The July Revolution (1820 to 1830)

France in the early 1820s had done the impossible. They had re-integrated themselves back into the international system as a Great Power. But in 1823, that all changed. For some reason, France recklessly invaded Spain, which brought the Great Powers to the brink of war and almost took down the international system. Why did France get like 20% stupider in the 1820s? It’s an important question, and to answer it, we will have to go back to where we left off with French politics, 1820, 3 years before France invaded Spain. The 1820s were when things began to change in France, and it all started when the nephew of the King of France was stabbed to death by a left wing radical. This event sent shockwaves through French politics. The aristocracy and their allies in the French legislature, the Ultra-Conservatives, demanded immediate action. During the crisis, superstar politician Richelieu was brought back into government, and as Prime Minister, he pushed through a series of changes to the French electoral system. Up until now, the process had been that 1/5th of the legislators were elected every year, and the trend over the last 5 years had been that every year, the Ultra-Conservatives were losing ground to the Centrists and the left-wing Republicans. With the assassination of the Kings nephew, the Ultra-Conservatives were officially freaked out by the rise of the French Left, and Richelieu was committed to stopping them from making any more electoral gains. Under the new system, 40% of the seats in the legislature would be elected by a select group of ultra-wealthy elites, who were a lot more conservative and pro-monarchy than the general public. That was precisely the point. The people close to the King were getting worried about the mood of the public, so they just insulated themselves from public opinion. They came from the “maybe if I ignore my problems they’ll just go away” school of thought. They made elections a lot less frequent for the same reason. The thing about elections is that the more representative they are, the more stabilizing they are to the state. It forces governments to address problems early, before they became existential threats. It gives opposition groups something productive to do. Would you rather have angry opposition groups handing out leaflets, or stockpiling weapons? Which do you think is better for the long term health of the state? But that only works if elections are fair. Without fair elections, opposition groups are forced to get creative, and the probability of a rebellion or a civil war or even a Revolution increases. Hmm. So France’s electoral reforms in 1820 made the French state more brittle, and they did this to insulate the King and his preferred Ultra-Conservatives from their own growing unpopularity. In my opinion it was a stupid thing to do. But the Ultra-Conservatives didn’t see it as stupid. In the next election under this new rigged electoral system, the Ultra-Conservatives won 85% of the seats in the French legislature, absolutely dominating every other group that voiced any opposition to the King’s will. The Ultra-Conservatives thought that they had pulled off a soft coup. They thought that they had won. But it was all an illusion. Even with 85% of the seats in the legislature, the Ultra-Conservatives were still unpopular with the people. The electoral reforms didn’t fix that fundamental problem, it only concealed it. In fact, they had sown the seeds of their own destruction. With the huge Ultra-Conservative majority in the legislature, the centrist Prime Minister Richelieu was replaced by an extreme conservative named Villèle. And then a few years later, when the Spanish Liberals rose up and remove their autocratic King from power, Villèle persuaded the King of France to invade. It’s clear why Villèle felt threatened by this, right? He was trying to re-establish autocratic rule in his own country, and he feared the French Liberals doing in France what the Spanish Liberals were doing in Spain. That’s called foreshadowing, baby! Invading Spain was not wise, but Villèle was not thinking strategically, he was only thinking about his own narrow political interests.

Sharing a border with a Liberal Spain was not an existential threat for France, it did not require a military intervention. But it was politically inconvenient for France’s Ultra-Conservative faction, so they invaded anyways. You’d think that the decision to invade a neighbouring country for political reasons would spark a lively debate in the French legislature, but it didn’t. The legislature was 85% Ultra-Conservative, and with the new rigged voting system, nobody in the government was particularly worried about the next election. Everybody just mindlessly went along with Villèle and the King. The fact that this dramatically increased the probability of a World War, a Great Power Conflict, didn’t bother any of them. That was far less important to them than their goofy Ultra-Conservative ideology. It’s worth repeating that the French people were not on board with this. The Ultra-Conservatives had never been popular, they only dominated the legislature because the elections had been rigged to favour them. The people favoured the Liberals and the Republicans. The centrist Liberals hated the invasion for obvious reasons, the Spanish Liberals were their ideological brothers. The left-wing Republicans hated it too, the Spanish Constitution had been an invention of their beloved Emperor Napoleon. To the millions of Frenchmen who had at one time served under him, the thought of invading another country just to undo the work of Napoleon was unthinkable. But none of that opposition mattered. The invasion of Spain went ahead anyways, and in the next French election, 96% of the seats went to the Ultra-Conservatives. Now there was virtually no domestic political opposition to whatever Villèle and the King of France wanted to do. But I’ll say it again. There was plenty of opposition out on the streets, it’s just that the political system had been designed so that none of those people were allowed to participate in politics anymore. Shortly after this, King Louis XVIII, the man who had been restored to the throne after the fall of Napoleon, died. He was succeeded by his younger brother, a much more autocratic and conservative man who took the name of Charles X. Under King Charles and his Ultra-Conservative Prime Minister Villèle, Liberals and Republicans working within the government were purged. Purged is such a heavy word. They were fired, they weren’t killed. Villèle then began to systematically roll back reforms from the French Revolution in an effort to return France to an 18th century political mindset. The previous King had promised to never do this, and that promise had kept the peace in France for the last 9 years. The new King did not feel bound by this promise. Bear in mind that none of these moves were popular, and the people weren’t afraid to let ‘em know. Public outcry reached a fever pitch, and in order to insulate the government from any further criticism, Villèle clamped down on the Liberal press with heavy censorship laws. Again, “maybe if I ignore my problems they’ll just go away. ” It soon became clear that the new King had a pretty old fashioned attitude when it came to his Prime Minister. At the beginning of each year the King gave Villèle a list of priorities, and it was Villèle’s job throughout the year to simply make everything on that list a law. It was like the King was his own Prime Minister and Villèle was his little assistant or something. Under such a system it’s not clear what the purpose of elections would even be, there’s not really any point if the King is just going to personally dominate the legislature no matter what. I frankly don’t understand why Villèle tolerated being humiliated in this way, but I guess it was the logical conclusion of his extreme Ultra-Conservative ideology. One of the things that the King ordered Villèle to do was compensate the aristocracy for the loss of their land during the Revolution. The land was long gone, so what Villèle had to do was pay the rich by taxing the poor. It was exactly as popular with the people as you might imagine. The new taxes weren’t even sufficient, so France had to plunge itself deeply into debt in order to finance this scheme. And for what? Just to re-establish the supremacy of the French aristocracy. The country was politically unstable and the poor were still struggling to find enough to eat.

The King’s political instincts were all out of whack. An actual election would have helped the King to refocus on what was actually important, but he didn’t care about actual elections. As the years passed, the King and Villèle continued their politically unpopular Ultra-Conservative crusade, which had the unintended but in my opinion obvious side-effect of making France incredibly politically unstable. In 1827, as the King was performing a routine inspection of the Paris National Guard, the guardsmen surprised him with impromptu cries of “down with Villèle! ” When officers tried to establish order, one guardsman decided to go down in history as an absolute legend and punched his superior officer in the face right in front of the King. Pretty soon, the officers completely lost control of the men. They were unable to stop another guardsman from breaking ranks and screaming treasonous stuff right in the King’s face. It was a wake-up call for the Ultra-Conservatives. The next day, Villèle’s government disbanded the Paris National Guard. The backlash was here, and even the rank and file in the military were coming out openly against the King. Villèle thought that this might just be the beginning of a period of unpopularity for the government, and so he advised the King to call an early election so that they could lock in their legislative majority for the next seven years. Yes, they had been working tirelessly this entire time to make elections as infrequent as possible. When we started this story there was an election every year, now 7 years. If he locked in a legislative majority now, Villèle hoped that all of his autocratic reforms would be done within the next 7 years, and after that maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about elections at all anymore. The Liberal and Republican opposition groups saw this as an existential crisis. They feared that in 7 years time this may all be gone, and that this may literally be the last French election. The electoral system was still rigged against the opposition, but nevertheless the Liberals and the Republicans threw every resource they had into rallying public support and coming out in force. Here were the results of the 1827 French election. 46% of the seats went to a coalition of Liberal and Republican opposition groups. 45% of the seats went to Villèle’s Ultra-Conservative government coalition. 7% of the seats went to a conservative group that opposed Villèle’s government. Even under the rigged electoral system, the Liberal opposition unexpectedly won the most seats. They were ecstatic. The King and Villèle had made a historic blunder. To make matters worse, it quickly became clear that all of these groups hated each other, and so nobody was able to put together a governing majority. The King was now stuck with a deadlocked legislature for the next 7 years. The King fired Villèle, and selected a new Ultra-Conservative Prime Minister who believed that they could find compromises with the Liberals. But the Liberals and the other opposition groups were high on their electoral victory and out for blood, so none of them would agree to work with any Ultra-Conservative Prime Minister. If the King really wanted to work with the Liberals then he should select a Liberal Prime Minister! But he didn’t. Over the next year and a half, the legislature accomplished virtually nothing. Eventually the King grew frustrated, and fired his failed compromise Prime Minister in favour of somebody who actually shared his politics. In 1829, he appointed named an extreme right-wing Ultra-Conservative named Polignac as Prime Minister. If a compromise Ultra-Conservative couldn’t figure out how to pass anything in the legislature, then an extreme Ultra-Conservative definitely wouldn’t either. But the King no longer cared. He just wanted somebody who shared his views to start pushing people around. Just to give you a sense of how extreme this new Prime Minister was, during the Napoleonic Wars he was implicated in an attempt to assassinate the Emperor, and was imprisoned for 9 years. After the King was restored to the throne, Polignac’s political right hand man argued for rounding up Napoleon’s supporters and putting them to death. The Liberal opposition groups, and in particular their Republican allies, were justiably alarmed that the King would allow men like this to get anywhere near government. In addition to all of this, the King was sending an undeniable signal with this appointment. He

was signaling that it did not particularly matter what the results of the election were, since he was perfectly comfortable running everything through his unelected and unrepresentitive Prime Minister. Perhaps a taste of what the future of France may look like. Around this time, King Charles decided to invade Algeria. He had some pretext for this, but the pretext doesn’t really matter. The real reason is that France lost virtually all of its colonies after its defeat at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the King felt that establishing a new colony in Algeria would restore French prestige. I would just ask you, is this a good reason to establish a colony? What would our beloved George Canning say about this? Canning had argued that colonies were only useful insofar as they facilitated trade. I don’t recall him saying anything about making the King feel better about past humiliations. You will see this argument made time and time again by mediocre men in the 19th century. They will become obsessed with how colonies look on a map, and then they will use the map to justify the policy. But the point of colonies cannot be how they look on a map. A map is an abstraction, a theoretical tool, they’re not real. What’s real is conditions on the ground. What would the invasion of Algeria do to improve the material conditions in France? Nothing. In fact it was worse than nothing. France would have to send 20% of its army overseas. It was France’s second unnecessary invasion in only 7 years. It destroyed France’s military readiness for basically no reason. If there was a crisis in Europe, France would find it difficult to respond. It was a risky plan. Furthermore, France didn’t really have any money, and this invasion would impose a huge financial burden. Remember, France was still taxing the poor so that they could give money to the rich. Any additional taxes to finance this reckless invasion would be met with hostility. But King Charles and Prime Minister Polignac wanted to do it, and so they just did it. In 1830, the King opened that year’s deadlocked legislature by proposing a relatively modest series of programs, but many of the politicians found the way that he opened the session alarming. He seemed to subtly threaten violence if any of them stood in the way of his legislation. He even hinted that he may act without the approval of the legislature if necessary, describing himself as the true representative of the people, not the elected legislature. It was a real “mask off” moment for the King. Even the King’s own Ultra-Conservatives were bothered. A couple of weeks later, the Liberal opposition in the legislature were able to gather enough support to push back against the King. They sent a letter to the King and told him that from now on, the King’s ministers, including the Prime Minister, must have the support of the legislature. The King couldn’t just appoint whomever he wished. Elections had to mean something. King Charles was incensed by what he perceived to be a direct challenge to his power. He accused the Liberals of trying to overthrow the government. He decided that he could not work with these people, so he immediately dissolved the legislature and called a new election. According to his own electoral reforms, this was 4 years ahead of schedule. But given the current political climate, the Liberal opposition was likely to get stronger in the short term, not weaker, and so he thought that he would need a friendly legislature to get him through the coming storm. Elections were scheduled to begin in late June. The date was not an accident. The French army was scheduled to land in Algeria in early June, so the thought was that by the end of the month there would probably be some good news to bolster support for the Ultra-Conservatives. One politician begged Prime Minister Polignac to keep the legislature in session all the way up until the election, because he believed that he could cobble together a small working majority of moderates from different factions. Polignac responded, “a majority! That would really cause me problems; I wouldn’t know what to do with it! ” Kind of a shocking thing for a politician to say out loud, but it really shows how Polignac and the King really weren’t interested in

Liberal Democracy at all. The Ultra-Conservative faction was really lost at sea at this point, they only cared about investing more and more power into the King and the aristocracy, and very little about any other people or institutions. Polignac wasn’t even particularly interested in popular support, what he wanted to do was make elections no longer matter. We must now talk about Article 14 of France’s Constitution, also known as the Charter. History will hang on the wording of Article 14, so let me just give you the whole thing up front. “The King is the supreme head of the state, commands the land and the sea forces, declares war, makes treaties of peace, alliances and commerce, appoints to all places of public administration, and makes the necessary regulations and ordinances for the execution of the laws and the security of the state. ” Let’s break it down. The King is the head of the state, he commands the military, runs foreign policy, and appoints all ministers. That’s all very straightforward. But then there’s this funny bit at the end, “and makes the necessary regulations and ordinances for the execution of the laws and the security of the state. ” “Regulations and ordinences,” that basically means laws, right? “And makes the necessary laws for the security of the state. ” Huh. You see what this is, don’t you? If the King pressed a giant red button that said “this is a security matter,” he could institute any regulation or law that he wished. Who got to decide what was a security matter? The King. It was a giant loophole in the middle of the French Constitution that could theoretically grant the King unlimited power in the name of security. The King’s supporters in the Ultra-Conservatives began to argue that the unruly Liberal opposition to the King was a security matter, and if the upcoming election tipped in the Liberal direction, the King could use Article 14 to overturn it. Nobody had ever done anything like this before, and even the Ultra-Conservatives were split on whether it would even be legal. But the Ultra-Conservatives didn’t need to agree. Only the King needed to agree. After some consideration, the King spoke to his closest ministers. If the upcoming election results were not to his liking, he said, then he would “make [his] prerogative respected. ” The King was not being explicit, but everybody took his meaning. One way or another, the Liberal opposition would be out of power after the next election. The French army landed in Algeria in early June, and ten days later they won their first significant victory. All according to plan. On the day that news of the French victory reached Paris, the King decided to make a big public spectacle of attending Mass, you know, to beef up his religious credibility on the eve of the election. As expected, large crowds gathered to catch a glimpse of the King as he made his way through the streets. But there was no cheering, no waving. The crowds just stood there, eerily silent, and watching the King like a pack of hungry wolves. Voting began shortly after this, and then wrapped up in the third week of July. The feeling going into the election was that it might be close. It wasn’t close. 65% of the legislative seats went to the Liberal and Republican opposition. 32% of the seats went to the King’s Ultra-Conservatives. The rest went to smaller groups that also opposed Polignac’s government. A massive victory for the Liberals. The King and his Ultra-Conservative allies met to decide what to do about the election results. Discussion centred around Article 14 of the Charter. If they argued that the Liberals in the legislature were a semi-treasonous faction, then the King had the authority under Article 14 of the Charter to make the necessary laws for the security of the state. After much debate, the King decided to invoke Article 14 and use it to do 4 things. These would later become known as the Four Ordinences. Dissolve the newly elected Liberal-majority legislature. Reform the French electoral system and make it pretty much impossible for the Liberals to ever win again Immediately hold new elections under this new

electoral system and allow the Ultra-Conservatives to win pretty much every seat. Suspend freedom of the press and shut down the Liberal newspapers, who the King blamed for his drop in popularity and the unexpected election results. That’s right, it was the newspapers’ fault, not the 10 years of unpopular policies. The King’s cousin, Louis-Philippe, was not informed that the King was taking this step. He learned of the Four Ordinences by reading about it in the newspaper. Louis-Philippe was more friendly to the Liberals than his cousin the King was, and when he read what the King had done, he told his wife “they’ve done it, they’ve mounted a coup d’etat. ” Later that day he hosted a large group of mostly Liberal supporters at his home, and quite naturally, the King’s Four Ordinences were all anybody could talk about. In front of all of these people, the usually careful Louis-Philippe lost his composure and shouted, “they’re mad! They’ll get themselves exiled again! ” His Liberal supporters urged him to come to Paris and throw his support behind the Liberal opposition. Louis-Philippe told them no, he wouldn’t openly go against the King. For the time being, he would do nothing. In Paris, the Liberal newspapers were not taking this laying down. One paper famously wrote, “the legal regime is now interrupted; that of force has begun. In this situation obedience ceases to be a duty. ” Later continuing, “France must judge how far it ought to take its resistance. ” They were coming just a hair shy of openly calling for revolution. That evening, soldiers tried to shut down one of the many Liberal newspapers that were continuing to operate in violation of the King’s new censorship law. This attracted a crowd, who began taunting the soldiers by chanting “down with the Bourbons! ” and “long live the Charter! ” The soldiers tried to suppress the crowd, but it quickly turned into a riot, with mobs roaming the streets and smashing street lamps. By pure chance, one of these mobs stumbled across Prime Minister Polignac and his Minister of the Navy as they were leaving a cabinet meeting. The mob closed in and started pelting the two with rocks. The politicians narrowly escaped the mob by jumping into a nearby carriage, but not before the Minister of the Navy was badly injured. Somehow the French Navy managed to lose a battle on the streets of Paris! They really weren’t safe anywhere! On July 27th, thousands of soldiers were sent to shut down Liberal opposition newspapers, which led to widespread protests across Paris. First, the soldiers tried to escalate things by charging one of the crowds on horseback, which didn’t work. Later, they tried toe escalate further by firing indescriminately into the crowd. 21 were killed and scores were wounded. As the sun set on a violent day, some new Revolutionary solgans were heard in the protests. “Down with the Aristocrats! Death to the Ministers! ” Only 24 hours ago these had been Liberal crowds who had been protesting for constitutionalism and a free press. Now they were Revolutionary crowds, and they wanted to overthrow the government. The violence had only radicalized the people. The next day, the crowds were significantly larger. The man in charge of defending Paris at this time was major-general Marmont, and he had a hell of a problem on his hands. His garrison in Paris had been hollowed out for the Algerian campaign, and of those that remained, most of his higher ranking officers had been sent home so that they could vote for the Ultra-Conservatives in the upcoming election. Marmont’s garrison was not in any way prepared for what they were about to encounter. At noon, Marmont moved into Paris with the aim of occupying key bridges and public squares where the protests had been the strongest. What they found when they entered the city was totally unexpected. Within the last 24 hours, veterans of the Napoleonic Wars had grabbed their dusty old muskets and gone over to help the protesters. The veterans had each adopted large groups of protesters and in only a day, they taught them a few tricks.

As Marmont’s soldiers advanced through the streets, they ran into thousands - yes thousands - of barricades. These were tall defensive structures built out of ripped up cobblestones and furniture and wagons and parts of buildings and anything else that the protesters could get their hands on. The taller ones could be 3 meters high, which for the Americans in the audience, is approximately “learn how long a metre is high. ” Quite high. The old veterans instructed the protesters not only to build the barricades, but also to occupy the buildings on each side of the streets approaching the barricades, so that any enemy soldiers would be hit with musketfire from three directions. They also loaded up the buildings with cobblestones and roof tiles and other things that unarmed protesters could hurl down at the soldiers. Let’s not be cute, by “other things” I mean human excriment. As groups of soldiers advanced into the city, they bumped into barricades that hadn’t been there last night. When they turned around, they bumped into new barricades that hadn’t been there a few hours earlier. It was like being trapped in a maze, but the walls kept shifting, and also somebody kept dumping human excriment into it. Marmot had not thought to send his soldiers into the city with supplies, and so the whole garrison spent 8 or more hours covered in filth, frantically marching in circles with no food or water. Morale was at an all-time low. A great many soldiers either surrendered to the protesters or defected to join their cause. As the sun began to set, many of the soldiers had to make direct assaults on the barricades just to escape the city and make it back to camp. Late in the day, the Liberal opposition opened negotiations with Marmont. They told him that as a precondition to any talks, the King must revoke the Four Ordinences. Marmont expressed his sympathy, and agreed to take their demand directly to Prime Minister Polignac. The Prime Minister flatly rejected this preliminary demand, and told Marmont that there would not be any further meetings with the delegates. Marmot was stunned at this response, and decided to take the highly unorthodox step of writing to the King personally. He wrote, “This is no longer a riot. It is a Revolution. ” Continuing, “I think it is urgent that your majesty profit without delay from the overtures that are made to him. The honour of the Crown can still be saved; tomorrow perhaps it will be too late. I am taking measures to pacify the revolt. The troops will be ready at noon, but I await with impatience your majesty’s orders. ” To be clear, this was way out of line, this was a local military officer going around the Prime Minister so that he could advise the King on political matters. But Marmont was desperate, and nobody above him seemed to be taking the situation seriously. The King wrote back, and basically told Marmont to “hold steady. ” Marmot’s pleas had fallen on deaf ears. The next morning, Marmont pulled back to a defensive position. He wouldn’t be tricked into another costly engagement like yesturday. Almost immediately, 15 or 20% of Marmont’s 12,000 soldiers defected and went over to join the protesters. In order to fill holes in his defensive position, Marmont ordered his men to pull back into an even tighter circle, which the soldiers incorretly interpretted as a retreat, which triggered a chain reaction of even more defections. By noon, the defections were totally out of control, and in order to stem the losses the King fired Marmont and ordered the garrison to withdraw from the city, turning a false retreat into a real one. The protesters had captured Paris. The whole thing only took 3 days. Old Man Talleyrand, who had lost faith in the King and had been helping to guide the Liberal opposition from behind the scenes, was perhaps the first person to fully understand the significance of this. As he and his political allies watched the soldiers leaving the city, he took out his pocketwatch and declared, “Twenty-nineth of July, five minutes past midday, the elder branch of the house of Bourbon has ceased to reign. ” The Liberal opposition was blown away at their own success. They had been fighting to overturn the Four Ordinences and squeeze some

political concessions out of the King, and now, without even really intending to do so, they had overthrown the monarchy. That evening, the King finally tried to negotiate. If he had done that yesterday when Marmont asked him to it may have helped, but now it was too late. The Liberals controlled Paris, and they got to decide what happened next. The next day, the Liberals and their Republican allies were locked in a heated internal debate. Some argued for using their new position to overthrow the entire system, while others urged caution. The other Great Powers were monitoring the situation in France carefully, and if they caught even a whiff of something resembling the French Revolution, most of them were prepared to march into France to stop it. This is how you get a World War! As if to drive this point home, as the Liberal opposition gathered to debate their next move, they could hear cries of “Long Live Napoleon! ” coming from the streets. The People were in a dangerous mood, they seemed fully prepared to do the whole French Revolution over again. Although it must be said that the crowd was a little misguided in their sloganeering, Napoleon was dead, he wasn’t long living nothing. The Liberals finally figured out what there demands would be. They demanded that King Charles be removed from power, and that France transition to a limited constitutional monarchy kind of modelled after Great Britain. This, they believed, would be just radical enough to satisfy the Republicans and prevent a civil war, but not so radical that it would freak out the Great Powers and trigger a World War. The problem was figuring out who to replace the King with. Some of the more radical Republicans suggested Napoleon’s 19 year old son, but that idea was dismissed out of hand. Remember, they were trying to not freak out the Great Powers. Others suggested the King’s 9 year old grandson [English] Henri, or [Frenchified] Henri I guess, but the mainstream Liberals rejected this over fears that the tyrant King Charles would continue to wield power from behind the scenes. They settled on the one person that they could all agree on. The King’s 56 year old cousin, Louis-Philippe. The Liberal politicians, by far the largest part of the coalition of opposition groups, strongly favoured Louis-Philippe, as it was widely known that he was a closet Liberal. The more conservative members of the group felt that they could hold their noses and back Louis-Philippe since they could rest easy knowing that the monarchy would survive. The Radical Republicans, who were initially pushing for Napoleon’s son, also felt that they could hold their noses and get behind Louis-Philippe. What made Louis-Philippe unique was that he had fought with distinction in the Republican army. That was a big deal to the veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. He may have been royalty, but in a way he was one of them. It was also noteworthy to the veterans that even after circumstances forced him to flee France, Louis-Philippe never took up arms against his own country. Many exiled aristocrats did, but Louis-Philippe always refused. That was a big deal.