France's last king once joined the Jacobins and fought for the Republic
Before he became the Citizen King in 1830, Louis Philippe was a teenage revolutionary officer who helped hold the guns at Valmy. Within months he was fleeing France as a suspected traitor, wandering Switzerland under a false name while monks turned him away as a tramp.
Born in 1773 at the Palais-Royal in Paris, Louis Philippe was the eldest son of the Duke of Orléans, head of a cadet Bourbon branch the senior line deeply mistrusted. His tutor, the Countess of Genlis, gave him liberal ideas and a faintly Voltairean Catholicism. In 1788, visiting Mont Saint-Michel with her, he helped break down a prison cell door. His father, later known as Philippe Égalité, backed the Revolution, and the son joined the Jacobin Club with his blessing.
Given command of a dragoon regiment, he proved brave: in 1791 he twice rescued priests from angry crowds, once stepping between a peasant's carbine and his targets. At the Battle of Valmy in September 1792 he posted an artillery battery on the hilltop, and he was made lieutenant general before turning 20. At Jemappes that November, after his division broke in a wood, he rallied scattered units into what he named the battalion of Mons.
Then the Republic turned radical. He was appalled when the Convention condemned Louis XVI and his own father voted for the execution. Drawn into General Dumouriez's scheme to march on Paris and restore the 1791 constitution, he fled to the Austrian lines with him in April 1793 as shots were fired after them. His father and two younger brothers were arrested, and Philippe Égalité was executed in the Terror. The exiled prince moved from town to town with a single loyal valet, once waking in a barn to find a musket aimed at him.
He spent 21 years in exile before the Bourbon Restoration. The July Revolution of 1830 toppled his cousin Charles X and put him on the throne. His July Monarchy favoured bankers and industrialists, turned conservative under François Guizot, courted Britain and pursued the conquest of Algeria. Economic troubles in 1847 eroded support, and the 1848 revolution forced his abdication. He died in English exile in 1850.
Source: Louis Philippe I
