Episode 47: The July Settlement

This is The Siècle, Episode 47: The July Settlement.

Welcome back, everyone. Today, we’re going to pick up where the fighting and the politicking left off in France’s July Revolution of 1830. France was now a constitutional monarchy under the rule of King Louis-Philippe I. But what kind of constitutional monarchy would it be? That was far from decided when the dust settled after the Three Glorious Days that saw Parisians eject Marshal Marmont and the Royal Army from Paris. Today, we’ll see how the winners of this revolution crafted their new regime — the so-called “July Settlement.”

But first, I wanted to thank, as always, this show’s network, Evergreen Podcasts. I also want to thank the show’s patrons, who make all of this possible. Since the last episode, new patrons include Frank Holleman, Bruce Gudmundsson, Adam Wright, Eliezer Shmuel Farhi, Mark Hartherly, J., Ilan, and JohnMGK. They and all other patrons can receive an ad-free feed of the show for as little as $1 per month. Find out how to join them at thesiecle.com/support.

Now, let’s get into the episode.

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Bring out your dead

As the last gunshots of the July Revolution in Paris faded away on July 29, 1830, lots of things still needed to be settled. One of those big issues would be settled over the course of the next 10 days, culminating in the Duc d’Orléans taking the throne as King Louis-Philippe I. We talked about that in Episode 45, and will talk more about it shortly. But first, we need to rewind to watch the Parisians deal with something even more important than the throne of France: all the dead bodies lying in the street. (If you find this kind of talk disturbing, you may want to skip ahead two minutes.)

According to official records, around 650 people died during the Parisian fighting of the Three Glorious Days: 496 civilians and around 150 soldiers.¹ That’s a lot of bodies. By contrast, one almanac I have on hand lists 1,601 deaths total for the entire month of July 1819.² So we’re talking 40 percent of an entire normal month’s deaths, happening in just three days. Making matters worse, the fighting and the barricades had blocked the normal machinery of death that underpins a big city like Paris — bodies could not be moved out to the city’s cemeteries, and instead were left lying on the street in the scorching July heat. Solutions were improvised, like the designation on Wednesday of a fire station on the Rue de la Poterie as an emergency morgue — but just one day later, the stench was already unbearable. Here and in several other parts of central Paris, officials decided the emergency justified breaking the law, and dug mass graves in the center of Paris.³

Above: Charles Nicolas Lemercier, “Burial of the Victims of July 1830 Before the Louvre,” circa 1830-1854. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This stopgap solution helped for a time, but within a week the smell of decomposing corpses was beginning to waft up from below the ground. A local police commissioner reported that in at least one case, “the remains had not been buried deeply enough” in their hasty interment. City officials ordered some bodies to be moved out to the Montmartre cemetery in the middle of the night. Another reeking mass grave was addressed by paving over the impromptu burial site, but even this didn’t stop the smell from disturbing pedestrians. This manner of improvised corpse management kept the crisis under control in the short term, but it wouldn’t be until nearly a decade later before Paris finally properly disposed of all the bodies from the July Revolution.⁴

Above: Louis-Alexandre Péron, “Transport de nuit, au Gros-Caillou, des cadavres non reconnus à la morgue, après les journées de juillet 1830, quai du Marché-Neuf,” 1834. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The dead bodies of the July Revolution were perhaps the most immediately pressing issue that Paris was confronted with after the fighting ended. But it was far from the only one. For example, Parisians had thrown up barricades that had blocked the movements of Marshal Marmont’s army, but with Marmont fled, those barricades were now blocking the movement of everyone else, too. We saw in Episode 45 how these barricades slowed politicians on important diplomatic missions, but they were also impeding less lofty trips. On August 1, Paris authorities asked that Parisians partially dismantle their barricades to allow travel through at least half of each street. On August 2, stagecoaches reached central Paris for the first time in a week. But tearing down these barricades didn’t solve the problem, because one of the key barricade building materials had been uprooted paving stones — and despite some valiant efforts by Parisians to put the paving stones back where they had found them, wheeled vehicles needed a smooth road that these enthusiastic amateur pavers couldn’t manage. This was a job for the city’s professional pavers, and it wasn’t going to be done overnight. A July 31 decree ordered all paving workers to report for duty, but turnout was disappointing, and repaving work was still underway a few weeks later.⁵

These broken-up streets weren’t merely an impediment to traffic. They were also a public health crisis. Paris in 1830 largely lacked underground sewers. Instead streets had gutters that channeled refuse into drains — helped along by daily street sweepers who cleared away debris. The revolution meant those street sweepers stayed home, and that many of the gutters had been torn up. As a result, sewage was backing up in the streets of Paris, steaming in the July heat. The city begged residents to chip in by clearing wastewater and sweeping gutters until the professional workers could catch up to the problem, but a week later there were still isolated reports of built-up refuse.⁶

Despite all of that, life began to return to normal in Paris surprisingly soon after the fighting stopped on Thursday. Friday passed with the city still on edge, but by Saturday, shops began to reopen and pedestrians to reappear on the streets. On Sunday, churches held normal services, and crowds thronged the Tuileries Garden, promenading as they had a week earlier, before all the unrest. Theaters resumed performances on Sunday, and reading rooms reopened on Monday, August 2. On Thursday, August 5, one week after the fighting stopped, trading resumed on the Paris stock exchange.⁷

“To Rambouillet!”

While city officials handled the thankless task of literally cleaning up after the revolution, the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom was trying to clean up the revolution’s political mess. Louis-Philippe, the Duc d’Orléans, was well on his way to becoming king. But there were matters that could not wait until he was on the throne.

For example, there was still the lingering headache of the old king, Charles X, who had abdicated the throne on August 2, but who remained in France, a mere 50 kilometers away from Paris at the royal hunting lodge of Rambouillet. Charles had soldiers with him, and a grandson with a claim on the throne. Charles could have traveled to royalist parts of the country, such as the western Vendée region, and begun raising an army to fight back. With hindsight, we know that Charles had rejected advice to launch a civil war, but Louis-Philippe didn’t know that.

On Tuesday, August 3, the people of Paris offered the Lieutenant-General a nifty solution to his Charles problem. Rumors swept Paris that Charles had murdered Louis-Philippe’s emissaries and was refusing to leave. This was completely untrue, but it was plausible enough for an agitated population: thousands of armed Parisians began to gather, chanting “To Rambouillet!” Louis-Philippe worked with the commander of the National Guard, Lafayette, to call up 7,200 National Guardsmen — not to break up this mob, but to escort it. As many as 20,000 Parisians streamed out of the city, accompanied by the uniformed Guardsmen, drums beating, all headed toward Charles.⁸

Above: Augustus Charles Pugin, Fenner Sears and Joseph Nash, “Departure of the Populace for Rambouillet,” 1831. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

But Louis-Philippe wasn’t trying to defeat Charles’s remaining army. Instead, the duke’s real gambit was the messengers he sent ahead of the Paris mob. These envoys met with Charles and spun him a terrible tale about the bloodthirsty mob just a day away, a mob they couldn’t control, and how Charles had better run for his life. Along the way they embellished the size of the mob from 20,000 up to 60,000, and neglected to mention the part where they had arranged for the the crowd to halt a ways away from Rambouillet so as to avoid accidentally provoking a fight instead of merely looming menacingly.⁹

The ploy worked. Charles’s courage failed him and after just 15 minutes of debate, he agreed to flee. Within a few hours, Charles and his family had left Rambouillet. Most of his royal army was left behind, surrendered to Louis-Philippe’s protection. Meanwhile the envoys continued on with Charles. Now that he was retreating, their job was to make sure he retreated west and got on a ship to England — not south to raise the banner of resistance. After a little cajoling, Charles gave in and headed west. He moved slowly, with the distant hope that the longer he took, the more time it would give for a miracle to save him.¹⁰

Bourmont

That brings us to Marshal Louis-Auguste de Bourmont. You might remember that one reason the July Revolution succeeded was because Charles had sent 37,000 of his best soldiers, along with his most reliable officer in Bourmont, across the Mediterranean. Bourmont and the royal army had conquered the city of Algiers, and they were still there — numerous, well-equipped, and led by a devoted royalist. If anyone was going to be Charles’s miracle, it was Bourmont.

And in the days after the July Revolution, rumors ran wild in France that Bourmont was doing just that — that he had landed in force in southern France, almost an ultraroyalist mirror of Napoleon’s famous march on Paris 15 years earlier.¹¹

Right: Arist unknown, Marshal Louis-Auguste de Bourmont, 19th Century. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

These rumors were wrong, but not because Bourmont was unwilling. It was more that the long travel delays between Paris and Algiers meant Bourmont might not even had heard the July Revolution had succeeded at the time he was supposedly invading to reverse it. The first official notification Bourmont received was orders from Louis-Philippe’s provisional war minister Étienne Gérard, sent on August 2. Bourmont received these orders on August 12, ten days later.¹²

Those orders informed Bourmont of the revolution, and ordered him to stand down his army and to hoist the tricolor flag. Gérard tried to thread a delicate needle — asserting the new government’s authority, while also persuading Bourmont to not do anything stupid. His message noted that Bourmont had done a great service to France by conquering Algiers — and noted that he, unlike Charles’s other ministers, had not signed the Four Ordinances. (He might well have, had he not fortuitously been out of the country at the time.) “But,” Gérard went on, “you must feel an imperative responsibility” to not allow “the slightest hestiation or the slightest dissent to appear in the soldiers under your command.” Finally, Gérard suggested that if Bourmont did try to take his army from Algiers to France, it could lead to France losing Algiers, wasting Bourmont’s great triumph.¹³

Right: Jacques-Louis David, “Étienne Maurice Gérard,” 1816. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Bourmont got Gérard’s message on August 12 and did not comply. Nor did he reject it. Instead he waited, apparently debating what to do. His biographer, Gustave Gautherot, says that Bourmont didn’t consider joining the new regime for a second. He was devoted to the Bourbons, and was not going to abandon them now. But Bourmont also was unwilling to try to march his army on Paris. For one thing, significant parts of the Army of Africa didn’t share Bourmont’s loyalties, and trying to press the issue might “divide his army into two rival camps.” So after several days, Bourmont gave in: on August 16, he ordered the tricolor raised, and the next day sent a message to Gérard instructing him that “the army was awaiting with submission the new orders from the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom.” Marshal Bourmont would not be Charles X’s miracle.¹⁴

The purge

Bourmont was the most dangerous servant of Charles X who Louis-Philippe had to deal with after taking power, but he was far from the only one. The government of France at this time was top-down and hierarchical, with decisions made at the top by the King and ministers, and passed down through prefects and subprefects to mayors and more. And pretty much all of those public servants, on whom Louis-Philippe would depend to rule, had been appointed by Louis XVIII or Charles, with loyalty to the Bourbons one of the principal criteria for the job. “No nomination was outside or untouched by politics,” historian Nicholas Richardson wrote in his history of Restoration prefects.¹⁵

Louis-Philippe and his chosen ministers moved ruthlessly to put their own men into place. All but seven of France’s 86 prefects were sacked within a month. The commanding generals of all 19 of France’s military districts lost their commands. By the end of the year more than 400 judges, prosecutors and court officials had been fired. Twenty-four of the 34 members of the Council of State were dismissed. “Authority,” Louis-Philippe declared, a few days after becoming king, “should be in the hands of men firmly devoted to the national cause.” By that he meant his cause, of course, but more broadly the adjective “national” was used in this period to refer to the new France created by the French Revolution. One might remember the slogan of Louis XVIII’s prime minister, Élie Decazes, who sought a middle path where he would “royalize the nation and nationalize the royalists.”¹⁶

The purge did not stop with senior officials. Instead, it swept through lower-ranking officials, “like a great broom.” Forty-seven of France’s 50 largest cities got new mayors. Subprefects and junior officers were also widely replaced. Men were fired not only for being “devoted supporters of the old regime,” but also those who were “no longer devoted but suspected of having served the Bourbons too zealously in the past,” and also those who “had showed insufficient enthusiasm” during the July Revolution. The goal here was not simply to remove unreliable public servants. It was also to open up jobs for liberal lawyers, army officers, and other would-be functionaries who had been denied appointments for years under the Restoration. The so-called “Revolution of the Job-Seekers” saw many thousands of Frenchman surge into the streets to press for any appointment they could get. The liberal icon Benjamin Constant complained that more than 6,000 people called at his house asking for his endorsement for a government position; Lafayette allegedly endorsed 70,000 job applications. The opposition newspaper the Globe had to shut down when almost all its staff got government jobs.¹⁷

When all the dust settled, thousands of civil servants had lost their jobs. Historian David Pinkney notes that “probably at no other time did France experience so thorough a purge of the higher offices of state so quickly.”¹⁸ As one example, take the 79 prefects that Louis-Philippe sacked in his first month in power. By comparison, when the moderate Martignac ministry took over from the ultraroyalist Villèle ministry (see Episode 33), they dismissed 19 prefects — over his entire year-plus in office. Polignac dismissed 12 prefects over his entire year in office.¹⁹

The strongest comparison to this thorough purge of France’s civil service in 1830 is the purge that happened in 1815, after Waterloo. In Episode 5 I described this purge, in which 50,000 men or more lost their government jobs, up to one-third of all government employees. The 1830 purge seems to have been on a similar or larger scale. Certainly the prefectoral house got a more thorough cleaning jn 1830, with 79 fired, than it had after Waterloo, when 38 prefects had been fired.²⁰ And this comparison to 1815 was very much on people’s minds at the time. Many men in the new government had been active in 1815, and they remembered how the Bourbons had fired thousands of state employees. In Episode 5 I noted that the victims of the 1815 purge “would absolutely remember this crackdown and plot their revenge for whenever they themselves gained power again.” Well, here we are: the victims of 1815 are back in power, and they didn’t hesitate to strike back.²¹

The Charter of 1830

We can now turn away from the quotidian work of cleaning the streets and cleaning house for the loftiest task facing Louis-Philippe and his allies after the July Revolution: France’s constitutional charter.

The 1814 Charter isn’t going away, despite the wish of republicans. We’ve already seen in Episode 41 how many of the revolutionaries were chanting “Long live the Charter!” as they took to the barricades, fighting against the man they saw as threatening constitutional government: Charles. We’ve also seen in Episode 45 how Louis-Philippe, in accepting the office of Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, had promised that under him, “a charter would henceforth be a reality.”

But it wasn’t going to be exactly the same Charter that Louis XVIII had introduced 16 years earlier. Liberals’ experience under the Restoration in general, and everything that had happened with Charles in recent months in particular, had made it to them that changes were needed. The only problem is that France’s victorious liberals didn’t agree on what those specific changes needed to be.

Here, as has often been the case in recent episodes, the divide is between the more conservative and the more progressive factions of the victorious rebels. The conservatives hoped to change the Charter as little as possible, while the radicals hoped for more drastic changes. As things play out, though, this isn’t going to be so much a confrontation between these two sides as a negotiation. Conservatives knew that they had to make a certain amount of change to satisfy the demands of insurgents on the streets, while progressives knew that even with this leverage, there was only so much they could get away with. It was simply a matter of where the two sides would meet in the middle.

The actual process of revising the charter played out over just a few days. Both the conservative Orléanists and the progressive Orléanists wanted to move quickly to implement reforms, for fear that delay would only embolden republicans, ultraroyalists, and Bonapartists to challenge the Orléanist victory. One of the progressive deputies, Auguste Bérard, took the initiative to draft a list of specific constitutional changes, and began circulating his draft on August 4. That afternoon, Louis-Philippe’s advisors asked him to delay presenting his plan until they could suggest some revisions. In truth, these advisors were conservatives who thought Bérard’s proposal too radical, and they wanted time to draft a more moderate version. This was assembled by two of those conservatives, François Guizot and Victor, the Duc de Broglie²² — who you have met before, most notably in Episode 29, but whose name I have been incorrectly pronouncing as “BRO-glee,” instead of the correct “Breuy.” In my defense, it’s spelled b-r-o-g-l-i-e, but the Broglie family is of Piedmontese origin and apparently kept this unusual pronunciation when they migrated to France. Thank you to listener Victor for the correction.

Above: Nicolas Eustache Maurin, “Victor, Duc de Broglie,” circa 1818-1860. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Guizot-Broglie draft dropped some of Bérard’s more radical proposals, though they kept more than you might think. They then presented this new draft to Bérard on August 6, and he made further revisions, nudging it slightly back to the left. At Guizot’s request, Bérard agreed to present the revisions to the Chamber of Deputies as his own work. After Bérard’s proposal, a committee of deputies made a few more revisions, and on August 7, the Chamber approved a revised Charter — sometimes called the Charter of 1830.²³

Symbolic shifts

So let’s look at these changes in some detail.

I’ll group these changes thematically, rather than going through one-by-one. I won’t bother you with a few minor tweaks, or with the re-numbering of the Charter’s articles as a consequence of some deletions. If you’d like to see the complete changes, I have uploaded a document at thesiecle.com/episode47 that uses a Track Changes-style formatting to show what was added to and deleted from the original 1814 Charter in its 1830 revision.

Charter of 1830 Revisions by David Montgomery

First, the deputies made a big symbolic change: they deleted the original Charter’s preamble. That’s the passage whereby Louis XVIII asserted that the Charter was “voluntarily, and by the free exercise of our royal authority… [granted] to our subjects.” The implication of a constitution granted voluntarily and freely by a ruler who is king “by grace of God” is that said constitution could be voluntarily un-granted, and so might not actually be binding on the monarch. While liberals had disliked this preamble all the way since 1814, the topic was particularly sensitive in August 1830, after King Charles X had just tried to unilaterally override the Charter.²⁴ The writers in 1830 intended the Charter to be a contract issued by a duly elected parliament, and accepted by a constitutional monarch — not a royal gift. There was no attempt to write a new preamble or to revise Louis’s old one — it was just gone.

Equally symbolically, two new articles were added to the end of the Charter, the last before some “special provisions” we’ll get to shortly. Article 66 said that “The present charter and all the rights that it consecrates stand entrusted to the patriotism and the courage of the National Guards and of all French citizens.” This both added the National Guard to the constitution, and also implicitly granted the French people the right to revolt in defense of the Charter and its rights — as they had in July 1830.

Continuing, Article 67 declared, “France resumes its colors. For the future, no other cockade shall be worn than the tricolor cockade.” The tricolor flag was the single most popular symbol of the revolution, and it would be written in to the Charter.

Finally, the original Charter’s line about how kings had to swear to uphold the charter was kept, but where the old version said this oath would be taken “at the solemnizing of their coronation,” the new version said it would be taken “at their accession in the presence of the assembled chambers.” The formal basis of the new Charter would be parliament, not God.

Rights and liberties

Second, the new Charter expanded some of the rights granted to the French people. The 1814 Charter had guaranteed freedom of the press, “while conforming with the laws, which are necessary to restrain abuses of that liberty.” The 1830 Charter kept the clause about about freedom of the press “conforming with the laws,” but struck the phrase about laws being “necessary to restrain abuses of that liberty.” It also added a new blunt declaration: “The censorship can never be re-established.”

An 1814 article had declared that special courts outside the Charter could not be created — but left an exception for the “provost courts.” These special courts, with no juries and no appeals, had been used to prosecute political enemies in the 1815 “White Terror,” and the 1830 deputies were done with them. They removed the provost court exception, and said that special courts could not be created “under any title or under any denomination whatsoever.”²⁵

Most interestingly was a change to the Charter’s treatment of religion. As you might recall from Episode 27, the 1814 Charter declared that “the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the state.” Catholicism was the state religion — a fundamental part of what the Charter asserted it meant to be French, even if it granted religious freedom to non-Catholics.

The men revising the Charter in 1830 were not inclined to keep that clause. Anticlericalism had been a key part of opposition discourse during Charles’s reign, and moreover Charles had worked to turn the episcopacy and clergy into agents of the Bourbon regime, including by urging endorsements of ultraroyalist candidates in the 1830 elections. So the revolutionary deputies saw an “alliance of throne and altar” as neither desirable nor beneficial. But these men were also generally not radicals who wanted to abolish the Catholic Church, either. Attacks on the Church had happened after the 1789 Revolution, too, and had been followed by years of strife, including armed rebellion, attempts to create replacement state churches like the Cult of the Supreme Being, and lingering disputes over things like the validity of civil marriages that were still ongoing. The last thing most of these deputies wanted — much to the disappointment of some left-wing republicans — was a continuing crusade against the Catholic Church.²⁶

So Bérard in his draft simply eliminated the article declaring Catholicism to be France’s state religion, and the more conservative version from Guizot and Broglie didn’t add it back in. But as the revised Charter went through parliament, other people thought a wholesale elimination of the Catholic Church’s special role in France was too much. A committee led by André Dupin added a reference to Catholicism being “the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.” This phrasing, borrowed from Napoleon’s Concordat with the Catholic Church, was seen as a symbolic middle ground between Catholicism as state church and no reference all.

Bérard objected to this on two grounds: first, that “statistical data had no place in a constitution,” and second, that it wasn’t even correct. A more accurate line, Bérard said, would read that “indifferentism is the religion of the majority of Frenchmen.” This latter was probably true, as far as actual religious practice went, but the majority preferred the compromise language, and so the phrase about Catholicism as the “religion of the majority of Frenchmen” went in. As far as substance, the new Charter’s religious policy remained the same: both Catholic and Protestant clergy would continue to have their salaries paid by the central government.²⁷

Power to the deputies

The biggest area of changes to the Charter involved the sections dealing with the powers of the different branches of government. In particular the deputies in 1830 systematically pruned back the powers of the king and strengthened the powers of parliament — and especially that of the Chamber of Deputies.

I don’t want to overstate this. The revised charter keeps the same basic form as the old one. But where it changes the balance of power, it’s consistently to benefit the chambers at the expense of the king.

The top of the to-do list here was Article 14, which had granted Charles the power to make “the necessary regulations and ordinances for the execution of the laws and the security of the state.” Charles had cited this clause as justifying the Four Ordinances, since he believed the security of the state was threatened. Well, the deputies had disagreed with that interpretation and now they made it clear: the words, “and the security of the state” were deleted, and replaced by the phrase, “without the power ever to suspend the laws themselves or to dispense with their execution.”

The old Charter had granted the king the right to appoint the president of the Chamber of Deputies, and the presidents of local electoral colleges. Now those bodies would elect their own presiding officers.

The old Charter had said that “the king proposes the laws”; the new Charter gave that power to “the king, the Chamber of Peers, and the Chamber of Deputies.”

A clause limiting the ability of the chambers to amend laws was struck. An article covering the king’s power to veto bills until the next legislative session was changed to apply to bills rejected by the king or either chamber.

The old article requiring meetings of the Chamber of Peers to be secret was struck, replaced by new language requiring their sessions to be open to the public.

Speaking of the Peers, another constitutional change fell into the category of the purges I talked about before. Because Article 68 of the revised Charter stated, “All the new appointments and creations of peers made during the reign of Charles X are declared null and void.” You might remember from Episode 31 how one factor in the Election of 1827 was Charles’s desire to take control of the liberal-leaning Chamber of Peers by appointing a bunch of new lords. Charles had done so, and ever since then the Chamber of Deputies had been the thorn in Charles’s side, not the Peers.

Now, in one fell swoop, the post-revolutionary parliament was undoing all of that, and kicking out 89 ultra-royalist peers. When Bérard read out this line, it drew “a particularly lively burst of applause from the listening deputies.”²⁸

You might be wondering how the Peers felt about this purge of their ranks. Well, they weren’t particularly fond of it. But in a Paris still humming with revolutionary energy, the Peers didn’t have the political capital to take a stand on an issue like this. As historian David Pinkney puts it, “the declaration came before the Peers only as a gesture of courtesy by the Chamber of Deputies, and the Peers had no choice but to accept it.” Moreover, many Peers who might have felt inclined to raise a fuss weren’t in the room. Two-thirds of the chamber was absent when they voted on the revised Charter on August 11, 1830, more than 200 peers. There were some innocuous reasons to be absent — France was a big country — but many were away because they didn’t approve of the Revolution and refused to take part in this new, illegitimate regime. So this cowed, shrunken Chamber of Peers voted 89-10 with 14 abstaining to approve the revised Charter.²⁹

Responsibility

Given the revised Charter’s drive to address clauses that had contributed to Charles’s attempted coup, it’s really interesting that the deputies did nothing about the old Article 13, which declared that the king’s ministers are “responsible” without saying who they were responsible to. This ambiguity have been at the root of the past year’s political crisis, with Charles insisting that his ministers were responsible to him, and that he could appoint whoever he wanted to his ministries, while the Chamber of Deputies insisted that the ministers were responsible to parliament and that the king couldn’t appoint ministers who lacked support in the Chamber of Deputies.

The revised Charter did not change this. The text of the old Article 13 was kept verbatim, except for being renumbered to account for the deletion of the old article declaring Catholicism to be the state religion. Why did the revised constitution fail to clarify this vitally important issue? Historian Pamela Pilbeam suggests one reason might be that there wasn’t any need: the only people seriously arguing that ministers were responsible to the king alone were Charles and his fellow Ultras, and they were now gone. Louis-Philippe could of course be trusted to understand that his ministers were responsible to parliament.³⁰

Just in case Louis-Philippe or one of his successors couldn’t be trusted, though, the deputies did make one final tweak. The 1814 Charter had allowed the Chamber of Deputies to impeach the ministers — but only for “acts of treason” and embezzlement. The 1830 Charter struck that restriction. The deputies could now impeach the king’s ministers for whatever reason they wanted.

Unfinished business

The Chamber of Deputies approved the revised Charter just three days after Auguste de Bérard began circulating his draft. Delay, many feared, would leave the door open for dissidents on both the Left and Right to try again to install a republic or Charles’s grandson Henry instead of Louis-Philippe.³¹ But that haste meant there was no time to hash out a series of big, complicated topics where the deputies didn’t already agree on a consensus solution.

Conservatives would have been happy to push off those unresolved issues indefinitely. But the radicals had leverage in the form of thousands of armed Parisians who had just overthrown one government, and who seemed very willing to do so again. Not content to just take advantage of the continuing unrest, some radical activists were deliberately trying to organize protesters to pressure the deputies. On the afternoon of August 6, as deputies debated the wording of the constitutional revision, a crowd of demonstrators filled the streets outside the palace. The deputies could hear the angry shouts from their meeting rooms, and had to push past menacing crowds when they took a break for dinner.³²

To appease these radicals, the deputies had appended to the revised Charter a new Article 69, which promised that “the following subjects shall be provided for successively by separate laws within the shortest possible space of time.” Those nine subjects were demands of the Left, including:

• Education reform
• Re-organizing the National Guard, and including allowing National Guardsmen to have a voice in choosing their officers
• Jury trials for any press offenses or political crimes
• Some form of elected local government
• Requiring any deputies who were given government jobs to face immediate re-election, and
• Abolishing the Law of the Double Vote and generally revising elections

These had appeased some of the agitation. But there was one remaining unresolved issue that had protesters chanting on August 6: the future of the Chamber of Peers.

Not content to merely purge its ranks, many radicals wanted to abolish France’s upper chamber entirely — seeing a separate house for unelected artistocrats as “among the least republican of institutions,” and as thus a violation of Lafayette’s slogan of “a popular monarchy surrounded by republican institutions.” And at the very least, if the Chamber of Peers could not be abolished, they wanted it significantly reformed. On the other hand, left to their own devices, the preference among Louis-Philippe’s advisers and among the deputies was to preserve the hereditary Chamber of Peers. The English House of Lords was widely admired, and abolishing the Chamber of Peers seemed like a step too far in the direction of democracy.³³

The protesters dispersed as the night wore on, but Louis-Philippe’s advisers were spooked. Two of them went to talk to Lafayette, where they found to their relief that Lafayette had called on his followers to abandon their effort to intimidate the chamber with street protests, and was actively urging peace. But as Louis-Philippe and his advisers talked late in the evening, they couldn’t get rid of their doubts. What if Lafayette couldn’t control the crowds? François Guizot got to the core issue with a question for Louis-Philippe, whose title was still Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom: “If, contrary to all possibility, a revolt took place, would the lieutenant-general be resolved to dissipate it by force of arms?” And put on the spot like this, Louis-Philippe’s answer was an unequivocal “No.” He would not kill Parisians to defend the Chamber of Peers. Instead of a violent confrontation in the streets, both Lafayette and Louis-Philippe had backed down.³⁴

So compromise was the order of the day. While the article declaring that the king could appoint members of the Chamber of Peers at will was kept, another clause specified that this article “shall be submitted to a new examination in the session of 1831.”

Flash-forward

I’ll cover the political fights of late 1830 and 1831 in detail in future episodes. But this episode is about the entire “July Settlement” put in place after the revolution, so let’s quickly cover how these postponed debates wrapped up.

The Chamber of Peers was not abolished — but a December 1831 law ended the hereditary status of the Peers. The king could appoint as many Peers as he wanted, but they would serve for life, rather than passing on their seats to their sons or heirs. The vote was overwhelming: 324 to 26. While some of Louis-Philippe’s advisers defended a hereditary peerage, the king himself never did. His biographer Munro Price says that Louis-Philippe “felt that ever since 1789 the political power of the nobility had been a lost cause, and was more a hindrance than a help to a constitutional monarchy.” The Chamber of Peers would continue, and would provide a number of Louis-Philippe’s ministers, but historians have noted a general decline in its status and prestige. Ambitious men would increasingly refuse elevations to the peerage until their political career was over.³⁵

When it comes to the other nine promised future reforms, I’ll focus on electoral reform, where the key law was passed in April 1831. This law kept the basic principle of Restoration elections: a parliament of limited suffrage, where the right to vote was determined by how rich you were. Compared to the Restoration, the new “July Monarchy” would make it easier to vote and run for office — but only to a point.

For example, the 1814 Charter had required voters to be 30 years old and to pay at least 300 francs per year in direct taxes. The July Monarchy would require voters to be 25 years old, and to pay 200 francs per year in direct taxes. This roughly doubled or tripled the size of the old Restoration voter base — but the electorate remained small and restricted. At the start of Louis-Philippe’s reign, about 2.4 percent of adult males, or 0.5 percent of the population, had the right to vote. That’s up from about 1 percent of adult males voting under the Restoration, but far lower than the 13 percent of English adult males who could vote at the time. Just a year later, the Reform Act would expand the English electorate further to around 18 percent.³⁶

It also became somewhat easier to actually become a deputy. The Restoration had required deputies to be 40 years old and pay 1,000 francs per year in direct taxes; the July Monarchy would require deputies to be 30 years old and pay 500 francs in direct taxes. This roughly doubled the number of eligible deputies, and would make a big difference in the political careers of men like Adolphe Thiers, who was 33 years old and not wealthy at the time of the July Revolution; the lower eligiblity will let men like Thiers take center stage years before the Restoration would have let them.³⁷

Oh, and the Law of the Double Vote? Getting rid of that wasn’t controversial at all — it had been an Ultraroyalist law designed to give an advantage to Ultraroyalist candidates, by letting the richest 25 percent of voters elect a special set of deputies as well as voting as normal electors. The revolutionary Chamber of Deputies eliminated it. The delay in getting rid of the Law of the Double Vote was because of the complexity involved in re-drawing electoral districts, not because any significant number of these men wanted to keep it.³⁸

Finally, another law in March 1831 allowed for the election of municipal councils. You might recall from Episode 33 that elected local government had been a demand of the liberal opposition under the Martignac ministry, and helped bring Martignac down. These local elections would have an expanded franchise of up to 19 percent of taxpayers. For every one man who could vote for parliament, nine more would be able to vote for their local governments.³⁹

Diplomacy

I want to close by talking about a final aspect of the July Settlement that wasn’t entirely in the hands of Louis-Philippe, the deputies, or even the people of Paris: foreign affairs.

During the struggle for power immediately after Marshal Marmont’s army fled Paris, Orléanists had made a big deal about the fact that adopting a republic or a Bonapartist empire might expose France to foreign invasion. Only Louis-Philippe, they argued, represented a change of regime who could avoid this catastrophe. These arguments were definitely partisan and self-motivated. But they probably weren’t entirely wrong. France did face genuine danger of foreign invasion in the aftermath of the July Revolution, and Louis-Philippe thought he could prevent this.

In Episode 17, I talked about the 1815 Congress of Vienna, and the “Quadruple Alliance” between Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia that committed those four powers to upholding the Congress of Vienna and to preventing any Bonaparte from ruling France. And in Episode 18, I talked about the “Troppau Protocol” adopted by the conservative powers of Austria, Russia, and Prussia in 1821. This stated that states that had revolutions “cease to be members of the European Alliance” and committed themselves to “if need be, by arms… bring back the guilty state into the bosom of the Great Alliance.” The Troppau Protocol had justified Austrian suppression of Italian revolutions in the 1820s. Now it could justify suppressing the July Revolution.

Many people in France would have have been happy for such a fight. Radical leaders in Paris chafed at the restrictions imposed on France by the Congress of Vienna, and wanted to reclaim France’s so-called “natural frontiers” on the Rhine River, even if this meant fighting. But Louis-Philippe was not among the warmongers — especially since the revolution had left France’s army in disarray. He quickly dispatched envoys to other European powers, telling them that “he had only taken the throne so as to save France from the dangers of a republic” — a very different tone from the regime’s domestic proclamations. The envoys also promised that France would not declare war, would respect all its treaties, and would not try to seize territory or influence other countries.⁴⁰

Britain was easy to convince. Charles and Polignac had not been popular there, and public opinion was strongly supportive of the July Revolution. The British prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, agreed to give refuge to the exiled King Charles X. But this didn’t stop Wellington from setting aside concerns about the revolution and recognizing Louis-Philippe’s government. “There are some bitter pills to swallow,” Wellington said on August 12. “However, the best chance of peace is to swallow them all.”⁴¹

The most hostile power was Russia, where Tsar Nicholas I threatened armed intervention to suppress this new revolution. Besides Nicholas’s committment to the principle of legitimacy, Louis-Philippe faced a minefield with Russia’s ambassador in Paris — a well-traveled man originally from Corsica named Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo. Pozzo di Borgo had opposed the Four Ordinances and was open to Louis-Philippe. But more personal matters threatened to intervene. According to the memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne, word reached her very late on Friday, July 30, that Louis-Philippe was going to appoint his ally General Horace Sébastiani as foreign minister in a new government. But Sébastiani was Corsican, and had a fierce clan rivalry with Pozzo di Borgo. “I cried out that this was a fatal choice,” Boigne wrote. “I knew Pozzo’s hatred for him and the intensity of his Corsican feelings. The mention of this name would have been enough to make him as hostile to the Duc d’Orléans as he was then favourable. His great influence upon the diplomatic body would have been an enormous obstacle.” She hurried to Louis-Philippe’s sister, Adelaide, and secured a promise that Sébastiani would not become foreign minister — at least, not right now, at this sensitive moment.⁴²

With this minefield dodged, the pivotal obstacle ended up being Austria and its chancellor Klemens von Metternich. After some debate, Austria agreed to recognize Louis-Philippe. Metternich told the French envoy that Austria was pointedly not approving of the July Revolution, but that “in a choice between the Orléanist government and anarchy,” the Austrian emperor “would not give its support to anarchy.” With Britain and Austria both recognizing Louis-Philippe, Prussia followed suit, followed — finally — by Russia. But Nicholas made it very clear that his acknowledgment of Louis-Philippe was begrudging. His letter to Louis-Philippe addressed the new French king distantly as “sire” — rather than the customary formula of “Monsieur mon frère,” or “My brother.” The cold, clinical salutation was intended as an insult, and Louis-Philippe received it as such.⁴³

After Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia all recognized Louis-Philippe, the rest of Europe followed suit — with a few exceptions. One is the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which is a whole can of worms that we’ll discuss in a future episode. Another was the tiny Duchy of Modena in Italy, which held out recognizing Louis-Philippe until 1831. When Modena finally did offer to belatedly recognize the Orléanist government, France gave this tiny duchy the cold shoulder. Louis-Philippe would never establish diplomatic relations with Modena for the rest of his reign.⁴⁴

Last of all is Spain, whose King Ferdinand VIII had been put back on his throne by Louis XVIII’s French army. Ferdinand openly recognized Charles X as the rightful ruler of France and allowed anti-Orléanist conspirators to operate from Spanish soil. In return, Louis-Philippe’s government began allowing Spanish refugees to plot on French soil. These bedraggled exiles posed little threat to Ferdinand, but the message was sent, and in October Spain agreed to recognize Louis-Philippe in return for removing the Spanish exiles.⁴⁵

I saved foreign policy for last because it’s an area where the new king Louis-Philippe was determined to play an active role, whatever his ministers or the Chamber of Deputies wanted. Louis-Philippe corresponded directly with his fellow monarchs, and bypassed his foreign ministers to communicate directly with his ambassadors. Dealing with foreign affairs, Louis-Philippe put it, gave him “primordial satisfaction.”⁴⁶

France’s new king would be a very different king from his cousin Charles X. But he would also be a very different king from the figurehead many of his advisers expected. Next episode, we’re going to look more deeply at Louis-Philippe, and at exactly what kind of monarch he intended to be. Join me next time for Episode 48: Citizen-King.