France's Citizen King rose on barricades and fell to them eighteen years later
Louis Philippe took the French crown in 1830 after Parisians barricaded the streets against Charles X. He styled himself King of the French, not of France, to signal that his power came from the people. In February 1848 the same kind of street uprising drove him into exile in Britain.
Restored after Napoleon's fall, the Bourbons faced a changed country: revolutionary ideals, a merchant class grown powerful and Napoleon's code and bureaucracy all survived. Louis XVIII mostly accepted this, but his brother Charles X, crowned at Reims in May 1825 with old-regime splendour, tried to compensate aristocrats for revolutionary losses and leaned hard to the right. The July Revolution ended the main Bourbon line, and on 9 August 1830 the more liberal Orléans branch took over in the person of Louis Philippe.
He promised the juste milieu, a middle course between reactionaries and radicals, dropped much royal pomp and surrounded himself with bankers and merchants. The revised Charter of 1830 curbed the king's power to decree laws and backed religious equality for Catholics and Protestants. Reform proved thinner than it looked. The electorate roughly doubled, from 94,000 under Charles X to over 200,000 by 1848, but voting depended on tax payments, so it still covered only about one percent of the population and favoured the wealthy bourgeoisie.
Conservatives ran the government. The banker Casimir Perier broke up republican secret societies and unions and disbanded the National Guard when it leaned radical. In 1834 the regime outlawed the word republican itself. Reformers such as the journalist Adolphe Thiers never gained the upper hand, and François Guizot's ministry pursued protective tariffs, handed railway and mining contracts to allies and gave workers no right to organise. To those shut out of the vote by the tax threshold, Guizot's reported advice was to get rich. Abroad, the king cultivated friendship with Britain and pushed the conquest of Algeria.
Pressure came from both flanks: Legitimists wanted the elder Bourbons back, while republicans and socialists grew stronger. Late in his reign Louis Philippe turned rigid and refused to drop the deeply unpopular Guizot. The February Revolution of 1848 toppled him and created the Second Republic. His was the last Bourbon-Orléans monarchy in France, though Napoleon's nephew would restore a throne as Napoleon III from 1852 to 1870.
Source: July Monarchy
