Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

We left off last time on the evening of February the 21st, 1848. As we discussed, the government of Prime Minister François Guizot had just said that the recent banquet campaign had not been an exercise in constitutionally protected assembly. If the government decided not to grant permission for a banquet, then that banquet would be illegal. And they announced this while not granting permission for a final banquet in Paris that had been organized by students, artisans, and radical officers inside the Paris National Guard.

Opposition leaders in the Chamber of Deputies and the press seized on the banquet as a test case to prove that the government did not have the authority to cancel the event. But after the opposition and the Paris police worked out a deal to hold a symbolic banquet and then let the legal chips fall where they may, the government dug in their heels and said, no, this is illegal, do not do it.

Not wanting their symbolic test case to turn into a bloody clash, the opposition backed down, canceled the banquet, and settled for a strongly worded petition. With the opposition clearly blinking, there was every reason for Guizot and King Louis-Philippe to believe on the evening of Monday, February the 21st, 1848, that this little crisis had passed, that it really all had been a bunch of smoke and it was all now dissipating.

The government’s confidence that things were well in hand was further bolstered by the forces they had at their disposal. Thanks to the run of the revolts in the 1830s, the government now kept more than 30,000 regular troops of the line garrisoned around Paris, then maintaining order inside the city on a day-to-day level were 3,900 municipal guards, which was basically the Paris police force. And then in times of emergency, there were tens of thousands of national guardsmen who could be called on. And for the last 18 years, the National Guard had always rallied to the side of the regime in the end.

The government was so satisfied by the conclusion of this recent showdown over the banquet that they actually canceled an order to deploy soldiers in the streets of Paris on the morning of February the 22nd, believing that it would be needlessly provocative.

They would come to regret this decision because while the more respectable members of the political elite went to bed believing the showdown had come and gone, the working class neighborhoods of Paris had decided to not let it go. This was one of those classic cases you find in history where intransigent authorities go to bed believing their latest repressive antics will be swallowed like all their other repressive antics and then wake up to discover that, actually, they have just broken some last straw without realizing it.

You will find this, for example, in chapter nine of The Storm Before the Storm, the Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic forthcoming October the 24th, 2017. In chapter nine, the Romans will once again deny the Italians full citizenship and go to bed believing that this was just another in a long string of times they had denied the Italian citizenship. But for the Italians, it turned out to be the last straw and the social war would blow up in Rome’s face. You can read all about it when the book comes out and to make sure that you can read all about it, you should go pre-order it right now to make sure we hit the bestseller list. We only have about three weeks to go, so please go pre-order the book now. You can pause this episode and just go do it.

Okay, thank you very much. Well, a similar thing is happening right now to the July Monarchy. And specifically, what the government did not realize on the night of February the 21st is that by winning the showdown over the banquet, they lost the loyalty of the National Guard, and this would prove to be fatal.

So before we get going with the run of events that will see King Louis Philippe abdicate the throne by the end of today’s episode, we need to talk about how much and how inexplicably the July Monarchy blew it with the National Guard.

Okay, so quick trip down memory lane because this is important. The National Guard is a citizen militia composed mostly of lower and middle-middle-class Parisians. We discussed in Episode 7.2 how much they had controlled the balance of events since 1789. Whichever side the National Guard was on almost inevitably won. If they backed a regime, the regime stayed in power. If they turned against a regime, that regime fell. It happened to Louis XVI, it happened to Napoleon, it happened to Charles X, which King Louis Philippe knew all too well.

Stepping up as organized and disciplined middle-class defenders of the Orleanists, the National Guard was the decisive weight that propelled the Orleanists to victory in 1830. It was understood by all, then and now, that the National Guard was the great legitimizing foundation of the July Monarchy. And as we also discussed, they then stuck with the regime during the more radical uprisings in 1832 and 1834 and 1839. The fortunes of the July Monarchy were tightly bound to the support of the National Guard.

But as we also discussed in Episode 7.2, while the July Monarchy readily acknowledged the importance of the National Guard, they refused to give most of the guardsmen a voice in government. The wealth requirement to join the Guard fell well short of the wealth requirement to vote in national elections. So the vast majority of the rank-and-file National Guardsmen were not deemed worthy of the vote. This was never a popular state of affairs, and any political reform package proposed in the 1830s and 1840s inevitably included a call for enrollment in the National Guard to automatically grant suffrage. A huge petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures was presented in 1839, but it was rejected.

The unwillingness to let the National Guard have a share in the vote turned out to be stubbornness of the stupid and fatal variety. The Guizot government refused to budge one single inch on any call to extend the vote, because Guizot argued that it would be the first step towards revolution, or something. Though I personally suspect he had much baser motivations. As we’ve seen, Guizot’s parliamentary majorities were shallow and thin. Bringing in more voters, especially of the lower middle class Parisian variety, would almost certainly be the end of his government. But in blocking the extension of the vote to protect his government, Guizot managed to bring down the whole monarchy.

This now long-festering frustration inside the ranks of the National Guard was given an enthusiastic outlet when the banquet campaign got going, because what was the single issue the opposition decided to unite around? That’s right, expanding the vote. So the National Guard was totally on board with the banquets. Many of them watched expectantly as the opposition resisted the government’s claim that the banquets were not constitutionally protected, but then also watched in disgust as the opposition shrank from the fight and decided to settle for yet another meaningless petition.

So had the morning of February the 22nd, 1848, opened with merely students, artisans, and some more militant political activists demonstrating in the streets, the whole thing goes down as a non-event. But the National Guard had now had enough. This was their last straw. They were done putting their lives on the line for a government so committed to ignoring their very reasonable request for a very small voice in government. I will never for the life of me understand how you can successfully identify the National Guard as one of the keys of your regime’s survival, and then so obstinately refuse to grant them what is in every way a perfectly reasonable demand. If I’m in the National Guard, I get a vote. But that’s the story of 1848, the great unforeseen and eminently avoidable revolution.

It is obvious just how oblivious the government was to their alienation of the National Guard, because on the morning of February the 22nd, all their plans to defend Paris in case of an uprising still relied heavily on the National Guard. Neither the King nor his ministers liked the optics of using regular troops of the line to suppress civilian uprisings. That was how despotic tyrants behaved. The King believed he needed not just physical strength, but also moral authority. And so just like always, it was to the National Guard whom he expected to give him that combination of physical strength and moral authority. But the King did not realize, nor did any of his ministers realize, that they had already lost both.

The morning of Tuesday, February the 22nd, 1848, dawned cool and drizzly. Despite the rain and warnings that demonstrations would be considered illegal, students, artisans, and more radical activists began gathering at the Pantheon, near where the controversial final banquet was supposed to have been held, before the whole demonstration had been co-opted and moved to the Champs-Elysees by the more respectable members of the opposition. The plan that morning was to walk together to the planned starting point for the now-cancelled march to the banquet, a march that had been advertised in all the opposition papers.

At 10 a.m. this group set off from the pantheon, reaching their destination at 11 a.m. and finding at that starting point about 1,500 people who either did not know or did not care that the banquet had been cancelled. This group of now somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 marched not to the proposed site of the cancelled banquet, but over to the Palais Bourbon, where the Chamber of Deputies would be sitting and who were now the intended audience/target of the demonstration.

But when the small mob arrived, they discovered that the Chamber of Deputies was not yet in session, but that two companies of infantry and a company of cavalry were patrolling the grounds against just such a mob demonstration. The soldiers methodically pushed the crowd back across the bridge into the Place de la Concorde, where the first sporadic violence broke out. Predictably, a flurry of cobblestones, roof tiles, rocks and bricks started flying at the troops, then a few shots rang out, but mostly warning shots fired over the heads of the demonstrators. The troops cleared the Place de la Concorde without much bloodshed, but pushed into the adjacent streets, the small agitated mob did not disperse. Instead, they began building the first barricades of 1848. They also raided neighborhood gun shops for arms and ripped up iron railings to serve as hand-to-hand weapons.

Now armed, they attacked municipal guard posts and police offices in the neighborhood. A group also advanced on the offices of the Foreign Ministry, where they knew that long-time Foreign Minister Guizot often lived and worked. When they got to the building, they threw rocks at it. Still, the most honest and cathartic form of political protest.

Right around this same moment, so just about 11 a.m. on February the 22nd, opposition Deputies and journalists were assembled in the home of Odilon Barrot to draw up their formal statement of protest about the canceling of the banquet. The petition said that the government had betrayed French honor and interests, violated the Charter of Government, corrupted parliamentary government, and deprived citizens of their rights. So in a superficially similar way, this is starting to look like the Dual Revolution of 1830, that is, the revolution of violence out in the streets, and the revolution of speeches and petitions in the salons and newspaper offices. But unlike the Revolution of 1830, the opposition leaders of 1848 never quite got out in front of events. None of them wanted a revolution, and they were looking here to leverage concessions out of Guizot, maybe bring down his government, but certainly they did not want to overthrow the monarchy.

But events would move far too quickly for any of them, and when this petition was ultimately published the next day, the only effect it had was giving a rhetorical justification for the revolution they did not want. Not that the people out in the streets doing the fighting took much time to read it.

With the streets rapidly outpacing the politicians, the Chamber of Deputies finally convened in the early afternoon and tried to pretend like nothing at all unusual was happening. Deputy Alexei de Tocqueville was there, and he wrote later that on February the 22nd, the Chamber of Deputies was the only place in Paris not talking about the unrest in the streets. Instead, they scrupulously stuck to the regular calendar of business and spent the afternoon debating the Charter of the Bank of Bordeaux. It was an absurd farce as everyone was thinking about what was going on in the streets while pretending to care about some minor matters relating to some bank charter.

Meanwhile, out in the streets, disturbances and rumors were leading stores and workshops to close down for the day, putting even more lower class workers out into the streets. Gun shops continued to be raided, guard posts continued to be attacked, and now customs barriers at the city limits were attacked as well.

By the late afternoon of February 22nd, the government reversed course and decided it was time to formally order an armed occupation of Paris. A plan had been drawn up after the last major insurrection in 1839. This plan called for the government to mobilize the three prongs of their armed authority, the regular army, the municipal guards, and the National Guard.

But though the reliability of the first two seemed perfectly sound, the National Guard showed very troubling signs very early. When the orders went out to mobilize, many guardsmen did not even heed the call, and those who did seemed to be assembling on their own terms, some of them chanting things like, Viva Reform and Down with Guizot.

But despite the troubling attitude of the National Guard, as darkness fell on the 22nd, things seemed to be fine. The troops of the line occupied their assigned strategic points, the combination of cold and dark dampened the enthusiasm of the mobs, and by 9 p.m. Paris was mostly silent and calm. The authorities waited until past midnight to be sure that all was indeed well, and then they ordered the troops back to their barracks, with instructions to get some rest, and then march back out at dawn to make sure Paris remained silent and calm. King Louis Philippe went to bed quite content that this all now had come and gone.

When dawn broke on Wednesday, February 23, the light revealed another cold and drizzly day. After having caught a few hours’ sleep, the troops of the line remobilized and set back out to their assigned points. At 7 a.m. they were all in position. But the National Guard remained a problem, and the seditious foreshadowing of the day before now came out into the open. Once again, many guardsmen did not answer the call from the government to mobilize, and those who did seemed to be fully operating under their own agenda. While some companies continued to chant Down with Guizot, the Fourth Legion of the Paris National Guard had taken the time the night before to draw up a petition to the king, saying that Guizot had presided over a quote, “corrupting and corrupted ministry“. They made it very clear that they were not mobilizing to defend the government against insurrectionary Parisians. They were instead here simply to keep the peace, but fully expected, along with those insurrectionary Parisians, to see the end of Guizot.

In the spirit of keeping the peace, when and where early skirmishes opened up between the regular troops and the people, the Guard inserted themselves into the middle of the fight, which spooked the regular army soldiers. They weren’t thrilled about being used to bludgeon raucous civilians. They were even less thrilled about the prospect of a full-blown fire fight with the National Guard. So out in the streets, everyone stood around nervously, waiting for some sign from the King that would either diffuse the tensions, or, if he decided to dig in his heels, force everyone to open fire on everyone else.

Inside the Tuileries Palace, the King huddled with his inner circle. His eldest son, the queen, and other military and political advisors to decide what should be done. It was impressed upon the King that if he wanted to avoid further escalation that there was only one solution, he had to drop Guizot. The King bitterly resented the demand. In this confrontation, he was the one operating inside the law and inside the constitution. It was the opposition that was acting unconstitutionally. And to submit to their unconstitutional, illegal, and violent demands would betray the very principles of constitutional government they allegedly held so dear. But Louis Philippe was in the end a pragmatic man who favored cautious compromise over bold adventurism, and so he relented. Not wanting this to lead to blood in the streets, he called in Guizot at about 2:30 in the afternoon and said, Well, this has gotten away from us, and if I don’t sack you, Paris is going to have our heads. So I’m sorry, but I have to let you go.

Guizot was as furious as the King that this is what it had come to, but was no less pragmatic. He would not fight the dismissal. He did not want this to turn into a bloody street fight. Instead, he marched over to the Chamber of Deputies to bring them the news. Now on the 23rd, the Deputies had decided to forego the charade of pretending like it was business as usual, and had in sped spent their early session listening to reports of the situation in Paris. Guizot came in at around 3:30 and unceremoniously announced his dismissal.

Now remember, though Guizot had very little popularity outside the Chamber, inside the Chamber, he still commanded a loyal majority, so they exploded at the King’s betrayal of the constitution and his cowardly capitulation to the rabble in the streets. Was this to be a constitutional monarchy, or were they to be ruled by brick-throwing radicals? So while a minority of opposition deputies high-fived each other in the back, the rest of the Chamber swarmed Guizot to show him support and find out what they could do for him. De Tocqueville was in the Chamber that day as well, and watching these deputies, he knew to be loyal to Guizot only because Guizot meant cushy jobs, de Tocqueville said they looked like a “pack of hounds whose prey had been snatched from their half-full mouths”.

With the dismissal of Guizot, King Louis-Philippe was well aware that everyone now expected him to make Adolphe Thiers Prime Minister. But to avoid that distasteful conclusion, the King instead called the Comp de Molay. Now, we don’t have to spend too much time on Molay because he won’t be around for very long, but he was a principal player in the governments of the 1830s. He was himself a former Prime Minister who had drifted decisively into the reformist opposition with the permanent ascension of Guizot. But at their first meeting that afternoon, Molay told the King, there’s no way I can form a government without Thiers, so we’re gonna have to bring him in. The King was incensed. He said, Thiers, what will Europe say? To which Molay replied, it’s not Europe we should be thinking about. The house is on fire. The King fumed, but finally agreed that Molay should bring Thiers into the government.

While this was going on in the palace, out in the streets, the people of Paris continued to man their growing number of barricades. The army continued to hold their strategic points, and the National Guard continued to monitor the spaces in between. Now the King and his advisors hoped that the dismissal of Guizot would be the end of it. But when word spread, it was justifiably celebrated as proof in the streets that they were in control of the situation. The King was making concessions not because he wanted to, but because they had forced him to. So Guizot’s dismissal didn’t make them want to go home. It made them wonder what else they could make him do.

But still, on the night of February 23, the February Revolution of 1848 was not yet a revolution. It did not become a revolution until about 9:30 p.m. The afternoon and early evening had seen a continuation of the sporadic skirmishing around guard posts and police offices, but after sunset, a large crowd gathered at the Place de la Bastille. And remember, the Place de la Bastille is now dominated by the Great July Column that celebrated the foundation of the July Monarchy, and which would now, ironically, prove to be ground zero for its demise.

When a critical mass of demonstrators had gathered, they pointed themselves from the July Column to the headquarters of the Foreign Ministry on the Boulevard des Capucines. Word had gone out that Guizot himself was there, and the idea was probably to celebrate his demise right under his window. But when they arrived at the Foreign Ministry, they found the building guarded by a strong phalanx of regular infantry. The crowd started to surge forward, but the soldiers held their ground. And then we get one of those recurring moments that has cropped up so often over the course of this podcast. Large mob, lots of confusion, armed soldiers, armed demonstrators. So what happens? That’s right, somebody’s gun went off. No one knows who shot first or why, and probably it was just an accident. But as soon as the first shot went off, the soldiers opened fire on the crowd, blasting away at the tightly packed wall of men and women in front of them. At such close range, those in the front of the mob could do nothing but just be riddled with bullets. The firing naturally forced the crowd to retreat, but when they fell back, they left 50 to 60 dead on the street, and another 75 to 80 wounded and crying in pain.

The massacre at the Capucines is when the riots of February 1848 became the Revolution of February 1848.

While the army officers restored discipline to their own ranks, the demonstrators gathered 16 of the dead bodies onto a cart, and then paraded them through central Paris by lantern for the next three hours. Crying, “we’ve been assassinated”, they rolled the bodies past the offices of the National and Reform, and at both stops, impromptu speeches were given about this unforgivable sin. The cries were now “to arms“, “revenge“, and now not just “Down with Guizot”, but “Down with the King, down with Louis Philippe, down with the monarchy“.

The King was informed of the disastrous massacre while the bodies were still warm, and he was angry and horror stricken. He did not want to shed blood, and was mortified that the troops had done so. He also now feared events were getting out of control, and he was simply being swept along by a current. Then at midnight, the King got even more bad news. The Comte de Molay came back to the palace and told the King, I cannot form a government. After talks with Thiers and the other opposition Deputies, it was obvious that no one would expect to compromise government under Molay, and now the massacres made it truly impossible. It had to be Adolphe Thiers as Prime Minister. And on top of that, Thiers was sending word that Odilon Barrot, the leader of the dynastic left, was going to be his principal collaborator in government. So this was now no longer about making a few minor tweaks and reforms. The elevation of Barrot and the dynastic left meant sweeping reform and probably a significant loss of power for the King.

So the next morning, the King met with Thiers in the palace. Thiers reiterated that Barrot would be brought into government along with a list of reform Deputies pushing a reform agenda. That reform agenda now included increasing the number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, making it illegal to be both a functionary and a Deputy, and then holding new elections. The King accepted the members of the new government, but refused to explicitly commit to the other reforms, hoping that once everything had died down, that these reforms would be blocked by the other Deputies, who, after all, would still have supported Guizot if given the chance.

Now the King hoped that forming a government around Thiers would bring an end to the unrest, but that was not going to happen. In the wake of the massacre at the Capucines, Paris had stayed up all night transforming the riots of 1848 into the revolution of 1848. Now over the course of the February days, something like 1,500 barricades were erected, and nearly all of them went up over the night of February 23rd, February 24th. And I saw it quoted that an estimated 1.2 million paving stones were dug up and organized into defensive fortifications. Now it was not just gun shops, but military armories that were being successfully raided and pillaged. On the morning of February 24th, 1848, Paris looked like it had on the morning of July 29th, 1830, on the last of the Three Glorious Days. And of course, most importantly, the National Guard almost to a man was now ready to stand with the people against the regime if it came down to a firefight.

At about 5:30 in the morning on Thursday, February 24th, 1848, three large columns of regular infantry marched out into Paris to occupy three strategic locations, the Place de la Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Pantheon, where all of this had originally started. Not wanting to make the same mistakes as in 1830 though, a number of units were held back from these advanced columns. Their job would be to follow the columns and then relentlessly patrol the streets to make sure that barricades were not erected to cut all of these columns off from each other.

This was supposed to be a great show of force, and each of the columns numbered 2,000 to 3,000 men, plus all those patrols running around. But still, what did we say at the beginning of this episode? That there were over 30,000 troops in the vicinity of the capital? Not quite a third of them were now actually being used. So there’s still a real hesitancy and unwillingness to just flood the streets of Paris with the regular army. Even though the King didn’t want to back down, he also didn’t want to win by merely calling in the regular army, which would prove that he was the tyrant his enemies claimed him to be. And which he was not, to be honest. I mean, a lot of what happens next is an extension of Louis Philippe not being a tyrant.

As these columns marched out, they were also told to announce everywhere they went that Thiers and Barrot were forming a government, so you’ve won, you can go home. The troops successfully occupied the Pantheon and the Hôtel de Ville, but the column heading over to the Place de la Bastille was stopped in the boulevards by a massive barricade. And just as fighting was maybe about to break out, the National Guard rolled in and placed themselves between the troops and the barricades. They told the soldiers not to shoot, that the people were under the Guards’ protection.

Without really clear instructions about what he should do in this situation, the officer in charge hesitated, and the National Guardsmen said, look, send back to the Palace for instructions, and we’ll all just wait right here together. So a messenger was sent back to the Palace to explain the situation, and he came back at around 9 a.m. with very surprising orders. A ceasefire was now in effect. All the columns were ordered back to the Tuileries Palace. From this point on, the safety, security, and order of Paris was to be left solely to the National Guard.

In later years, no one took responsibility for the decision to hand the capital over to the National Guard. The General in charge of the troops said that Thiers and Barrot had told him the order came from the King. Thiers said he was delivering an order from the King. The King, meanwhile, said that Thiers and Barrot had issued the order and only told him about it after the fact. But once the order was given, their collective fate was sealed. It was taken as further proof that the regime was not only weak, but unsure whether it even wanted to fight for its own survival.

At the Hôtel de Ville, a National Guard captain entered the building and told the General in charge, I’m taking control of the building on behalf of the people. And the General said, OK, and left. He didn’t lead his troops away. The General just walked out. So the troops left behind, then prudently surrendered and handed their guns over to the National Guard and dispersed back to the Tuileries Palace. Not in good order, just leaving in small groups and picking their own individual ways back.

In his recollections, de Tocqueville recounts a story that he ran into the column that was supposed to have gone to the Place de la Bastille returning under demoralizing harassment from the people. When this little mob saw de Tocqueville, they surrounded him, and he said all the right things. He said, “I’m in the opposition, long live reform, down with Guizot.” But he cautioned the people against letting this all go too far. He said, “reform forever, but you know that Guizot’s ministry has been dismissed.” And one of them answered, “yes sir, I know, but we want more than that.”

With everything now coming undone, the King tried to make further concessions. He decided to bypass Thiers completely and instead elevate Odilon Barrot to Prime Minister and bring in his whole crew of reform opposition. Maybe that would finally settle things. But it was way too little and way too late. Plus he had no way of telling anyone in Paris about these further concessions.

With crowds now congregating near the palace, the queen urged her husband to go review his troops and especially the National Guard unit stationed at the palace to win them back to his side. But this review was truly the end of King Louis Philippe. Now this had worked before. Remember, there was that decisive moment in 1832 when Paris was rising and the King had boldly gone out to review his troops and bolster the morale of the National Guard to keep them on his side. Well, this time he went out and after a few half-hearted, “long live the King”s, he started to get hit with much louder, “long live reform”. And when he passed the Fourth Legion, they broke ranks and started to surround him. This shattered what was left of the King’s already dangerously low morale. He spurred his horse and bolted back to the safety of the palace, where he hunkered down in a chair and bewailed his fate. The King now knew that the only way out of this was to turn the full force of the army against the National Guard, but it was a step that he refused to take. If the only way to save his regime was to open fire on the National Guard, then his regime was past saving.

Out near the Palais Royale, the King’s ancestral home, a large mob confronted army units guarding the area. The mob knew that some among these units had been those who perpetrated the massacre at the Capucine the night before. Shooting and killing began with the troops now very unsure of what they were supposed to be doing, and the officers aware that a ceasefire was supposed to be in effect. The violence could be heard from the palace, as could chance from a mob that was now gathering. They were shouting, “Down with Louis Philippe“, “Down with the King“, and then relentlessly, “Abdicate, abdicate, abdicate“.

74 years old, surrounded by an angry mob and brutally demoralized, the King said, If they want me to abdicate, then I shall abdicate. He sat down at his desk and drew up a short statement, abdicating the throne in favor of his 10 year old grandson, Philippe. Now we will talk next week about why it was 10 year old Philippe, who was now supposed to be the new King of the French, as we discuss whether the fall of Louis Philippe meant the fall of the King, or the fall of the monarchy. But we will discuss that next week, and for now, let’s just stick with the fact that the King has abdicated.

A King Louis Philippe I lived kind of an insane life. It’s hard to remember this, but he’s the son of Philippe Égalité. He had fought in the French Revolutionary Army. He had been exiled, wandered Europe under an assumed name, lived in the United States, lived in England, lived in Sicily. Then he had come back to France with the Restoration, and lived knowing that his Bourbon cousins could never quite believe that his father hadn’t brought down their brother, and that he himself was not trying to bring them down. Louis Philippe was not trying to bring his Bourbon cousins down, but then when the opportunity landed in his lap in July of 1830, he picked up the crown, and then spent 18 years as King of the French. It’s quite a ride. And now, here he was, toppled by an almost identical revolution to the one that had put him in power in the first place, with his stubborn resistance to reform undoing the conservative order he had been so desperately trying to protect. But in the end, he did not have the heart to shed his people’s blood in his own defense.

If it was a massacre or abdication, he would choose abdication. And as de Tocqueville said, “I knew the vices of the July government all too well, and cruelty was not among them. I consider it to have been one of the most corrupt, but least bloodthirsty, that ever existed.”

After abdicating, the former King of the French hurried to the Place de la Concorde with a small entourage. They piled into some carriages that would take them to St. Cloud, and from there they would follow a similar procession that Charles X had embarked on 18 years earlier. From a royal palace to the northern coast, and from there to England, an exile.

Next week, we will dig into the fate of France in the wake of Louis Philippe’s abdication. In 1830, the respectable opposition had successfully replaced one Bourbon with another. But in 1848, that would no longer be an option. And so, more than 40 years after the death of the First Republic, the Second Republic was about to be born.

Return to The Revolutions of 1848 >>