Three glorious days swapped Bourbon blood for Orléans popularity
France's July Revolution of 1830—les Trois Glorieuses—overthrew Bourbon King Charles X and raised his cousin Louis-Philippe of Orléans, restoring a constitutional July Monarchy on popular sovereignty instead of pure hereditary right. It was framed as a second French Revolution after 1789–99.
The Bourbons owed their return to the diplomats. After Napoleon's surrender in 1814, the Congress of Vienna was steered by Metternich for Austria, Castlereagh for Britain, Tsar Alexander I and King Frederick William III of Prussia. Talleyrand, arguing he had served Napoleon only under pressure, won France its 1791 borders and a restored monarchy under Louis XVIII, who was obliged to grant a constitutional charter. When the childless Louis died in September 1824, his more reactionary brother Charles, then 66, succeeded him and was crowned at Reims in May 1825.
Goodwill evaporated within months. A law making desecration of the Eucharist a capital crime looked like pandering to the Church, and compensation for property seized since 1789 was painted by opponents, many of them Bonapartists, as a plan to humiliate those who had stayed in France. In April 1827 deputies threw out a change to inheritance law, the king was met with cold silence and kept hats at a Royal Guard review on the Champ de Mars, a censorship bill had to be withdrawn, and on 30 April Charles disbanded the Paris National Guard.
The final clash came in 1830. On 17 March deputies passed the Address of the 221, a vote of no confidence in the king and his minister Polignac; Charles dissolved the chamber, but July elections gave the liberals a 274 to 143 majority. On Sunday 25 July he issued the July Ordinances, dissolving the new chamber, suspending press freedom and cutting commercial men out of future voting. Le Moniteur printed them the next day, and on 27 July Paris rose.
Louis-Philippe's reign lasted eighteen uneasy years, with Legitimists, Orléanists and Bonapartists all feuding, until the revolution of 1848 toppled him too.
Source: July Revolution
