King Charles and his ultra ministers might nevertheless have remained in solid control if they had been shrewd and sensitive men, aware of the rise of public discontent and flexible enough to appease it. Instead, they forged stubbornly ahead on the road to disaster. Villèle, though a talented administrator, lacked creative imagination and charismatic appeal. As the years passed, his leadership was increasingly challenged even within his own ultra majority. A bitter personal feud between Villèle and Chateaubriand, who had entered politics after 1814 and had become the most colourful of the ultra politicians, undermined both the ministry and the dynasty. The liberal campaign organization "Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera" (“God helps those who help themselves”) coordinated the opposition’s preparations for the elections of 1827, which brought a sharp resurgence of liberal and moderate strength and led to Villèle’s downfall. The king patched together a disparate ministry of moderates and ultras headed by an obscure official, Jean-Baptiste-Sylvère Gay, vicomte de Martignac. But Martignac lacked Charles’s confidence and failed to win the support of the more moderate leftists in the Chamber. In 1829 the king brusquely dismissed him and restored the ultras to power.
The delayed consequences of this act were to be fatal to the dynasty. The king, instead of entrusting power to an able ultra such as Villèle or a popular one such as Chateaubriand, chose a personal favourite, Jules-Auguste-Armand-Marie, prince de Polignac, a fanatic reactionary. The makeup of the cabinet, which included several members of the most bigoted faction of “ultra-ultras,” seemed to indicate the king’s determination to polarize politics. That, in any case, was the immediate result. On the left the mood turned aggressively hostile; the republicans of Paris began to organize; an Orleanist faction emerged, looking to a constitutional monarchy headed by the king’s cousin, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’Orléans. The liberal banker Jacques Laffitte supplied funds for a new opposition daily, Le National, edited by a young and vigorous team whose most notable member was Adolphe Thiers. A confrontation of some sort seemed inevitable.
Some of Polignac’s ministers urged a royal coup d’état at once, before the rejuvenated opposition could grow too strong. Instead, the king procrastinated for several months, offering no clear lead or firm policy. When the Chamber met at last in March 1830, its majority promptly voted an address to the throne denouncing the ministry. The king retaliated by dissolving the Chamber and ordering new elections in July. Both Charles and Polignac hoped that pressure on the electors, plus foreign policy successes, might shape the outcome. Such a success was won at just the opportune moment: news came that Algiers had fallen to a French expeditionary force sent to punish the bey for assorted transgressions. But even this brilliant victory could not divert the fury of the king’s critics. The opposition won 274 seats, the ministry 143. When Charles chose not to substitute a moderate for Polignac and accept the role of constitutional monarch, the risk was great that a royal coup d’état would leave the Charter of 1814 in tatters. King and ministers prepared a set of decrees that dissolved the newly elected Chamber, further restricted the already narrow suffrage, and stripped away the remaining liberty of the press. These July Ordinances, made public on the 26th, completed the polarization process and ensured that the confrontation would be violent. The revolution of 1830
The July Revolution was a monument to the ineptitude of Charles X and his advisers. At the outset, few of the king’s critics imagined it possible to overthrow the regime; they hoped merely to get rid of Polignac. As for the king, he naively ignored the possibility of serious trouble. No steps were taken to reinforce the army garrison in Paris; no contingency plans were prepared. Instead, Charles went off to the country to hunt, leaving the capital weakly defended. During the three days known to Frenchmen as les Trois Glorieuses (July 27–29), protest was rapidly transmuted into insurrection; barricades went up in the streets, manned by workers, students, and petty bourgeois citizens (some of them former members of the National Guard, which Charles, in pique, had disbanded in 1827). On July 29 some army units began to fraternize with the insurgents. The king, on July 30, consented at last to dismiss Polignac and to annul the July Ordinances; but the gesture came too late. Paris was in the hands of the rebels, and plans for a new regime were crystallizing rapidly.
As the insurrection developed, two rival factions had emerged. The republicans—mainly workers and students—gained control of the streets and took over the Hôtel de Ville, where on July 29 they set up a municipal commission. They looked to the venerable General Lafayette, commander of the National Guard, as their symbolic leader. The constitutional monarchists had their headquarters at the newspaper Le National; their candidate for the throne was Louis-Philippe. He was at first reluctant to take the risk, fearing failure and renewed exile; Adolphe Thiers undertook the task of persuading him and succeeded. On July 31 Louis-Philippe made his way through a largely hostile crowd to the Hôtel de Ville and confronted the republicans. His cause was won by Lafayette, who found a constitutional monarchy safer than the risks of Jacobin rule; Lafayette appeared on the balcony with Louis-Philippe and, wrapped in a tricolour flag, embraced the duke as the crowd cheered. Two days later Charles X abdicated at last, though on condition that the throne pass to his grandson, “the miracle child.” But the parliament, meeting on August 7, declared the throne vacant and on August 9 proclaimed Louis-Philippe “king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the nation.” The July Monarchy
The renovated regime (often called the July Monarchy or the bourgeois monarchy) rested on an altered political theory and a broadened social base. Divine right gave way to popular sovereignty; the social centre of gravity shifted from the landowning aristocracy to the wealthy bourgeoisie. The Charter of 1814 was retained but no longer as a royal gift to the nation; it was revised by the Chamber of Deputies and in its new form imposed on the king. Censorship was abolished; the Tricolor was restored as the national flag, and the National Guard was resuscitated. Roman Catholicism was declared to be simply the religion “of the majority of Frenchmen,” the voting age was lowered to 25, and the property qualification was reduced to include all who paid a direct tax of 200 (formerly 300) francs. The suffrage was thus doubled, from about 90,000 to almost 200,000.
The new king seemed admirably suited to this new constitutional system. The “Citizen King” was reputed to be a liberal whose tastes and sympathies coincided with those of the upper bourgeoisie. He had spent the Revolutionary years in exile but was out of sympathy with the irreconcilable émigrés; and since his return, his house in Paris had been a gathering place for the opposition. Yet, in spite of appearances, Louis-Philippe was not prepared to accept the strictly symbolic role of a monarch who (in Thiers’s phrase) “reigns but does not govern.” His authority, he believed, rested on heredity and not merely on the will of the Chamber; his proper function was to participate actively in decision making and not merely to appoint ministers who would govern in his name. As time went by, he was increasingly inclined to choose ministers who shared his view of the royal power. The Orleanist system thus rested on a basic ambiguity about the real locus of authority.