Do you not feel … that the earth is trembling again in Europe? Do you not feel … a whiff of revolution in the air? Can you be sure what will happen in France, a year, a month, perhaps a day from now? You cannot; but what you do know is that there is a tempest on the horizon, and that it is bearing down on you.
Alexis de Tocqueville, to the Chamber of Deputies
IT WAS SAID of the returning Bourbons that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. In many cases this was very largely true, but it did not altogether apply to King Louis XVIII. He would doubtless have voted for absolute monarchy if he had had the chance – during the ancien régime he had employed a domestic staff of 390 – but twenty-three years of exile, first in the Low Countries, then in Koblenz, Verona, Blankenburg in Brunswick (where he occupied a two-bedroom apartment over a shop), Courland (in modern Latvia), Warsaw, Sweden and Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire had taught him that absolute monarchy had gone for good. His first return to post-Empire France had been cut dramatically short by the Hundred Days; his second was something of a triumph. He was welcomed at Calais by an enthusiastically cheering crowd – which included, for some unaccountable reason, a party of virgins in white – after which he boarded his carriage and was pulled, not by horses but by the local populace, to a service of thanksgiving in the cathedral.*
On that first return, with his arrival at Cambrai on 26 June 1815, Louis had issued a proclamation promising that those who had served Napoleon during the Hundred Days, ‘apart from the instigators’, would not be punished. Three days later the Duke of Wellington, then British ambassador in Paris, received a delegation proposing to put a foreign prince on the French throne, but he quickly sent them packing. ‘Louis XVIII’, he maintained, ‘represents the best way to preserve the integrity of France.’ And when the king entered his capital on 8 July he was given another rousing welcome, to the point where the duke complained testily that the continuous cheering prevented him from hearing a word His Majesty said. After his second return Louis was determined to stick to his Charter of 1814, but resigned most of his duties to his council. All he wanted was a nice quiet reign, with regular supplies of sufficient food and drink and ample opportunities to swap risqué stories with his friends. To ensure this he was perfectly happy to accept the constitution – though he drew the line at the tricolour cockade – and was delighted to have as his prime minister Prince Talleyrand, who had stood up so brilliantly at the Council of Vienna to champion his defeated country.
If only Louis’s family and friends had been like him; alas, they were not. After a quarter of a century in obscurity they longed for vengeance. Talleyrand was succeeded by the Duc de Richelieu, who was accepted by the royal family despite the fact that he had formerly governed the Crimea under his close friend the Tsar. The king’s younger brother, the Duc d’Artois, surrounded himself with a fanatical court of his own, his two sons, the dukes of Angoulême and Berry, talking treason from morning till night. Berry was especially vindictive towards Napoleon’s marshals: ‘Let’s go marshal hunting,’ he used to say.* Many of the king’s friends would have welcomed a return of the Terror, with the gallows of the Old Regime substituting for the guillotine of the Convention, and there were indeed all too many executions. ‘If these gentlemen had full freedom’, the king remarked, ‘they would end by purging me as well.’ This wave of violence was particularly prevalent in the south, where there were at least three hundred lynchings and where, in Marseille, a regiment of Napoleon’s Mamelukes preparing to return to Egypt were massacred in their barracks. Meanwhile, in January 1816, all members of the House of Bonaparte were banned from entering France or owning property in the country.
The situation was made more desperate still by the attitude of the allies. The Treaty of Paris that was signed in November 1815 demanded a retraction of France’s borders to those of 1790, costing her much valuable territory in the north and east. Then there was to be an army of occupation, to remain for at least three years and possibly five, for which she would be obliged to pay some 150 million francs a year. The French saw the treaty in much the same light as, a century later, the defeated Germans of 1919 would see the Treaty of Versailles. ‘After what I’ve consented to,’ remarked the Duc de Richelieu after he had signed it, ‘I deserve to go to the scaffold.’
Nobody – except the tiny minority of ardent royalists – liked the monarchy much; but the people of France were prepared to put up with it simply because they were exhausted, and by now sickened by the seemingly constant bloodshed which had left relatively few families in the whole country untouched. Like their ruler, they wanted a quiet life; and a wise government would have given them just that. But the royalists could not bear to see men trained by the Revolution and the Empire occupying high positions in the state – and performing their duties, in all probability, a good deal more efficiently than their royalist predecessors. For some time Louis, assisted by his enlightened chief minister Elie Decazes, was able to keep them under control; but then, on St Valentine’s Day 1820, the Duc de Berry was stabbed to death as he emerged from the Paris Opera. The assassin proved to be ‘a little weasel-faced mongrel’ and rabid Bonapartist who had worked in Napoleon’s stables on Elba; and the ‘ultras’, as they liked to call themselves, were instantly up in arms. The true assassins, they claimed, were those who had bestowed governmental office on the enemies of the Bourbons and the hirelings of Bonaparte.
With all his immediate family in an uproar around him, Louis realised that Decazes would have to go. He bestowed on him a dukedom and appointed him ambassador in London. Richelieu returned to power, supported by the ultras, and immediately clamped down on individual liberties and the freedom of the press. But not even he could last long; when, seven months after the death of her husband, the Duchesse de Berry gave birth to a posthumous son – thus further securing the future of the Bourbon dynasty – the jubilant royalists forced his resignation. They were led by the Comte d’Artois, the king’s brother, who had previously promised Richelieu his support; when Richelieu complained, Louis replied: ‘What did you expect? He plotted against Louis XVI, he plotted against me, he plotted against you. Soon he’ll be plotting against himself.’
Louis was to last another four years, during which a little more sunshine was brought into his life by a lady named Zoé Victoire Talon, Comtesse du Cayla, who visited him every Wednesday.* But in the spring of 1824 his health began rapidly to fail; he was by this time fatter than ever, and a martyr to gout. In the summer his legs were attacked by gangrene, and his neck became so weak that it could no longer support the weight of his head. He was obliged to rest it instead on a cushion in front of him on his desk, which made it difficult indeed for him to maintain the royal dignity during audiences. He died on 16 September – he was the last French monarch to die while still on the throne – and the Comte d’Artois became King Charles X.
The new king was already sixty-seven. He had been the close friend – some said the lover – of Marie Antoinette, with whom he had regularly taken part in the amateur theatricals staged in her private theatre at Versailles. With the beginning of the Revolution he and his family had hurriedly left France at the insistence of his brother the king, and after the death of his wife (Marie-Thérèse of Savoy) in 1804 had spent his years of exile in Edinburgh and London† with his mistress Louise de Polastron, generously funded by King George III. The moment he heard of Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 he had hurried back to France. He arrived there nearly three months before Louis, for whom in the interim he had acted as Lieutenant General of the Kingdom. During that time he secretly created an ultra-royalist secret police, which was to report back to him, without the king’s knowledge, for the next five years.
From the very outset of his reign, it was clear that Charles X was a disaster. Whereas his brother had had the good sense to realise that the days of the ancien régime were gone for ever, for Charles it was as if not only the last thirty-five years but the last several centuries had never happened. On 29 May 1825 he had himself anointed in Reims Cathedral, a ceremony which Louis XVIII had scrupulously avoided; and he and his prime minister, Joseph Villèle – ditchwater-dull but ever prepared to do his master’s bidding – then retreated so far into the past that even the most ardent of the ultras were moved to protest. When, for example, the proposed law of sacrilege made the theft of sacred vessels punishable by the severing of the hand from the wrist before execution, the historian Chateaubriand remarked on the idiocy of governing as though it were still the year 800, pointing out that if the monarchy continued to make mistakes on such a scale, a republic would surely result. The government grew more and more unpopular until it was beaten at the polls and Villèle had to resign. ‘Your forsaking Monsieur de Villèle’, the dauphin told his father, ‘means that you are taking the first step down from your throne.’
In January 1830 the political situation in France still seems to have been sufficiently stable to allow a foreign adventure, this time a military expedition to Algeria – ostensibly to put an end to worsening piracy in the Mediterranean, but in fact to distract attention from domestic troubles. (There was also an unfortunate incident in which the Turkish viceroy, furious at the French failure to pay debts arising from Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition, had struck the French consul in the face with his fly-swatter.) French troops invaded the country and on 5 July 1830 hoisted the tricolour over Algiers; they were to remain there till 1962.
But Charles had other things on his mind. At a meeting of the Chamber of Deputies on 18 March 1830, 221 of its members – a majority of 30 – voted in favour of an address expressing the nation’s anxiety at the course the government was taking. The king replied on the following day by dissolving the Chamber, calling for new elections, and shortly afterwards by suspending the constitution. Then, on 25 July, from his residence at Saint-Cloud, he issued four ordinances which further censored the press, dissolved the new Chamber that had just been elected, changed the electoral system in the government’s favour and called for further elections in September. Anyone except himself and his prime minister, Jules de Polignac – who claimed to be receiving regular visits from the Virgin Mary – could have seen that this was political suicide: ‘still another government’, as Chateaubriand put it, ‘hurling itself down from the towers of Notre Dame’.
Chateaubriand was proved right all too soon. When Le Moniteur Universel, the government newspaper, published the ordinances on 26 July, a rival paper, Le National, defied the censorship and published a call to revolt. It was signed by forty-eight journalists from eleven newspapers, led by Le National’s founder, a certain Louis-Adolphe Thiers. Born in Marseille in 1797 and only an inch or two over five feet in height, Thiers had first qualified as a lawyer; but his extraordinary energy, combined with his intelligence, his wit and his way with words, made him a natural journalist. In 1823 – by which time, at the age of twenty-six, he had already written the first two volumes of his History of the French Revolution* – he had met Talleyrand, who had given up all hope for the Bourbon restoration and who saw in the young man a kindred spirit whom he could shape, he believed, into something like his own image. We can imagine him following with interest and approbation the events to follow.
On 28 July the king – who seemed to grow more idiotic with every day that passed – instructed the prefect of police to close down Le National, and one of the last survivors of Napoleon’s former marshals, Auguste Frédéric Marmont,* to re-establish order; but neither command could be carried out. The prefect arrived with workmen who dismantled the printing presses and locked the building; but as soon as he left, the same workers unlocked it again and quickly put the presses back into service. Meanwhile crowds gathered in the gardens of the Palais-Royal; barricades were raised; a group of students unfurled the tricolour on the towers of Notre-Dame. Soon the insurgents had gained control of the entire eastern end of the city. Marmont, receiving no orders or supplies, was powerless; 40,000 of the best French soldiers were away in Algeria and a steady trickle of those under his command was going over to the other side. On the morning of the 29th two regiments followed, and in a few hours the whole army was in flight, from the Tuileries to Saint-Cloud. From his house in the Rue Saint-Florentin on the corner of Place Louis Seize – now the Place de la Concorde – the seventy-six-year-old Talleyrand contemplated the steady procession up the Champs-Elysées. He took out his watch, and announced to his companions: ‘Twenty-ninth of July, five minutes past noon: the elder branch of the House of Bourbon has ceased to reign.’
It was in fact not till 2 August that Charles X, surrounded by his family, wrote out his abdication. Even then, he had not entirely given up hope for the future of his line: he appended a proposal that his ten-year-old grandson, the posthumous son of the Duc de Berry, should be immediately proclaimed King Henry V while the Duke of Orléans, as Lieutenant General of the Realm, should act as regent. To this suggestion he received no answer. A considered reply would perhaps have been more polite; but the fact was – as anyone but Charles would have seen – that after the events and the bloodshed of the past three days another Bourbon king would have been out of the question. Even if Orléans had accepted the proposal, the inevitable clashes between the two sides of the family would have made his task impossible; and if the boy had died during the regency he would instantly have been accused of poisoning him. A fortnight later the former King Charles X and his family left – hotly pursued by their creditors – for England, on a packet steamer put at their disposal by his successor.*
Louis-Philippe d’Orléans was only a remote cousin of Charles; to find a legitimate royal antecedent we have to go back to Louis XIII, who was in fact his great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was the son of Philippe Egalité, who during the Revolution had voted for the execution of Louis XVI but whose own life had subsequently ended on the guillotine. Louis-Philippe himself had fought with conspicuous courage at Jemappes and later at Valmy, rising to the rank of lieutenant general. The years of exile had not been easy for him. In 1793 he had been obliged to take refuge with his commander, General Dumouriez, in the Austrian camp;† inevitably – though quite unjustly – his reputation had suffered. With his father and two brothers he had kept to the shadows, first in Switzerland and then in Germany, where he had taught at a boys’ boarding school at Reichenau on the upper Rhine. This he had to leave in something of a hurry (having made the school cook pregnant‡) and so in 1796 he moved to Scandinavia, staying for almost a year in a remote village in Lapland as the guest of the village priest and travelling widely within the Arctic Circle. There followed four years in the United States, visiting Philadelphia (where he was reunited with his two brothers), Nashville, New York and Boston, during which he met Alexander Hamilton and even George Washington.§
In the autumn of 1797 the three brothers decided to return to Europe and travelled to New Orleans, planning to sail first to Havana and then on to Spain. Stopped in the Gulf of Mexico by a British warship, they were taken to Havana anyway – but were quite unable to find a passage onwards to Europe. After a year in Cuba they were expelled by the Spanish authorities, and eventually found a ship bound for Nova Scotia; from there they had to return to New York, from which, finally, they were able to reach England, arriving in January 1800. There they were to stay for the next fifteen years. Louis-Philippe had hoped to marry the Princess Elizabeth, the sixth child and third daughter of George III; but her mother Queen Charlotte drew the line at a Catholic son-in-law so he had to settle for Princess Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily. The choice was a little awkward perhaps, since she was the niece of Marie Antoinette; but it proved the happiest of marriages. She was to bear him ten children in swift succession.
But Maria Amalia was not the only woman in Louis-Philippe’s life. There was another, a good deal closer and perhaps even more important: his sister Adélaïde. She was by no means a beauty, and never seemed much interested in marriage; but she was every bit as intelligent as her brother, and possessed quite remarkable political judgement. For the first fifteen years of their exile the two had been separated, but in 1808 – the year before his marriage – she had made her way to England to find him, and for the rest of their lives they were seldom apart. By an almost incredible stroke of good fortune, Maria Amalia liked her from the start, and the two became best friends; whenever he was away from home, they kept each other company and he would write joint letters addressed to them both.
The question that now arose was a simple one: was he or was he not prepared to accept the position proposed for him by King Charles X? He was not, and for one reason only. He knew that there was no conceivable future for the Bourbons; he would – he must – be king himself. But in such a case, as the monarchists, the republicans and even his own wife and sister objected, he would be a usurper: one who had been trusted to preserve the throne for the rightful king but who had pilfered the crown for himself. Perhaps they were right; but as he persuasively argued, France needed a king, it needed a strong one, it needed him now – and there was no one else available. Besides, he would be a different sort of king, a king without a court. He would not even be King of France; he would be King of the French. (Just who, asked his enemies, had consulted the French about this?) But he knew that he was by no means without support. Since the Revolution there had grown up a new and vocal middle class, a class of industrialists, bankers and businessmen, intrigued by the prospect that the franchise was to be doubled to 200,000 and perhaps even seeing themselves with seats in the newly constituted House of Peers provided for in the Charter.* They, he was sure, would back him to the hilt.
He had one especially valuable champion: Adolphe Thiers, who had already been active in the removal of Charles X and was now convinced that Louis-Philippe of Orléans was the only man to succeed him. Thiers carefully drew up an eight-point manifesto, and plastered it on posters all over Paris. It read as follows:
Charles X can never again enter Paris; he has caused the people’s blood to be shed.
A republic would expose us to dreadful divisions; it would embroil us with Europe.
The Duke of Orleans is a prince devoted to the cause of the Revolution.
The Duke of Orleans has never fought against us.
The Duke of Orleans was at Jemappes.
The Duke of Orleans has carried the tricolour under fire; the Duke of Orleans can carry it again, we want no other.
The Duke of Orleans has declared himself; he accepts the Charter as we have always wanted it.
It is from the French people that he will hold his crown.
Only the penultimate claim was a little premature. Louis-Philippe had not declared himself – so Thiers leaped on his horse and rode off then and there to the duke’s house in Neuilly. He has left his own account of what followed. He was disappointed to find the duke absent, but the duchess and her sister-in-law made him welcome and he put the question to them. It was Adélaïde who made the all-important reply: ‘If you think that the adhesion of our family can be of use to the Revolution, we give it gladly.’ ‘Today, Madame,’ he replied, ‘you have gained the crown for your House.’
The following afternoon Louis-Philippe rode on a snow-white horse in a short procession from the Palais-Royal to the Hôtel de Ville, from which the municipal commission and the seventy-five-year-old Lafayette – whom many were pressing to accept the presidency of a new republic – were acting as the provisional government of Paris. He was, as he well knew, risking his life. The crowds were dense – denser still as the ride went on – and by no means all were friendly. They doubtless contained royalists, republicans and Bonapartists, many of whom would be only too pleased to have done with the House of Orléans for good. More by good luck than anything else he reached the Hôtel de Ville without incident, to find Lafayette on the steps waiting to receive him and to lead him into the Great Hall; but there again his reception was little more than lukewarm, while ominous shouts of ‘Vive la République!’ and ‘A bas le duc d’Orléans!’ could be heard from the windows looking out on the Place de Grève. It was Lafayette who came to the rescue. With his unfailing gift for the dramatic gesture he seized the corner of a large tricolour flag, gave the other end to Louis-Philippe, and the two advanced side by side on to the balcony, where they warmly embraced each other. It was all that was necessary: Lafayette’s towering reputation did the rest. Instantly, the shouts changed to ‘Vive le Roi!’ The game was won. Then and there, Louis-Philippe was acclaimed by the people as King of the French.*
During these stirring events Maria Amalia and Adélaïde were still at Neuilly. Clearly they had now to set off for Paris without delay. But the journey was still not without risk, and risks at such a moment were not to be taken. As soon as it was dark, therefore, they and the children crept out of the park at Neuilly and hailed a passing omnibus, on which there was little or no chance of their being recognised. They arrived safely at the Palais-Royal just before midnight. It was perhaps the only recorded occasion when the family of a man just acclaimed as ruler has used public transport to rejoin him.
There could have been no greater contrast between Louis-Philippe and his predecessor. Charles X had been every inch a king – an absolute monarch, even though a disastrously unsuccessful one. Louis-Philippe had never known a court worthy of the name; all he had known was war, exile and poverty. But just for those reasons he saw himself as the perfect answer to France’s present dilemma: a citizen king whose father had voted for the execution of his fourth cousin Louis XVI and then himself ended on the guillotine, he was clearly the perfect compromise between the Revolution and the monarchy. Elaborate protocol and splendid uniforms he avoided as far as possible; he preferred the idea of strolling down the streets with an umbrella, raising his hat to his subjects as he went. It was what we should now recognise as the Scandinavian style, appearing in Europe for the first time; if bicycles had existed, he would surely have ridden one.* He believed in peace, and wanted no more foreign adventures, in Algeria or anywhere else.
A foreign policy, on the other hand, was essential; and that, for Louis-Philippe, meant the closest possible friendship with Britain. It was not just that he had lived there for years and spoke almost perfect English; more important, Britain was exactly what he wanted France to be – a constitutional monarchy founded on liberty. Most of his leading collaborators agreed with him; so did the most venerable of them all, Prince Talleyrand. Talleyrand had represented the revolutionary government in London some forty years before, and several of his old English friends were still alive; now, at the age of seventy-six, he was appointed ambassador, and London gave him an enthusiastic welcome.* He differed from other French ambassadors, however, in one important respect; apart from his official despatches, he also kept up a long private correspondence with Adélaïde, knowing that she would show his letters to the king. Successive foreign ministers objected strongly to this arrangement, but there was nothing they could do.
Talleyrand arrived in London in September 1830 – and immediately found himself in the middle of a crisis. Belgium, which had been combined with Holland by the Congress of Vienna, rose in revolt and demanded independence;† at a conference held in November in London, dominated by Talleyrand and Lord Palmerston, the separation of the two countries was recognised. But now a problem arose: a new country needed a new king. Louis-Philippe wisely refused the suggestion that the crown should go to his own son the Duc de Nemours; the rest of Europe, he knew, would never stand for it. The other leading contender was Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, whose candidature was not helped by the fact that he was a widower who had been married to the daughter of George IV, and was consequently the uncle of Princess Victoria, heir to the British throne; but objections were at least partly silenced when Talleyrand suggested that Leopold should marry one of Louis-Philippe’s three daughters. None of them was particularly keen, but the eldest, Louise, took the plunge and eventually presented her husband – who was twice her age – with two boys and a girl. Leopold was duly selected, and the future of the Belgian royal family was assured.
The two completely separate events of 5–6 June 1832, one tragic and one comic, may not have been particularly important in the history of France, but are perhaps still worth briefly recording here. The 5th saw the funeral of the radical nationalist deputy, General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, who had died a few days before of cholera – an epidemic was then raging in Paris – and the extreme left-wing opposition decided on a public demonstration in the hopes that it might lead to something more. They were not disappointed. The situation soon got out of hand, and for the next two days Paris was virtually under mob rule.* The king hurriedly left Saint-Cloud for Paris, where he distinguished himself by his courage; two days later the situation was once again under control, but at the cost of 150 lives. Meanwhile on 6 June, 300 miles away in the Vendée, another insurrection occurred, engineered almost single-handedly by the quixotic and mildly ridiculous Duchesse de Berry – now disguised as a male peasant – on behalf of her son. Not surprisingly it failed to ignite and the duchess sought refuge at a house in Nantes, in a secret room behind a fireplace. Unfortunately the police who were tracking her down lit a fire in it, and she was forced to surrender. She was then imprisoned in the castle of Blaye on the west coast, where she was almost immediately discovered to be pregnant. The birth of her first child had delighted the monarchists; the imminent arrival of her second embarrassed them considerably and rather put paid to their attempt to portray her as a romantic martyr. But her honour was saved when she was allowed to invent a secret marriage to a chivalrous young nobleman from Naples – to which city she was consequently deported.
The reign of Louis-Philippe was never as calm and peaceful as he had hoped it would be. There were several more insurrections, in Paris, Lyon and elsewhere, all of which were put down without too much difficulty but with inevitable loss of life; there were constant changes of government – in the seven months between August 1834 and February 1835 France had five prime ministers – and on 28 July 1835 the king narrowly escaped assassination. He was riding out from the Tuileries to review the National Guard, accompanied by his three eldest sons and several of his marshals and ministers, and had reached the Boulevard du Temple when a volley of bullets was fired from an upper window. Eighteen people, including several bystanders, were killed outright; another twenty-two were wounded. Old Marshal Mortier was shot through the head, covering Thiers’s white trousers with blood; the Duc de Broglie, then prime minister, was hit in the chest and saved only by his Legion of Honour star. The king himself, however, received nothing but a light graze on the forehead and with his usual courage insisted on continuing the procession. Only at the end of the review in the Place Vendôme, when he fell into the arms of his wife and sister, did he burst into uncontrollable tears.
Meanwhile the National Guard had smashed its way into the house from which the shots had been fired, to discover a rack of twenty-five musket barrels, mounted on a wooden frame so that they could all be fired simultaneously. The assassin had fled, but was quickly found and arrested. He was Joseph Fieschi, a thirty-five-year-old Corsican Bonapartist who had joined forces with two republican terrorists, and had been seriously wounded in the head* by his own mildly ridiculous weapon, subsequently described by the press – in a phrase that has become almost a cliché in both French and English – as a machine infernale. After a show trial that was attended by Talleyrand himself, all three were publicly guillotined before a cheering crowd.
In January 1836 the government of the Duc de Broglie fell, largely because nobody could bear him. By this time Louis-Philippe had gone through seven prime ministers, including a count and four dukes; now at last his choice fell on the man who stood – if only figuratively – head and shoulders above all his predecessors, the commoner Adolphe Thiers. Still only thirty-nine, Thiers had completed the last eight volumes of his History of the Revolution in 1827; it had been much praised by Chateaubriand and Stendhal, but had found rather less favour in England.* Politically, he started with a major disadvantage: he had no vote. To qualify for the franchise, a man had to pay taxes of at least a thousand francs a year, which meant owning a quite considerable property. Fortunately Thiers was able to arrange for a loan of 100,000 francs, with which he bought a suitable house. In October 1830 he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies where, despite the heavy Provençal accent that he never lost, he developed into a superb speaker; according to Lamartine, ‘there was enough gunpowder in his nature to explode six governments’. In 1833 he was elected to the Académie Française at the almost unheard-of age of thirty-six.
But he failed to endear himself to the king. In June 1836 Louis-Philippe survived another assassination attempt – there would be seven altogether during his reign, something of a record – as a result of which he was persuaded not to be present at the inauguration of the Arc de Triomphe, begun by Napoleon but only just completed. The ceremony was performed by Thiers on 29 July,† by which time the relationship between the two men was becoming seriously strained, largely because of the king’s insistence on conducting his own foreign policy. Thiers wished France to follow the example of Britain, where the prime minister was responsible for all diplomatic and military affairs, but Louis-Philippe would not hear of it; Thiers felt that he had no choice but to resign – which, the following August, he did.
His two successors, Count Louis-Mathieu Molé and François Guizot, were also outstanding figures, though very different in character: one a Parisian Catholic, the other a Protestant from Nîmes. Molé had been a staunch Bonapartist in his youth, while Guizot – if only because he was six years younger – had escaped that taint and was a committed royalist. During the years of the Empire he had stayed well clear of politics and devoted himself to literature, becoming professor of modern history at the Sorbonne and producing a translation of Gibbon’s six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; during the Hundred Days he had followed Louis XVIII into exile in Ghent. There was, however, one formative experience that he shared with Molé, and shared also with their sovereign: all three of their fathers had died on the guillotine.
Soon after Molé had succeeded Thiers as prime minister, in April 1837, the engagement was announced between the king’s eldest son, the Duke of Orléans, and Princess Helena of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Blond and blue-eyed, the groom was unusually handsome, and despite somewhat aggressive political ambitions was a good deal more popular than his father. The betrothal was celebrated by an amnesty of all political prisoners and by the reopening of the Palace of Versailles. The building had been sacked during the Revolution and most of its contents sold by auction; it was now restored (and where necessary rebuilt) at the king’s personal expense, its completion celebrated by a banquet for 1,500 guests. The marriage proved an outstandingly happy one, and over the next five years the princess was to bear her husband two sons, thus ensuring the Orléans line. But all too soon came tragedy. On 13 July 1842 the young duke, still only thirty-one, was killed in a carriage accident. The family never really recovered from the blow. ‘It should have been me!’ the king would murmur over and over again.
The year 1840 saw the second ministry of Thiers – who had by this time married the daughter of his creditor and so expunged his 100,000-franc debt. Like his first ministry, it was short-lived, lasting only seven months, but it gave rise to one magnificent event – the return to France of the body of Napoleon Bonaparte. Guizot, who had recently been appointed ambassador in London – all his life he had been a passionate anglophile – was instructed to obtain permission from Lord Palmerston to bring it back from St Helena. To Palmerston the idea seemed mildly ridiculous, but he could hardly refuse; and on 7 July the Duc de Joinville, Louis-Philippe’s third son, was despatched in a frigate to the island to fetch it. After the ship docked at Cherbourg the coffin was loaded on to a black-painted barge and carried slowly up the Seine as far as Courbevoie, where it was transferred to an immense carriage draped in purple velvet and hung with battle flags. On 15 December it was trundled slowly down the Champs-Elysées to the Invalides, where the king was waiting to receive it. Twenty years later the work was completed in the crypt beneath the dome, where the gargantuan sarcophagus can still be seen today, magnificently out of proportion to the pintsize body resting within it.
Guizot’s embassy in London proved all too short. He was recalled to Paris in October to join a government headed by the seventy-one-year-old Jean-de-Dieu Soult; but Soult, after a magnificent career that had taken him from being one of Napoleon’s marshals – he had been chief of staff to the emperor through the Waterloo campaign – to three times prime minister, was now declining fast, and within a short time Guizot, though technically only minister for foreign affairs, was effectively in control. It was he, therefore, who was responsible for the arrangements for the visit of Queen Victoria in September 1843 – the first time a British sovereign had set foot on French soil since the Field of the Cloth of Gold. After Princess Louise’s marriage to Prince Leopold there had been two more alliances between Louis-Philippe’s children and members of the House of Coburg, so the families felt closely related; and to emphasise the personal and domestic nature of the meeting it was agreed that Victoria and Albert should not even go to Paris; they stayed at Louis-Philippe’s country house, the Château d’Eu near Le Tréport. The visit lasted for five full days and was a huge success, to the point where the king actually suggested that it should become an annual event, which it very nearly did. He himself visited England in 1844 – the first time a French king had stepped on English soil since the captive John II had been taken there as a prisoner after the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 – and Victoria was briefly at the Château d’Eu again in 1845. Then, however, the exchange stopped. Events were closing in.
In Paris, and indeed in France as a whole, dissatisfaction was once more on the march. With increasing age the Citizen-King, as he still liked to call himself, was veering further and further to the right, determined as always to govern as well as to reign and to choose his own ministers. Thanks to men of the calibre of Thiers and Guizot and to the extremely limited suffrage – which meant that he had the voters on his side – he was able to limp on for a little longer, but citizen-kings are almost by definition devoid of charisma and somehow he had never been really popular. Now, with the republicans, the royalist supporters of the Bourbons and the Bonapartists all clamouring for his abdication, he was beginning to fear that his reign could be approaching its end. It might have been thought that with Napoleon now dead for nearly a quarter of a century and his son for some fifteen years, the Bonapartist threat had diminished; but Louis-Napoleon, the Emperor’s nephew,* had already attempted two coups d’état, the first in 1835 and another in 1840. He had then been sentenced to life imprisonment; but in 1846, with his political ambitions as firm as ever, he had escaped to England – where he could be trusted to stir up trouble. That same year France had suffered a serious financial crisis and a disastrous harvest. The still rudimentary railway system hindered rather than assisted attempts to provide aid, and the peasant rebellions that followed were mercilessly put down. Perhaps a third of Paris was on the dole, and writers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (‘Property is theft!’) were not making things any easier.
For Louis-Philippe personally, the greatest blow – and one that may well have lost him his throne – was the death, on the last day of 1847, of his sister Adélaïde. She was just seventy. As may be imagined, he was devastated. The two had met every evening in his study for long discussions on the problems of the day. For eighteen years he had relied implicitly on her wisdom, her courage, her unfailing political instincts; now, just when he was to need them most, they were gone. He was still in shock when, just six weeks later, the storm broke.
The year 1848 was the year of revolutions; that which was about to occur in Paris would be one of at least fourteen in Europe.* But for some time Louis-Philippe found it hard to understand that a kingdom like his own, itself founded on a revolution, should be overthrown by another. In the event of a genuine uprising, on the other hand, he was far from certain of his ability to deal with it. He worried in particular over the loyalty of the National Guard. This was separate from the army and was used for policing and for a military reserve. It had previously enjoyed his total trust – having performed magnificently, for example, during the riots of 1832. But times had changed: although the National Guard was much as it had always been, popular feeling had swung against the monarchy and the Guard had swung with it.
And there was another problem. Because political demonstrations had been prohibited, the various opposition parties had begun to hold a series of fund-raising ‘banquets’ – which also of course provided a legal outlet for criticism of the regime. So dangerous did these occasions become that in February 1848 they too were banned. For the Parisians this was the last straw. At noon on 22 February they swarmed out into the streets, shouting, ‘A bas Guizot!’ and ‘Vive la Réforme!’. It was not long before fighting broke out. On the following day Guizot resigned, and a large crowd gathered outside the Foreign Ministry. An officer tried to block their path, but those in front were being pushed by those behind. He then gave the order to fix bayonets, and while this was being done a soldier, possibly accidentally, fired his musket – at which his fellows lost their heads and began firing into the crowd. Fifty-two people were killed. And now the barricades went up, and chaos reigned. Just as the king had feared, the National Guard began to crumble; and it became clear to him that if he were to save his throne he must order the army to fire on the Guard – a step which would effectively lead to civil war. This – like Louis XVI in 1789 – he refused to contemplate. The only alternative was to abdicate, which on 24 February 1848 he did – in favour of his nine-year-old grandson the Comte de Paris.
He had hoped to retire to the Château d’Eu; but early the following morning he was told that his grandson had been rejected and a republic proclaimed. What his own position would be in this republic he had no idea, and no intention of finding out. He and Maria Amalia, with their daughter-in-law the Duchesse de Nemours and her children, and only fifteen francs between them, arrived that evening at Honfleur where, under impenetrable aliases and with the help of the British Consul in Le Havre, they boarded a ship for England. There, within hours of their arrival at Newhaven, they received a message from Queen Victoria offering them Claremont House in Surrey. They were shortly afterwards joined there by nearly all the rest of the family and their troubles seemed to be over; but all too soon tragedy struck again. The house had been uninhabited since 1817, and over the past thirty years the lead piping had poisoned the water supply. Nearly all the inhabitants were severely affected and to three members of the household the contamination proved fatal. The king lived another two years, but his health was by now declining fast. He died at Claremont on 26 August 1850. Maria Amalia survived there for another sixteen years, finally expiring in 1866, aged eighty-three.
Louis-Philippe, it comes as something of a surprise to realise, was one of the best kings France ever had – a king who deserved from his country far more than he ever received. He succeeded where all his predecessors had failed, presenting France with a viable constitutional monarchy which lasted for nearly twenty years and might well have endured a good while longer; he had given the French some of the happiest years in their history. His reward was exile, never again to see the country that he loved and for which he had worked so hard. Sadly and strangely, he has also been neglected by history: compared to Napoleon I and III, there are few books devoted to Louis-Philippe and Adélaïde. Those last two words are important: his sister’s contribution was always vital, to the point where arguments still continue as to whether, if she had lived, she might have saved the kingdom, giving her brother an injection of hope and strength at the moment when his confidence failed. We shall never know, but the question is academic. All that can be said is that their country owes the two of them a huge debt – and that that debt has been ill repaid.
* Considering that he already weighed well over seventeen stone, this was no mean achievement by the populace. The Prince Regent, fastening the Garter round his leg three days before, had said that it was like buckling it around anyone else’s waist.
* Marshal Michel Ney, ‘bravest of the brave’, who had had five horses killed under him at Waterloo, was executed by firing squad on 7 December 1815 on a charge of treason. Marshal Brune, Napoleon’s Governor of Provence, was butchered and thrown into the Rhône, where his body was used for target practice.
* It was rumoured that he inhaled snuff from her bosom, a fact which earned for her the nickname of la tabatière – the snuffbox.
† There is a blue plaque on the London house at 72 South Audley Street where he lived from 1805 to 1814.
* Another eight volumes were to follow four years later.
* Perhaps the king should have worried a bit about Marmont. The marshal had recently lost all his money in a hare-brained scheme that involved sewing sheep into overcoats.
* They went first to Lulworth Castle in Dorset, but soon moved to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. In the winter of 1832–3 Emperor Francis I invited them to Prague, but after his death in 1835 they made their way to Gorizia on the Mediterranean. It was there that Charles died of cholera on 6 November 1836.
† See p.213.
‡ So far as we know, this was the only casual affair of his life.
§ He also became friendly with an Indian chief, who accorded him the highest honour the tribe could bestow – sleeping in the chief’s wigwam between his grandmother and his aunt.
* See p.241.
* Though he did not technically become king until he took the oath in the Chamber of Deputies on 9 August.
* Alas, the idea did not work in practice. The poet Alfred de Vigny saw him return from a trial walk: ‘He arrived … in a dreadful state, with his waistcoat undone, his sleeves torn off, and his hat battered by the greetings he had exchanged in the depths of the crowd that submerged him.’
* His old club, the Travellers, took pity on his increasing infirmity and built him a special banister up the main staircase. It is marked by a brass plaque, and can still be seen today.
† The revolt had begun with a performance of Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. It dealt with the rebellion of Naples against Spain in 1647, and featured a stirring hymn to liberty. The audience began to riot as soon as they left the theatre, and the riot developed into a rebellion. It must be the only case in history of an opera having such an effect.
* This is the battle of the barricades described by Victor Hugo, who was caught up in it and made it the climax of Les Misérables.
* His head was subsequently examined by a brain specialist; a particularly unpleasant painting of it now hangs in the Musée Carnavalet. No. 50 Boulevard du Temple bears a commemorative plaque.
* The historian George Saintsbury wrote in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition): ‘Thiers’s historical work is marked by extreme inaccuracy, by prejudice which passes the limits of accidental unfairness, and by an almost complete indifference to the merits as compared with the successes of his heroes.’
† Louis-Philippe’s first public appearance after the assassination attempt was on 25 October, when the great obelisk from Luxor, gift of the Khedive Mohammed Ali, was erected in the Place de la Concorde.
* He was – or was assumed to be – the son of Napoleon’s brother Louis and Josephine’s daughter Hortense de Beauharnais.
* The first was in Palermo in January. In Italy alone, revolutions then occurred in Naples, Rome, Venice, Florence, Lucca, Parma, Modena and Milan; in northern and central Europe, apart from Paris, there would be uprisings in Vienna, Warsaw, Cracow and Budapest.