Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

As we saw last time, the July Revolution got going in earnest on Tuesday, July 27, 1830. An attempt by King Charles X to shut down presses had triggered resistance from the liberal opposition and violent unrest in the streets of Paris. But as we also saw last time, the rash of initial skirmishes around the Palais Royale and the Louvre in the Tuileries Palace on the evening of the 27th had mostly dissipated when darkness fell. This allowed Marshall Marmont to send his optimistic report to the King, saying all was well. When he got up on the morning of Wednesday, July 28, Marmont regretted writing this letter because it turned out that he was about to enter day two. That is day two of the three glorious days. 

So reports came into the Tuileries early that morning that far from giving up and going home, the Parisians had stayed up all night working. Working on what, you ask? Working on larger and stronger barricades that now loom defiantly in neighborhoods across Paris. And so, as promised, it is now time to talk a little bit more about the symbols of urban revolution. For starters, a barricade is nothing fancy. Most of them started with a pile of cobblestone ripped out of the street, on top of which were then dumped anything big and heavy that happened to be on hand. Street rubble and debris, overturned carts and wagons, couches, desks, doors, whatever. Now, some of these barricades were low walls, not much taller than a backyard hedgerow. Others were imposing monoliths that were as steep and tall as the buildings that surrounded them. 

Now, the purpose of the barricades was twofold. First, from a tactical standpoint, they obviously provided a defensible position behind which one might fight, or let’s say, the French royal guard, should they decide to go marching around Paris. No point in just standing in the middle of the street and getting shot. But the other purpose was more strategic. The barricades allowed the Parisians to literally control access to the streets, to turn Paris from a latticework of crisscrossing streets into a surreal maze filled with dead ends. With the help of the barricades, the Parisians would be able to prevent scattered enemy forces from coming to each other’s aid if, say, widespread street fighting were to break out simultaneously at points throughout central Paris on, let’s say, Wednesday, July 28, 1830. 

Now, directing these efforts and teaching the Parisians the finer points of basic strategy and tactics were old veterans of Napoleon’s army. Though there was no centralized command to speak of on the Parisian side, on the 28th, all these old Napoleonic veterans came out of the woodwork to assume natural authority over the defenses on their local block. If everyone is standing around wondering what to do, and a guy comes down and says, well, I was at Austerlitz, so you should do this and that, you’re going to do whatever that guy tells you, whether he used to be a private or a sergeant or a lieutenant, he probably knows more about these things than you do. 

Now, from a political standpoint, the Napoleonic veterans had been simmering on a low boil ever since Napoleon’s abdication. They felt the emperor could have won, but he had been stabbed in the back by treacherous politicians. They also believe that the Bourbons had shamefully abandoned France’s national honor. These guys had been spoiling for a fight for quite a while now. And with only limited contact between each neighborhood, the veterans cobbled together something resembling an organized resistance. By the morning of July 28, they were ready to fight. 

Adding to Marmont’s growing sense of dread were further reports that the Parisians were also now scouring the city for arms. They raided government buildings and guard houses, metal works, gun shops, and private homes. Any place that might have weapons was ransacked, and anything that might be turned into a weapon was turned into a weapon. So at about nine that morning, Marmont sent a dispatch to the King, drastically reassessing the situation. Copying language from 1789, almost certainly on purpose, Marmont now wrote to King Charles and said,

“this is no longer a riot, it is a revolution. It is urgent that your majesty decide on the means of pacification.” 

While he waited for the King’s instructions, Marmont did what he could. He sent word to garrison’s outside of Paris to send as many men as possible to reinforce Paris. He also sent troops out to once again occupy key buildings and public squares. But he was now running into a problem – the regular common soldiers had zero interest in fighting the Parisians, whom they had a heck of a lot more in common with than their aristocratic officers. Companies sent out often never came back. Instead, the men offered their services to the Parisian resistors and crossed over to the other side of the barricade.

By midmorning, then, Marmont got his reply back from the King, which was helpful, but not super helpful. The King had declared martial law in Paris. All civil law was suspended, and Marshall Marmont had blanket jurisdiction over everyone, up to and including the power of life and death. Marmont appreciated the clarity of his authority, but there was nothing in the letter from the King about reinforcement or resupply or any kind of answer to the political question, the political question that had led to all of this: the Four Ordinances. But though martial law was now in effect, nobody in Paris knew it. In defiant solidarity, most printers in Paris refused to handle any order bearing the royal seal and what few declarations were printed up could not be posted on the streets of Paris, because crowds would come round menacing the men putting them up. The declaration of martial law literally wound up in the gutter. 

Capping off this run of bad news was a report that at about 11 o’clock, a large, angry crowd had mustered in front of the Hotel de Ville, Paris’ city hall. Easily overcoming the limited defenses of the building, the Parisians pushed their way in and occupied it. Now, mostly they went around ransacking the joint for supplies and arms, but shortly after taking the building, they also raised that simple symbol that everyone recognized and could rally around: the tricolor flag. It now flew for the first time in 15 years. It really was a revolution. 

While the tricolor was being hoisted by the streets, the respectable liberal opposition met at around noon. And for the first time, the stable core of 40 or 50 Deputies composing the heart of the opposition were joined by the banker Jacques Laffitte and the hero of two worlds, the Marquis de Lafayette. Both, remember, had been out of Paris when the Four Ordinances hit and had not gotten back to the capital until late on the night of the 27th. At the opening of this meeting, Francois Guizot presented the response to the Four Ordinances that he had been tasked with drafting the day before. And if that already feels like ages ago, just try to remember how compact the timeline is for all of this. It’s only been about 50 hours since the Four Ordinances first hit the streets back on Monday morning. Guizot’s response said, among other things, that the Four Ordinances were “in the eyes of the undersigned directly contrary to the constitutional charter, to the constitutional rights of the Chambers, to the public law of the French people, to the jurisdiction and order of the courts, and are capable of throwing the state into confusion that will compromise both the peace of the present and security of the future”. Events were, of course, already proving this prophecy correct. 

The opposition liberals accepted the statement and ordered that it be printed and distributed. Then they resolved to defuse this state of confusion that will compromise both the peace of the present and the security of the future by sending a small delegation headed by Jacques Laffitte to the Tuileries Palace to negotiate some kind of ceasefire with Marshall Marmont.

As the liberals were making this decision to try to negotiate with Marmont, Marmont was making a few fateful decisions of his own that would ensure that the day was consumed by the confusion that would compromise both the peace of the present and security of the future. 

With reports now coming in of violent unrest escalating everywhere, Marmont decided to send his army out in a great show of force. He masked all of his troops into three large columns at around noon and dispatched them in three directions. The first was to occupy the Place Joachim du Bellay. The second was to occupy the Hotel de Ville. And the third was to occupy the Place de la Bastille. All these points are marked on the map of Paris at revolutionspodcast.com that if you go to and look at, I think will make everything I’m about to say just a wee bit more intelligible. 

Now, a charitable reading of Marmont’s strategy is that he had learned his lesson from the night before. The night before, he had sent out small 30 to 40 men detachments to clear barricades, and those detachments had been attacked because they were small and isolated. Guardhouses across the city were also currently burning one by one because the individual units holding the guardhouses were outnumbered. So by massing his troops, Marmont hoped to overawe the Parisians and make them think twice about chucking their damned rocks. It would also preclude the possibility of individual soldiers defecting, as they would all be under close order and watched by their officers. 

That is the charitable reading, the uncharitable reading one, for example, that would be embraced by the son of King Charles X, was that Marmont was intentionally sending his forces out to be consumed by the streets of Paris because he was planning to betray the King as he had once betrayed Napoleon. Now, nothing that I have read makes me think Marmont was literally sabotaging his own forces on purpose. So I wound up in kind of a middle ground between these two reads that whatever Marmont’s plan had been, he really did not think about what might happen next. He had no experience combating urban guerillas. I mean, it’s 1830, who does? And Marmont simply did not conceive how much he had just set his army up to fail. 

So the first column set out to occupy the Place Joachim du Bellay. And while they marched down the Rue Saint Honoré, they cleared a few barricades and endured some random enemy fire, but nothing they couldn’t handle. Now, if you really want to get into this thing, I’ve marked the Place Joachim du Bellay on the Google map and if you drop the street view guy in there, you can take a look around because it’s not that different from the way it was in 1830. It’s an open air space surrounded by buildings with four streets leading in and out. Even that fountain in the middle there dates back to 1550, so even that was the same. 

Okay, so with this royalist column having entered this space, what do you think happened next? Correct. The Parisians converged on the buildings, took positions in the windows and opened fire. The soldiers scrambled to take cover behind the fountain and any overturned shopping stalls they could convert into quick bunkers. But they were now pinned down. And while they were pinned down, the rest of the Parisians barricaded the four streets. The column was now trapped. So maybe an hour after setting out, one third of Marmont’s army was now trapped and cut off. Did I mention that when they took off at noon, they were issued eleven cartridges apiece and had no food, no water and no wine? I mean, there is a reason that one of the explanations for all this is that Marmont was a traitor, intentionally sabotaging his own army. 

The second column, meanwhile, headed down along the right bank of the Seine on their way to the Hotel de Ville. When they got there, they discovered that the Parisians who occupied the building had barricaded the entrance to the large square in front of the Hotel de Ville, now known as the Place Hotel de Ville. To confront this barricade, the advancing column broke out the cannons and blasted away with grapeshot until the Parisians fled. And this was, I should mention, the first whiff of grapeshot in Paris since Napoleon’s famous whiff in 1795. The column then cleared the barricade and pushed their way into the Place Hotel de Ville and there found themselves in the same predicament as the first column – they were caught out in an open space, surrounded by tall buildings and barricades. Now, this column was not in quite as dire straits as the first column because they did continue to hold the street that they had just come down. If worse came to worse, they could pull themselves out. They were also lucky in that the Parisians holding the Hotel de Ville decided they could not hold the building in the face of a cannon wielding column of professional soldiers and so exited out the back door. The royal forces were able to enter the building and, more importantly, strike the tricolor. 

The third and final column had a slightly easier time of it in the early going. Marmont ordered this third column to take a wide swing north through the boulevards to drop down on the Place de la Bastille from above. This route allowed them to mostly bypass the barricades in the center of Paris, and though they came under some light attack, it was not enough to slow them down. But during some of those light attacks, the soldiers in the column had fought back. And by the time they reached the Place de la Bastille, some of them had already discharged every cartridge they had been issued. But when this column arrived at the Place de la Bastille, they found it mostly quiet. And so they proceeded down to Saint Antoine, once the home base of the sans-culottes during the French Revolution. The column found this neighborhood also mostly peaceful, with the residents not firing shots so much as complaining about overpriced bread and unemployment and economic distress. The leader of this third column later said that the whole July Revolution could have ended right there had he brought with him not a company of soldiers, but a wagon load of gold. 

So finding this section of Paris mostly quiet, the third column could now hear the active fighting that was going on at the Hotel de Ville, and they were determined to go reinforce their comrades. And that is when things got really bad for column number three. When they turned around to march back the way they had come, they discovered that in the meantime, the Parisians had barricaded all the streets. They were cut off deep in the east end of Paris, and, like the other two columns, had no food, no supplies, no water, no wine, and they were running low on ammunition. 

Now, Marmont was not oblivious to what was going on. The first column had gotten a message back through the lines to request immediate reinforcements. So the marshall dispatched a company of royal guards and a company of Swiss guards. But Paris was now a brutal maze of traps. The royal guard proceeded down a street, but soon ran into a barricade. When they turned around to find an alternate route, they found a barricade had been built behind them, too. So they too were now trapped and had to simply hunker down and hold out. The Swiss, meanwhile, did not get trapped by barricades, but they had only been recently posted to Paris, and none of them were familiar with its confusing explosion of streets and alleyways. To make a long story short, they went left when they should have gone right, and it took them hours to finally find the Place Joachim du Bellay. Marmont also got a message from that third column way out in the east, saying, we need more ammunition but when the messenger tried to make his way back, he found his path blocked by the same barricades now keeping that third column bottled up in the east end, it’s safe to say that within just a few hours, this three column attempt to pacify Paris had turned into a complete disaster. 

It was just as the scope of this disaster was becoming known that the Laffitte delegation approached the Tuileries Palace. At about 2:30 in the afternoon, they boldly approached the palace and requested an audience with Marmont and Polignac. Believing it prudent to open a dialogue, Marmont let them in, but at the outset of the meeting, he said, look, I can’t negotiate with a gun to my head. You tell the streets to stand down, that will be the prerequisite for any talks. 

But Laffitte and his guy said, actually, you’ve got it backwards. Look around you. The prerequisite for talks is that the King repeals the Four Ordinances. Until that’s done, no one is going anywhere. The barricades will all be manned. Marmont said, while that’s a political matter, not a military one. So why don’t I go get Polignac and see what he has to say? But in a fit of pique, Polignac refused to meet the Deputies. As usual, he believed that this was all just going to work itself out and that there was no need to show weakness to a bunch of trees in his rabble. So Laffitte’s delegation departed without any firm commitment one way or the other. 

After this meeting, the Laffitte delegation returned to the house they had been meeting at and informed their fellow Deputies that Marmont had been noncommittal and they had not been able to see Polignac at all. After this discouraging report, Jean Jacques Baud showed up with the proof of Guizot’s response. Remember, Baud was the editor of The Times, the guy who had barricaded himself inside his office the day before. Well, he had been tasked with printing Guizot’s response to the Four Ordinances and had helpfully gone through the statement, stripping out all of the flowery pleasantries, the cliche respect for His Royal Highness, whom we all love and respect, et cetera, et cetera. The Deputies agreed to the changes, though they all now hesitated to sign. Remember, these guys have really done nothing more than talk for these last few days. It was the journalists who had signed the Declaration of Resistance and the Parisians who were now fighting out in the streets. This was the moment when the opposition Deputies could have put down their names as revolutionary leaders, but they balked and in the end could only agree to list the names of those who had been present at the meeting. And as Laffittee wryly noted, “in this way if we are defeated, no one will have signed. If we win, we won’t lack for signers”. 

Back at the Tuileries, Marmont wrote a dispatch to the King summing up the meeting with Laffitte. Marmont, remember, is by nature a centrist liberal. He thought the Four Ordinances were a terrible idea. He thought Polignac was literally a stupid man, like, straight up unintelligent. He sympathized with Laffitte’s point. So he told the King, look, I’m not preparing to evacuate Paris or anything, but it is getting dicey down here. I think you should negotiate. So Marmont personally recommended the King consider the liberal demands and repeal the Four Ordinances. But unbeknownst to Marmont, Polignac had already sent a dispatch to the King while Marmont was busy with Laffitte that said, don’t worry about anything. Everything is fine. This is no time to get scared and quit. Don’t make the same mistakes your brother did. It’s cool, I promise. So when King Charles received Marmont’s dispatch at about four in the afternoon, he was already primed to believe that Marmont was exaggerating, possibly for nefarious reasons, that he was maybe already in league with the opposition. Marmont got his answer from the King as evening approached, it said, quote, “concentrate your forces and hold firm”. That was it. Gee, thanks. 

At that moment, Marmont’s forces were anything but concentrated. With darkness approaching, each column was going to have to figure out for itself how they were going to extract themselves from the trap that they had fallen into. The commander of the first column decided that with darkness falling, there was nothing to do but simply fight their way out. The most direct route out of the Place Joachim du Bellay, was down the Rue Saint Denis. So with night falling, the first column launched an all out attack on the barricade, blocking the Rue Saint Denis. Pushing the Parisians off the first barricade, the soldiers cleared it out and slowly moved south down the street, only to find a second barricade now blocking their way. Now, just picture that these are very narrow streets, like glorified alleyways, really, flanked on both sides by buildings as tall as six stories. As this column struggled down the street, they were shot at and pelted from roofs and windows above. Fighters would burst out of doorways, lobbing projectiles and firing muskets before disappearing back into the building. It was a deadly and nerve racking advance. 

The column cleared the second barricade and then, of course, found a third barricade in their way, and they had to do it all over again. But though this was a traumatic and grueling fight, these were professional soldiers, especially the Swiss. And the column was able to keep moving forward. About a third of a mile of fighting later, they finally emerged out of this deadly chute into the promised land, the right bank of the River Seine. When the column got to the river, they turned right and marched to where the Pont des Arts is right now, at the southern corner of the Louvre. There they bivouacked, waiting for instructions about what on earth they were supposed to do next. 

Out in the east end of Paris, the third column was about to face an even more intense version of the battle of Rue Saint Denis. Still trying to get to the Hotel de Ville to reinforce the troops there, the third column tried to push straight west out of the Place de la Bastille down the Rue Saint Antoine. Now, these days, the Rue Saint Antoine peters out where it meets the Rue de Rivoli, but in 1830, it was a straight shot to the Hotel de Ville, following what is today the Rue Francois Miron. I really do recommend you go to that Google map I’ve been telling you about so that you can have some idea of what’s going on here. 

Now, the first attempt to reach the Hotel de Ville seemed like it was going to work. Under pretty light fire, they were able to make it to an intersection just 350 yards from the back of the Hotel de Ville. But there they ran into a huge barricade, one of the big mothers, ten feet tall at least. As the third column approached this barricade, though, they found it ominously silent and empty. This was because the Parisians were massing on the rooftops and high windows above and waiting down little alleyways and inside the buildings. The column cleared the barricade. But as they tried to move through all the debris, the Parisians exploded from every window, door and rooftop, swarmed on all sides by musket fire and projectiles, and the third column was forced to retreat. 

While the officers in charge of this column huddled and tried to figure out what to do next. The Parisian rushed back out onto the roofs of Saint Antoine and built fully seven barricades in the span of just a thousand feet, covering the line between that first big barricade and the Church of Saint Paul. As night began to fall, the third column decided to make one last go of it. They began their advance down the street and as had happened at the battle of Saint Denis, the battle of the Rue Saint Antoine was a grueling advance through seven, count them, seven barricades. The soldiers hugged the walls of the buildings as best they could to avoid the projectiles from above, which I should mention included an array of chamber pots which, you know, gross! But though under constant attack, the column managed to keep moving forward and clear their way through the six new barricades. But that left them at the base of the big mother that they had gotten to the first time. At this barricade, the two sides waged an intense firefight that lasted nearly a half hour. But the barricade held, the Parisians did not flee, and the third column was forced to retreat again. The commander in charge of the column admitted defeat. Night was upon them. The guys at the Hotel de Ville were just going to have to fend for themselves. Unable to go north back through the boulevards because of all the barricades, and unable to go west because of all the barricades, the third column was forced to go on a circuitous route south that eventually took them across the Austerlitz bridge to the relative safety of the left bank, which they then followed back towards the Tuileries Palace. 

So both the first and the third columns then retreated back to homebase without having received orders to do so. They were cut off from orders and simply doing the only sane thing they could do under the circumstances. But they would face no reprimand because, unbeknownst to them, Marmont had in fact sent out orders for everyone to retreat back to homebase. The only column to remain in place until that order arrived was the second column at the Hotel de Ville. Still controlling the street in and out of the square, a messenger was able to come through at about ten o’clock that night with orders for them to abandon the Hotel de Ville and come home. So the column withdrew back to the river at about eleven, but with full darkness now having set in, the Parisian fighters offered little resistance. So the second column evacuated in good order to the Seine, and then they marched back towards the Louvre. 

By midnight, all the royalist forces were back at home base. Between them, there was not one shred of good news to share. So far as they were concerned, Wednesday, July 28, 1830 was not day two of the three glorious days. It was instead the crappiest day of their lives, and they were really ready for it to be over now, please.

Now, oddly enough, the opposition liberals were as demoralized as the royalist soldiers. They had agreed to reconvene at nine o’clock that night, but with active fighting and barricades erected everywhere, many of the Deputies stayed home rather than meet back up. Only one or two of them even welcomed the idea of fighting in the street so the very fact that there was fighting in the street was already demoralizing enough. They had also heard rumors that garrisons from across France were marching doubletime to Paris and would probably be at the capital in the morning. So even if there was good news today, it was all likely to be crushed tomorrow. So, like I say, most of them stayed home rather than go out again. 

But the dozen or so Deputies who did pick their way through the barricades were the most energetic and committed among them, including Jacques Laffitte. Having received no response at all from the King about rescinding the Four Ordinances, Laffitte was now convinced that the end goal of all this would be regime change. Deliberately invoking England’s glorious revolution in 1688, Laffitte got all puffed up and said “William must replace the Stewarts”. And then Laffitte broached for the first time the idea that the part of William would be played by the Duc d’Orléans. Laffitte also said that from this point on, his house would become the headquarters for a war against the Bourbons on behalf of the Orléans. Though, funny thing about this, no one, not Laffitte, not anyone had actually talked to the Duc d’Orléans about whether he was cool with a revolution being waged in his name. 

So at the break of dawn, Thursday, July 29, 1830, day three of the three glorious days, Paris was quiet and still. A few of the opposition liberal journalists who had fled the city when the arrest warrants came out, now gingerly picked their way back into Paris, and they were convinced that the royalist forces had been victorious in their absence, that the insurrection had been crushed. The revolution, if it had ever been a revolution, was defeated. But it turned out they were reading things backward. It was quiet because all the royalist forces were pulled back to the Louvre and the Tuileries and were not planning on leaving. And overnight, the Parisians had redoubled their barricade building efforts though redouble doesn’t quite capture it. Nearly every block in and around central Paris now boasted a barricade, and historians estimate that something like 4,000 of them were erected over the night of the 28th and 29th of July. Far from defeated, the Parisians now controlled Paris. 

With nearly all of Paris in the hands of the insurrectionary Parisians, a member of the Chamber of Peers named the Marquis Sémonville picked his way through to the Tuileries Palace to consult with Marmont. Where Marmont was a liberal centrist, Sémonville was a conservative centrist and he was there to do what he could to detach the King from the ultra royalist ministers who were so obviously destroying the monarchy. At 7:30 that morning, Sémonville met with Marmont and said, look, here’s what you need to do. Arrest Polignac and the other Ministers. They are to blame for this. And then, for God’s sake, get the King to rescind the Four Ordinances. But Marmont refused to take things that far. And so Sémonville went to Polignac and said, look, jackass, you have to drop the Four Ordinances, you’re about to lose Paris. Polignac refused, so Sémonville said, fine, I’m going to Saint Cloud and I am going to see the King personally. And Polignac said, oh yeah? Well, let’s see who gets there first. And I kid you not, these two old men, like, ran as fast as their little old legs could carry them down to their respective coaches. And then their respective coaches braced to Saint Cloud. 

Now, Charles had, of course gone to bed the night before, believing matters were well in hand, and he was in for a rude awakening. Now, as I said last time, the Bourbon response to the July Revolution was routinely about twelve hours behind events. So here Sémonville is trying to get the King to rescind the Four Ordinances. But the time to rescind the Four Ordinances had been the night before. By the morning of July 29, that was no longer good enough. Laffitte got up on the morning of July 29 and began laying the groundwork for regime change. Though he still had not been in direct contact with the Duc d’Orléans yet, Laffitte made his house the homebase for a self organized, Orléanist faction dedicated to ensuring that this revolution did not become a republican revolution. Laffitte and his guys in fact planned to leverage fear of the Republic, which in those days was still synonymous with terror, to get everybody to go along with the change over to the Orléans. 

Among those at Laffitte’s house that morning was Adolphe Adolphe Thiers who had gone into hiding the day before and now emerged again. Laffitte sent Thiers to drop a broadsheet trumpeting the Duc d’Orléans as the people’s champion without knowing if it was actually true. At noon, Laffitte then hosted an open meeting of opposition delegates, electors and journalists. But the royalist forces obviously not leaving the Tuileries Palace and Paris in the hands of the Parisians, it was time for some kind of provisional government to step in to direct events. Again, the object for these liberals was not now only to defeat King Charles, but also to box out the more radical elements out manning the barricades. The right sort of men needed to guide this thing or it’ll be Madame La Guillotine for the lot of us. 

So, on their own authority, this meeting selected a half dozen men to be provisional municipal commissioners who would then establish a headquarters at the Hotel de Ville and take central control of this decentralized insurrection. All of the commissioners were upstanding liberals, men of business and finance and holding good Doctrinaire values. Francois Guizot and Casimir Périer were among the commissioners. 

Now, there is no way to know whether the authority of this municipal commission would be accepted in the streets. And it kind of felt like only one man had the answer to that question, and that man was the Marquis de Lafayette. After departing the meeting with Laffitte the day before, Lafayette had been approached by the old officers of the disbanded National Guard who said, look, we’re getting back together and we want to name you as our General in Chief. Now, this request obviously had deep personal meaning for Lafayette. I mean, he was the one, after all, who had first created the National Guard almost exactly 41 years earlier. He had designed their uniforms, he had designed the revolutionary cockade and he had been the leader of the National Guard for their first three years before the revolution had swept him aside in the summer of 1792. So even though he was now 73 years old and had not given a military order since that same summer of 1792, Lafayette said, yes, I will do it. 

So at that meeting at Laffitte’s, as they were self declaring a municipal commission, Lafayette stepped forward and said, I’m self declaring myself the leader of the reconstituted National Guard. Most of the men in the room were thrilled at the idea of Lafayette and the bourgeois National Guard running the show in Paris rather than these irregular bands of street fighters. So Lafayette then sent out a general order to all National Guard officers, calling on them to come back and fight for the tricolor again. If after the restoration of Louis XVIII the Bourbons had pursued a policy of unite and forget, Lafayette now offered a more visceral call: unite and remember. 

By the time the municipal commission was setting up in the Hotel de Ville, with Lafayette alongside them, setting up a headquarters for the National Guard, the Parisians were busy expelling the last forces of the Bourbons from Paris. Now, Marmont’s plan, on the morning of July 29, was to form a ring around the Tuileries Palace and the Louvre and do as the King said, concentrate his forces and try to hold out. But at about ten o’clock in the morning, the entire western end of this line defected to the Parisians. With a huge gaping hole in his line, Marmont then ordered one of the two companies of Swiss Guards inside the palace to go out and fill it. But when they left, I’m not making this up, they left one of the doors open. Some Parisians noticed the open door, a mob came together and everyone rushed inside. 

Now, this did not have to be the decisive moment of the July Revolution, but the thing is that the Swiss Guards inside the palace were now being swamped by a mob of angry Parisians, and they knew full well how things like that turned out. The Swiss Guard was something of a hereditary vocation. It drew from a pretty small circle of families, and many of the guys on duty there in July of 1830 had relatives who had been massacred in August of 1792. Fathers, brothers, cousins and uncles. So, unwilling to follow their unfortunate relations, the Swiss Guards hustled out the back door. 

Now, all they were trying to do was get out of the building so they didn’t get massacred. But when the French forces saw the Swiss forces making a run for it, everybody panicked. Before Marmont knew what was happening, his entire army was in a disorganized flight up the Champs Élysée. Marmont grabbed a horse, but he was not able to get out in front of his troops until he reached where today, the Arc de Triomphe sits. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon, and when Marmont turned around, he saw the tricolor being hoisted above the Tuileries Palace. There was no point going back now, his men probably would have disobeyed the order anyway. Paris was lost. 

The capture of the Louvre in the Tuileries Palace marked the end of the three glorious days of fighting. Paris had won, King Charles had lost. The final casualties on the Royalist side were 150 dead and 530 wounded. While on the Parisian side, there were 496 dead and 849 wounded. All in all, a pretty reasonable number given the circumstances. And though no one knew it, really, no one would have believed it if you had told them, the fighting was now over.

Next week, we will move on to the final stage of the July Revolution, as the opposition liberals grab the reins of the revolt and steer it, very often against its will, in the direction of the Duc d’Orléans. King Charles X will finally wake up to the fact that this really is a revolution, but as usual will come out with concessions to save his hide twelve hours after those concessions stopped being good enough. Believing that all he had to do to win was to not be like his brother, to be tough, to not concede anything, to not compromise over anything, King Charles would soon find himself signing his own abdication.

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