Bourbon Restoration in France

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bourbon Restoration began on the 6th of April 1814. The armies of the Sixth Coalition had just defeated Napoleon and handed France back to a dynasty absent for over two decades. The returning exiles encountered a country almost unrecognizable. Revolution and empire had reorganized France into more than eighty uniform departments and abolished the old patchwork of overlapping legal jurisdictions. A generation had grown up with no memory of kings. The men and women coming home from exile carried ideas formed in a world the revolution had swept away. Whether they could govern the France they found, rather than the France they remembered, was the question the next sixteen years would test. The answer came on the barricades of Paris in the summer of 1830. Charles X prepared for his third exile, and a new political order began.

• 2. The Narrow Constitution

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  Talleyrand, Napoleon's former foreign minister, was the architect of Louis XVIII's return. He persuaded the victorious Allied Powers that a Bourbon restoration was the wisest available course. The Allies had been divided. Britain favored the Bourbons. The Austrian Habsburgs preferred a regency for Napoleon's young son. Russia was open to either the Duke of Orleans or Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, the former Napoleonic marshal already heir-presumptive to the Swedish throne. Napoleon had been offered his throne in February 1814, on condition that France return to its 1792 frontiers. He refused. Demonstrations of Bourbon support in Paris, Bordeaux, Marseille, and Lyon helped persuade the hesitant Allies.

  Louis XVIII had spent two decades in exile. He understood that France would not tolerate a resurrection of the eighteenth century. The Charter of 1814, which he granted as a concession and grant from his own royal authority, established a constitutional monarchy. Two legislative chambers were created: an appointed Chamber of Peers and an elected Chamber of Deputies. The franchise was narrow. Only men paying at least 300 francs a year in direct taxes could vote. Just one percent of the population held any political say. The king retained enormous power. He commanded the armed forces, declared war, made treaties, and held the sole power to propose or sanction laws.

  The Napoleonic Code stayed in force, guaranteeing legal equality and civil liberties. Peasants kept the biens nationaux, the lands confiscated from the Church and aristocracy during the Revolution. Church-state relations continued under the Concordat of 1801. A standardized legal system, administered by judges appointed in Paris and backed by a national police force, remained in place. Louis chose centrist cabinets and made no attempt to recover emigre properties.

  The noblesse d'empire had risen under Napoleon after 1796. They dismissed the returning old nobility as an outdated remnant of a discredited regime. The returning old aristocracy recovered much of the land they had owned directly but lost their seigneurial rights over the peasantry. Cultural differences between the two factions were too great for genuine political cooperation. Across the countryside, meanwhile, peasants were taking on mortgages to buy as much land as possible for their children. Debt was already shaping the new France as surely as liberty had.

• 3. The Price of Return

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  On the 20th of March 1815, Napoleon returned to Paris from the island of Elba. He found the city largely indifferent or hostile. Most troops sent to stop him joined him instead. Louis XVIII had left Paris for Ghent on the 19th of March, establishing a government in exile. The episode known as the Hundred Days ended when Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo and sent to Saint Helena. On the 8th of July 1815, the kingdom was formally restored a second time.

  Talleyrand was again essential to the restoration of Bourbon power. This time he worked alongside Joseph Fouche, who had served as Napoleon's minister of police during the Hundred Days. What followed in the south of France was the Second White Terror. Unofficial royalist groups sought revenge against those who had aided Napoleon's return. Around 200-300 people were killed. Thousands fled. About 70,000 government officials were dismissed. The perpetrators were known as the Verdets, named for their green cockades, which was the color associated with the Comte d'Artois. That title belonged at the time to the man who would become Charles X.

  The treaty signed on the 20th of November 1815 was far more punishing than its 1814 predecessor. France was ordered to pay 700 million francs in indemnities. Its borders were reduced to their 1790 status, two years further back than the previous treaty had required. Until 1818, France was occupied by 1.2 million foreign soldiers, including roughly 200,000 under the Duke of Wellington. France paid the costs of housing and feeding them all. The promise of tax cuts, prominent in 1814, became impossible to keep.

  The chamber elected in 1815 was so overwhelmingly ultra-royalist that Louis XVIII nicknamed it the chambre introuvable, meaning the unobtainable chamber. It moved to legitimize the White Terror, passing judgment on enemies of the state. It dismissed between 50,000 and 80,000 civil servants and 15,000 army officers. The Duke of Richelieu was appointed Prime Minister. An emigre who had left France in October 1789, he was described as having nothing at all to do with the new France. He would serve until the 29th of December 1818.

• 4. Liberals and Ultras

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  Elie, Duke of Decazes, the most moderate minister in Louis's early cabinets, moved in July 1816 to reduce the political temperature. He banned political demonstrations by the National Guard, which had been partly staffed by Verdets. That September, Louis XVIII dissolved the ultra-dominated chamber, and electoral manipulation produced a more liberal majority. For several years the Doctrinaires held real influence, hoping to reconcile the monarchy with the French Revolution's legacy. Francois Guizot, Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, and the count of Serre were central to that effort. Press censorship was relaxed. Some military positions were opened to competition. Mutual schools were established that challenged the Church's monopoly over primary education.

  In February 1820, a Bonapartist assassinated the Duc de Berry, the ultrareactionary son of the future Charles X. The killing triggered Decazes's fall and handed power back to the ultras. Detention without trial was reinstated. Guizot was banned from teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure. The franchise was altered to give the wealthiest electors a double vote in time for the November 1820 election. A new ultra ministry formed, headed by Jean-Baptiste de Villele, who would remain dominant for the next six years. Seven months after the assassination, the duchesse de Berry gave birth to a son. Henri was celebrated by the ultras as a miracle child.

  Napoleon died on Saint Helena in 1821. His son, the duc de Reichstadt, remained interned in Austrian custody. With the Bonapartist threat diminished, the literary world largely rallied to the ultra cause. Among them were Chateaubriand, Hugo, Lamartine, Vigny, and Nodier. Both Hugo and Lamartine would later become republicans. In 1823, French forces intervened in Spain to back the Bourbon King Ferdinand VII against a liberal government. The expeditionary force, called the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis, was led by the duc d'Angouleme. It marched to Madrid and then to Cadiz, ousting the liberals with little resistance between April and September 1823. The troops remained in Spain for five years. The 1824 election secured another large ultra majority. Louis XVIII died on the 16th of September 1824.

• 5. The Reign of Charles X

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  Charles X inherited a parliament under firm ultra control. The restraint Louis had imposed on the most extreme royalists was immediately lifted. On the 29th of May 1825, Charles was crowned at Reims Cathedral, the traditional site of French royal coronations. The ceremony deliberately evoked the medieval bond between the French crown and the Catholic Church.

  The Villele government, under pressure from the Chevaliers de la Foi, voted in the Anti-Sacrilege Act in January 1825. The law prescribed death for the theft of consecrated hosts. It was never applied, existing mainly as a symbolic assertion of Church authority. But it caused a major uproar, particularly among the Doctrinaires. The Jesuits, brought in to operate a network of colleges for elite youth outside the official university system, became a separate controversy. Their loyalty to the Pope and their indifference to Gallican traditions made them enemies inside and outside the Church. The king ended their institutional role in 1828.

  Legislation compensating royalists for lands confiscated during the Revolution was pushed through by Charles, though it had been designed under Louis XVIII. The final settlement allocated 988 million francs in state funds. This was financed by converting government bonds from five percent to three percent interest, saving around 30 million francs a year. Around 18 million francs were paid out annually. Approximately one million owners of biens nationaux saw their property rights confirmed and their land values rise sharply as a result.

  By 1827, the opposition had grown too large to contain. The Journal des debats sponsored Chateaubriand's articles attacking Villele's government. A new press law reimposed censorship on the 24th of July 1827. In April of that year, a review of the National Guard turned chaotic. Troops shouted anti-Jesuit remarks at Charles's devoutly Catholic niece Marie Therese, the Dauphine. Liberal officers led soldiers to protest at Villele's office. The Guard was disbanded. In November 1829, Charles appointed Jules de Polignac as chief minister. Polignac was so repellent to liberals and moderate monarchists alike that his appointment signaled the end of any serious attempt at compromise. Charles remained nonchalant. Some royalists called for a coup. Prominent liberals called for a tax strike.

• 6. Economic Fault Lines

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  The tariff on iron goods under the Bourbon Restoration reached 120 percent. Agricultural protectionism was equally aggressive. British goods had flooded the French market after 1814, and the government responded with high duties on a wide range of imports. French winegrowers, whose wines needed no protection, lobbied for a tariff on tea. One agrarian deputy offered a frank explanation. Tea, he argued, converted drinkers into cold and stuffy Nordic types, while wine gave Frenchmen their amiable and witty national character. Industry also benefited from heavy protection. With little competitive pressure, there was small incentive for entrepreneurship or innovation.

  A series of progressively worsening grain harvests between 1827 and 1830 drove food prices sharply upward. Rural peasants lobbied for the relaxation of protective tariffs on grain. Charles X refused. He drew a lesson from 1816, when Louis XVIII had relaxed tariffs during the Year Without a Summer. That move had incurred the lasting resentment of wealthy landowners, the Bourbons' traditional base of support. Keeping the tariffs in place meant that by 1830, workers in Paris and other cities faced genuine hardship.

  The financial crisis of 1826-1829 had disillusioned the business community, particularly merchants and industrialists. The government had falsified official trade statistics to claim that exports and imports were growing, when in reality there was stagnation. Paris's population grew from 714,000 in 1817 to 786,000 in 1831, but industrialization remained far behind Britain and Belgium. Railways had not yet appeared in France.

  The liberal bloc in the Chamber of Deputies had numbered just 17 in the 1824 election. By 1827 it had grown to 180. By 1830 it stood at 274. Opposition committees added 18,000 new voters to the rolls of 60,000 before the 1827 election. Government prefects tried to remove voters who had not updated their documents since 1824. The opposition largely outmaneuvered them. Charles X retained a firm belief that he remained popular with the unenfranchised mass of the French people. That belief would drive his final gamble.

• 7. The July Revolution

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  At the opening of the parliamentary session in March 1830, Charles X delivered a speech containing veiled threats against the opposition. In response, 221 deputies, an absolute majority, formally condemned his government. Charles dissolved the chamber and called new elections. The liberals won again. He and Polignac could not govern with a liberal majority and could not yield to one. The only path forward, in their view, was to rewrite the constitutional rules by decree.

  Charles and Polignac had also been pursuing a foreign policy of colonialism and expansionism. Expeditions went to Greece and Madagascar. Polignac initiated the French conquest of Algeria. A force of 38,000 soldiers and 4,500 horses, carried on 103 warships and 469 merchant ships, was sent to Algiers. Victory over the Dey of Algiers was announced in early July 1830, just weeks before the revolution.

  On the 10th of July 1830, a group of wealthy liberal journalists and newspaper proprietors gathered in Paris. Three weeks remained before Charles made his move. Adolphe Thiers led the meeting. The decision was precise: when Charles issued his proclamations, the Parisian press would publish fierce criticism to mobilize the public. On the 25th of July, Charles issued the Four Ordinances. They dissolved the chamber and suspended freedom of the press. They excluded the commercial middle class from future elections and called for new elections under a restricted franchise. The liberal press moved exactly as planned.

  Barricades went up across Paris. Economic hardship and patriotic anger drove the crowds. They attacked pro-Bourbon printing presses and overwhelmed the monarchy's coercive apparatus. On the 30th of July 1830, Charles X abdicated. Twenty minutes later, his son Louis Antoine, Duke of Angouleme, who had nominally assumed the title of Louis XIX, also abdicated. The Chamber of Deputies declared the throne vacant and elevated Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans to power on the 9th of August. He ruled not as King of France but as King of the French, marking a formal shift toward national sovereignty. Charles sailed to England.

  The July Monarchy lasted until 1848, when another revolution removed Louis-Philippe. The French Second Republic followed, with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte elected its first president. In the coup of 1851, he declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. The Algerian expedition Charles had dispatched in the spring of 1830 was a dramatic military success. It paid for itself with captured treasures. The king who ordered it had been driven from his throne before he could see what it would become.