Louis-Philippe I (6 October 1773 – 26 August 1850)
was
King of the
French from 1830 to 1848 in what was known as the
July Monarchy.
He was the last king
to rule France
, although
Napoleon III, styled as an
emperor, would serve as its last
monarch.
Before the Revolution (1773–1789)
Early life
Louis-Philippe d'Orléans was born at
the Palais
Royal
in Paris
to Louis Philippe Joseph,
Duke of Chartres (later Duke of
Orléans and, later still, known as
Philippe Egalité) and Louise
Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre. As a member of the
reigning
House of Bourbon, he was a
Prince du Sang. He was the first of
three sons and a daughter to the Orléans family, a family that was
to have erratic fortunes for the next court years.
The elder branch of the House of Bourbon, to which the Kings
belonged, deeply distrusted the intentions of the cadet branch,
which would succeed to the French throne should the senior branch
die out. Louis-Philippe's father was exiled from the royal court,
and the Orléans confined themselves to studies of the literature
and sciences emerging from the
Enlightenment.
Education
Louis-Philippe was tutored by the
Countess of Genlis, beginning in 1782. She instilled in him a
fondness for
liberal thought; it is
probably during this period that Louis-Philippe picked up his
slightly
Voltairean brand of
Catholicism. When Louis-Philippe's grandfather
died in 1785, his father succeeded him as Duke of Orléans and
Louis-Philippe succeeded his father as Duke of Chartres.
In 1788,
with the Revolution looming, the
young Louis-Philippe showed his liberal sympathies when he helped
break down the door of a prison cell in Mont
Saint-Michel
, during a
visit there with the Countess of Genlis. From October 1788 to
October 1789, the Palais-Royal
, the Parisian residence of the Orléans family,
was a meeting-place for the revolutionaries.
Revolution (1789–1793)
Louis-Philippe grew up in a period that changed
Europe as a whole and following his father's strong
support for the revolution, he involved himself completely in those
changes. In his diary, he reports that he himself took the
initiative to join the
Jacobin Club, a
move that his father supported.
Military Service
In June 1791, Louis-Philippe got his first opportunity to become
involved in the affairs of France. In 1785, he had been given the
hereditary appointment of
Colonel of the
14th
Regiment of
Dragoons (
Chartres-Dragons).
With war on the horizon in 1791, all proprietary colonels were
ordered to join their regiments. Louis-Philippe showed himself to
be a model officer, and he demonstrated his personal bravery in two
famous instances. First, three days after Louis XVI's
flight to Varennes, a quarrel between two
local priests and one of the new
constitutional vicars
became heated, and a crowd surrounded the inn where the priests
were staying, demanding blood. The young Colonel broke through the
crowd and extricated the two priests, who then fled. At a river
crossing on the same day, another crowd threatened to harm the
priests. Louis-Philippe put himself between a peasant armed with a
carbine and the priests, saving their lives.
The next day, Louis-Philippe dived into a river to save a drowning
local engineer. For this action, he received a
civic crown from the local municipality. His
regiment was moved north to
Flanders at the
end of 1791 after the
Declaration of Pillnitz.
Louis Philippe served under his father's crony, the Duke of Biron,
along with several officers who later gained distinction in
Napoleon's empire and afterwards. These
included Colonel
Berthier
and Lieutenant Colonel
Alexandre de Beauharnais
(husband of the future
Empress Joséphine).
Louis-Philippe saw the first exchanges of
fire of the Revolutionary Wars at Boussu
and
Quaragnon and a few days later fought at Quiévrain
near Jemappes
, where he
was instrumental in rallying a unit of retreating soldiers.
Biron wrote to War Minister
de
Grave, praising the young colonel, who was then promoted to
brigadier, commanding a brigade of cavalry
in Lückner's Army of the North.
In the Army of the North, Louis-Philippe served with four future
Marshals of France:
Macdonald,
Mortier
(who would later be killed in an
assassination attempt on Louis-Philippe),
Davout, and
Oudinot.
Dumouriez was appointed to
command the Army of the North in August 1792.
Louis-Philippe
commanded a division under him in the Valmy
campaign.
At Valmy, Louis-Philippe was ordered to place a battery of
artillery on the crest of the hill of Valmy.
The battle of Valmy
was inconclusive, but the Austrian
-Prussian army, short of
supplies, was forced back across the Rhine
river. Once again, Louis-Philippe was praised in a letter by
Dumouriez after the battle. Louis-Philippe was then recalled to
Paris to give an account of the Battle at Valmy to the French
government. There he had a rather trying interview with
Danton, Minister of Justice, which he later
fondly re-told to his children.
While in Paris, he was promoted to the rank of
lieutenant-general.
In October he returned
to the Army of the North, where Dumouriez had begun a march into
Belgium
.
Louis-Philippe again commanded a division.
Dumouriez chose to
attack an Austrian force in a strong position on the heights of
Cuesmes and Jemappes to the west
of Mons
.
Louis-Philippe's division sustained heavy casualties as it attacked
through a wood, retreating in disorder. Louis-Philippe rallied a
group of units, dubbing them "the battalion of Mons" and pushed
forward along with other French units, finally overwhelming the
outnumbered Austrians.
Events in Paris undermined the budding military career of
Louis-Philippe. The incompetence of
Jean-Nicolas Pache, the new
Girondist appointee, left the Army of the North
almost without supplies. Soon thousands of troops were deserting
the army.
Louis-Philippe was alienated by the more
radical policies of the Republic
. After the National Convention decided to
put
the deposed King to death -
Louis Philippe's father - by then known as
Philippe
Égalité - voted in favour of that act, Louis-Philippe began to
consider leaving France.
Louis-Philippe was willing to stay in France to fulfill his duties
in the army, but he was implicated in Dumouriez's plot, who had
planned to ally with the Austrians, march his army on Paris, and
restore the Constitution of 1791. Dumouriez had met with
Louis-Philippe on 22 March 1793 and urged his subordinate to join
in the attempt.
With the French government falling into the
Terror, he decided to leave France to save
his life. On 4 April Dumouriez and Louis Philippe left for the
Austrian camp. They were intercepted by Lieutenant-Colonel
Louis Nicolas Davout, who had served at
Jemappes with Louis-Philippe. As
Dumouriez ordered the Colonel back to the camp, some of his
soldiers cried out against the General, now declared a
traitor by the
National Convention. Shots rang out as
they fled towards the Austrian camp. The next day, Dumouriez again
tried to rally soldiers against the Convention; however, he found
that the artillery had declared for the Republic, leaving him and
Louis Philippe with no choice but to go into
exile. At the age of nineteen, Louis-Philippe left
France; it was some twenty-one years before he again set foot on
French soil.
Exile (1793–1815)
The reaction in Paris to Louis-Philippe's involvement in
Dumouriez's treason inevitably resulted in misfortunes for the
Orléans family. Philippe Égalité spoke in the
National Convention, condemning his son
for his actions, asserting that he would not spare his son, much
akin to the
Roman consul
Brutus and his sons. However, letters
from Louis-Philippe to his father were discovered in transit and
were read out to the
Convention.
Philippe Égalité was then put under continuous surveillance.
Shortly thereafter, the
Girondists moved
to arrest him and the two younger brothers of Louis-Philippe,
Louis-Charles and
Antoine
Philippe; the latter had been serving in the
Army of Italy.
The three were
interned in Fort Saint-Jean
in Marseille.
Meanwhile, Louis-Philippe was forced to live in the shadows,
avoiding both pro-Republican revolutionaries and
Legitimist French
émigré centers in various parts of
Europe and also in the Austrian army.
He first moved to
Switzerland
under an assumed name, and met up with the Countess
of Genlis and his sister Adélaïde
at Schaffhausen
. From there they went to Zürich
, where the Swiss authorities
decreed that to protect Swiss neutrality, Louis-Philippe would have to
leave the city. They went to Zug
, where
Louis-Philippe was discovered by a group of
émigrés.
It became quite apparent that for the ladies to settle peacefully
anywhere, they would have to separate from Louis-Philippe.
He then
left with his faithful valet Baudouin for the heights of the
Alps, and then to Basel
, where he
sold all but one of his horses. Now moving from town to town
throughout Switzerland, he and Baudouin found themselves very much
exposed to all the distresses of extended travelling. They were
refused entry to a
monastery by monks who
believed them to be young vagabonds. Another time, he woke up after
spending a night in a barn to find himself at the far end of a
musket, confronted by a man attempting to
keep away thieves.
Throughout this period, he never stayed in one place more than 48
hours. Finally, in October 1793, Louis Philippe was appointed a
teacher of
geography,
history,
mathematics, and
modern languages at a boys' boarding school. The school, owned by a
Monsieur Jost, was in Reichenau, a village on the upper Rhine,
across from Switzerland. His salary was 1,400 francs and he taught
under the name
Monsieur Chabos. He had been at the school
for a month when he heard the news from Paris: his father had been
guillotined on 6 November 1793 after a
trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Travels
In early 1794, Louis-Philippe began courting Marianne Banzori, the
cook of the Reichenau schoolmaster. In late 1794, Jost discovered
that Marianne was
pregnant.
This ended
Louis-Philippe's academic career and Jost sent Marianne to Milan
where the
child was born in December 1794, and then placed in an
orphanage.
After Louis-Philippe left Reichenau, he separated the now
sixteen-year-old Adélaïde from the Countess of Genlis, who had
fallen out with Louis-Philippe.
Adélaïde went to live with her great-aunt
the Princess of Conti at
Fribourg, then to Bavaria
and Hungary
and, finally, to her mother who was exiled in
Spain
.
Louis-Philippe travelled extensively.
He visited Scandinavia in 1795 and then moved on to
Finland
. For about a year, he stayed in Muonio
(in valley
of Tornio river), a remote village at the northern end of the
Gulf of
Bothnia
, living in the rectory under
the name Müller as a guest of the local Lutheran vicar. Here he met the vicar's
wife's sister, Beata Caisa Wahlbom, who was a housekeeper in the
rectory. The 22-year-old single sympathetic world-experienced
prince charmed the 28-year-old inexperienced girl and she fell in
love with him. Not long after Louis-Philippe left Scandinavia,
Beata Caisa Wahlbom gave birth to a son, whom she named Erik.
Louis-Philippe also visited the United States
for four years, staying in Philadelphia
(where his brothers Antoine Philippe and
Louis-Charles
were in exile), New York
City
(where he most likely stayed at the Somerindyck
family estate on Broadway and 75th Street with other exiled
princes), and Boston
.
In
Boston, he taught French for a time
and lived in lodgings over what is now the Union Oyster
House
, Boston's oldest restaurant. During his time
in the United States, Louis Philippe met with American politicians
and people of high society, including
George Clinton,
John Jay,
Alexander
Hamilton, and
George
Washington.
His visit
to Cape
Cod
in 1797 coincided with the division of the town of
Eastham into two towns, one of which took the name of Orleans,
possibly in his honour. During their sojourn, the Orléans princes
travelled throughout the country, visiting as far south as Nashville
and as far north as Maine
. The
brothers were even held in Philadelphia briefly during an outbreak
of
yellow fever.
Louis-Philippe is
also thought to have met Isaac Snow of
Orleans,
Massachusetts
, who had escaped to France from a British prison
hulk during the American
Revolution. In 1839, while reflecting on his visit to
the United States, Louis Philippe explained in a letter to
Guizot that his three years there had a
large influence on his later political beliefs and judgments when
he became king.
In Boston, Louis Philippe learned of the
coup of 18 Fructidor (4 September 1797)
and of the exile of his mother to Spain. He and his brothers then
decided to return to Europe.
They went to New Orleans
, planning to sail to Havana
and thence
to Spain. This however was a troubled journey, as
Spain and Great
Britain
were then at war.
They
sailed for Havana in an American corvette, but the ship was stopped
in the Gulf of
Mexico
by a British warship. The British seized the
three brothers, but took them to Havana anyway. Unable to find
passage to Europe, the three brothers spent a year in Cuba, until
they were unexpectedly expelled by the Spanish authorities.
They
sailed via the
Bahamas
to Nova
Scotia
where they were received by the Duke of Kent, son of King
George III and
later father of Queen
Victoria. Louis-Philippe struck up a lasting friendship
with the British royal. Eventually, the brothers sailed back to New
York, and in January 1800, they arrived in England, where they
stayed for the next fifteen years.
Marriage
In 1809, Louis-Philippe married Princess
Marie Amalie, daughter of
King
Ferdinand I of the
Two Sicilies and
Marie Caroline of Austria. They
had the following ten children:
- Ferdinand-Philippe
d'Orléans (3 September 1810–1842) married Helena of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin
- Louise-Marie
d'Orléans (3 April 1812–1850), who married Leopold I of Belgium
- Marie
d'Orléans (12 April 1813–1839), who married Duke Alexander of
Württemberg (1804–1881)
- Louis
Charles Philippe Raphael d'Orléans, Duke of Nemours (25 October
1814–1896), who married Victoria of
Saxe-Coburg-Kohary
- Francisca d'Orléans (28 March 1816–1818)
- Clémentine
d'Orléans (3 June 1817–1907), who married August of
Saxe-Coburg-Kohary
- François
d'Orléans, Prince of Joinville (14 August 1818–1900), who
married Francisca of
Brazil
- Charles d'Orléans, Duke of Penthièvre (1 January
1820–1828)
- Henri d'Orléans, Duke of Aumale
(16 June 1822–1897), who married Princess
Maria Carolina Augusta of Bourbon-Two Sicilies
- Antoine d'Orléans, Duke
of Montpensier (31 July 1824–1890), married Luisa Fernanda of
Spain
Bourbon Restoration (1815–1830)
Silver five-franc coin featuring Louis-Philippe from 1834.
The French inscription is LOUIS PHILIPPE I ROI DES
FRANÇAIS, in English, "Louis Philippe I, King of the
French."
After the
abdication of Napoleon,
Louis-Philippe, known as
Louis Philippe III, Duke of
Orléans, returned to France during the
restoration of the monarchy under
his cousin King
Louis XVIII.
Louis-Philippe had reconciled the Orléans family with Louis XVIII
in exile, and was once more to be found in the elaborate royal
court. However, his resentment at the treatment of his family, the
cadet branch of the
House of
Bourbon under the
Ancien
Régime, caused friction between him and Louis XVIII. He
openly sided with the liberal opposition.
Louis-Philippe was on far friendlier terms with Louis XVIII's
successor,
Charles X, who
acceded to the throne in 1824, and with whom he socialised.
However, his opposition to the policies of
Villèle and later of
Jules de Polignac caused him to be a
constant threat to the stability of Charles's government.
King of the French (1830–1848)
In 1830, the
July Revolution
overthrew Charles X. Charles abdicated in favor of his 10-year-old
grandson,
Henri, Duke of
Bordeaux. Louis-Philippe was charged by Charles X to announce
to the popularly elected
Chamber of Deputies his desire
to have his grandson succeed him. Louis-Philippe did not do this,
in order to increase his own chances of succession. As a
consequence, because the chamber was aware of Louis-Philippe's
liberal policies and of his popularity with the masses, they
proclaimed Louis-Philippe, who for eleven days had been acting as
the
regent for his small cousin, as the new
French king, displacing the senior branch of the
House of Bourbon.
In anger
over this betrayal, Charles X and his family, including his
grandson, left for Great Britain
. The grandson, better known as comte de
Chambord, later became the
pretender to
Louis Philippe's throne and was supported by many nobles known as
Legitimists.
Arms of Louis-Philippe.
Upon accession, Louis-Philippe assumed the title of
King of the
French - a title already employed by
Louis XVI in the short-lived Constitution of 1791.
Linking the
monarchy to a people
instead of a territory (as the previous designation
King of
France and of Navarre) was aimed at undercutting the
Legitimist claims of Charles X and his family.
By his ordinance of 13 August 1830, soon after his accession to the
throne, it was decided that the king's sister and his children
would continue to bear the arms of Orléans, that Louis Philippe's
eldest son, as
Prince Royal,
would bear the title
Duke of
Orléans, that the younger sons would continue to have
their previous titles, and that the sister and daughters of the
king would only be styled
Princesses of Orléans, not
of France.
In 1832,
his daughter, Princess Louise-Marie (1812–1850), married the
first ruler of Belgium, Leopold I, King of
the Belgians.
In July
1835, Louis Philippe survived an assassination attempt by Giuseppe Mario Fieschi on the
boulevard du
Temple
in Paris.
In 1842, his son and heir,
Ferdinand Philippe,
Duke of Orléans, died in a carriage accident.
Louis-Philippe ruled in an unpretentious fashion, avoiding the pomp
and lavish spending of his predecessors. Despite this outward
appearance of simplicity, his support came from the wealthy middle
classes. At first, he was much loved and called the "Citizen King"
and the "
bourgeois monarch," but his
popularity suffered as his government was perceived as increasingly
conservative and monarchical, despite
his decision of having
Napoleon's
remains returned to France. Under his management, the
conditions of the working classes deteriorated, and the
income gap widened considerably. An economic
crisis in 1847 led to the citizens of France revolting against
their king again the following year.
Abdication and death (1848–1850)
On 24 February 1848, during the
February 1848 Revolution, to
the general surprise of the French people, King Louis Philippe
abdicated in favor of his nine-year-old grandson,
Philippe. Fearful of what had
happened to Louis XVI, Louis-Philippe quickly disguised himself and
fled Paris.
Riding in an ordinary cab under the name of
"Mr. Smith", he fled to England
. According to The
Times of 6 March 1848, the King and Queen were received at
Newhaven,
East Sussex
before travelling by train to London.
The
National Assembly initially
planned to accept young Philippe as king, but the strong current of
public opinion rejected that. On 26 February, the
Second Republic was proclaimed.
Prince Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was elected President on 10
December of the same year; a few years later he declared himself
president for life and then
Emperor
Napoleon III in
1852.
Louis-Philippe and his family remained in
exile in England in Claremont
, Surrey
. He
died on 26 August 1850.
He is buried with his wife Marie-Amélie at
the Chapelle
royale de Dreux
, the Orléans family necropolis his mother had built
in 1816, in Dreux
, and which
he had enlarged and embellished after her death.
The clash of the pretenders
The clashes of 1830 and 1848 between the
Legitimists and the
Orleanists over who was the rightful monarch were
resumed in the 1870s. After the fall of the
Second Empire, a monarchist-dominated
National Assembly offered a throne to the Legitimist pretender,
Henri de France, comte de
Chambord, as
Henri V. As he was childless, his heir
was (except to the most extreme Legitimists) Louis Philippe's
grandson,
Philippe d'Orléans,
comte de Paris. Thus the comte de Chambord's death would have
united the House of Bourbon and House of Orléans.
However, the comte de Chambord refused to take the throne unless
the
Tricolor flag of the Revolution
was replaced with the
fleur-de-lis flag
of the
Ancien Régime. This the National Assembly was
unwilling to do. The
Third
Republic was established, though many intended for it to be
temporary, and replaced by a constitutional monarchy after the
death of the comte de Chambord. However, the comte de Chambord
lived longer than expected. By the time of his death in 1883,
support for the monarchy had declined, and public opinion sided
with a continuation of the Third Republic, as the form of
government that, according to
Adolphe
Thiers, "divides us least". Some suggested a monarchical
restoration under a later comte de Paris after the fall of the
Vichy regime but this did not
occur.
Most French monarchists regard the descendants of Louis Philippe's
grandson, who hold the title
Count of Paris, as the
rightful
pretenders to the French throne;
others, the Legitimists, consider Don
Luis-Alfonso de Borbón, Duke of
Anjou (to his supporters, "Louis XX") to be the rightful heir.
He is descended in the male line from
Philippe, Duke of Anjou, the second
grandson of the Sun-King,
Louis
XIV. Philippe (King Philip V of Spain), however, had renounced
his rights to the throne of France to prevent the much-feared union
of France and Spain.
The two sides challenged each other in the French Republic's law
courts in 1897 and again nearly a century later. In the latter
case,
Henri,
Comte de Paris, Duc de France, challenged the right of the
Spanish-born "pretender" to use the title
Duke of Anjou.
The French courts threw out his claim, arguing that the legal
system had no jurisdiction over the matter.
Ancestors
See also
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