Hello and welcome to Revolutions.
So a funny thing happened on the way to the final episode of this series on the Revolution of 1830. I am locked in the final edits for my book, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, forthcoming from Public Affairs fall 2017. Those edits kind of gobbled up all my time this week, so we have a slight revision to our schedule here at the Revolutions podcast. This week’s episode, as you might have already noticed, is a bit shorter than usual – that is because I had way less time to work on it. But fortuitously this did solve my problem of where I was going to shoehorn in the back story of Louis Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans. It had gotten kind of long and was getting in the way. So I have taken that back story and present it to you now as a standalone episode. We’ll get back next week to wrap up the Revolution of 1830. This week we are going to get Louis Philippe to the Revolution of 1830, he is, after all, kind of important to the climax of the story.
Louis Philippe was born on October the 6th, 1773, the first born son of his father, the Duc d’Orléans. Now we know all about the elder d’Orléans, right? Philippe Egalité. Not only did he pop in and out of the French Revolution series, going back to the First Assembly of Notables, where I did a whole supplemental episode on him. It was Episode 3.34b. As I said in that episode, there was then and is now a version of history that paints the French Revolution as a conspiracy orchestrated by d’Orléans to overthrow his cousin Louis XVI. If you believe that version of history, then 1830 is nothing less than the culmination of a project that had been ongoing since 1789. Now, I personally don’t really believe that version of history. I don’t really think that there was a sinister d’Orléans conspiracy – it was just that as the senior cadet branch of the royal family, those who were unhappy with the Bourbons always tended to gravitate to the Orléans.
Louis Philippe’s father was always a bit of an intentional iconoclast who embraced modern ideas almost specifically to raise a middle finger at his more traditionalist royal cousins. So rather than his children being educated by traditional aristocratic tutors, the Duc placed them in the hands of Madame de Genlis, one of his former mistresses who is a passionate devotee of Rousseau. So Louis Philippe and his two brothers, his sister Adelaide and a few other random children were put through an intensive program of physical, mental and emotional education. Their days ran from 6am to 10pm and included, in addition to math and literature and philosophy, lots of physical exercise – like they were forced to complete tasks while wearing weights around their ankles. All of this was very experimental. All of it was very demanding. But Louis Philippe and the rest of the d’Orléans brood did emerge with a laudable physical endurance and incredibly wide-ranging knowledge of the world that most aristocrats of their day lacked.
Louis Philippe was just emerging from childhood as the French Revolution got going. He was about to turn thirteen when Finance Minister Calonne declared the monarchy broke in 1786. He was fifteen when the Bastille fell, and then by sheer coincidence, it was actually on his sixteenth birthday that the women marched to Versailles and dragged the royal family back to Paris. He personally witnessed the final leg of that procession from his own window.
But while his father was off playing a direct role in the revolution, Louis Philippe’s involvement would be limited because a) he was just a teenager and b) he had been enrolled as a Colonel of dragoons and now had military duties to attend to. But he did join the Jacobin Club in 1790, when it was still simply the Friends of the Constitution and most of the liberal nobility were members in good standing. Because he was stationed at a garrison near the border with the Austrian Netherlands, Louis Philippe missed the drama surrounding the attempted breakout of his cousins in June of 1791. But the flight to Verennes had enormous consequences for the young man. You’ll recall that in the wake of the King’s recapture, something like half the officer corps of the French Army deserted. But as a good liberal noble, the now eighteen year old Louis Philippe stayed on, and in fact, suddenly became the senior most Colonel in the entire French army.
When the Girondins declared war on Austria in April of 1792, Louis Philippe was promoted to Lieutenant General and attached to the staff of the new Commander in Chief of the French Army, Dumouriez. In the early days of the war, Louis Philippe showed himself to be a courageous patriot. He was cited for bravery at the pivotal Battle of Valmy, and then cited further for distinguished service at Jena and Neerwinden as the French Army first advanced towards the Netherlands and then retreated in early 1793.
Over the winter of 1792 to 1793, Louis Philippe’s father was back in Paris wrestling with the most difficult decision of his life. The King was now on trial and the newly restyled Philippe Egalité had to decide how far he was willing to go down this revolutionary road.
With the final vote approaching, would he really vote for his cousin’s death? In December 1792, Louis Philippe was on leave in Paris and tried desperately to talk his father into recusing himself from the final vote on King Louis’s fate. But Philippe Egalité did not take his son’s advice, and in January 1793, famously voted death without appeal to the people.
With the execution of the King coming amidst a broader turn towards a more aggressive revolutionary agenda, Louis Philippe became disillusioned with the whole project. In March 1793 he wrote an intemperate letter to his father denouncing the increasing excesses of the convention, and then the following month found himself brought into General Dumouriez’s plot to stage a coup. Now even though Louis Philippe was noncommittal about the coup, the fact that he knew about the plot but did not report it left him a marked man.
When Dumouriez’s conspiracy was uncovered and the General ran across the lines to the Austrians, Louis Philippe had no choice but to follow him. After he crossed the lines, Louis Philippe would spend the next 21 years in exile.
But his emigration had more immediate consequences for the rest of his family. The newly born Committee of Public Safety put his father and the rest of the d’Orléans family under house arrest. So it was as a direct result of Louis Philippe’s emigration that his father was arrested, and because that arrest led directly to Philippe Egalité’s execution in November 1793, Louis Philippe would spend the rest of his life blaming himself for his father’s death. He was in Switzerland when he got the news. His father was dead and he was now the Duc d’Orléans, if such a thing even existed anymore.
After depositing his sister, Adelaide, in the care of some nuns in Switzerland, the newly minted Duc d’Orléans began an unhappy exile. He was orphaned by everyone and everything. Supporters of the revolution considered him a traitor. Supporters of the monarchy would not forgive d’Orléans for the death of King Louis. So he had to travel under an assumed name and eventually settled for a year in Switzerland, working as a math and language instructor. He was able to do that until he accidentally knocked up a young cook’s assistant and had to move on. Unwelcome among the various émigré communities, d’Orléans had to keep on the move, and he made his way from Germany to Scandinavia over the next few years. While he traveled, the revolution peaked and retreated, and the Directory took over France.
Orléans was living in Denmark in 1796 when he was located by an agent of the Directory. Wanting to clear anyone with royal blood out of Europe to hopefully ensure the sustainability of the French Republic, these agents offered d’Orléans a deal. If you go to the United States, we will release your two brothers from custody and send them across the Atlantic to join you. With a chance to save his brothers, d’Orléans took the deal and sailed for Philadelphia, arriving in early 1797.
Good to their word, the Directory released his two brothers and the reunited trio set themselves up in the émigré community of the United States. There, the d’Orléans were better treated as they now lived among a grab bag of French exiles. Some families had fled the Jacobins. Some had fled the monarchy. Still others had only recently arrived after fleeing the Directory. The d’Orléans brothers lived a fairly comfortable life in the United States and paid calls on various notables, for example making the obligatory pilgrimage to Mount Vernon to spend some time with George Washington. But eventually the three brothers got good news – their mother, the last member of the family still in France, had been granted permission to move with her new husband to Spain. Free of the Directory’s potential retribution, the brothers broke their promise to stay in the United States and arranged passage to England.
Upon arrival in England in 1800, d’Orléans put out feelers to his cousin, the Comte d’Artois, who had himself settled in London. A lot of water had passed under the bridge since 1793 and the Duc d’Orléans suggested it was maybe time for the extended royal family to get back together. And as odd as it may seem, d’Artois was open to the suggestion. Towards the wider world, the Comte d’Artois was an inflexible ultra royalist who scrupulously maintained grudges while his brother, Louis XVIII, was open to forgiveness and compromise. But when it came to the inner circle of the family, their roles flipped. D’Artois is the one who wanted to mend all fences and unite the royal family, while Louis XVIII bore eternal enmity and deep anger to the entire Orléan family. Louis XVIII would never not believe that the d’Orléans hadn’t staged the revolution to kill his brother. He would never not believe that the d’Orléans weren’t plotting against him even now.
But for the sake of the greater royalist cost, the families publicly reconciled. The Duc d’Orléans then settled down in England and lived there from 1800 until 1808 with the help of a British pension. He would later consider these days the happiest of his life. In 1809, the Duc D’Orléans was 36 years old and still a bachelor, so he flipped open the registry of eligible aristocratic daughters and soon found a perfect match: Marie Amelie, a daughter of the branch of the Bourbons who still reigned in Sicily and also the niece of Marie Antoinette. So Louis Philippe put out his feelers, arranged the marriage, and in 1809, the couple wed. The following year, d’Orléans tried to join the Peninsula War on the side of the Allies, but the British ministry blocked his attempt. They did not need a man with a possible claim to the French throne running around loose in Europe, so they barred him from service. Instead, d’Orléans settled with his new wife in Sicily, and together they started making babies, eventually producing five boys and three girls.
It was while in Sicily that d’Orléans was also reunited with his sister Adelaide. Having spent her own years in exile bouncing around central Europe trying to stay out of Napoleon’s clutches, she was now a grown woman – worldly, intelligent, erudite, and full of energy. Adelaide joined her brother in Sicily and elected to eschew starting a family of her own, instead becoming a member of her brother’s family. She was a sister to his wife, a second mother to his children. Aunt Adelaide became a powerful and beloved presence inside the d’Orléans family. Above all, she became her brother’s personal and political confidant and eventually became impossible to tell where his thoughts ended and hers began.
So from their home in Sicily, d’Orléans monitored the collapse of Napoleon. At first, I imagine d’Orléans watched Napoleon setbacks with some gratification. But by 1814, I imagine his emotions had become a bit more conflicted. The fall of Napoleon would lead to major tensions inside the royal family. If a restoration came, would it be a Bourbon restoration, or would the old branch die and the d’Orléans finally be called to the throne? But as the Emperor’s abdication became more and more certain, the Duc d’Orléans let it be known that he was not, repeat not, a candidate for King. He recognized Louis XVIII and pledged to support him. Now this may have been his own convictions talking, but I also imagine he was helped along by his British patrons, who had themselves settled on Louis as their man.
When the Comte d’Artois made his way to Paris in April 1814, the Duc d’Orléans soon followed. And though King Louis XVIII did not like d’Orléans one bit but for the sake of royal unity, he appointed his cousin Lieutenant-General of the realm and restored to him all family property, which is how d’Orléans reacquired the Palais Royale. Although the family was officially reunited, the events surrounding the hundred days ended any possibility of personal reconciliation between Louis and d’Orléans. With Napoleon on his way back, d’Orléans boldly declared that he would remain in Paris and not leave until the King ordered him to do so. Now, on the one hand, this is d’Orléans doing the opposite of what he had done in 1793 when he had run away and gotten his father killed. But King Louis always believed that d’Orléans was trying to hang around to act as a plausible alternative monarch if Napoleon should lose and the allies decided to dump the Bourbons. So the king ordered d’Orléans to vacate Paris. But instead of joining the royal court at Ghent, d’Orléans took his family back to England. Again, Louis believed this meant d’Orléans was actively positioning himself to become king of the Second Restoration. Partisans on either side will keep the debate about d’Orléans’ intention going for the next 200 years, people still argue about it but at least on the surface, d’Orléans never wavered from his recognition of Louis XVIII. And when the Second Restoration came, d’Orléans once again let it be known that he was not a candidate for King.
During the Second Restoration, tensions continued to simmer between d’Orléans and the King. Now the public face was all happy unity, of course, and d’Orléans was named to the Chamber of Peers. But in fine d’Orléanist tradition, his home in the Palais Royale became a magnet for bourgeois liberal intellectuals, old Bonapartists, and Doctrinaire style constitutional monarchists. D’Orléans was happy to entertain these guys because their values were his values, but it annoyed King Louis, who thought the whole thing reeked of an d’Orléanist conspiracy. D’Orléans only seemed to confirm the King’s suspicion when he gave a speech in the Chamber of Peers in October 1815 expressing disapproval of the new white terror that had been sweeping France. Now, it’s not like King Louis was himself a huge fan of the terror, but he did not care for d’Orléans’ critical tone, nor the applause he received for said critical tone. The King ordered d’Orléans to vacate the country. Packing up his family, d’Orléans returned to London and lived there for the next two years.
He was finally allowed to return to Paris in 1817 and resettled in the Palais Royale. During the next few years. d’Orléans focused on restoring his family’s properties, refurbishing the Palais Royale back to what it had once been, and sending forth an army of lawyers to track down and disentangle deeds to old d’Orléans property. Though re-confiscation of the national lands would never be official policy, d’Orléans worked out private purchases to reconstruct the family portfolio. When the émigrés billion came along, he got in on that action, submitted a bunch of paperwork and got a huge payout. By the mid 1820s, the d’Orléans were back to being one of the richest families in France.
But in keeping with the spirit of the times, d’Orléans did not live as an old feudal lord. Instead, he lived as a member of the urban bourgeoisie. He had a knack for business and often handled his own contract negotiations, earning him a good reputation among the men of, say, Jacques Lafitte’s set, who were impressed that the Duc was a man to be treated as an equal at the conference table. D’Orléans continued to mingle easily with the crowds at the Palais Royale and hosted salons that attracted all the best sorts. He even broke with royal tradition and had his sons educated in school rather than at home with private tutors. Rich, respectable and available, the Duc d’Orléans might have even been considered a man of the people.
King Louis XVIII did not like any of this. From his perspective, the very existence of the Duc d’Orléans was a threat to the Bourbons, especially as their branch of the family seemed to be going extinct. When Duc du Berry was assassinated in 1820, the line of succession in the Bourbon family stood as follows. First, the 63 year old Comte d’Artois. And then second, d’Artois’ last living son, who was himself 45 years old and childless. Third, the Duc d’Orléans. Now sitting on a clutch of five sons, almost overnight it became dangerously plausible that the Duc d’Orléans would, in fact, one day be the king of France.
But the late Duc du Berry’s miracle baby, who was born in September of 1820, put an end to all of that. And though he really had endlessly said he did not want to be King, when the miracle baby was born, d’Orléans cornered men who were there to witness the birth and grilled them about whether or not they had seen the umbilical cord connected to the mother. When these witnesses confessed that yes, it was all true and they had seen it with their own eyes, d’Orléans cried, then it is true – we will really count for nothing in this country.
But while d’Orléans’ relationship with King Louis was always abysmal, the Comte d’Artois continued to be generous and inviting. When Louis died in September 1824, and the Comte d’Artois became King Charles X, one of the first things he did was invite d’Orléans and his family to the palace to make them feel not just officially welcome, but really, truly, personally welcomed. It’s one of those odd quirks of history that there was really no one in the Bourbon family who treated d’Orléans better than King Charles X, the man d’Orléans was destined to overthrow.
Now this bond between Charles and d’Orléans only existed at the intimate level. Their politics could not have been more different. D’Orléans remained what he had always been a liberal leaning constitutional monarchist, and Charles remained what he had always been, an ultra Royalist absolutist. When, for example, d’Orléans had gotten the boot from the country in 1815 for denouncing the White Terror, Charles had been the one actively cheering it on.
So it was with a great deal of studied grimacing that d’Orléans watched Charles’ reign unfold. The kind of bourgeois liberals d’Orléans had long surrounded himself with were forming the core of resistance to the new King’s ultra royalism and d’Orléans could only shake his head as Charles responded with increasingly reactionary measures. Like everyone else, d’Orléans considered the appointment of the Polignac ministry in 1829 to be a baffling mistake. And then d’Orléans was sitting just to the left of Charles when the King delivered his inflammatory opening to the Chamber of Deputies in March of 1830. The one that led to the address of the 221 and the beginning of the boulder of the revolution rolling down the hill. Well informed of both ministerial policy and the liberal opposition, d’Orléans began to fear that the King was losing his grip. But despite those fears, at the end of July 1830, the Duc d’Orléans, like everyone else in France, had no idea just how loose the grip was becoming. He certainly had no idea that he was on the verge of becoming King.
But as usual, one man suspected that the Duc d’Orléans was about to become king – Talleyrand. In mid June 1830, as the elections for the Chamber of Deputies unfolded, Monsieur Talleyrand paid a call to the Duc d’Orléans. Now 76 years old and all but an invalid who had to be carried in and out of salons, Francois Guizot famously described Talleyrand as looking like a dead lion, the old master mentally was sharp as ever. When he arrived at the Palais Royale, he retired to a private room with d’Orléans and Adelaide and the three of them had a brief conversation that Talleyrand later recalled to a friend. With some talk in the air that d’Orléans might marry his son to King Charles’s daughter, Talleyrand said the elder branch is finished. Be careful not to give your son to Mademoiselle Berry. Alone you may succeed, linked to them you’ll be chased out as well.
Now, of course, not even Talleyrand realized that they were all just weeks away from the Revolution of 1830. But he did know something was brewing, and that when it hit the Duc d’Orléans would be living in Paris and make for a very enticing alternative to the increasingly unhinged Charles. So it really did seem possible that what had begun in 1789 might now be finished in 1830.
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