactionaries. Tierre believed that the only way to push back would be an equally energetic defense of liberal principles. 

Now, ultimately, Adolphe Tierre has a pretty mixed historical reputation, but I will admit to you all that I am personally drawn to him for two reasons. First, after making his splash in the Paris literary scene, Tierre was introduced around at all the best liberal salons, and he met Lafayette, and more importantly, he met Talleyrand. Talleyrand was approaching his 70th birthday, but he had lost none of his cunning nor his desire to get back into government, and he saw in Tierre an energy that he could harness. As a friend later said of Tierre, “there was enough gunpowder in his nature to explode six governments”. So Talleyrand made a point to guide the young man’s political development and became a key early mentor. So, yes, the fact that Adolphe Tierre is Talleyrand’s protege means that I’m already in the bag for him. 

The second reason I’m drawn to him, though, is that the thing that made Tierre really rich and really famous was his work as a historian. His historical work is what made his name, his fortune and his reputation, because in 1823 he published the first two volumes of The First True History of the French Revolution. Up until that point, takes on the Revolution usually came in the form of memoirs of participants or eyewitnesses. Tierre, however, was coming from the first generation of scholars for whom the Revolution was really history, not a living memory. And his history of the French Revolution is now considered the founding text of French revolutionary historiography. 

In the history, Tierre helped cement that most enduring of analytic frameworks, namely that there was a good revolution in 1789 and a bad revolution in 1792. He praised the enlightened principles of the liberal nobility, like his new friend and patron, Lafayette, and he thrashed guys like Marat and Robespierre for being bloodthirsty extremists who wrecked everything. Eventually spanning ten volumes, the history was enormously popular and made Tierre the equivalent of a millionaire by the time he was 30 years old. 

Now, on its own, this history is worth talking about but it also played a part in the contemporary politics of the late 1820s because Tierre was scathing in his attacks on the pig headed aristocracy who were so wrapped up in protecting their own venal privileges that they could not see the destruction they were doing, nor the revolution they were creating. And during the reign of Charles X, this was commentary that no one missed the point of. 

It was even harder to miss the point of the commentary that he was trying to offer in the popular presses. After the appalling arrival of the Polignac ministry, the articles Tierre submitted for publication were simply too scathing for the more risk averse papers who did not want to bring the King’s hammer down on their head. So with the powerful voice of Tierre in danger of being silenced, we bring ourselves back to the banker Jacques Laffitte, who, along with a consortium of rich liberals, including Talleyrand, bankrolled a new paper in January of 1830, what they called The National. 

Tierre was put in charge of it, along with two other guys whose names I won’t trouble you with and given now free reign, The National published articles explicitly comparing 1830 to, for example, England in 1688 and saying, look, if the King is not going to respect the people’s participation in government, then it is the King who should get the boot, not the people. Tierre himself wrote a hugely popular article that popularized the essential aphorism of the liberal opposition – the King rules, but he does not govern. 

Okay, so getting back to the main story here, guys like Laffitte and Guizot and Tierre were among those convinced that the King was planning some kind of royal coup. But what none of them knew was that neither King Charles nor Polignac were actually planning to stage said coup, at least not in 1829. Though no one knew it at the time, the provocative new ministry had neither the will nor, frankly, the ability to stage anything so bold as a coup d’etat. Now, for sure, Polignac had some vague plan to change the electoral laws to ensure that, as he put it, “mediocre men driven by turbulent and revolutionary passions would be forever barred from serving in the Chamber of Deputies”, but the Prime Minister was a very passive agent of history. He believed that everything would just sort of magically work itself out on its own. Polignac trusted in the will of God without quite realizing that when you become prime minister, you are actually the one who God or history or whatever is working through so you might actually have to do some work to bring about God’s will. 

Polignac’s optimistic passivity set the tone for the rest of the ministry. And so far from staging some lightning coup, literally months went by without any action at all from the ministry, not just in the power struggle with the liberal opposition, but on any matter of state whatsoever. The new ministry was not working around the clock to take over the kingdom. They were, in fact, often reported to be dozing off during meetings and shrugging at the day to day responsibilities of their office. So summer turned to fall turned to winter without the expected other shoe ever dropping, which allowed the royalist press to paint the liberal press as a bunch of hysterical lunatics who were jumping at shadows. 

Fully six months passed after the elevation of the Polignac ministry before Polignac decided it was time to actually do something. The charter of government could be vague on a few points, but the budget was not one of them. The budget had to be approved by both the Chamber of Deputies and the Chamber of Peers to take effect. So in January of 1830, the King finally called for the Chambers to reconvene in March. But critically, Polignac recommended that the King submit to the chambers only the budget. All other matters would be withheld from their consideration and instead those decisions would be made by the King invoking his article 14 powers. 

Presenting only the budget would then provoke one of two reactions: either the Chambers would approve the budget and life would go on with the King now clearly in the driver’s seat or they would make a big fuss and the King would have an excuse to dissolve the chamber and call for a new election. The latter, frankly, being the most likely. 

With a new election then probably in the making, the ministry also got going with a plan to bolster the reputation of the regime with a fun overseas adventure – they wanted to go capture Algiers. Now, this adventure was designed to satiate the cravings of an entire generation who had been raised on Napoleon’s imperial expansion. Everyone in the prime of their life here in 1830 had spent their childhood or adolescence or young adulthood reading reports of the latest smashing victory of the French army and lists of additional territory added to the French empire. Whatever they thought of the Emperor, by the end, Napoleon had stamped this generation with an expectation that the French were meant to conquer and to rule. 

When the Bourbons came back, they brought with them a renunciation of that entire mentality. I mean, that renunciation was probably the single biggest reason the other powers of Europe had decided to bring King Louis XVIII back in the baggage train. So for the past 15 years, the nationalistic yearning for great victories abroad had been pretty much ignored. Sure, the French had successfully invaded Spain in 1823, but that wasn’t the same thing, since they were really just acting as muscle for King Ferdinand. Now, France had played some leading role in the crisis of Greek independence that was unfolding in the 1820s, over in the Ottoman Empire, but there they played an ambiguous game of negotiation and clandestine support, and mostly ensuring that the fire did not spread. 

So the Polignac ministry was not insensible to the lamentations in the press that once glorious France was being frittered away by the lethargic inept and cowardly Bourbons. And so Polignac concluded that some kind of operation to bolster national morale was just the thing he needed to trap the liberal opposition between an ultra royalist monarchy and the common men and women of France who would thrill that the King was restoring national glory. 

Algiers offered a perfect target because it came with a prepackaged casus belli and was well outside the sphere of influence of Russia and Prussia and Austria, none of whom objected to the operation. The cause for war was that way way back in the 1790s, the French Directory had contracted to buy Algerian wheat to feed its armies. But in the tumults that followed, no French government ever repaid the debts. When the restoration came around and everyone in Europe was invited to submit their claims for repayment, the Dey of Algiers, the Dey, being like the governor of Algiers, duly submitted his claim. But the claim was never taken up and the Algerian debt never paid. 

So finally, in 1827, the Dey deliberately insulted the French consul resident in Algiers, trying to provoke a settlement. And in response, King Charles ordered a naval blockade of the city. But with Algiers easily defensible from a sea attack, and with the thin blockade easily runnable by smugglers, pirates and privateers, the blockade turned out to be as expensive as it was pointless. So by the end of 1829, most people were looking for a way to honorably break off the two year old blockade but Polignac said, what if we went the other way? Rather than pulling back? What if we really leaned into it? Now, no senior Commander in either the army or the Navy liked the idea of invading Algeria, and it actually took Polignac some time to go down the list of senior Commanders until he finally found someone willing to take the assignment. In February of 1830, the King approved a plan for an invasion force of 37,000 men and more than 100 warships to go land besiege Algiers and capture it. 

With word now leaked of the planned expedition, the liberal opposition came out hard against it. Nearly everyone predicted it would be an expensive failure, and the opposition differed amongst themselves only on what they thought Charles was really up to. Some correctly divined that it was an attempt to cloak the regime in the cape of glory to permit further attacks on the charter of government while the more radical amongst them believed that the plan was actually to seize the personal treasury of the Dey of Algiers reckoned to be a pile of loot worth some 150 million francs that Charles could then use to buy off the army as a step in the royal coup, they believe now more than ever was coming.

One way or the other, though, the connection was drawn early between this foreign war and domestic politics, they quote “a victory in Algiers is a victory over our liberties”.

So this was the atmosphere into which the Chambers finally reconvened after a seven month hiatus on March 2, 1830. In the weeks leading up to it, everything about the conduct of the King and his ministers seemed designed to provoke lockstep opposition that would allow the king to dissolve the Chambers rather than try to work with them. The ministry did very little outreach to Deputies who could potentially be bought off or convinced to support the regime. They did very little to prepare the Deputies for the fact that they were going to be presented only with a completed budget that would be voted up and down. And they never even bothered to ask what little bits of port could be slipped into said budget to make a particular Deputy vote yes instead of no. 

Then the speech opening the session from the King left no one with any room to doubt what his expectation of the Chamber was. After a boring review of state finances, the King wrapped things up with a threat that snapped everyone back to attention. He said, “if criminal maneuvers rise up obstacles against my government, which I hope will not be the case, I will find the strength to overcome them with my resolution to maintain public order in the just confidence of the French people and in the love that they have always demonstrated for their Kings.” 

This gauntlet thrown down, the Chamber of Deputies went ahead and picked it up. In their next session, they appointed a committee to draft a response to the King and since the liberal opposition still held their majority, it shouldn’t surprise you that only members of the liberal opposition were allowed to sit on the committee. The response they drafted was presented to the whole chamber on March 15 and read in part:

“Sire, the Charter which we owe to the wisdom of your august predecessor and which your Majesty is firmly committed to defend consecrates as a right the participation of the country in the discussion of public affairs. That intervention ought to be, it is in fact, indirect, widely regulated, fixed within limits, exactly drawn, and we would never permit that anyone dare violate those limits. But it is positive in its result because it is based on the permanent accord between the political views of your government and the wishes of your people, the indispensable condition of the normal conduct of public affairs. Sire, our loyalty and our devotion compel us to tell you that this accord does not now exist”. 

So what they’re saying here is, yes, we know that you have all these powers, but unless some sort of working relationship exists between the Ministry and the Chamber of Deputies, the government simply cannot function. And it strongly implied that it was now up to the King to dismiss his unpopular ministers. 221 Deputies elected to sign this reply to the king, which is how the 221 became not just a list of names, but also an abstracted stand-in for the entire apparatus of liberal opposition in the Chamber of Deputies. 

Predictably, the King did not take the response well. He told his ministers that he had no intention of negotiating with this 221. If they were not going to support his government, then it would be them, not the government, who would be dissolved. So two days after receiving the reply, the King sent a few of his ministers down to the Chamber of Deputies to deliver the news. Their session was at an end. Goodbye. Go home. Now, this, of course, caused an enormous hubbub in the hall as both Deputies and the audience in attendance exploded at the abrupt end to the session that had only just begun. But there was nothing anybody could do about it. The King had spoken. The session was terminated. 

But though the Chambers were now again on hiatus, the King did not yet officially dissolve them or call for new elections. With the power to control the calendar in the ministry’s hands, they wanted to wait for just the right moment to strike. Some advised waiting until September because the electoral/jury rolls were set to be revised in August so there was an opportunity there to manipulate those roles to their advantage. But there was a problem with that. They did still need a budget, and September was a long ways away. 

But by now, Polignac was getting good news from the army and navy, who reported that preparations for the Algerian expedition were ahead of schedule and they would all be ready to launch by the end of May. So putting two and two together, the Ministry submitted a plan to the King. We’ll have you wait until the eve of the expedition to announce the dissolution of the Chambers and then schedule elections to begin on June 23 – with luck, in the glorious wake of a great overseas victory. 

With everything for the Algerian expedition still on track in May, the King officially announced on May 17 that the Chamber of Deputies was dissolved and the elections would be held on June 23 and July 3. The first round being the “regular elections”, the latter being the upper departmental election, open only to those who qualified under the Law of the Double Vote. All available reports indicated that the vote was going to be razor thin. And some ministers wanted to know what would happen if the King’s party lost. Was the king ready to go even further in his invocation of article 14, or would the ministers have to resign? In typical fashion, Polignac brushed off the need to think too far ahead, and he told the King, quote, “we will think of everything, sire. Everything will come in time.” 

So going into this election, the liberals are just way ahead of the royalists in terms of organization. They’ve been actually working steadily on it for years, and the leading apparatus for this organization was a club called Help Yourself and Heaven Will Help You. It’s almost too perfect how much this organization contrasts with Polignac’s theory of meh, everything will work out in the end. 

Run by a central committee in Paris that included Jacques Laffitte and Lafayette and Francois Guizot, it had branches now all over France. And though it will be easy to say that it resembled the old Jacobin network, the Help Yourself Club was far less about fostering passionate oratory and debate and much more about nuts and bolts electoral organizing. The men running the Help Yourself Club committed themselves to reelecting every single one of the 221. They hosted dinners and parties for these candidates, raised money and spread it around both above and below board. They also held training sessions to instruct electors on the rules of voting to avoid disqualification, which was a tactic they all correctly assumed would be a core part of the ultra royalist campaign strategy. This group also commissioned a little manual on electoral rules and made it available for free, because who could vote and who could not vote was probably going to count for far more than the individual personalities of the candidates. 

Alongside this voter mobilization and education project, the liberal presses were blasting out claims that if the King’s party won, that national lands were going to be re-confiscated, that tithes and feudal dues would come back, and that the church would get its own massive lump sum payoff for all the lands that they had lost in the revolution. Now, mostly this was a bunch of exaggerated half truths, but King Charles and Prime Minister Polignac were frankly perfect villains for the liberal voters and the presses that serve them. 

With the election now in full swing, the invasion of Algiers was then launched right on schedule. Between May 25 and May 27, the entire fleet sailed away, carrying with them the hopes and fears of the entire kingdom. The liberals made aggressive hay that this adventure was folly and destined to fail, and they were happy to report that shortly after leaving, the fleet had to hold up for a week because of relentlessly bad weather, a most inauspicious beginning to the adventure. 

But though stalled, the invasion was not called off, and on June 13, the fleet dropped anchor off the coast of Algeria and prepared to land their forces. That same day, June 13, 1830, the people of Paris woke up to something that they had never seen before. In the official government paper, The Moniteur, was a direct appeal from the King to support royalist candidates in the election. He said, among other things:

“do not permit yourselves to be misled by the insidious words of enemies of public tranquility. Reject the groundless suspicions and false fears that would shake public confidence and excite grave disorders. Electors, hasten to your colleges, let no reprehensible negligence deprive them of your presence. May a single sentiment move you. May a single flag rally you. It is your King who asks this. It is the father who calls you.” 

This direct appeal was a risky move, as it shattered the fantasy that the King was above and beyond politics. King Louis XVIII had warned his little brother to not ever be the King of two people. But with his direct appeal, Charles made it clear that he was in fact the King of only one people. The risky strategy of directly involving the King didn’t even help. Within days, Polignac had intelligence reports coming back saying that it hadn’t moved the needle at all and had perhaps even stiffened the opposition. It looked like the 221 were going to get re-elected. So what were they going to do now? 

After discussing various options, the ministry settled on a plan to postpone the elections of 20 departments identified as being the strongest base of opposition. Saying that the tangle of challenges and counter challenges to various individual voters’ qualifications prevented the vote from going forward on time, the Ministry pushed those 20 departments back to July 12 and 19th, hoping that the friendly departments voting first would create a wave of momentum that would depress turnout and blunt the energy of those unfriendly departments when they voted a few weeks later. They announced all this on June 18, which was coincidentally the same day the army was able to report that they had landed all their troops on Algerian soil. So this looked great for the Ministry, a little patriotic fever would run through the first round of voting, which would run through only friendly districts. Victory looked like it might still be possible. 

So it came as an especially hard blow in the first round of elections ran on June 23, and almost every one of the 221 standing for re-election in those supposedly royalist friendly districts was re-elected. And it was clear that the liberals were now on their way back to a majority. The second round of voting on July 3 produced the expected royalist candidates, but not enough to offset the damage done on June 23, and certainly not enough to offset the fact that those 20 unfriendly districts were about to dump their guys into the basket too. The King and his ministry were facing a humiliating defeat. 

On July 4, an enraged King Charles stormed around a meeting of his ministry, demanding answers and swearing that he was not going to let the opposition Deputies illegally seize control of the government just because they had won some damn silly election. He said that he would not compromise on the sanctity of the charter of government, which gave him the right to appoint his own ministers as he saw fit. If the Chambers tried to impose their will on him, they would find the King perfectly ready to invoke article 14 to stop the opposition from threatening the security of France and destroying the charter of government. 

Now, in the midst of all this, though, the invasion of Algeria was somehow miraculously still going according to plan. On July 5, the French army successfully forced the Dey of Algiers to surrender. And they entered Algiers. They won. They captured it. Though it was supposed to be just a punitive expedition and the occupation only temporary, the King was then able to announce that France would not be leaving, and instead they would be annexing Algeria, beginning almost for the sake of a single election, 130 years of colonial occupation. 

But though the victory was popular in the streets, the dread of it being tied to domestic tyranny never went away. Indeed, it was now heightened. At a public ceremony celebrating the victory a few days later, the Archbishop of Paris said, “may the enemies of our God and our King everywhere and always be so treated.”

With the King’s appeal from just two weeks earlier, making it plainly clear who he thought his enemies were, the Archbishop’s words were a giant flashing alarm bell. But though the Algerian expedition had gone exactly the way Polignac and the King had hoped it would go, in the end, it didn’t matter much. The twenty postponed departments had 100 seats up for grabs, and they went 89 to 11 to the liberals. With all balloting complete, almost every one of the 221 were reelected, with a bunch of new friends now joining them in the Chamber of Deputies. The liberal majority was now 270 to 145. It was a brutal wipeout for the King, and the only question was how he now planned to treat his enemies.

In the days after the election, the Ministry again convened to hatch some kind of scheme to get out of this. And it was finally here in the third week of July 1830, that they really got to planning what you might call a royal coup – even though they didn’t seem to quite recognize what they were doing. An atmosphere of angry resentment now hung over the Tuileries Palace, and they were simply looking for a way to stop the King’s enemies from coming to power. And so, fatefully, they sat down and drafted four ordinances, four ordinances that have become known to history as the Four Ordinances.

First, the newly elected Chamber of Deputies was dissolved, before they even had a chance to sit. Second, the date for new elections would be September 6 and 13th. Third, a new electoral law would be in effect for those new elections. Only the top 25% of taxpayers would get to vote, and that tax assessment would exclude things like the window and door tax, which is how lawyers and merchants and the urban bourgeoisie paid their taxes, the clear intent being to give all voting power to large conservative landowners. Fourth, and finally, freedom of the press was suspended. Printers would have to apply for permission to print and then renew that permission every three months. And in the meantime, the government could close any press it wanted at any time, for any reason. 

Now, obviously, the Ministry knew that these Four Ordinances would be controversial and provoke a response from the opposition. But, boy, oh, boy, did they ever underestimate that response. Next week, the Four Ordinances will be published, and yes, indeed, they will be controversial, and yes, indeed, they will provoke a response from the opposition. Because though no one knew it at the time, everyone was now just hours away from the beginning of the July Revolution.

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