Horace Vernet: Portrait of Charles X 1757-1836 King of France and Navarre
The July Revolution of 1830 was stunningly swift, a matter
of days instead of years. On Monday, 26 July, King Charles X issued the four
ordonnances, a bold attempt to subvert the constitution and increase royal
power. By late Thursday morning, he had lost control of Paris; by Saturday, the
duc d'Orléans had accepted an invitation from the Chamber of Deputies to become
Lieutenant General of the kingdom. On Monday, 2 August-just a week after the
ordonnances had appeared-Charles X abdicated on behalf of his grandson. On 7
August, the Chamber approved a hasty revision of the constitution. And on
Monday, 9 August, a mere two weeks after it all began, the duc d'Orléans was
installed as Louis-Philippe I, King of the French.
Republicans were not happy, but there were too few of them
to affect the outcome. "We ceded only because we were not in force,"
said republican journalist Godefroy Cavaignac. Nevertheless, the leading moderate
republicans, all of them members of the educated middle classes-physicians,
lawyers, hommes de lettres-were willing to tolerate a throne genuinely
"surrounded by republican institutions," according to the popular
formula. The July Monarchy soon disappointed expectations, first with a
contrived political trial, the Proces des Dix-Neuf, and then with a series of
judicial attacks against the free press, the right of association, and the
Société des Amis du Peuple. By 5-6 June 1832, violent montagnardism had
emerged, and active Parisian republicanism had become a largely working-class
movement.
There were significant economic problems in the background
of the 1830 revolution, acute in the period from 1827 to 1832; the years were
marked by harvest failures, food shortages, and increases in the cost of
living. These agricultural difficulties made worse the recession in the
industrial economy, leading to an upsurge in the number of bankruptcies, a
sharp rise in unemployment, and the lowering of wages in several important
industries. During the unusually cold winter of 1828-1829, up to a quarter of Paris
residents had depended on bread cards, which entitled them to cheap loaves. Yet
the revolution was a political adjustment rather than an economic upheaval; the
economic forces that drove it were not in the streets but in a struggle of the
elites, and the regime that emerged-despite the continuing strength of the
nobility-was called, with reason, the bourgeois monarchy.
The revolution began within the government itself. On 16
March 1830, by a vote of 221 to 181, the members of the liberal opposition in
the Chamber of Deputies deliberately challenged the king by requesting that he
change his council, which was headed by the reactionary Prince Jules de
Polignac. Rather than concede, the king dissolved the chamber. New elections in
June led to results even more lopsided; the opposition was now at least 270
votes strong, with only about 145 firmly for the Polignac ministry. In early
July, after a very brief campaign, French forces seized Algiers. The initial
conquest was easy; pacification would become the chief foreign military burden
of the Orléans regime. But for the moment, it seemed that colonial success
might embolden Charles X to use article 14 of the Charter, which allowed the
monarch to issue ordonnances for "the security of the state," and
thus effectively to assume dictatorial powers.
These premonitions were fulfilled on Monday, 26 July 1830,
with the publication of the four ordonnances. The new regulation on the press
prohibited newspapers from publishing without government authorization, renewable
every three months and revocable at will. The already narrow voting rights (based
on the payment of taxes) were further restricted to landowners, by a
disqualification of the sorts of taxes paid by wealthy businessmen. Of the
remaining voters, only the top one-quarter would elect deputies directly. The
other two decrees dissolved the new Chamber and called for elections in
September. If the ordonnances had stood, the monarchy would have been able
effectively to muzzle a critical press and manipulate elections. To the liberal
opposition, such a regime would have meant dominance by the old nobility and
clergy.
July was the first of what would become an astonishing
series of revolutions and unsuccessful rebellions. The National Guard of Paris,
dissolved by Charles X after many of them had shouted against his ministry
during an 1827 review, spontaneously began to appear on the streets to mediate
between combatants and troops. Among the insurgents, ordinary working people
predominated, with little to guide them except the energetic journalists'
protest, drafted by Adolphe Thiers of Le National and read out on the streets
by angry printshop workers (their livelihoods threatened) on Tuesday, 27 July.
Those who fought, according to David Pinkney, were mostly respectable artisans
and skilled workers. The construction and wood-working trades, including
masons, carpenters, joiners, cabinetmakers, and locksmiths, were
overrepresented, according to their total numbers in Paris. There were
relatively few students. Pinkney suggested that the principle leadership was
provided by veterans of the empire, an impression shared by physician F.
Poumies de la Siboutie, who set out with his medical kit on the second day of
the fighting and noted "uniforms of all branches [of the service], of all
epochs, of the Republic, the Empire, worn by old soldiers or retired
officers." The dead numbered 496 civilians and 150 soldiers.
But the insurgents were not republicans. Edgar Leon Newman
has shown that the working classes of 1830 spurned the republican students and
journalists who tried so desperately to enlist them. Instead, they had learned
to trust the liberal opposition leaders of the Restoration, bound to them by a
shared anticlericalism that was nourished with cheap reissues of Enlightenment
classics. They followed these same leaders in 1830, to the amazement even of
liberals; Le National editor Armand Carrel was frankly surprised that working
people concerned themselves with the constitutional questions that agitated the
political classes: "Everywhere in the streets men without coats,
shirtsleeves rolled up, armed with muskets, and running to the defense of the
barricades, said: `We want our Deputies; our Deputies know what we need, and
the king doesn't.” The duc d'Orléans' oldest son later remembered the appeal of
a wounded combatant: "`Prince,' he said to me, his eyes haggard and his
hair bristling, `time presses. It is necessary to save the fatherland! Your
father at our head, your father king, and we will finish with the emigrés and
the Jesuits!'"
