Louis Philippe I

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis Philippe I stepped onto the throne of France in August 1830 having already lived more lives than most kings ever get. He was born in the Palais-Royal on the 6th of October 1773, the eldest son of a prince who would one day vote to send a king to his death. By the time he was sworn in as King of the French on the 9th of August 1830, he had been a revolutionary soldier, a schoolteacher in the Swiss Alps, a lodger above a Boston oyster house, a British intelligence operative in Sicily, and a fugitive who once spent a night in a barn and woke to find a musket in his face.

  He earned the nickname "the Citizen King", and for a while the French believed it. He walked among people without the ceremonial pomp of his predecessors. He reminded citizens of the man who had sold his horse in Switzerland just to buy bread. But before his reign ended, those same citizens would drive him into exile a second time, disguised in an ordinary cab under the name "Mr. Smith".

  How does a prince who grew up in a revolutionary club end up being called a tyrant of the bourgeoisie? How does a man who risked his life saving two priests from a mob become the king Victor Hugo described in an oxymoron as "Prince Equality"? And what does Louis Philippe's strange, wandering life reveal about the forces that kept tearing France apart for nearly a century?

• 2. A Revolutionary Upbringing

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  The Palais-Royal, where Louis Philippe was born, was not a quiet place by the time he came of age. From October 1788 to October 1789, it served as a gathering point for the very revolutionaries who would soon upend the monarchy. His father, the Duke of Orléans, had embraced the Revolution with a fervour unusual for a prince of the blood, and Louis Philippe followed.

  His education had been placed in the hands of the Countess of Genlis, beginning in 1782. She shaped a mind inclined toward liberal thought and what the sources describe as a slightly Voltairean brand of Catholicism. In 1788, when he was still a teenager, he demonstrated exactly the kind of instinct she had cultivated: during a visit to Mont Saint-Michel with the Countess, he helped physically break down the door of a prison cell.

  By June 1791, with war imminent across Europe, Louis Philippe had been given the hereditary appointment of Colonel of the Chartres Dragoons. His regiment was a testing ground for the young man's character. Three days after Louis XVI's flight to Varennes, a crowd surrounded an inn demanding blood from two priests caught in a dispute with a constitutional vicar. Louis Philippe pushed through the crowd and extracted them. Later that same day, at a river crossing, he placed himself between a peasant with a carbine and the two priests again. The following day, he dived into a river to save a drowning local engineer. The local municipality awarded him a civic crown for that last act. He was not yet nineteen years old.

• 3. Soldier and Defector

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  After France declared war on the Habsburg monarchy on the 20th of April 1792, Louis Philippe was in combat within days. He fought at Boussu on about the 28th of April, at Quaregnon the day after, and at Quiévrain near Jemappes on about the 30th. The Duke of Biron wrote directly to War Minister Pierre Marie de Grave praising his performance, and Louis Philippe was promoted to brigadier general, commanding the 4th Brigade of cavalry in Nicolas Luckner's Army of the North.

  Among the officers he served alongside were four men who would become Marshals of France: MacDonald, Mortier, Davout, and Oudinot. At the Battle of Valmy on the 20th of September 1792, Louis Philippe was ordered to place a battery of artillery on the crest of the hill. The engagement looked inconclusive, but it forced the Austro-Prussian army back across the Rhine. General Dumouriez praised Louis Philippe's role in a letter afterward, and the young officer was then called to Paris to account for himself to Georges Danton, the Minister of Justice. It was, Louis Philippe later told his children, a rather trying interview.

  At the Battle of Jemappes on the 6th of November 1792, Louis Philippe's division attacked through a wood and sustained heavy casualties before retreating in disorder. He rallied the scattered units himself, calling the ad hoc force he assembled "the battalion of Mons", and pushed forward until the Austrians were overwhelmed. He had been promoted to lieutenant general while still only nineteen.

  That career collapsed in the spring of 1793. After the National Convention voted to execute Louis XVI, Louis Philippe's loyalties fractured. He was dismayed to learn that his own father, Philippe Égalité, had voted in favour of the execution. General Dumouriez had met with Louis Philippe on the 22nd of March 1793 and urged him to join a plot to march the army on Paris and restore the Constitution of 1791. When the plan fell apart, the two men fled toward the Austrian camp and were briefly intercepted by Lieutenant-Colonel Davout, who had fought alongside Louis Philippe at Jemappes. Shots rang out as they escaped. On the 4th of April, Louis Philippe went into exile. He would not return to France for twenty-one years.

• 4. Twenty-One Years Wandering

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  The first stop was Switzerland. Moving under an assumed name, Louis Philippe met up with the Countess of Genlis and his sister Adélaïde at Schaffhausen, then moved to Zürich, then to Zug, where a group of émigrés recognized him. The women had to separate from him for their own safety, and Louis Philippe continued with only his valet Baudouin. The two men were refused entry to a monastery by monks who took them for vagabonds. They never stayed in one place more than forty-eight hours.

  In October 1793, Louis Philippe found a more stable arrangement: a teaching post at a boys' boarding school in Reichenau, a village on the upper Rhine in the then-independent Grisons league state. The school was owned by a Monsieur Jost, and Louis Philippe taught geography, history, mathematics, and modern languages under the name Monsieur Chabos, for a salary of 1,400 francs. He had been at the school for one month when word arrived from Paris that his father had been guillotined on the 6th of November 1793 after a trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

  From Switzerland, his wandering took him north and then west. He visited Scandinavia in 1795 and spent roughly a year in Muonio, a remote village in the Tornio river valley in Lapland, living in the local rectory under the name Müller as a guest of the Lutheran vicar there. He then crossed the Atlantic. Between about 1796 and 1798, he travelled through the United States, spending time in Philadelphia (where his brothers Antoine and Louis Charles were already in exile), in New York City, and in Boston, where he taught French and lived above what is now the Union Oyster House, described as Boston's oldest restaurant. During his time in America, he met George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and George Clinton.

  Louis Philippe's 1797 visit to Cape Cod coincided with the division of the town of Eastham into two towns, one of which took the name Orleans, possibly in his honour. In 1798, the three Orléans brothers passed through colonial Louisiana and were entertained by Julien Poydras at Pointe Coupée and by the Marigny de Mandeville family in New Orleans. Sailing for Havana in an American corvette, they were intercepted by a British warship in the Gulf of Mexico. The British took them to Havana anyway. After a year in Cuba, Spanish authorities expelled them, and they sailed via the Bahamas to Nova Scotia, where the Duke of Kent, son of George III and later father of Queen Victoria, received them. Louis Philippe struck up a lasting friendship with the British prince. In January 1800, the brothers arrived in England. Louis Philippe would remain there for the next fifteen years, teaching mathematics and geography at the Great Ealing School, described in its nineteenth-century heyday as "the best private school in England".

• 5. The July Throne

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  The July Revolution of 1830 forced Charles X to abdicate in favour of his ten-year-old grandson, Henri, Duke of Bordeaux. Charles named Louis Philippe Lieutenant général du royaume and asked him to present the Chamber of Deputies with his wish to see his grandson succeed him. Louis Philippe did not carry out that request. The Chamber, aware of his liberal reputation, proclaimed him king instead. For the eleven days before his proclamation, he had been acting as regent for the young Henri.

  On the 9th of August 1830, Louis Philippe was sworn in as King of the French. The title was deliberate. He chose "King of the French" rather than "King of France and of Navarre", a form previously adopted by Louis XVI in the short-lived Constitution of 1791. Tying the monarchy to a people rather than a territory was a calculated move to undercut the Legitimist claims of the exiled Bourbons.

  The new king governed without ostentation. He avoided the lavish spending of his predecessors and cultivated the image of a man of the people. He returned Napoleon's remains to France; his son the Duke of Joinville brought them from Saint Helena for reinterment at Les Invalides. Napoleon's statue went back atop the Vendôme Column in 1833. The Arc de Triomphe, which commemorated Napoleon's victories, was inaugurated in 1836 and included Louis Philippe's own name on its northern pillar, listed as "Chartres" for the title he had held during the Revolutionary Wars. He commissioned a national history museum at the Palace of Versailles, where famous Napoleonic battles were rendered in paint by major artists.

  The electorate that supported this arrangement was extremely narrow. Only about one in every 170 citizens was enfranchised at the start of his reign. Historian William Fortescue described the contradiction plainly: Louis Philippe owed his throne to a popular revolution, was called "the King of the Barricades", yet went on to preside over a regime that gained notoriety for political repression and rule in the interests of the rich. In October 1844, he visited Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, becoming the first reigning French king to set foot on English soil since Jean II had been imprisoned there after the Battle of Poitiers in 1356.

• 6. Violence and Survival

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  Louis Philippe survived seven assassination attempts across his reign. The most spectacular came on the 28th of July 1835, during his annual review of the Paris National Guard, as he moved along the Boulevard du Temple accompanied by three of his sons: Ferdinand Philippe Duke of Orléans, Louis Duke of Nemours, and François Prince of Joinville.

  A Corsican ex-soldier named Giuseppe Mario Fieschi had rented the third floor of number 50 Boulevard du Temple and built a weapon he called the Machine infernale. It consisted of twenty-five gun barrels fastened to a wooden frame and arranged to fire simultaneously. When Fieschi discharged the device, a ball only grazed the king's forehead. Eighteen people were killed, including Marshal Mortier, duc de Trévise, who had served with Louis Philippe in the Army of the North decades earlier. Twenty-two more were wounded. Several of the gun barrels burst on firing, badly injuring Fieschi himself. He was captured quickly and executed by guillotine the following year, along with his two co-conspirators. The king's painter, Horace Vernet, was ordered to document the event.

  The June Rebellion of 1832 presented a different kind of threat. A cholera outbreak earlier that spring had fueled bitter resentment toward the July Monarchy, and insurrectionists seized a portion of central Paris. The uprising was crushed by a large combined force of soldiers and National Guards. Louis Philippe's own response was described as one of cool resolve: he came to Paris as soon as the disturbances were reported, went among the troops, and walked among the people. Whether this reflected genuine courage or political calculation, it was the kind of gesture that had earned him his early reputation.

• 7. The Fall and the Exile

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  An industrial and agricultural depression beginning in 1846 eroded the foundations of Louis Philippe's government faster than any assassin had managed. His popularity faded as economic conditions deteriorated, and the conservative policies he had pursued under statesman François Guizot gave his critics little room to argue otherwise.

  Victor Hugo's portrait of Louis Philippe in Les Misérables captured the paradox of the man at length. Hugo wrote that Louis Philippe had "to bear in his own person the contradiction of the Restoration and the Revolution". He described the king revising criminal cases late at night after exhausting days of diplomacy, considering it a greater thing to save a man from the executioner than to hold his own against all of Europe. Hugo called him "Prince Equality" as an oxymoron; he also wrote that taking away Louis Philippe the king left behind a man who was "good. He is good at times even to the point of being admirable."

  On the 24th of February 1848, during the February Revolution, Louis Philippe abdicated in favour of his nine-year-old grandson, Philippe, comte de Paris. Fearing what had befallen Louis XVI, he left Paris quickly, travelling in an ordinary cab under the name "Mr. Smith". He and his wife fled to England aboard a packet boat arranged by the British consul at Le Havre. The National Assembly briefly considered accepting the young Philippe as king, but public opinion rejected it, and on the 26th of February the Second Republic was proclaimed.

  Louis Philippe and his family lived out their exile in Claremont, Surrey. He died there on the 26th of August 1850. He was first buried at St. Charles Borromeo Chapel in Weybridge, Surrey. In 1876, his remains and those of his wife were brought back to France and laid in the Chapelle royale de Dreux, the Orléans family necropolis that his mother had built in 1816 and that he himself had enlarged after her death. His daughter Louise-Marie had married the first ruler of Belgium, King Leopold I, in 1832, and among his grandchildren were King Leopold II of Belgium, Empress Carlota of Mexico, Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, and Queen Mercedes of Spain.