Episode 48: Citizen-King

When Charles X of France was crowned king in May 1825, it took place in an elaborate ceremony at the cathedral of Reims, where French kings had been crowned for more than a millennium. Charles wore elaborate coronation robes for the occasion. Catholic bishops presided, and Charles was anointed with drops of oil that had supposedly been brought down from heaven by a dove in the 5th Century. He accepted the throne by swearing an oath: “In the presence of God, I promise to my faithful people to maintain and honor our holy religion, as becomes the most Christian king and eldest son of the Church, to render justice to all my subjects, and to govern in conformity with the laws of the kingdom and the Constitutional Charter, which I swear to observe faithfully, so help me God.”¹

Above: François Gérard, detail from “Coronation of Charles X of France,” circa 1827. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Below: Eugène Devéria, “King Louis-Philippe I takes his oath, in the presence of the chambers, to defend the Charter of 1830, August 9, 1830,” 1831. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

When Charles’s cousin Louis-Philippe became king in August 1830, the ceremony took place in front of a joint session of the two chambers of the French parliament. Louis-Philippe wore a military uniform. The ceremony was presided over by Casimir Périer, a banker and elected deputy. Louis-Philippe swore an oath: “Before God, I swear to faithfully observe the Constitutional Charter… to govern by the laws and only by the laws, to render good and exact justice to each according to their right, and to act in all things with my sole goal the interest, happiness, and glory of the French people.” Then he signed the oath, in triplicate.²

As you can gather from the different ways these two men formally accepted the office of king, Charles and Louis-Philippe conceived of their positions in very different ways. Yes, both were kings under the Constitutional Charter, with a sweeping set of executive, legislative and judicial powers to rule one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. But while Charles saw his role as carrying on traditions from a millennia of French monarchs, Louis-Philippe cast himself as a thoroughly modern king for a modern age.

This is The Siècle, Episode 48: Citizen-King.

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Welcome back, everyone! Today we’re going to lay the groundwork for the July Monarchy to come by looking at our July Monarch himself, and the ways in which Louis-Philippe’s personality and ideals will shape his kingship.

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Now, that’s enough preliminaries. Let’s get back to our man Louis-Philippe.

What’s in a name?

I talked about the very different ways that Louis-Philippe and his predecessor conceived their roles as king. That even starts with what we call them. Charles was King of France — the country. Louis-Philippe was crowned King of the French — the people.³

Louis-Philippe was, in fact, the second “King of the French.” The first had been Charles’s brother, the guillotined Louis XVI. There were years between the Fall of the Bastille in July 1789, and Louis’s deposition in September 1792, and the French Constitution of 1791 had proclaimed Louis a constitutional monarch with the title “King of the French.” Charles had recognized none of this — as an exiled émigré during that entire time, he was trying to organize an army to crush the Revolution, and published a declaration denouncing the “pretended constitution” that had been forced on his “captive” brother.⁴ Meanwhile, when Napoleon became Emperor in 1804, it was under the title Emperor of the French, not Emperor of France. So Louis-Philippe’s adoption of this style cast him as an heir to the revolutionary and imperial traditions.

Below: Horace Vernet, “Louis-Philippe, accompanied by his sons, leaving the Palace of Versailles on horseback,” 1846. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Then there’s the name “Louis-Philippe.” That was the new king’s birth name, but it was by no means guaranteed that that would become his regnal name. Louis XVIII had been born Louis Stanislas Xavier, but he did not become King Louis-Stanislas I. Charles X was born Charles Philippe. And in the days before his coronation ceremony, Louis-Philippe and his advisors seriously debated a range of different regnal names. One possibility was to adopt the name “Louis XIX” or “Philippe VII,” which would have emphasized continuity to past French kings, as the nineteenth or seventh of his name to sit the throne. Some advisers, including the Duc de Broglie, pushed hard for “Philippe VII” for that exact reason.⁵ Other advisors wanted a more radical move — adopting a name like “Louis I” or “Philippe I” would have represented a total break from the past, an assertion of a new dynasty completely incompatible with the 24 prior Louises and Philippes. In the end, though — and you may be sensing a recurring theme — the new king and his advisors settled on a middle ground: “King Louis-Philippe I.” This signified that this new monarchy was something new, not a mere continuation, but without implying the old kings were illegitimate like “King Louis I” would have. It turned a page without closing a door.⁶

The King as politician

So Louis-Philippe intended to be a modern king. But what did being a “modern king” mean to him?

One thing he did not intend was to be a mere figurehead, one who exercised primarily ceremonial powers. In Great Britain, for example, parliament had long since taken the leading role in shaping public affairs. British monarchs still had powers, and used them — especially to block policies or politicians they disliked. But by 1830, it had been more than a century since British kings had used their power to veto a bill passed by parliament. They generally “tended to wield their influence within the House of Commons, rather than in opposition to it.”⁷

Right: Martin Archer Shee, “King William IV of Great Britain and Ireland,” circa 1833. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Louis-Philippe had no intention of riding roughshod over parliament, like Charles had tried to do. But he also didn’t plan on playing second fiddle to them. He was an intelligent man who had followed politics and government affairs all his life. He had spent decades interacting with the crowned heads of Europe, and was related to many of them. Louis-Philippe thought he had something to offer as a leader. He also thought, on the basis of a lifetime interacting with French politicians, that these men needed a leader. Without him, he increasingly believed, the system would collapse under the weight of his ministers’ egos and rivalries.⁸

Needless to say, these politicians had a different opinion. One of them, Adolphe Thiers, summed up the alternative viewpoint in a phrase: “The king reigns but does not govern.” Thiers, and to lesser degrees other leading politicians of the July Monarchy, saw themselves as responsible primarily to parliament, and Louis-Philippe as an interfering busybody. As we will see in coming episodes, both sides of the argument had some merit.⁹

In practice, Louis-Philippe took an active hand in managing his council of ministers. This was the area where he had perhaps the most in common with his predecessor Charles. Both kings had chaired their own ministerial meetings — sometimes to comic effect. Charles “not only directed the general course of affairs, but was involved in even the smallest details,” wrote the naval minister Baron d’Haussez. He never let his other priorities, like hunting or Mass, interfere with ministerial meetings, which usually lasted at least three hours. These long meetings could be boring: Charles would pass the time by cutting up pieces of paper into “unusual patterns.” Not uncommonly a minister would fall asleep; Charles would laughingly announce that the dozer was not to be disturbed.¹⁰

Below: Hendrick Scheffer, “Council of Ministers, chaired by Louis-Philippe, on August 3, 1838,” 1840. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Louis-Philippe likewise refused to delegate the task of running meetings to a prime minister. A hard-working man who believed that “every waking moment should be filled with activity,” he was ready to spend as long as it took to sort out government policy. One extreme — and extremely funny — example comes from October 1830, when the council of ministers was in the middle of a political crisis. Louis-Philippe brought the meeting to order at 9 a.m., and was still presiding over the ministers’ debates by 5:30 p.m. At that point, Louis-Philippe excused himself to go to the bathroom — and his exhausted ministers took the opportunity to run for it. Hearing the commotion, the King of the French burst out of the lavatory, holding his trousers up with one hand, yelling at his aides to track down the fleeing ministers.¹¹

The King as citizen

Louis-Philippe ruled a monarchy born from revolution — a fundamental tension that will never go away. And the king himself embodied this contradiction. Because this is a man who was literally born in a palace, a descendant of kings. He married a princess. He was the richest man in France.

On the other hand, Louis-Philippe was also a man who had embraced the French Revolution and fought in its armies. He had then been driven into exile, earned a living as a schoolteacher, and spent three years living in the republican United States of America. There he met Alexander Hamilton and George Washington; he would later write that his three years in America “had a great influence on my political opinions.” He had traveled widely, visiting places as diverse as Lapland, Niagara Falls, and Cuba. He had experienced struggle and danger, and been changed by these experiences.¹²

Above: François-Auguste Biard, “The Duke of Orleans riding dawn the great rapid of Eijanpaikka at the Muonio River (Lapland), August 1795,” 1840. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

So which one was the real Louis-Philippe? The wealthy prince, living a life of ease? Or the man of the people, in tune with new ideas and unafraid of toil and adventure?

There’s no need to choose. The important thing is that both aspects were parts of Louis-Philippe’s personality. But these parts of him were in conflict. Louis-Philippe’s attempt to thread this needle was with the concept that gave this episode its title: “Citizen King.” He was simultaneously a monarch and an ordinary French citizen, the same as any other citizen. Unfortunately for Louis-Philippe, he will find it difficult — if not impossible — to be simultaneously citizen and king. Instead, he will be pulled by circumstances to prioritize one or the other side.

In the early months of his reign, for example, Louis-Philippe will lean in to his revolutionary origins. For several nights each week, the Palais-Royal was opened to the public. Crowds would gather underneath the king’s window and chant for Louis-Philippe to appear — which he usually did. Then the king and the crowd would join together in singing the revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise. This song had been banned under the Restoration, as I covered in Supplemental 8, but now it was embraced by the king himself.¹³ Indeed, one of Louis-Philippe’s first actions as king was to grant a pension to Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, La Marseillaise’s elderly composer.¹⁴

Right: Joseph-Désiré Court, “The King Distributing Battalion Standards to the National Guard,” 1834. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Louis-Philippe also abolished a great deal of the ceremony and pomp and circumstance that had traditionally surrounded the French monarch. For example, he ordered that guests at his dinners not rise when he entered the room.¹⁵ And you might remember from Episode 44 that Charles was surrounded by a rigidly formal royal court — high aristocrats with titles like First Gentleman of the Bedchamber and Grand Squire of France. Louis-Philippe was having none of that. Right from the start, he abolished the formal royal court. All those court offices were gone. He gutted the institutions of the Royal Household, including offices in charge of the royal stables, royal hunts, and other forms of entertainment. The opera composer Gioachino Rossini saw his title of “First Composer of the King” abolished, and “left Paris in disgust.” Hunting rights in royal forests were leased out to members of the public. Louis-Philippe even banned people from using the word “court” to describe his entourage.¹⁶

Below: Pierre-Roch Vigneron, “Louis-Philippe I,” 1831. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The most famous example of Louis-Philippe’s new egalitarian style were his walks. Wearing a simple coat, carrying an umbrella, and accompanied only by a single aide, Louis-Philippe would leave his palaces and go for strolls around Paris. The writer Alfred de Vigny memorably describes the scene:

I saw a multitude of men, women and children come running, and in the middle, struggling to get through, a man in a grey hat and brown coat with a large umbrella under his arm, who was shaking hands on all sides with anyone who got close, which was necessary as a rampart or shield to fend people off. He arrived at the foot of the great staircase in a dreadful state, with his waistcoat undone, his sleeves torn off, and his hat battered by the greetings he had exchanged in the depths of the crowd that submerged him. It was the king.¹⁷

It’s impossible to imagine Louis XVIII or Charles X doing something like that, or at the very least outside of a special occasion. Even the king’s clothes were novel. Louis XVIII and Charles X occasionally wore the bourgeois frock coat, but they more often wore military uniforms in public. Louis XVIII had even modified his frock coats to include military epaulettes. In contrast, Louis-Philippe primarily wore simple frock coats. He even passed the dress code on to his servants, abolishing liveries in favor of generic coats.¹⁸

Many of Louis-Philippe’s own advisers viewed this all behavior as disgustingly democratic and unbecoming of a king — especially, horror of horrors, “shaking hands with all and sundry.” He ignored them and persisted, at least for a while. As time passes, though, Louis-Philippe’s aristocratic side will assert itself, and he will pull back from these democratic gestures. For example, after some time, François Guizot supposedly urged Louis-Philippe to stop singing La Marseillaise on his balcony for the crowds. “Do not concern yourself,” the king is said to have replied. “I stopped saying the words long ago.”¹⁹ Within a few years, the royal footmen were back in livery — Louis-Philippe had more than once mistaken his servants for deputies, asking the footmen which department they represented.²⁰ And the famous walks eventually ended, too. Partly this was for reasons of simple security after attempts to assassinate Louis-Philippe. But partly the king himself will become less enthusiastic about his citizenry — and they with him.²¹ But that is a story for future episodes.

The King as man

Stepping back from affairs of state, let’s talk a bit about Louis-Philippe the person. For example, if you’re just listening to this show and not following the annotated transcripts at thesiecle.com, it’s possible you might have no idea what Louis-Philippe looks like! He was 56 years old in July 1830, and his “youthful good looks had long since faded.” He had gained weight — not to the degree of Louis XVIII, but he was definitely portly. (This pudginess does not always show up in his official portraits!) Louis-Philippe grew very prominent sideburns over his equally prominent jowls. His full head of curly dark hair, however, was a wig; Louis-Philippe had been concealing baldness for at least a decade by this point.²²

The combination of all this made Louis-Philippe less than majestic in appearance. Most notoriously, in 1831 the cartoonist Charles Philipon published an image depicting Louis-Philippe’s head as a pear. Put on trial for insulting the king, Philipon defended himself by telling the court that Louis-Philippe so resembled a pear that an “artist could quite easily have drawn the parallel unintentionally” — and then demonstrated it by drawing a four-panel caricature in which a drawing of the king’s face morphs into a pear. Despite the attempt to suppress the insult by putting Philipon on trial, the image of Louis-Philippe as a pear became a near-universally recognized symbol.²³

Right: Possible design by Honoré Daumier, after Charles Philipon, “The Pears (Caricatural transformation of King Louis-Philippe),” 1834. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

All this was unfortunate for Louis-Philippe, since the king was hardly a glutton or a layabout. His daily schedule was full of work with only a few breaks: waking up at 7:30 or 8 a.m. and working all morning on diplomatic correspondence or affairs of the royal household. Louis-Philippe usually worked through lunch, then spent the afternoon meeting with ministers. He would take a break in the late afternoon to walk, often in the galleries of the Louvre after it closed. (It’s good to be the king.) Dinners were usually public affairs,²⁴ and so were the daily salons each evening where various notables could mingle with the king and his family. This wrapped up about 10 a.m., but the king would then retire to his study to work for another four hours. After 2 a.m., Louis-Philippe went to sleep, not on a sumptuous feather bed but on a horse-hair mattress on a wooden plank. Five or six hours later, he started all over again.²⁵

Below: Théodore Chassériau, “Alexis de Tocqueville,” 1850. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Those people honored by an invitation to meet with the king, such as at one of those dinners or salons, often found themselves doing more listening than talking. Louis-Philippe was good at talking, and liked to do it. The writer Alexis de Tocqueville, who published his famous work Democracy in America during Louis-Philippe’s reign, recorded a story of being summoned to meet with the king:

The king detained me, sat down in a chair, gestured to me to sit down in another, and said to me informally, “Since you’re here, M. de Tocqueville, let’s have a chat, I’d like you to talk to me about America.” I knew him well enough to know what this meant: “I am going to talk about America.” … After three-quarters of an hour, the king rose, thanked me for the pleasure our conversation had given him (I hadn’t said four words), and took his leave, clearly delighted with me in the way one generally is with someone before whom one thinks one has spoken well.²⁶

In Louis-Philippe’s defense, I should note that while the king was undoubtedly a monologuer, many people report enjoying his impromptu speeches. His biographer T.E.B. Howarth writes that with the limited exception of Tocqueville, “there is almost complete unanimity amongst those who knew him well, whether admirers or critics, that this famous readiness in conversation was anything but tedious.”²⁷

Courage to the sticking place

While Louis-Philippe loved to talk, he was less comfortable with taking action. This shouldn’t be a surprise given how we saw him vacillate over accepting the throne in Episode 45. That hesitation wasn’t a one-off event. Louis-Philippe was undeniably a man with strong physical courage who could stare death in the face without flinching. In July 1835, for example, Louis-Philippe was riding through the streets of Paris in a parade celebrating the July Revolution when a volley of gunfire erupted. It was an assassination attempt that left 18 people dead and dying around the king, who himself took a bullet in the arm. Among the dead was Louis-Philippe’s prime minister. But shocked and wounded, with the conspirators still at large, Louis-Philippe calmly and stoically continued with the parade and ceremony. It wasn’t until he finally returned to his palace at the very end that the king allowed himself to break down weeping at the deaths.²⁸

Above: Eugène Lami, “Portrait of Louis-Philippe,” 19th Century. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

On the other hand, Guizot described Louis-Philippe like this: “though personally brave, he was politically timid; he preferred address to force; he always wished to turn an obstacle instead of attacking it in front.” This judgment was motivated by Guizot’s own particular frustrations, but is basically accurate. Thiers called him “sharp and wily”; another politician, Odilon Barrot, wrote that Louis-Philippe preferred “indirect means” to a straight route. Over a life of revolution, exile, and subservience to his cousins, Louis-Philippe had learned caution; he was wary of taking a wrong step and always ready for the other shoe to drop. Throughout his entire reign, Louis-Philippe slept with a lantern burning and two loaded pistols on his bedside table — just in case. Should we really be that surprised if such a man sometimes tried to find a way to avoid making hard decisions?²⁹

One hard choice in particular that Louis-Philippe tried to avoid was executing people. The July Monarchy had the death penalty, but Louis-Philippe abhorred violence. Unlike his predecessor Charles, he hated hunting. And he would have abolished capital punishment if he could. This is a man whose own father had died on the guillotine. But Louis-Philippe’s ministers, and parliament in general, were strong supporters of the death penalty. So instead, the king tried to use his pardon power as much as he could get away with as a constitutional monarch.

Right: Unknown photographer, “Daguerreotype of King Louis-Philippe I,” 1842. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The socialist historian Louis Blanc, otherwise a fierce critic of the king, called him “more human than any prince of his time, because of his respect on principle for the inviolability of human life.” A close aide told the story of walking into the king’s study during one of those late-night working sessions the king did almost every day; he found Louis-Philippe “bent over a notebook,” writing, and asked if the king were composing his memoirs. “My God, no,” Louis-Philippe replied. “You see me occupied with something a great deal sadder. In this notebook I enter the names of criminals condemned to the death penalty, those whom my prerogative of mercy has not been able to protect against my conscience and the decision of my ministers.” One entry in the book read: “Alibaud, to my great regret.” Monsieur Alibaud had been executed, over Louis-Philippe’s objections, for the crime of trying to assassinate Louis-Philippe.³⁰

Louis-Philippe’s opposition to capital punishment was sincere and deeply felt. But remember: he was the king. He had a legal right to pardon anyone he wanted to. A bolder man could have used that power to spare all these convicts’ lives, whatever the political cost. But Louis-Philippe was not that kind of man. He preferred indirect maneuvers over frontal assaults. And so he pleaded, and bargained, and saved some, but not all, of the men whose lives were in his hands.

Next time, we’re going to dive back into the narrative, as a king full of contradictions tries to govern a country full of contradictions, too. The new “July Monarchy” will be battered from the very beginning, as Louis-Philippe and the various factions of victorious rebels struggle for control. Join me next time for Episode 49: The Trial.