Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Welcome back to the show as we now embark on our sixth revolution together, this time, the July Revolution of 1830. And as I said, this run will be far more compact than the sprawling epics that we’ve gotten up to lately. So what we’re looking at here is a six episode miniseries that will serve as a bridge to 1848, the great year of revolution. In terms of podcast continuity, we return now to the very end of Episode 3.54 as we wrapped up the series on the French Revolution; Napoleon abdicates the throne and the Bourbons are returning to power. If you’re so inclined, it probably wouldn’t hurt to go back and listen to those final episodes on the French Revolution series to get back in the groove. So did you go back and listen to him? Fantastic. Let’s dive back in then. 

By the dawn of 1814, Napoleon and what was left of his army had been pushed back into France and the whole of Europe was collapsing in on him from all sides. Despite a round of brilliant maneuvers to stave off the inevitable, the inevitable was finally at hand in the spring of 1814. On March 31, the soldiers guarding Paris stood down and the Allies entered the capital. Down in Fontainebleau, about 40 miles southeast of Paris, Napoleon’s generals were forcing him to face the grim reality that there was nothing more to be done and the end was, in fact, at hand. 

In Paris, Talleyrand took the lead in both negotiations with the victorious allies and with the leaders of the Senate, that is, the upper house of Napoleon’s imperial legislature. In both cases, Talleyrand had the same objective: force Napoleon to abdicate the throne and bring the Bourbon monarchy back to France. 

Now, there were alternatives to what post Napoleon France might look like. The Austrians would have accepted the nominal continuation of the imperial structure with a regency government over Napoleon’s three year old son. After all, the boy’s mother was an Austrian princess. Tsar Alexander would have kept the imperial structure, but he wanted ex-French marshal and future King of Sweden Jean Bernardotte to take the helm. But Talleyrand guessed that the best and most stable course would be the return of the Bourbons and because this idea was supported by the British, and because Talleyrand had long had the ear of Tsar Alexander, the suggestion to bring back the Bourbons carried the day. 

But Talleyrand did not in any way want to bring back the ancient regime or Bourbon absolutism, and he made that clear immediately. The official call for the still self proclaimed Louis XVIII to come back and rule France explicitly referred to him as merely “the brother of the former King”. Talleyrand had hoped that this would set an early precedent that regal continuity had, in fact, been broken by the Revolution. One monarchy had died in 1792, and a new one was being born now here in 1814.

Further, Talleyrand and his secretaries then hastily cobbled together a constitution that Louis would have to agree to before the Senate would accept him as King. And the specifics of this constitution were not as important as laying down the principle that the legitimacy of the new monarchy would be rooted in national sovereignty, not royal sovereignty. The Senate approved this constitution on April 6, 1814, the same day Napoleon abdicated the throne in favor of his son. 

So after 23 years in the émigré wilderness, the Bourbons were finally coming home. Now, just so we remember who we’re talking about here, Louis XVI, the dead guillotine Louis XVI, had two brothers. The elder had been known as the Comte de Provence. The younger was the Comte D’artois. Both showed up at various points during our run of episodes through the French Revolution. D’artois, for example, was the most reactionary and absolutist member of the Bourbon royal family. He had conspired with Marie Antoinette to drive Louis XVI on a hard line during the early days of the Estates General, and then personally kickstarted the émigré exodus on July 17, 1789, when he departed the country after failing to convince his brother to crack down harder after the fall of the Bastille. 

Personally chivalrous in manners, d’Artois was ruthlessly inflexible in his absolutism and mostly made a nuisance of himself wherever he went during his years in exile. When we talked about how the other heads of Europe found the émigrés to be kind of an obnoxious lot, d’Artois was probably the most obnoxious. He joined in a number of conspiracies and operations to try to undermine the French Republic, most notably in 1795 when he briefly landed in the Vendée to try to rally the failing royal and Catholic forces; we talked about that in Episode 3.45. But when the French army started steamrolling Europe, d’Artois could do nothing more than settle down in England and live on a British pension. 

D’Artois’ older brother, meanwhile, had been known for most of his life as the Comte de Provence. Always more moderate and inclined to compromise than his more reactionary little brother, Provence stayed in France until June of 1791, when the royal family collectively decided that it was time to make a run for it. But while Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were caught in the flight to Verennes, Provence made it safely out of the country. With the King and Queen and all of their children under house arrest, Provence proclaimed himself Regent of France in exile, as the true King could only be considered incapacitated. After the Revolution guillotined his brother in January of 1793, Provence and d’Artois recognized their seven year old nephew as Louis XVII. Provence maintained his claim to the regency over the boy, however, as he was both a minor and imprisoned by the revolutionary dogs. 

When poor Louis XVII died of neglect at the age of ten in 1795, the Comte de Provence declared himself Louis XVIII. No one else in Europe cared to recognize the claim. So for the rest of the Revolution and all of the Napoleonic Empire, the now self styled Louis XVIII had been forced to bounce around from Italy to Germany and then to England, trying to stay out of the reach of the increasingly invincible French war machine. 

But bouncing is perhaps overstating things a bit, as during these years, Louis became both physically and mentally stagnant. Once a man of fairly lively intellectual pursuits, he practically willed himself to not keep up with the times. So as the gears of war ground the rest of Europe towards modernity, Louis XVIII engaged not at all with any of the new ideas or realities of the world. He also let his health go completely. By the time Napoleon was on the brink of defeat, Louis XVIII was obese, diabetic and suffering from gout. He could not ride a horse, he could barely walk around. Living in England, he continued to insist that he was King of France, and he won the backing of the British government. Now, this was thanks to a genuine affinity for the British that Louis developed while in exile and for his repeated renunciations of all territory claimed by France since the original declaration of war back in April of 1792. So, above all, putting the Bourbons back on the throne, meant putting France back into a box. 

So, thanks to Talleyrand’s skillful negotiations and British support, the Bourbons did in fact get the call in the spring of 1814 that they had been waiting for for 23 years. As the Allies advanced towards Paris, the British arranged for the Comte d’Artois to go to Switzerland and from there he crossed back into France once the capital had been captured. D’Artois entered Paris on April 12, the same day Napoleon was forced to admit that his dynasty was dead and he had to abdicate, not to his son, but just unconditionally. 

D’Artois was gratified by the mostly warm welcome he received in Paris, though it was hardly love for the Bourbons currently driving public opinion. Public opinion was, in fact, being driven by total exhaustion from war and much justified dread about how hard the Allies planned to punish France for, oh let’s say, 25 years of nonstop bloodshed, destruction and conquest. So however France felt about the Bourbons was neither here nor there, with Tsar Alexander promising Paris leniency and peace in exchange for accepting the Bourbons, that’s a giant gift horse in whose mouth one does not look. 

With the coast now apparently clear, d’Artois told his brother “hey, it’s safe to come on back now” and Louis XVIII was carried on board a ship that crossed him from England to France. With the King on the way, the question became whether he was a new King of a new monarchy or an old King from an ancient monarchy. Talleyrand and the other leaders of the Senate hoped Louis would accept the ultimatum that he would accept the constitution that they had written. But in a scene reminiscent of King Ferdinand VII’s return to Spain that we discussed in Episode 5.12, Louis had his own advisers who said “you know, you don’t have to accept this ultimatum if you don’t want to. In fact, you should ignore it altogether and assert your own terms”. 

So instead of accepting Talleyrand’s constitution, Louis XVIII did a really dumb thing and tried to reassert Ancien Régime absolutism, right? Well, no, actually not. There were simply too many advances that have been made during the revolution and then the period of the empire to turn the clock all the way back to 1788, and it would have been insane folly to try. But though Louis was now willing to negotiate with reality, he was not prepared to give up on his own beliefs about royal sovereignty, the divine right of Kings or the continuity of the Bourbon dynasty.

So from the outskirts of Paris, he issued a declaration on May 2. He said, the Senate’s constitution has been too hastily written to accept. But what he did acknowledge was the principle that France must have a liberal constitution that recognized, among other things, freedom of worship, freedom of speech in the press, equality before the law and the continuation of the Napoleonic Code. But critically, these rights would be granted as a free gift from the King to his subjects, they would not be recognized as natural rights that the King was bound to observe. 

King Louis XVIII then entered Paris the next day and was greeted by a warm crowd, most of them women, there to thank him for representing an end to constant war. So in every way, the King’s return to Paris signified an ambiguous marriage of old and new, because, as the King acknowledged that some liberal rights would remain in place, he also ordered the tricolor flag struck and the white flag of the Bourbons re-hoisted above the Tuileries palace. The gains of the revolution may remain, but the revolution itself was over. 

Over the next few weeks, France’s domestic order and international position were re-established, and both turned out to be surprisingly mild given the conditions into which they had been born. Talleyrand took the lead as Louis’ new foreign minister, and he managed to extract from the allies remarkably lenient terms and on May 30, they all signed the Treaty of Paris. France would be reduced to its 1792 boundaries, which though not the fabled natural boundaries that had been established when France conquered the Rhineland in 1795, it did represent more territory than they had held on the eve of the revolution. Of more immediate importance, though, there would be no permanent military occupation and no punitive reparations to be paid. 

Talleyrand also won France a seat at the coming Congress of Vienna that would finalize the post Napoleon settlement of Europe. It really did seem like everyone was ready to play it that Napoleon had been the big problem, not France. Domestically, Louis’ advisors then worked around the clock on a new charter of government. And critically, it would be called a charter, not a constitution, because as I said it was going to be granted by the King to his subjects. 

Promulgated on June 5, it began with a preamble about the need for peace and reconciliation, but it also made it clear that Louis XVIII ruled as a member of the ancient and unbroken Bourbon dynasty rather than the founder of a new dynasty. The charter was literally dated as coming in the 19th year of his reign rather than the first. But contrary to the old saw about the Bourbons learning nothing but remembering everything, the charter also said that “in thus attempting to renew the chain of time which disastrous errors have broken, we have banished from our recollection as we could wish it were possible to blot out from history all the evils which have afflicted the fatherland during our absence”. So the monarchy was old, but they were willing to turn over a new leaf. 

The charter then moved on to a list of bequeathed rights that did not acknowledge the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but clearly drew from it. All Frenchmen were equal before the law, they could worship freely, though the catholic church would be considered the state religion, public office would be open to anyone qualified to do the job regardless of birth, taxes would be levied in proportion to fortunes, not social standing, there could be no arbitrary arrest, freedom of speech and the press would be respected, with necessary exceptions, of course, and private property would also be respected and super duper big deal here “without any exception for that land, which is called national”.  And this is a really big deal because remember the national lands where those lands confiscated from noble émigrés and the church and sold over the previous revolutionary generation. Not undoing those sales was incredibly prudent, but it annoyed guys like the Comte d’Artois and the more stubborn absolutists who wanted everything they had once held to be returned to them in full. But Louis and his guys recognized that if they let returned émigrés run around re-confiscating all that property, it was almost certain that the restored monarchy would run aground before it even left the harbor. 

After this benevolent grant of rights granted by me to you, remember, the King’s charter then moved on to the form of government, which was modeled on the British system that Louis himself had come to know and respect. But while establishing both an upper Chamber of Peers and a lower Chamber of Deputies, the Charter left no doubt in anyone’s mind that it would be the King who ruled in the restored Bourbon monarchy. The King would propose laws and then execute them when approved by the chambers. He would appoint all ministers. He would declare war and peace. He would control the army and the finances of state. The men who formed the Chamber of Peers would all be appointed by the King, and he did not have to consult with anyone, and the Chamber of Deputies could be dissolved at his word. In the end, there’s no question that in Louis’ eyes, national sovereignty was dead and royal sovereignty had returned. 

But again, there was a balance to all of this. Louis really did plan to at least attempt to rule from the center and with one royal eye on the world in which he lived, rather than simply up to the god from whom he believed his powers derived. Of the 143 peers created at the beginning of the restoration, 103 of them had been either senators or marshals during the empire; these men were to be co-opted, not banished. The huge civil service that had grown up under Napoleon was similarly retained where three quarters were carried over in their posts without any kind of great counterproductive purge. Again, Louis and his advisers were doing all this, with the Comte d’Artois squirming uncomfortably next to them, livid that the triumphant return of the monarchy was being so tepid in its reprisals, revenge and assertions of absolute power. 

The first restoration then was marked by an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. State finances were a mess. The conquered territories that had funded the empire were now all renounced. To meet the demands of France’s creditors, the new finance minister recommended not only raising taxes all over the place, but also deep cuts in the one place where you might logically cut – the military. Getting started on a demobilization project, somewhere between 12,000 to 15,000 veteran officers were marked for retirement at half pay. 

Now, on the one hand, those are obvious cuts to make, but at the same time, it unavoidably created anger and resentment inside the ranks of the military, who were by now fully subscribing to a stabbed-in-the-back theory that they could have beaten the Allies but had been sold out by the politicians and the cowards in Paris. On the civilian side, there was going to be no more new hiring into the civil service, which created parallel resentment among that class of young bourgeois students who had been raised to expect long and fulfilling careers in the imperial service and now had no prospects whatsoever. 

Then, despite the King’s promises, more hardcore former émigrés and hardline Catholics started pursuing the return of all their old lands anyway. They also started to exert their old aristocratic privileges, which daily irritated a nation that had long since moved on from archaic feudal pretensions. Then a general post war economic recession set in, just as everyone was hit with new taxes that in many cases doubled the price of various staple goods. This is all to say that when Napoleon decided he had a chance to make a comeback after laying low in Elba for a year, it’s not like there weren’t plenty of folks ready for the little Corporal to come lead them back to glory. 

So it was that in March of 1815, Napoleon relanded in France, attracting adherents and soldiers wherever he went. As every army sent to block the road to Paris promptly defected to Napoleon’s side, it became clear that there would be no defending the capital. So after just ten months in Paris, King Louis XVIII was forced to scamper out the back door and head for the Netherlands. There, everyone fell into backbiting with the Comte d’Artois and his gang, blaming the failure of the restoration on the fact that they had not sufficiently purged and punished the enemies of the Crown and another, more moderate faction, saying “actually, no, you guys couldn’t stop poking people in the eye with a stick instead of just being cool and look where it’s gotten us”. So, sitting in the Netherlands in the spring of 1815, there is absolutely no guarantee that the Bourbon Restoration would not go down as a brief and humiliating deadend in French history. But 100 days later, the remobilized Allies beat Napoleon at Waterloo, the Emperor abdicated again, and he was banished once and for all to Saint Helena. 

When the Bourbons came back the second time, for the now Second Restoration, the whole atmosphere was different. They were being restored, yes, but clearly they were coming in the baggage train of the Allies, as the old saying went. This was clearly a monarchy being imposed on France by her enemies, not one being freely welcomed by her people. But more than that, the Allies were beyond furious that their generosity the first time around had been so egregiously betrayed. So where once Napoleon had been the enemy, not France, France was now in fact the enemy. 

Within months of Waterloo, the country was occupied by 1.2 million foreign troops, all of whom treated France as a nation to be justly looted, pillaged, requisitioned and stripped clean. Louis XVIII, meanwhile, was obliged to recognize their presence as invited friends and guests. But to everyone else, they were vicious occupiers. 

But it wasn’t just foreign soldiers running amok. The kind of unreconstructed royalists and hard core Catholics that surrounded the Comte d’Artois were furious that their countrymen had gone back to Napoleon and so exacted vengeance of their own. A new White Terror swept the country, particularly down in the south, where gangs of royalists roamed free, pillaging and attacking men accused of collaboration with the hundred days regime. At least 300 lynchings were reported, as were multiple grisly assassinations of prominent officials. In this atmosphere of occupation, pillage and revenge, the election for the First Chamber of Deputies was finally held in August of 1815. 

Now, the King’s charter strictly limited suffrage to men over the age of 30 who paid 300 francs in taxes and limited deputies to men over 40 who paid 1,000 francs in taxes. So the Chamber of Deputies was representative in form, but hardly in function. In a kingdom of 30 million people, only about 75,000 men were eligible to vote, and they voted uniformly hardline royalist. Anyone with more moderate or liberal leanings was either too demoralized to participate or too disenfranchised to even be allowed to vote. 

So the men who gathered in the First Chamber of Deputies of the now Second Restoration were, as it was said, more royalist than the King. So royalist, in fact, that it gave birth to the name that would define their loose political party, the Ultra Royalist, or just the Ultras. This first Chamber of Deputies was so right wing that the temperamentally centrist King Louis dubbed them the Incredible Chamber and they would immediately cost the King plenty of heartburn as he tried to rule a defeated and divided kingdom. 

Now, it had been hard enough to govern, even with the generous leniency of the Allies during the First Restoration, but as the Second Restoration got going, that leniency was now withdrawn. Talleyrand tried his best to negotiate favorable terms, but his own star was on the wane everywhere. In a bold attempt to strengthen his negotiating hand with the Allies by proving that King Louis found him indispensable, Talleyrand strategically submitted his resignation and was shocked to find it accepted and this began Talleyrand’s ten year hiatus from public affairs much to his surprised chagrin. 

To replace Talleyrand, the King tapped the Duc of Richelieu, scion of an old noble family who had been an émigré during the revolution and spent most of his exile in Russia serving as an administrator for Tsar Alexander. Forced to negotiate a new treaty with the allies, with virtually no hand to play, he was forced to sign humiliating terms. France would go back to its 1790 boundaries. It would agree to an occupying army of 150,000 troops for at least the next five years, all of which would be paid for by France. And then on top of that, another 700 million franc indemnity to be paid to the allies plus every single scrap of debt that had ever been accumulated by any French government would be repaid in full. Signing the treaty because there was nothing else to do, Richelieu dejectedly observed “I deserve to go to the scaffold”. 

But if the livid and vengeance seeking allies were a problem for Richelieu who now slid in as Louis’ prime minister, the Incredible Chamber was proving even worse. They ran around trying to create a legalized white terror, setting up laws allowing for punitive attacks on their enemies, limits on freedom of the press, special courts that would deal with anyone accused of collaboration with the Bonaparte as criminals, and a law that amnesty actions from the past specifically exempting those same collaborators. And these were just the suggestions they managed to get past. At least one guy wanted the death penalty for anyone caught possessing the tricolor. 

This all created unpleasant problems for the King and his ministry, who really were trying to nip the country back together, not exact revenge on anything and everything in sight. But what really caused Richelieu to blow his stack was a movement to close the budget deficit by repudiating France’s debt. As you know, we weren’t the ones who ran up the bill, so why should we have to pay them? But reneging on the debt would destroy the credit of the state and basically end France’s expectation that it would one day be a great power again. So Richelieu successfully convinced the King that the Incredible Chamber was doing far more harm than good and in September of 1816, the King dissolved the Chamber of Deputies. 

New elections were then held in October of 1816 that brought a new batch of deputies that moved the government from the far right to the center right. Many voters who had abstained the first time around showed up in force. Many who had come out in force for the first election now stayed home. But more than anything, electors thought a little bit harder about the men they were voting for. And so, in the place of the Ultras, a new group of more moderate constitutional monarchists swelled the ranks of the Chamber of Deputies – only 90 of the 238 deputies could reasonably be called an Ultra. The rest were there to make a go of it on the terms of the charter, that Frenchmen had rights, that there was something resembling a constitutional monarchy going on here and that the time had come to move on from an angry past to a hopeful future. 

Now, it was not an easy time to be trying to build that future, because, as had happened during the French Revolution, the weather got in the way. 1816 was marked by a late frost and frequent hailstorms that decimated the harvest, wheat production was way down, and by the end of the year, there was almost no new wine to speak of. So prices began rising on bread by the end of the year, and riots started breaking out in market towns. And no one missed that there were still literally hundreds of thousands of foreign bellies occupying the country that always seemed to be prioritized when it came to divvying up the food. So January 1817 saw a rash of riots that were then followed by another wave in June of 1817, when spring droughts played further havoc with the food supply. Many in France now openly blamed the occupying forces for the skyrocketing prices and food instability, even if they were only one smallish factor among many. For his part, the Duke of Wellington started hinting back home that he could defend his forces if he had to, but at the end of the day, pulling out of France might be preferable than trying to stay.

Aided now by a more moderate chamber of deputies, Richelieu’s government then strengthened France’s international standing by prioritizing payment of the indemnity and promising to meet every reasonable claim of debt laid at their feet by foreign creditors. They went back to cutting expenses and raising taxes, which did earn enough goodwill out in the world but the government was able to strike a deal with prominent banks in both London and Amsterdam to help finance French debt, which all on its own shot up the value of French bonds – because if prominent British and Dutch banks like what they see in France, everyone else could too. 

So Richelieu was soon in talks to see what the real final pay off amount would have to be to convince the occupying powers to pull their troops out of France once and for all. This austerity and bond buying wasn’t exactly triggering boom times in the French economy in 1817, but at least the weather held and with peace reigning support for the King’s government was pretty high, though d’Artois nearly blew it all when he sent frantic memos to the allies saying “if your troops pull out, France will fall back into revolution”. This memo was then leaked to the press and it made the regime look more than ever like it was simply a government imposed by the enemies of France and who needed those enemies to stay in power. But while this minor scandal did not ultimately undermine coalescing faith in the monarchy, it did help embolden evermore liberal men to step forward and try to participate in the government. 

So in September of 1817, the elections brought enough of these liberals into the Chamber of Deputies that they actually formed a working majority. These guys might be old, bonapartist, unreconstructed Republicans or simply left leaning constitutional monarchists, the last of whom were a rising force that became a party of their own, dubbed the Doctrinaires and they had the special privilege of being led by one of King Louis’ favorite courtiers, Élie Decazes, the common son of a notary who had risen in the imperial service. Decazes had talked his way into the court, and the king all but fell in love with him, calling him my son. And the two shared a relationship so intimate that they met daily in the evenings before bed and it became Decazes above all, who the King listened to in matters of state. And by the way, it was Decazes who leaked d’Artois’ memo to discredit the now discredited Ultras. 

So the increasingly liberal government then moved in on some prized territory the Ultras had been trying to stake out for themselves – the army. The National Citizens Army of France had been a glorious wonder for 25 years, and in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat, d’Artois and the Ultras had been trying to dramatically reduce its size and turn it back into what it had once been – the walled off preserve of the aristocracy. Basically, they wanted their old jobs back on the same terms they had had before – experience and training, not prerequisites for senior commands. 

In March of 1818, though, the government and the chambers passed a series of laws on the military that pushed back against this return to Ancien Régime military service. They ensured that conscription would still be a viable tool of recruitment, rather than relying strictly on mercenaries, advancement through the rank would be based on merit, experience, and training, not simply doled out to random dandies who fancied themselves a General. Finally, they laid the groundwork for a reserve army of veterans who would be recalled in times of national emergency. And this last was particularly troubling to the Ultras, since every veteran who might possibly be so called were veterans of Napoleon’s army. 

Now, far from being troubled by all this, the other powers in Europe were ready for a monarchical France to retake its place in the concert of powers to help them keep the general peace. So in September of 1818, the quadruple alliance of Britain, Russia, Prussia and Austria met with France to hammer out the final terms of the withdrawal of foreign troops and, if all went well, to formally invite France back into the great power fold. Now, we actually touched on this meeting very briefly in Episode 5.23, because it did go as everyone hoped. 

In exchange for a final payment of 265 million francs, the allies would withdraw from France by the end of November 1818, and France would be an equal party at the table again. Now, if you can’t remember exactly why I talked about France’s readmission into the Concert of Europe during episodes on Spanish American independence you’ll remember in a second, I promise. 

Though Prime Minister Richelieu had done a pretty good job navigating the stormy seas and securing the liberation of French territory, he was center right in a regime that was going center left. The elections of 1818 brought in a majority of liberals and included, for example, the return to public life of the Marquis de Lafayette who was elected to the Chamber of Deputies and as the times, rather than the objective beliefs mark a man’s position in politics, Lafayette once again found himself representing the far left of public opinion, even if he himself had never changed. So Prime Minister Richelieu found himself on the losing end of a vote of no confidence in the Chamber of Deputies and he resigned his position. And though technically replaced by an old General, it was really Élie Decazes who led France from his new position as Minister of the Interior. 

The increased liberalism of the government was given immediate display in March of 1819 with a series of laws on freedom of the press that firmly established the principle that a man’s opinion did not become a crime just because it was expressed publicly. Now, there would be limits to the freedom of press of course, defamation and libel and pornography would still be punished or censored as were attacks on his sovereign majesty. But in general, the rule would be that there was freedom to speak without fear of immediate prosecution. 

So with liberalism on the advance, the ultra royalist Comte d’Artois complained incessantly to his brother, “you know, you’re helping our enemies!” The King got so annoyed that he finally rebuked him. He said “the system I have adopted and which my ministers are faithfully following is founded on the maxim that I must not be the King of two peoples. And the chief goal of my government is that these two people who are so much in evidence today should eventually become one.” 

But if d’Artois was mortified by what was going on around him, he was enraged by what happened next. In the elections of September 1819, 35 of the 55 open seats went to unabashed liberals, including scandalously, the Abbé Grégoire, who we last saw here on the Revolutions podcast advancing the cause of the blacks and coloreds in Saint Domingue, but who everyone in France remembered as a member of the National Convention who had openly supported the murder of Louis XVI. Grégoire’s presence in the chamber was an affront and marked the end of the move to the left as things now swung back around to the right.

Decazes himself took his center left principles, made them firmly center principles, and then when he started running into trouble with his left wing, started making them center right principles in search of new allies. To inoculate the government from radical liberalism and the potential return of neo jacobinism, Decazes got rolling with the infamous Law of the Double Vote. The purpose of the law would be to increase the size of the Chamber of Deputies by 173 seats, and these new seats would be voted on only by electors who paid the very highest amount in taxes each year, meaning that now fully two-fifths of the Chamber of Deputies would be elected solely by a small group of super rich landowners. Since this group would also get to retain their vote in the regular elections, the law got dubbed the Law of the Double Vote. 

The years of liberal advance, though, finally ended abruptly on February 13, 1820, when the Duc de Berry, the eldest son of the Comte d’Artois and future hope of the Bourbon monarchy, was murdered at the opera by a fanatical bonapartist. The Ultras seized on the notion that the assassin had been a part of a vast liberal conspiracy that seemed to be sweeping Europe. See also, for example, the mutiny at Cádiz, which we talked about in Episode 5.17. Decazes was forced to resign, and Richelieu returned at the head of a more right wing government. In the wake of Berry’s assassination, new restrictions on civil liberties were imposed, as was a pullback from the laws on freedom of the press. With liberal papers being censored, men had to literally take to the streets to hear news that wasn’t strictly conservative and supportive of the government, leading to a riotous atmosphere in June of 1820 that got explosive when the long rumored Law of the Double Vote passed on June 18. 

Believing they had just been permanently barred from ever having a say in government, a liberal conspiracy did break out with plans to combine an army mutiny with demonstrations in Paris in August of 1820. But as so often happens with these things, the plans were leaked by men who got cold feet at the last minute, and the uprising had to be called off.

So by the end of 1820, the Ultras were flying high. The posthumous son of the Duc De Berry was born in September, revitalizing the Bourbon line and, for example, all but eliminating any hope that the more liberal and enlightened cousin of the Bourbons, the Duc d’Orléans, might someday ascend to the throne. Hint, hint, foreshadow, foreshadow. 

Then, in the November elections, the Ultras exploited the new Law of the Double Vote and swept the Liberals into irrelevance. The rest of 1820 and 1821 saw a general crackdown against liberalism everywhere in Europe by the conservative powers. Austria invaded Italy to quell the Carbonari revolts, which were liberal secret societies that had been built up first to oppose the French occupation, but who now plan to follow the lead of the Spanish and force their monarchs to adopt a liberal constitution. 

A few French liberals had fled to Italy in the wake of their own failed uprising in 1820 and then came home fully briefed on how to build a Carbonari insurrection of their own, with a discrete hierarchy of cells and members paying dues and everyone keeping at least one gun with 25 bullets close at hand. With the Ultras now appearing to have arranged the voting law such to secure a permanent majority for themselves, the liberals decided extra legal action was now fully justified. The Carbonari movement and structure spread rapidly through liberal circles, including through the chateau of Lafayette, who once again found himself an active revolutionary. 

But as had happened in 1820, the planned revolt broke down. It was from a mixture of a lack of really strong leadership and the plans being betrayed before the launch date, which was set for November 1821. So the whole thing had to be called off. Lafayette literally had to turn his coach around and go home before anybody found out what he had been up to. Feeling their oats now, the Ultras forced the moderate Prime Minister Richelieu to resign at the end of 1821. And foolishly, that move was backed by those liberals remaining in the Chamber of Deputies, who believed an Ultra government would fatally discredit itself and instead, they ruled France uninterrupted for the next six years. 

By this point, Louis XVIII was completely checked out of government from a mixture of ill health and indifference and it was really only by dumb luck that Joseph de Villèle was tapped as Prime Minister. Though Villèle was an ultra, he was not an ultra ultra. A practical administrator, he was later scorned as an economist politician by his more extreme allies. But by refusing to adhere to the wishes of those more extreme allies, retake all the national lands, for example, Villèle managed to keep the threat of liberal revolution at bay for six years. 

That threat of liberal revolution was also undermined by the French invasion of Spain in 1823. As we discussed in Episode 5.23, the quintuple alliance was playing whack a mole with the liberal uprisings and none had risen higher or more successfully than the mutiny of Cádiz, which had forced King Ferdinand VII to accept the Constitution of 1812 and of course, also all but guarantee the loss of Spanish America. A royalist uprising in Spain in 1822 had been suppressed, and in the aftermath, King Ferdinand found himself under house arrest. This led the other European powers to approve a plan for France to invade and sweep aside the Spanish liberals. The French army invaded in April of 1823 and by September had secured all of Spain, broken the liberal government and restored Ferdinand to his absolutist rule. 

Now all on its own, this was demoralizing for French liberals, but even extra demoralizing was the conduct of the army. The army had not mutinied, it had not revolted, it had never disobeyed orders. The army had always been considered one of the key disgruntled parties that would be necessary to topple the Ultras. But the invasion of Spain appeared to have given the army a sense of purpose again. So instead of being a backbone of liberal revolution, they helped suppress one. And of course, as a good, quick war often does, patriotism in France exploded and everyone rallied around the triumphant crown. 

The final crushing blow for the liberals came in the elections of November 1824. Of the deputies elected, three fifths of them were nobles, one half had been émigrés during the Revolution, and only 19 could be considered liberal. Triumphantly dubbed by the conservatives “the restored chamber”, the new Chamber of Deputies was incredibly even more right wing than the incredible chamber had been. 

By now, though, the king, who had never been in good health, was flagging badly. By the end, he literally could not keep his head up. In one of his last public acts, he addressed the opening of the restored chamber in March of 1824 and said “the time has come for us to close the last wounds of the Revolution by repaying the émigrés for their lost property.” Now, he still did not mean that the land should be returned to them, just that the state ought to cough up for the lost property. Though by now it is worth noting that many former émigrés had made their own private arrangements to regain lost titles. But a plan was now being put forward to raise funds to pay out claims for the lost émigré property. What was left of the left claimed that this was unnecessarily punishing France for the revolution, while the right was disappointed that the King was still not advocating full restoration of their property, and that any indemnity payout would seem to close the books forever on any restoration of property. But even here, now, at the end of his life, the King tried to maintain a middle line. Anything less, he thought, would be disastrous. And as he now recognized that he was probably dying, he openly lamented that the Comte d’Artois had not died before him, believing that his brother’s Ultra policies would destroy the restoration, a prediction that would soon prove all too prescient. 

After slipping into a final fatal spell in September 1824, thanks to a kind of gross mixture of wet and dry gangrene, old King Louis XVIII died on September 19 at the age of 68. He had never lost the faith that he was God’s chosen King of France, had endured half a life of exile with patient determination, and then managed to last a decade on the throne, giving the restoration some hope of permanent success. But of course, with no sons of his own, the crown ominously passed to the head of the Ultras, the Ultra of the Ultra Royalist, the Comte d’Artois. Next week, the Comte d’Artois will become god’s chosen King of France and be recreated as King Charles X. But if it was in fact true that Charles was now God’s choice, it was clear that it was also God’s choice that the Bourbon monarchy be destroyed.

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