December 7, 2025 • 45 mins
🇫🇷👑 Charles X of France – The Last Bourbon King 👑🇫🇷
Charles X (1757–1836) was the final reigning monarch of the Bourbon line in France. Brother of Louis XVI and Louis XVIII, Charles inherited the throne in 1824 during the Bourbon Restoration. Special guest David Montgomery joins the show to discuss his reign, which was marked by attempts to roll back the French Revolution.
Deeply conservative, Charles X pushed policies favoring the Catholic Church and the old aristocracy—earning him fierce opposition from liberals and the middle class. His controversial July Ordinances of 1830, which dissolved Parliament, censored the press, and restricted voting rights, triggered the July Revolution. Charles was overthrown and forced to abdicate, ending Bourbon rule in France.
📜 In this video, we’ll explore:
Charles X’s rise to power
His political struggles during the Restoration
How his policies sparked the 1830 Revolution
The legacy of the last Bourbon king of France
🔔 Subscribe for more history on French kings, Napoleon, and the dramatic revolutions that shaped Europe!
X/Twitter: @TheSiecle, @andnapoleon
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome back to Generals and Napoleon.
We are super excited and very happy to have the great David
Montgomery joining us from the SIECLA podcast once again.
Hello, David. Hey John, thanks for having me
back. Yeah, my pleasure.
My pleasure. For those of you not familiar
with David, one of the best French history podcasts in the
world, this Siecla. And for the uninitiated, David,
(00:21):
what is your podcast about? So the the Siecla is looking at
sort of the overlooked century in French politics between the
downfall of Napoleon in World War One.
Obviously Napoleon sticks aroundfor a little bit spectacularly
in one case, but this part that doesn't get as much coverage, at
least not from like, you know, high politics reasons and sort
(00:41):
of going through in order tryingto understand and tell the
stories of things like the Bourbon Restoration and the July
Monarchy where a lot of interesting things were
happening that most people neverknow anything about from their
history books. So it's just seemed like a
perfect gap in people's understanding that all the
information was there and it wasjust take a little bit of work
to popularize it. How much you define a little bit
(01:04):
has maybe since I first conceived this a few years ago.
Yeah. Well, what I like about it is,
you know, my podcast obviously is focused on the Napoleonic
era, kind of 1789 to 1815, and yours kind of picks up the
story. But it also has a lot of
recurring characters, cameo appearances by guys like
Marshall Marmont and the guy we're talking about today, King
(01:25):
Charles the 10th, right? Yeah.
I mean, a lot of these figures were active through much of this
whole period, the whole revolutionary generation,
Lafayette, Louis the 18th, Charles the 10th, people who
were active in 1789, and a lot of them weren't, were gone by
1830, but some were still aroundand we're still playing really
big roles. Lafayette and Charles the 10th,
(01:46):
bigger than any of them, as wellas Louis Philippe, the Duke
Dorleon. Yeah, we're going to dive into
Charles the 10th. That's our focus for today.
Before I do that though, I want to mention David has a great
Patreon, a lot of bonus content,a lot of interesting stuff.
If you want to support the Siecla on his Patreon, please go
check that out. And of course, the Generals.
A Napoleon Patreon. Yeah, support John's Patreon as
(02:08):
well. That's right, that's right.
So I want to start off with an episode I I listened to recently
of yours. It was an episode with Mike
Duncan, the host of the Revolutions podcast, and he it
was really intriguing. It was a nice hook to get me to
listen to it. So it says basically, do you
think Charles the 10th might go down as quote, one of the
(02:28):
greatest idiots of history? End Quote.
Yeah, that was that was Mike's great phrase, and I'm not sure
if he's the single greatest idiot of history, but it's
always bad when you can make a case that you should be
included. Surely there have been bigger
idiots who've ruled. Ferdinand the 7th of Spain comes
to mind, a big dumb dumb. But Charles, the 10th, He might
appreciate this somewhat, given that he was a big gambler, but
(02:50):
he was playing with bigger stakes than most as the ruler of
France, a big country, and through an ultimately entirely
preventable a self-inflicted wound, ended up losing his
throne and losing his cause. Yeah, if those unfamiliar
Charles the 10th, that was his kingly name, but he was the
successor of Napoleon, successorLouis, correct?
(03:11):
Yeah. So Louis the 16th, you might
know, is the king of France during the French Revolution,
married Marie Antoinette, was guillotined.
Louis the 16th had two younger brothers.
The Comp de Provence, who later took the throne as Louis the
18th, was the middle brother andthe youngest brother, the Compt
Artois, who we're talking about today.
After Louis the 18th died without any children, Charles
(03:31):
then took the throne as the third of the Bourbon brothers to
rule France. He ruled from 1824 to 1830,
after Louis the 18th had well claimed to rule for several
decades, but actually ruled for most of 18, 1814, most of 1815,
and then all the way to 1824. Right, right.
(03:53):
Those don't know. Louis the 18th claimed he was
ruling from abroad while he was in exile while Napoleon was
running the show. But we'll get into all that.
OK, let's dive into the subject matter.
Born in 1757 as Charles PhilippeCompter, Count de Artois, he's
the younger brother of both Louis the 16th and Louis the
18th. What was his upbringing like?
(04:16):
Lavish. He grew up in Versailles.
You know, the system that had been constructed by Louis the
16th and by Louis the 14th, and refined by Louis the 15th as the
most glamorous court in all of Europe, one that hung on to that
glamour even as a lot of other courts were becoming more
austere, more military in style in the 18th century.
This was an era of elaborate court customs, elaborate court
costumes, powdered wigs, all this stuff.
(04:39):
And the competent Trois grew up in this atmosphere.
He was fantastically rich, something of a Playboy, loved
gambling and horse and hunting, fairly dissolute one might say,
enjoying all the pleasures of his position.
He was, even as a young man, always on the right wing, even
within ancient regime politics, which is saying something.
He was always among the most conservative of this
(04:59):
conservative regime. Right, and I would say that it's
going to be both his greatest strength and fatal flaw.
He's a staunch royalist and ultra conservative even before
the French Revolution happens. What does that mean exactly?
And why did this conflict with the Jacobins on the other side?
So before the French Revolution,what that meant was that he was,
generally speaking, an opponent of reform.
(05:20):
In the latter decades of the onsenal regime, there were also
France was in a rough state as acountry.
It was deeply in debt. Its revenues weren't meeting
expenses. The system was sclerotic.
It was impossible to get anything done.
And there were these ideas that were coming out left and right.
Well, we got if we do this, we can fix things.
If we do that, we can fix things.
And with every idea there were people saying, oh, we can't do
(05:41):
that. That would be too disruptive.
That would undermine the power of the king.
That would undermine the power of our ancient traditions, and
pretty reliably whenever there'sa group of people saying we
can't do that. The Compter Trois was one of
that group, along with Marie Antoinette, who is also a leader
of the conservative faction, theCompter Provence.
The future Louis the 18th was relatively more progressive.
He was certainly no radical, sort of like the Dabble and
(06:02):
Reform projects and stuff like that.
So even for this early age, there was this sort of political
difference and none of none of these were Democrats.
They were all committed royalists.
It's just a question of what's the best approach for this
absolute monarchy to take. Yeah, and it's interesting.
I mean, as you mentioned, it's kind of the youngest of the
family. His brother Louis the 16th has a
(06:23):
son. Oh, do you think he ever had an
inkling that he might be king one day?
Because he's pretty far down thelist of succession been even
after the French Revolution. The odds that Charles would ever
become king, you know, especially before the French
Revolution, were pretty low. But, like, low in the sense of a
royal family, Right? Like, he was still just a couple
steps away from the throne. You know, they say that like,
(06:45):
every cardinal imagines himself being Pope and every senator
imagines of themselves being president.
I have to imagine that every Bourbon imagined themselves
becoming king. And Charles is probably no
exception, even when he was fifth or sixth in the line of
succession. Yeah.
And of course, you know, the Bourbons had for several
generations had been very long lived and had passed their
throne from grandfather to grandson rather than father to
(07:08):
son. So it was entirely possible, if
that had continued, that, you know, Charles would have died
before ever having the chance tobecome king.
But on the other hand, Charles did have sons relatively early
on. The middle brother, Louis the
18th, never had children, and especially after the French
Revolution happened and Louis the 16th was killed, and then
(07:30):
Louis the 16th son, dubbed by royalist Louis the 17th, died in
fairly miserable captivity. At that point, it became fairly
likely that Charles would becomeking.
All he had to do is outlive his brother at that point, and if
Charles didn't become king, thenCharles's son was in line to
become king. Right.
And for those who don't know, Louis the 18th was never the
portrait of healthiness. No, he was.
(07:51):
Even as a young man, he tended to being overweight, as opposed
to Charles, who's always slim, elegant, eventually something of
a silver fox. By the time Louis the 18th was
king, he was massively overweight, was in a wheelchair
from many of the last years of his life, suffered from gout
that was so debilitating and sometimes prevented him from
engaging in politics at fairly crucial times.
Generally had, you know, it was it was never in great health.
(08:13):
And there was never any idea that, like Louis, the 18th is
going to live to be 90 or anything like that.
Yeah. Whereas, you know, Charles the
10th was, as I said, much more active physically, in much
better health. So, you know, at a certain point
he was the heir apparent to the throne, and it seemed fairly
likely that he would get a chance to become king.
Let's. Talk about his family.
(08:34):
In 1773 he gets married to Mary Teresa.
How was their marriage and did they have kids?
So their marriage was OK as far as aristocratic arranged
marriages go. They pro managed to procreate,
which is more than you could sayfor some of these.
These couples. They had two sons, became the
the Duke Danglem, who was something of a fail son,
(08:57):
ultimately not as bright as his father, a fairly bumbling.
And the Duke de Berry, who took after his father's youthful
Playboy ways and eventually partied and philandered his way
across Europe, eventually left astring of illegitimate children,
including, at the time of his death in 1820, stabbed by an
assassin outside the Paris Opera.
His wife and multiple mistresseswere all pregnant at that time
(09:20):
with posthumous children, which,you know, was embarrassing, but
also for a royal family that hadnot had a lot of children, was
at least a good sign that at least one of these guys was
fertile. Yeah.
And ultimately this, the Duke toBerry's posthumous son Henry,
would become the heir of the Bourbon line.
(09:41):
And would we continue to claim the Bourbon, make the Bourbon
claim to the throne as late as the Third Republic?
Yeah, Duke to Berry was stabbed,I believe, by Bonaparte.
So there's a lot of hatred, but you can see between Bonaparte's
factions and the Bourbons, but we'll get into that in a minute.
So the French Revolution happens, the future Charles of
the 10th has to flee France and become a leader of the emigre
(10:04):
opposition to the revolution. I mean, it must have been very
upsetting. His one brother, the King, Louis
the 16th, is guillotined and he's basically in exile with his
other brother, the future Louis the 18th.
How close were these brothers? Not especially close Charles the
10th the Carpenter trois was essentially the first emigre.
He left France the day after theBastille fell.
(10:25):
Widely reported that you know heleft because of his devotion to
conservative politics. News to discuss what was
happening. Other historians suggest this
might have been a You can't fireme I quit situation because
Louis the 16th was extremely annoyed that Artois, his younger
brother, by being so flamboyantly reactionary, was
stirring up opposition and trouble and just wanted him off
the scene. So whether he left entirely
(10:46):
voluntarily or was pushed out, he left.
In 1789, Louis the 18th, the Provence wouldn't leave France
for several more years, leaving successfully at the same time as
the famous flight to Varenne, when Louis the 16th also tried
to flee and was caught and captured and brought back from
exile. Artois just intrigued
constantly, even against direct orders from Louis the 16th to
(11:08):
can it and stop doing that. He was convinced that he knew
better than his brother what wasin the best interest of the
monarchy, and he pursued his idea of the best interest of the
monarchy even against the implied and sometimes direct
commands of the monarch himself.And he continued to do this
after Louis the 16th died and Louis the 18th was the head of
the family. Our trial was something of a
(11:29):
free agent to took instructions from his brothers under
advisement but rarely as direct commands and often was pursuing
sort of his own agenda to promote the family as he saw
best. Yeah, I was going to ask you.
Obviously Napoleon takes over in1799.
Depending on who I ask, who do you think was involved in some
of these assassination plots against Napoleon?
(11:51):
Obviously the famous one, the gunpowder infernal machine plot.
Was it the royalists? Was it, you know, Compt
Deretois? Was it the British agents?
Like who? Who was plotting these
assassination attempts? I mean, lots of people were, the
Jacobins and the royalists were both involved in some of these
various plots. How involved Artois was is a
little hard to pin down. Certainly if you go up the
(12:14):
ladder enough chains everything.All these royalist conspiracies
pretty much came back to him. He was in England for a lot of
the the polianic regimes, much closer to the scene than Louis
the 18th, who was in Germany or Russia for a lot of this time
was sort of much more out of things.
Our trial was sort of on the scene and much more actively
collaborating was tied up to allthese networks of royalist
conspirators in France, some of whom were merely spying or
(12:37):
trying to influence opinion, butothers who were actively
involved in what I call direct action.
And how much, you know, Charles was giving direct orders to
people or how much just saying like, go help, help about my
cause against the usurper and leaving it up to the
conspirators to decide what theywanted to do was hard to say.
I don't think he would have beenupset if a royalist had managed
(12:57):
to kill the usurper Napoleon. And it's certainly not
implausible that he talked to one of the people and told him
to go do your best to kill him. You know, I mean, Charles was an
inveterate conspirator. He, it was an national world of
plotting up until the very end. And I think we'll, I'll talk
about that a little bit later about this sort of
conspiratorial mindset and how that's contributed to his
(13:18):
downfall. But some of that was shaped
during his long exile when that's basically all he had to
do was plot. He, he, he had no armies.
He could not use the conventional tools of statecraft
to try to get what he wanted. All he had was the world of
skullduggery and plots and conspiracies and assassinations.
Yeah, and you wonder during thattime, and we'll get to post 1830
(13:40):
as well. Did you go back to those old
ways? Like, oh man, how do I get my
throne back? But we'll get into that the.
Other thing I should mention youtalk, we have talked about his
wife and their relatively distant relationship.
They they separated basically during the revolution and never
reunited. Charles had no interest really
in reuniting and I believe there's a request that she could
join him and he said basically no.
(14:01):
He also had this time had he hada long term mistress, Louise de
Paul Estrone, who he was with for many, many years devoted to
her. And she died while they were in
exile in England. And the story goes that on her
deathbed, she demanded that after that he promised to devote
himself only to God after she was gone.
And whether that actually happened or just a just so
(14:23):
story, about this time, Charles the 10th, the youthful Playboy,
did become devoutly religious, adevoutly religious Catholic, and
would remain devoutly religious through to the end of his life.
That's interesting. Yeah, maybe he had an awakening
or, or maybe he just wanted to keep his promise.
I mean, Napoleon had Marie Valeska, he had a mistress that
he was very infatuated with. So maybe, maybe Charles the 10th
(14:45):
was similarly infatuated with this this person and and wanted
to honor her in that way. A lot of these old aristocrats,
you know, they had their formal marriages, which often were cold
and people separated relatively young in life.
Often the people get married, they would have the air, maybe a
second child, and then they justseparate and go have their own
affairs of both husband and wife.
(15:06):
Not not uncommon at all. Yeah, well, not to jump too far
ahead in the story, but I'm trying to get to the reign of
Charles and 10th and we still have some background to lay.
He returns to France during the Bourbon Restoration 1814 and
supported his brother Louis the 18th.
Do you think King Louis the 18thand his brother, the future
Charles the 10th, were trying torestore stability to France or
(15:29):
turn back the clock on the Revolution?
Both. You know, Louis the 18th is just
a really fascinating figure who went through a lot of twists and
turns in his life that he was, he was something of a reformer
before 1789, after going to exile, went hard to the right
and became sort of an uncompromising reactionary,
demanding the complete and full restoration of the old ways.
(15:52):
But gradually over the long exile, Louis the 18th, bit by
bit would moderate and come to recognize that we have to make
some concessions. We can't continue to demand
everything goes back the way it was.
Which also ended up being convenient when he finally took
power and inherited the administrative state that
Napoleon had built and discovered that a lot of this
was actually very nice for the person at the top and that he
(16:13):
didn't want to get rid of the council of State and the
prefects and the disciplined army and all that.
So Lou, the 18th, under pressurefrom the Allies, issued a
constitution for France, the Charter of 1814, which well,
framed as a free gift that couldimplicitly be revoked at any
time. I still did sort of create a
sort of semi constitutional formof government for France.
(16:35):
And even though Louis the 18th was sort of pressured into it
and other people wrote it and hejust sort of signed off on it,
he did come to genuinely sort ofview the charter as his child.
There's a famous quote that he gave telling the intermediary,
the King of Naples, that it was better to issue a constitution
than to have one forced on you. And besides, it was the spirit
(16:58):
of the age, which I think sums up Louis the 18th's attitude
fairly well. Left his own devices, he
absolutely would have brought back the ASEAN regime of his
youth in all its pleasure and grandeur.
But he recognized that times have changed and that there are
certain things he had to compromise on if he wanted to
keep the other aspects of the the old order that he wanted.
Charles the 10th was never quiteso open to these changes.
(17:22):
By this time, he had acknowledged some things had
changed. You couldn't or didn't want to
undo literally everything and turned the clock all the way
back to 1789. But Charles the 10th was much
less in tune with the spirit of the age that his brother had
made his peace with. Throughout Louis the 18th reign
the Compt Artois was the leader of the right wing faction, the
(17:42):
so-called ultra royalists or thePures or the Pontoos, the sort
of the the pointed ones. Sometimes he kept it a little
distance because he was obliged to formally support his brother.
But it was an open secret that our Artois was the spiritual and
social center of this a hard right faction and sometimes
engaged in active participation in politics, much to his
(18:03):
brother's frequent frustration, especially earlier in the Louis
the 18th reign. Near the end, as Louis the 18th
health started to fail, political situation in France
had changed. Louis the 18th had moved to the
right a little bit, and also simultaneously gave Charles a
larger role in the governance ofFrance. 11 Wag said something to
the effect of poor Louis the 18th will guess to see his
(18:24):
brother as king before he even dies because of Artois larger
role. Although Louis the 18th was an
ornery fellow who remained stubborn to the end when he
wanted to be involved in something.
But you know, Artois was well known as a hard right leader.
This is not, you know, this had some things that can be
surprising to some people. For a lot of this period, the
(18:46):
ultra royalists were actually opposed to censorship because
partly because it was felt the ultra royalists had better
writers than some of these otherfactions.
And some also like some of theseministries that Louis the etieth
had were more moderate and censorship might have been used
against the ultra royalists. So Charles, you know, was sort
of anti censorship in this period and one of the first
things he did upon becoming kingwas end of the censorship that
(19:08):
had been currently in place. You look at it and you look at
some of the mistakes they made along the way, and we're going
to get to more of those here in a minute.
Obviously, the killing of Marshall Knave by firing squad
was 1. And I think if you're too strict
and you try to stamp things out too much, like they were trying
to avoid Bonapartism for forever.
And then sure enough, in 1848, Napoleon's nephew comes back on
(19:31):
the throne. So it's it's almost like perhaps
they were too harsh in their measures and if they were just
got a more moderate path, thingshave turned out differently.
In 1824, France was fairly stable politically.
The restoration was fairly entrenched.
There were still deeper currentsmoving.
No country in Europe would end up immune to the demands for
wider suffrage than the demands for sort of we called social
(19:56):
reform, for efforts to help workers who were impoverished as
the industrial revolution transformed the continent.
Those would have come to France regardless.
But the Bourbon restoration in the middle of the 80s was fairly
stable and secure. It had survived a number of
crises, some near death experiences, an arguable death
experience in 1815, but it had come through and was on
(20:16):
relatively stable footing. This included some fairly
repressive laws. It's often said that you know
that even at its worst, the Bourbon Restoration was less of
a police state than France had been under Napoleon, especially
if you were a member of the elite.
Under the burn Restoration, there was a parliament where
discourse was relatively free, Awider range of voices could
(20:40):
express themselves publicly and argue that had been allowed
under Napoleon. But you know, this was still a
fairly we would today call this a managed, managed
constitutional monarchy. There's heavy vote rigging,
secret police where ubiquitous, the king meddled in in public
affairs. So it was not what we would call
a free and democratic state. But compared to what had been in
the past and what people in Europe could experience by
(21:02):
traveling to Austria or Prussia at the time, France was more
free. And arguably at some points you
could argue at some way that Restoration France was more free
than Britain at some point in certain aspects.
This is a period when of the Peterloo Massacre and all sorts
of repression against left wing activists in Britain as well.
OK, so I'm just going to try andfigure out in the six years here
award starts travel. We'll start at the beginning,
(21:24):
but Charles the 10th becomes France, King of France in 1824,
his brother Louis the 18th dies and he promotes traditional
Catholic values, aristocratic privileges, earning support from
conservatives, conservatives andhostility from liberals.
Looking back on it, is this a bad idea?
So Charles the 10th has a bit ofa honeymoon phase after he takes
(21:46):
over, like everybody knows that he's far to the right.
This is an open secret in France.
But he comes in, he makes these goodwill gestures.
He he lifts censorship, he freesa bunch of political prisoners.
He does sort of a charm offensive and things, things go
pretty well. But over sort of his first year
in office, I think the turning point is often seen as Charles's
official coronation in 1820, May1825, the city of France and the
(22:09):
cathedral there. That's sort of seen as sort of
the end of the honeymoon in the in the beginning of this this
new phase. His government led by the Comp
de Vilal, who he inherited from Louis the 18th passes several
controversial laws so-called emigres billion, which
compensated nobles who'd lost land during the restoration.
(22:30):
Ironically, a a lot of historians just deeply unpopular
as it would be today, like usingtaxpayer money to reward a bunch
of rich and famous people. It was never going to be a
politically a good idea in in the short term.
A lot of historians do see it aslike probably a good policy
because the emigrates who had had their land seized were
(22:51):
ceaselessly agitating and stirring things up to try to get
their land back. And then what they wanted was
the state to see seize their land, the people who had bought
it and give it back to them or to pressure the people who
bought it using social pressure at the local level, pressure
them to sell it back. And the mere possibility that
(23:13):
there, this could like 10% of France of French people owned
some of the Seas land. This was not a small amount of
of resources. It was the existence of this was
a huge source of instability. And the opposition played this
up that like you have to supportus or the Bourbons are going to
retake the beyond nest. You know, the seas land, the
(23:33):
national goods and by paying offthe emigres, this agitation
largely stopped. The value of this seized land
went up after the emigrates billion was passed because the
title to it was seen as more secure.
So it was probably a good policy, but it was absolutely a
self-inflicted political wound. There's also a a blasphemy law
that was that was passed. There had been a couple of high
(23:54):
profile vandalizations of Catholic churches and then it
you you get to this 1825, the coronation ceremony of Charles
the 10th, which by and large follows the millennia old
traditions of French royal coronations.
There are some compromises, someupdates.
You know, some some of the French marshals participate in
the ceremony. The king included an oath to
(24:15):
uphold the charter, which you know, Louis the 16th had Louis
the 14th had and 16th had never never done.
But it was you know, it was heldin the Catholic Church.
There was bishops involved. There's a religious ceremony the
in France, there was this, this baptismal oil that has
supposedly been brought down by heaven for I think the baptism
(24:36):
of Clovis in like more than a millennia ago.
And this had been destroyed during the revolution.
But supposedly it was rediscovered like days before
the coronation that supposedly a, a loyal devotee had saved
some of this from destruction and kept it secret.
And it came out at the exact time.
This was amazing. France can continue this
(24:58):
tradition because there's been amiracle and this has been saved
to everyone else. All this smacked of the old ways
of religious devotion and it wasit was deeply unpopular and
cemented the image of Charles the 10th at combined with things
like the Emigres billion and thethe Sacrilege Law cemented the
(25:22):
image of Charles the 10th as this backwards figure.
Widespread conspiracy theories of this time from the left and
even up to the center right about the role of the Jesuits,
famed famous target throughout centuries for conspiracy
theories. And the so-called congregation
which was widely seen as this like right wing Catholic secret
society that had its tendrils everywhere in society and was
(25:44):
plotting to manipulate France. And it was widely believed that
Charles was either a member of this group or a puppet of this
group at the time. Well, he also gets involved in
foreign policy, notably the colonization of Algeria by
France. Is this just a distraction for
the public to kind of put their focus on, or is he trying to
like, rebuild the glory of France?
(26:05):
Both. Both.
Charles was active in foreign policy as as he was not a mere
figurehead as king, he was at active powers and much of Europe
was ruled by monarchs and monarchs would write to each
other. That was that was normal.
I don't continue under the July monarchy, much to the
frustration of Louis Philippe's ministers, Charles and his
advisors like Jules de Poliniak.We'll have time to talk about
(26:26):
coming up. Pursued lots of schemes to try
to boost French national greatness.
Poland Neck at one point proposed this elaborate
fantastical scheme involving redrawing the map of Europe
where Russia would get lands from the Ottoman Empire and in
Austria lands, the Ottoman Empire.
(26:47):
And then Prussia would get otherlands and it was out of the
swap. France would get some of the
territory that had been forced to surrender after Napoleon's
downfall, sort of reclaiming thenatural borders of France that
were such an obsession across the political spectrum at the
time. This went nowhere.
You know what, none of the othercountries in Europe wanted any
part of this but Charlie, it wasgenuinely interested in this.
(27:07):
But the particular circumstancesof the invasion of Algiers, the
modern day capital city of Algeria happened.
You know, there's some particular inspirations
involved. There'd been a long standing
dispute over some unpaid debt. The French envoy had been
swatted by a fly swatter by the the leader of Algiers.
But the particular circumstanceswas that in 1829, August 1829,
(27:31):
Charles the 10th had for the past year or two been forced
basically to accept a more moderate ministry than he
wanted. All the efforts of censorship
and vote rigging had failed. In 1827, France's very tiny
electorate, about 1% of its males had the right to vote,
just determined based on wealth of the time.
France's tiny electorate had defeated ultra royalist
(27:51):
candidates forced basically forced out at the comp to Vilal,
which was after Vilal, the fairly fairly competent Prime
Minister under Louis and Charles.
Charles had been forced to accept a more moderate ministry
under V Compton Martin Yak and hated it.
He absolutely hated all these concessions.
Every day he was asked to make anew concession, a new
(28:13):
compromise. And you know, occasionally he
like some of them, but the the culminating impact of all these
concessions and he was asked to make just chafed on him.
And in August 1829, he fired Martiniak and replaced him with
a new ministry led by his old friend Jules de Poliniak.
Back friends, back to the Versailles days, just as
(28:34):
Catholic and conservative as Charles was, and a ministry
made-up entirely of far right people.
Which is mostly due to what Charles wanted, but also because
anyone who wasn't far right generally declined to be
involved when they were asked. Yeah, and that's part of my next
question. I always wondered this about
failed kings and emperors and despots.
You know, did they just have badadvisors or did they have good
(28:57):
advisors and just ignore them? I mean, certainly some of
Charles's advisors over the years were bad, probably none
worse than Jules Dapolitiak, whohad some talents, but you can't
say conclude anything other thanthat.
Jules Dapolitiak was a disastrous choice of Prime
Minister for Charles, but he also had capable leaders.
Joseste Vilal was a fairly competent administrator,
(29:18):
although he ended up alienating a lot of people by the end.
Martiniak served ably and Martiniak was an ultra, was an
ultra royalist. But when it was pragmatic and
thought that there were certain concessions that had to be made
in order to preserve the crown, and there were other people who
were close to Charles, part of his court circle and stuff like
that, who had more moderate positions and were sending him
(29:39):
letters and messages trying to urge him to take more moderate
courses. And ultimately it comes down to
what Charles wanted. He chose who he would listen to
and who he wouldn't listen to. And by the end, what we wanted
to listen to was far right figures like Jules Napoleonic,
who take an uncompromising attitude toward France's liberal
opposition. And the reforms and the changes
(30:01):
that they were demanding, which Charles felt were offensive to
his dignity as monarch and whichhe felt were a slippery slope to
a new revolution, is one of the defining memories he took out of
1789. He saw what the catastrophic
mistake that triggered everything was when Louis the
16th had agreed under pressure to fire his Prime Minister and
(30:23):
bring on bring back Jacques Nacaire.
And Charles saw that as the big mistake and was determined to
not back down and not let the mob pressure him into firing his
ministers. And he would continue to
devoutly believe this right up until he was being chased out of
France. Yeah, let's get into it. 1830
July 1830 He issues the July ordinances, they're called,
(30:46):
which suspended press freedom, dissolved Parliament, led to
public outrage. I know you and I have gone into
the subject on our Marshall Mamont episode, but why wasn't
Charles able to put down this this particular revolution?
So let's let's zoom back a little bit.
France had been sort of in a slow moving political crisis
from the moment Charles appointed the Poliniak ministry.
(31:06):
What became the Poliniak ministry, the Chamber of
Deputies in early 1830 had made a provocative declaration or
Charles had made him speech to the chambers in which he had
insisted on the rights of his throne.
And the Chamber of Deputies had then voted a response to this
speech in which they basically called for Charles to fire
Poliniak. Charles dissolved Parliament.
(31:28):
There are new elections. And why why did Charles think
that he would be able to win this new round of elections when
all the past elections have beengoing badly?
Well, one thing he did was like take a more active Charles
penned an active appeal to voters to support ultra royalist
candidates. Previously, kings had kept a
little bit of remove a sort of fictitious neutrality in all
(31:49):
this, even though everybody knewthat the kings were had had
their political preferences. Charles broke that and got
himself directly involved in politics, which should have
undermined some of the mystique around him and was probably a
mistake. But the other thing he did was
try to stir up nationalist sentiment in favor of his
ministers with a successful foreign invasion.
And he took advantage of these provocations that's been
(32:10):
building up with Algiers to senda large expedition to do
something to the leader of Algiers.
There's not quite clear what exactly that would entail.
Maybe just like a punitive expedition to force some
concessions, as it ultimately ended up being a conquest.
And this expedition just ended up coming off fairly
successfully. The French army occupied the
city of Algiers without too muchtrouble, but Charles didn't get
(32:33):
the credit for it. People were like gay France
rather than gay Charles. And the electors went out, and
they voted even an even larger liberal majority.
And at this point, Charles and his ministers decided we can't
do this electorally. They thought, you know, there is
the, there are these conspirators on the left who are
stage managing events. The, the liberal press was, as
(32:55):
they saw it, printing all sorts of falsehoods and lies,
calumnies. And they generally thought that
they need, they needed a reset, they need to get friends right
on the right track. So they passed these 4
ordinances, which, you know, dissolved parliament before it,
even the newly elected parliament before it even had a
chance to meet it, imposed widespread path press
censorship, having taken the lessons of past attempts at
(33:16):
censorship, try to close all theloopholes that newspapers had
used to to dodge the the press censorship and unilaterally
rewrote election laws to skew the elections even more in favor
of far right candidates. Which is how they thought that
this new round of elections would go better for them than
all the last couple of rounds ofelections.
They adopted this on Sunday, July 25th.
(33:37):
It was published on Monday, July26th.
And on Tuesday, July 27th, everything exploded gradually.
Lots of people in France had expected Charles to try a coup.
It was, it was just like not a complete surprise.
Royalist newspapers had been urging Charles to do a coup for
for a long time. Opposition newspapers had been
challenging this. People in the middle were like,
(33:58):
oh, we are talking coup again. It was a boy cries wolf
situation. He's never going to actually do
it. He's never asked to have the
guts to seize power. And then he did, with the four
ordinances in July 1830, widely seen as a bad move.
Yeah, we we talked about our Marshall Mamont episode.
So basically this powder keg blows up and Arlo Mormont has
(34:19):
about 10,000 troops. That's really not enough to put
down this huge. I wouldn't call it citywide, but
it's a large revolution in Paris.
Yeah, much of central Paris alsoends up consumed by this
revolution. What begins as protests, then
becomes riots, then becomes an insurgency and gradually grows
and grows until the royal army'sbeing chased out of Paris with
(34:41):
its tail between his legs. And a lot of people have
wondered, like, how could Charles and Polinac have been so
stupid as to leave only about 10,000 effective troops in Paris
at the time when they're launching a royal coup?
There were like 3 times as many troops in Paris in in July 1789
when the Bastille fell and that had been an inadequate number of
troops, right? Decades later, Napoleon.
(35:02):
When Napoleon the Third launcheshis coup, he will move with
clockwork military efficiency toblanket the streets of Paris
with soldiers, arrest all all the opposition, preemptively
suppress any chance for anythingto go wrong.
None of that happens in 1830. The announcement ordinance are
published and then people start making OK we should probably
(35:24):
start arresting some of these critics and everything was very
slowly and languorously. And my theory I I I can't say
this is like absolute hard fact,but I think it's a strong
interpretation of the available data that the reason why Charles
and Paul in the act didn't have more on hand.
We know that a reason was they didn't want to tip themselves
off. They thought if they started
(35:45):
concentrating troops in Paris, it would tip everyone off that a
coup was coming that much we know right.
I think it goes back to the the Charles and polling acts.
Decades of life in this shadowy underworld of conspiracies and
plots. They saw the world in through a
conspiratorial mindset and they believed This is also true, that
there was the so-called faction that the left opposition was a
(36:06):
centrally directed conspiracy bythe so-called comedy director,
the director, directorial committee or managing committee.
My theory is that they thought that their opposition to the
reign wasn't organic and that all they had to do was take the
comedy director by the prize andthey wouldn't be able to arrange
any response. Because even even afterwards in
the memoirs that all these attempts by Charles's former
(36:29):
ministers to say, Oh well, you know, the the bourgeois factory
owners were paying their workersto go out into the streets.
It's all directed. This is planned.
This is a plot. None of this make this is all
spontaneous. Charles pissed off the printers.
The printers went off and stirred up trouble.
But these people seriously believe this was all stage
managed. And I think that explains why
they didn't take more preparations because they
thought if if we don't give these guys a chance to plot,
(36:50):
then there won't be any responseand everything will be quiet.
I think your episode where you mentioned even the first night
of the Revolution, Charles is doing his usual thing, playing
cards with his buddies. He doesn't think it's a big
deal. Yeah.
You know, Charles is often soundclue so he's not on the ground
and he's being informed mostly by Polanyak who's sending him
regular dispatches and telling him to not listen to anybody
else except him. I'm Polanyak is just blithely
(37:13):
convinced that everything's gonna turn out OK long after
things are not OK anymore, afterour mom was telling him we're in
trouble, after other ministers, like the naval minister Baron to
house a who's just like incredulous as to how
incompetent Poliniak is. He's saying like, dude, you got
to do something. Poliniak, just like refuse,
refuses to make any compromises,even like tactical compromises
(37:36):
where you pretend to make a concession that you'll plan on
going back on later. None of this happens.
And finally the, you know, the compromise.
Charles starts making compromises way too late.
Yeah, day late and a dollar short.
Every concession he makes is a daylight and a dollar short.
The the army is on the verge of losing Paris.
And he finally says, OK, I can make some minor concessions.
And these are concessions that like 3 days ago, the opposition
(37:58):
would have said, great, this is amazing.
You're going to fire Poliniak and repeal the four ordinances.
That's all we wanted. But by this time, that was no
longer enough. They wanted more.
They couldn't trust Charles anymore.
They needed more stuff. The people of Paris weren't
going to lay down their arms forthat.
So Charles would dig in his heels and he would refuse.
And there would be a long argument.
And finally, he'd agreed to makeanother concession.
OK, I'll appoint a more moderatePrime Minister.
(38:20):
And again, this would have been more than enough a couple days
ago, but now it was too late. And this happened again and
again and again. Yeah, yeah.
Well, he's finally deposed in 1830 during the July Revolution.
He's forced to abdicate a crown,passes to Louis Philippe.
Must have been very difficult toget booted out of your home
country on three different occasions.
French Revolution, 100 days and now this.
(38:42):
I imagine it gets a little easier with each subsequent
exile. You're not caught by surprise
anymore. Right, right.
He's like, I know how to flee. Yeah.
Also, I will note that Louis the18th, having gone through the
same double exile, insisted on keeping money in a British bank
in case he ever had to go into exile again.
So he would have money on hand and wouldn't be dependent on
(39:03):
handouts. Smart.
Well, did Charles attempt ever attempt to regain his throne?
Like, what were his later years like in exile?
Yeah. Charles went to England first in
exile, eventually went to Austria.
It was this weird ambiguity there where like Charles attempt
had abdicated in favor not of his son, the Duke Dangle M, but
(39:24):
of his grandson Henry, who was more seen as more of a political
innocent who wasn't tarred by the the calamitous decisions of
the four ordinances. But for the like the remainder
of his life there, it was sort of a Gray zone as a who was
really in charge in this exile court.
Charles is basically still running things even though his
underage son was heir. And it was not not clear.
(39:45):
Like it was as if Charles was acting as a Regent, but like
people who visited and were too obsequious about praising young
Henry as my king, we get like this real cold shoulder.
There's this real ambiguity thatCharles did not want punctured
as to like who was actually kingat the time.
Henry, for his part, saw that his grandfather was king and
assisted. His grandfather was the rightful
(40:06):
king of France until his death. But there were royalist attempts
to reclaim power, none more dramatic than that, led by
Charles's daughter-in-law, the Duchesse Deberry, the widow of
the assassinated Duke Deberry, who made a landing in France and
tried to stir up a rebellion that absolutely fizzled, that
she ended going to hiding in France.
For quite some time was finally betrayed and tracked down where
(40:29):
it was discovered then that she had had a second secret marriage
and was pregnant, which for traditionalist Catholic Church
Catholics as well As for someonewhose authority came entirely
from her first marriage to Charles's son, really just like
blew everything up and that failed.
(40:51):
You know, there were continued plots and schemes, but nothing
serious. The real danger after this from
to the July monarch that came from the left from republican
plotters and uprisings. Charles, you sort of maintained
his court in exile. You focus on educating his son,
getting offended at slights fromforeign leaders we thought
wanted to treat him with royal dignity, and who saw him as a
(41:12):
real screw up, who'd hurt the cause of royal legitimacy for
all of Europe. And ultimately, he died a sad
death of disease in exile. Yeah, it's fascinating to me.
Spends the rest of his life in exile.
Dies in 1836 in Austria. Oddly, he's the only French king
who's not buried in France. What do you think his legacy is?
I mean, it's not good even if you're, even if you put yourself
(41:35):
in the position of a devoted legitimacy, someone who's
convinced that he was the rightful king of France,
ordained by God and man and remain so until his death.
Even if you put yourself in thisposition, he made a lot of
blunders. Even even if you're in the
position that the only mistake he made was not enforcing his
(41:57):
four ordinances more vigorously,the still like he's the guy who
made the blunder and try to coupwithout having the soldiers on
hand to back it up. And whether you're you think
that was his mistake, whether you think his mistake was not
being willing to compromise moreor whether you think all this
was a mistake and you're not a legitimist at all.
There's no way in which you can view him as a successful ruler
(42:17):
of France. Whether it was by being too hard
or not hard enough, he didn't dodidn't get it right, which is
why you see a lot of the, the legitimist sort of clung to this
idea that there's been a conspiracy.
The real actors in this had beenthe opposition conspiracy that
had been laying these plots in motion.
And that it's not like, you know, the sensible leaders of
the conspiracy in like, Lafayette were off at their
(42:39):
country homes when this broke out.
Many of the other prominent liberal leaders spent the first
few days of the revolution trying desperately to save
Charles's throne for him. And again, he refused to make
these small compromises that might have done it at the time.
Well, that's what it strikes me as.
It's a huge failed opportunity. Obviously you're an educated
man. You grew up in Versailles.
You're the best teachers in the world.
(43:00):
You see where your brother Louisthe 16th failed.
You see where your brother Louisthe 18th failed.
You notice that Napoleon's system of government is a good
one. So you have all these things to
learn from and you still screwedup.
The July Revolution 1830 was an entirely self-inflicted wound.
Whether Charles would have eventually run into a popular
revolution driven by the refusalto expand to the franchise to
(43:23):
let more people vote, by the economic dislocations that were
starting to hit Europe at this time.
It's entirely possible like moremore moderate regimes like the
July Monarchy ultimately fell tothese these sort of pressures.
Like, would Charles have found away to thread the circle that
there are some ultra royalists who had the idea that we should
let poor people vote because thereal enemy is the middle class.
And if we let the poor people vote, then they'll vote for us.
(43:45):
They'll vote for the king against the middle class.
Which I'm not sure how well thatwould have played out for them
in the end. But in the short term, that
might have actually worked. You know, it's possible that
Charles might have come around to something like that.
Or maybe he would have liked theyounger Charles, fought reform
tooth and nail to the very end and ultimately fall into another
revolution that wasn't self-inflicted.
Who knows. But he didn't need to fall in
(44:06):
July 1830. That was on him.
No. And I think part of that legacy,
I mean, there's obviously no clamor to get his buried remains
back to France. Even Napoleon in 1840, there was
a push to get him back in Franceand maybe there is here and
there to get him reburied in France.
But clearly he didn't do a very good job if there's no clamor
for it. Yeah, I mean, some people.
There was some diehard loyalist to Charles during his years of
(44:29):
exile and a very tiny faction who were supporters of the
Charles son, the Duke Danglem. But most most of the French
legitimist put all their emotional devotion onto Henry
the grandson, and he became the locus of legitimism.
He was free from the follies andthe blunders of July 1830.
He could. He was someone that the
(44:50):
legitimist could put their pin their hopes into and eventually
he grew up to be an adult and made his own blunders.
But that's a story for another day.
There were not a lot of die hardCharles defenders after the
fact. Well, amazing overview as
always, David. Yeah, that was just great stuff.
I didn't, I knew a little bit about Charles the 10th, but I'm
really glad you kind of opened the box on him and let us learn
(45:12):
about him. That was really good stuff.
Thank you. I've I've covered Charles
extensively, the whole range of my podcast.
Episode 26, I sort of recover the whole events of the
restoration from Charles's perspective.
I put him on the throne in episode 28 and then cover the
events of the July Revolution ingreat detail, starting with
episode 39 all the way through to episode 45.
(45:35):
Yeah, again, if you want to learn more about Charles the
10th or the background, political background France at
this time, please check out the Siegla with David Montgomery and
we thank him for his time. Thanks for having me on.
Always a pleasure. Thank you, David.
Welcome back to Generals and Napoleon.
We are super excited and very happy to have the great David
Montgomery joining us from the SIECLA podcast once again.
Hello, David. Hey John, thanks for having me
back. Yeah, my pleasure.
My pleasure. For those of you not familiar
with David, one of the best French history podcasts in the
world, this Siecla. And for the uninitiated, David,
(00:21):
what is your podcast about? So the the Siecla is looking at
sort of the overlooked century in French politics between the
downfall of Napoleon in World War One.
Obviously Napoleon sticks aroundfor a little bit spectacularly
in one case, but this part that doesn't get as much coverage, at
least not from like, you know, high politics reasons and sort
(00:41):
of going through in order tryingto understand and tell the
stories of things like the Bourbon Restoration and the July
Monarchy where a lot of interesting things were
happening that most people neverknow anything about from their
history books. So it's just seemed like a
perfect gap in people's understanding that all the
information was there and it wasjust take a little bit of work
to popularize it. How much you define a little bit
(01:04):
has maybe since I first conceived this a few years ago.
Yeah. Well, what I like about it is,
you know, my podcast obviously is focused on the Napoleonic
era, kind of 1789 to 1815, and yours kind of picks up the
story. But it also has a lot of
recurring characters, cameo appearances by guys like
Marshall Marmont and the guy we're talking about today, King
(01:25):
Charles the 10th, right? Yeah.
I mean, a lot of these figures were active through much of this
whole period, the whole revolutionary generation,
Lafayette, Louis the 18th, Charles the 10th, people who
were active in 1789, and a lot of them weren't, were gone by
1830, but some were still aroundand we're still playing really
big roles. Lafayette and Charles the 10th,
(01:46):
bigger than any of them, as wellas Louis Philippe, the Duke
Dorleon. Yeah, we're going to dive into
Charles the 10th. That's our focus for today.
Before I do that though, I want to mention David has a great
Patreon, a lot of bonus content,a lot of interesting stuff.
If you want to support the Siecla on his Patreon, please go
check that out. And of course, the Generals.
A Napoleon Patreon. Yeah, support John's Patreon as
(02:08):
well. That's right, that's right.
So I want to start off with an episode I I listened to recently
of yours. It was an episode with Mike
Duncan, the host of the Revolutions podcast, and he it
was really intriguing. It was a nice hook to get me to
listen to it. So it says basically, do you
think Charles the 10th might go down as quote, one of the
(02:28):
greatest idiots of history? End Quote.
Yeah, that was that was Mike's great phrase, and I'm not sure
if he's the single greatest idiot of history, but it's
always bad when you can make a case that you should be
included. Surely there have been bigger
idiots who've ruled. Ferdinand the 7th of Spain comes
to mind, a big dumb dumb. But Charles, the 10th, He might
appreciate this somewhat, given that he was a big gambler, but
(02:50):
he was playing with bigger stakes than most as the ruler of
France, a big country, and through an ultimately entirely
preventable a self-inflicted wound, ended up losing his
throne and losing his cause. Yeah, if those unfamiliar
Charles the 10th, that was his kingly name, but he was the
successor of Napoleon, successorLouis, correct?
(03:11):
Yeah. So Louis the 16th, you might
know, is the king of France during the French Revolution,
married Marie Antoinette, was guillotined.
Louis the 16th had two younger brothers.
The Comp de Provence, who later took the throne as Louis the
18th, was the middle brother andthe youngest brother, the Compt
Artois, who we're talking about today.
After Louis the 18th died without any children, Charles
(03:31):
then took the throne as the third of the Bourbon brothers to
rule France. He ruled from 1824 to 1830,
after Louis the 18th had well claimed to rule for several
decades, but actually ruled for most of 18, 1814, most of 1815,
and then all the way to 1824. Right, right.
(03:53):
Those don't know. Louis the 18th claimed he was
ruling from abroad while he was in exile while Napoleon was
running the show. But we'll get into all that.
OK, let's dive into the subject matter.
Born in 1757 as Charles PhilippeCompter, Count de Artois, he's
the younger brother of both Louis the 16th and Louis the
18th. What was his upbringing like?
(04:16):
Lavish. He grew up in Versailles.
You know, the system that had been constructed by Louis the
16th and by Louis the 14th, and refined by Louis the 15th as the
most glamorous court in all of Europe, one that hung on to that
glamour even as a lot of other courts were becoming more
austere, more military in style in the 18th century.
This was an era of elaborate court customs, elaborate court
costumes, powdered wigs, all this stuff.
(04:39):
And the competent Trois grew up in this atmosphere.
He was fantastically rich, something of a Playboy, loved
gambling and horse and hunting, fairly dissolute one might say,
enjoying all the pleasures of his position.
He was, even as a young man, always on the right wing, even
within ancient regime politics, which is saying something.
He was always among the most conservative of this
(04:59):
conservative regime. Right, and I would say that it's
going to be both his greatest strength and fatal flaw.
He's a staunch royalist and ultra conservative even before
the French Revolution happens. What does that mean exactly?
And why did this conflict with the Jacobins on the other side?
So before the French Revolution,what that meant was that he was,
generally speaking, an opponent of reform.
(05:20):
In the latter decades of the onsenal regime, there were also
France was in a rough state as acountry.
It was deeply in debt. Its revenues weren't meeting
expenses. The system was sclerotic.
It was impossible to get anything done.
And there were these ideas that were coming out left and right.
Well, we got if we do this, we can fix things.
If we do that, we can fix things.
And with every idea there were people saying, oh, we can't do
(05:41):
that. That would be too disruptive.
That would undermine the power of the king.
That would undermine the power of our ancient traditions, and
pretty reliably whenever there'sa group of people saying we
can't do that. The Compter Trois was one of
that group, along with Marie Antoinette, who is also a leader
of the conservative faction, theCompter Provence.
The future Louis the 18th was relatively more progressive.
He was certainly no radical, sort of like the Dabble and
(06:02):
Reform projects and stuff like that.
So even for this early age, there was this sort of political
difference and none of none of these were Democrats.
They were all committed royalists.
It's just a question of what's the best approach for this
absolute monarchy to take. Yeah, and it's interesting.
I mean, as you mentioned, it's kind of the youngest of the
family. His brother Louis the 16th has a
(06:23):
son. Oh, do you think he ever had an
inkling that he might be king one day?
Because he's pretty far down thelist of succession been even
after the French Revolution. The odds that Charles would ever
become king, you know, especially before the French
Revolution, were pretty low. But, like, low in the sense of a
royal family, Right? Like, he was still just a couple
steps away from the throne. You know, they say that like,
(06:45):
every cardinal imagines himself being Pope and every senator
imagines of themselves being president.
I have to imagine that every Bourbon imagined themselves
becoming king. And Charles is probably no
exception, even when he was fifth or sixth in the line of
succession. Yeah.
And of course, you know, the Bourbons had for several
generations had been very long lived and had passed their
throne from grandfather to grandson rather than father to
(07:08):
son. So it was entirely possible, if
that had continued, that, you know, Charles would have died
before ever having the chance tobecome king.
But on the other hand, Charles did have sons relatively early
on. The middle brother, Louis the
18th, never had children, and especially after the French
Revolution happened and Louis the 16th was killed, and then
(07:30):
Louis the 16th son, dubbed by royalist Louis the 17th, died in
fairly miserable captivity. At that point, it became fairly
likely that Charles would becomeking.
All he had to do is outlive his brother at that point, and if
Charles didn't become king, thenCharles's son was in line to
become king. Right.
And for those who don't know, Louis the 18th was never the
portrait of healthiness. No, he was.
(07:51):
Even as a young man, he tended to being overweight, as opposed
to Charles, who's always slim, elegant, eventually something of
a silver fox. By the time Louis the 18th was
king, he was massively overweight, was in a wheelchair
from many of the last years of his life, suffered from gout
that was so debilitating and sometimes prevented him from
engaging in politics at fairly crucial times.
Generally had, you know, it was it was never in great health.
(08:13):
And there was never any idea that, like Louis, the 18th is
going to live to be 90 or anything like that.
Yeah. Whereas, you know, Charles the
10th was, as I said, much more active physically, in much
better health. So, you know, at a certain point
he was the heir apparent to the throne, and it seemed fairly
likely that he would get a chance to become king.
Let's. Talk about his family.
(08:34):
In 1773 he gets married to Mary Teresa.
How was their marriage and did they have kids?
So their marriage was OK as far as aristocratic arranged
marriages go. They pro managed to procreate,
which is more than you could sayfor some of these.
These couples. They had two sons, became the
the Duke Danglem, who was something of a fail son,
(08:57):
ultimately not as bright as his father, a fairly bumbling.
And the Duke de Berry, who took after his father's youthful
Playboy ways and eventually partied and philandered his way
across Europe, eventually left astring of illegitimate children,
including, at the time of his death in 1820, stabbed by an
assassin outside the Paris Opera.
His wife and multiple mistresseswere all pregnant at that time
(09:20):
with posthumous children, which,you know, was embarrassing, but
also for a royal family that hadnot had a lot of children, was
at least a good sign that at least one of these guys was
fertile. Yeah.
And ultimately this, the Duke toBerry's posthumous son Henry,
would become the heir of the Bourbon line.
(09:41):
And would we continue to claim the Bourbon, make the Bourbon
claim to the throne as late as the Third Republic?
Yeah, Duke to Berry was stabbed,I believe, by Bonaparte.
So there's a lot of hatred, but you can see between Bonaparte's
factions and the Bourbons, but we'll get into that in a minute.
So the French Revolution happens, the future Charles of
the 10th has to flee France and become a leader of the emigre
(10:04):
opposition to the revolution. I mean, it must have been very
upsetting. His one brother, the King, Louis
the 16th, is guillotined and he's basically in exile with his
other brother, the future Louis the 18th.
How close were these brothers? Not especially close Charles the
10th the Carpenter trois was essentially the first emigre.
He left France the day after theBastille fell.
(10:25):
Widely reported that you know heleft because of his devotion to
conservative politics. News to discuss what was
happening. Other historians suggest this
might have been a You can't fireme I quit situation because
Louis the 16th was extremely annoyed that Artois, his younger
brother, by being so flamboyantly reactionary, was
stirring up opposition and trouble and just wanted him off
the scene. So whether he left entirely
(10:46):
voluntarily or was pushed out, he left.
In 1789, Louis the 18th, the Provence wouldn't leave France
for several more years, leaving successfully at the same time as
the famous flight to Varenne, when Louis the 16th also tried
to flee and was caught and captured and brought back from
exile. Artois just intrigued
constantly, even against direct orders from Louis the 16th to
(11:08):
can it and stop doing that. He was convinced that he knew
better than his brother what wasin the best interest of the
monarchy, and he pursued his idea of the best interest of the
monarchy even against the implied and sometimes direct
commands of the monarch himself.And he continued to do this
after Louis the 16th died and Louis the 18th was the head of
the family. Our trial was something of a
(11:29):
free agent to took instructions from his brothers under
advisement but rarely as direct commands and often was pursuing
sort of his own agenda to promote the family as he saw
best. Yeah, I was going to ask you.
Obviously Napoleon takes over in1799.
Depending on who I ask, who do you think was involved in some
of these assassination plots against Napoleon?
(11:51):
Obviously the famous one, the gunpowder infernal machine plot.
Was it the royalists? Was it, you know, Compt
Deretois? Was it the British agents?
Like who? Who was plotting these
assassination attempts? I mean, lots of people were, the
Jacobins and the royalists were both involved in some of these
various plots. How involved Artois was is a
little hard to pin down. Certainly if you go up the
(12:14):
ladder enough chains everything.All these royalist conspiracies
pretty much came back to him. He was in England for a lot of
the the polianic regimes, much closer to the scene than Louis
the 18th, who was in Germany or Russia for a lot of this time
was sort of much more out of things.
Our trial was sort of on the scene and much more actively
collaborating was tied up to allthese networks of royalist
conspirators in France, some of whom were merely spying or
(12:37):
trying to influence opinion, butothers who were actively
involved in what I call direct action.
And how much, you know, Charles was giving direct orders to
people or how much just saying like, go help, help about my
cause against the usurper and leaving it up to the
conspirators to decide what theywanted to do was hard to say.
I don't think he would have beenupset if a royalist had managed
(12:57):
to kill the usurper Napoleon. And it's certainly not
implausible that he talked to one of the people and told him
to go do your best to kill him. You know, I mean, Charles was an
inveterate conspirator. He, it was an national world of
plotting up until the very end. And I think we'll, I'll talk
about that a little bit later about this sort of
conspiratorial mindset and how that's contributed to his
(13:18):
downfall. But some of that was shaped
during his long exile when that's basically all he had to
do was plot. He, he, he had no armies.
He could not use the conventional tools of statecraft
to try to get what he wanted. All he had was the world of
skullduggery and plots and conspiracies and assassinations.
Yeah, and you wonder during thattime, and we'll get to post 1830
(13:40):
as well. Did you go back to those old
ways? Like, oh man, how do I get my
throne back? But we'll get into that the.
Other thing I should mention youtalk, we have talked about his
wife and their relatively distant relationship.
They they separated basically during the revolution and never
reunited. Charles had no interest really
in reuniting and I believe there's a request that she could
join him and he said basically no.
(14:01):
He also had this time had he hada long term mistress, Louise de
Paul Estrone, who he was with for many, many years devoted to
her. And she died while they were in
exile in England. And the story goes that on her
deathbed, she demanded that after that he promised to devote
himself only to God after she was gone.
And whether that actually happened or just a just so
(14:23):
story, about this time, Charles the 10th, the youthful Playboy,
did become devoutly religious, adevoutly religious Catholic, and
would remain devoutly religious through to the end of his life.
That's interesting. Yeah, maybe he had an awakening
or, or maybe he just wanted to keep his promise.
I mean, Napoleon had Marie Valeska, he had a mistress that
he was very infatuated with. So maybe, maybe Charles the 10th
(14:45):
was similarly infatuated with this this person and and wanted
to honor her in that way. A lot of these old aristocrats,
you know, they had their formal marriages, which often were cold
and people separated relatively young in life.
Often the people get married, they would have the air, maybe a
second child, and then they justseparate and go have their own
affairs of both husband and wife.
(15:06):
Not not uncommon at all. Yeah, well, not to jump too far
ahead in the story, but I'm trying to get to the reign of
Charles and 10th and we still have some background to lay.
He returns to France during the Bourbon Restoration 1814 and
supported his brother Louis the 18th.
Do you think King Louis the 18thand his brother, the future
Charles the 10th, were trying torestore stability to France or
(15:29):
turn back the clock on the Revolution?
Both. You know, Louis the 18th is just
a really fascinating figure who went through a lot of twists and
turns in his life that he was, he was something of a reformer
before 1789, after going to exile, went hard to the right
and became sort of an uncompromising reactionary,
demanding the complete and full restoration of the old ways.
(15:52):
But gradually over the long exile, Louis the 18th, bit by
bit would moderate and come to recognize that we have to make
some concessions. We can't continue to demand
everything goes back the way it was.
Which also ended up being convenient when he finally took
power and inherited the administrative state that
Napoleon had built and discovered that a lot of this
was actually very nice for the person at the top and that he
(16:13):
didn't want to get rid of the council of State and the
prefects and the disciplined army and all that.
So Lou, the 18th, under pressurefrom the Allies, issued a
constitution for France, the Charter of 1814, which well,
framed as a free gift that couldimplicitly be revoked at any
time. I still did sort of create a
sort of semi constitutional formof government for France.
(16:35):
And even though Louis the 18th was sort of pressured into it
and other people wrote it and hejust sort of signed off on it,
he did come to genuinely sort ofview the charter as his child.
There's a famous quote that he gave telling the intermediary,
the King of Naples, that it was better to issue a constitution
than to have one forced on you. And besides, it was the spirit
(16:58):
of the age, which I think sums up Louis the 18th's attitude
fairly well. Left his own devices, he
absolutely would have brought back the ASEAN regime of his
youth in all its pleasure and grandeur.
But he recognized that times have changed and that there are
certain things he had to compromise on if he wanted to
keep the other aspects of the the old order that he wanted.
Charles the 10th was never quiteso open to these changes.
(17:22):
By this time, he had acknowledged some things had
changed. You couldn't or didn't want to
undo literally everything and turned the clock all the way
back to 1789. But Charles the 10th was much
less in tune with the spirit of the age that his brother had
made his peace with. Throughout Louis the 18th reign
the Compt Artois was the leader of the right wing faction, the
(17:42):
so-called ultra royalists or thePures or the Pontoos, the sort
of the the pointed ones. Sometimes he kept it a little
distance because he was obliged to formally support his brother.
But it was an open secret that our Artois was the spiritual and
social center of this a hard right faction and sometimes
engaged in active participation in politics, much to his
(18:03):
brother's frequent frustration, especially earlier in the Louis
the 18th reign. Near the end, as Louis the 18th
health started to fail, political situation in France
had changed. Louis the 18th had moved to the
right a little bit, and also simultaneously gave Charles a
larger role in the governance ofFrance. 11 Wag said something to
the effect of poor Louis the 18th will guess to see his
(18:24):
brother as king before he even dies because of Artois larger
role. Although Louis the 18th was an
ornery fellow who remained stubborn to the end when he
wanted to be involved in something.
But you know, Artois was well known as a hard right leader.
This is not, you know, this had some things that can be
surprising to some people. For a lot of this period, the
(18:46):
ultra royalists were actually opposed to censorship because
partly because it was felt the ultra royalists had better
writers than some of these otherfactions.
And some also like some of theseministries that Louis the etieth
had were more moderate and censorship might have been used
against the ultra royalists. So Charles, you know, was sort
of anti censorship in this period and one of the first
things he did upon becoming kingwas end of the censorship that
(19:08):
had been currently in place. You look at it and you look at
some of the mistakes they made along the way, and we're going
to get to more of those here in a minute.
Obviously, the killing of Marshall Knave by firing squad
was 1. And I think if you're too strict
and you try to stamp things out too much, like they were trying
to avoid Bonapartism for forever.
And then sure enough, in 1848, Napoleon's nephew comes back on
(19:31):
the throne. So it's it's almost like perhaps
they were too harsh in their measures and if they were just
got a more moderate path, thingshave turned out differently.
In 1824, France was fairly stable politically.
The restoration was fairly entrenched.
There were still deeper currentsmoving.
No country in Europe would end up immune to the demands for
wider suffrage than the demands for sort of we called social
(19:56):
reform, for efforts to help workers who were impoverished as
the industrial revolution transformed the continent.
Those would have come to France regardless.
But the Bourbon restoration in the middle of the 80s was fairly
stable and secure. It had survived a number of
crises, some near death experiences, an arguable death
experience in 1815, but it had come through and was on
(20:16):
relatively stable footing. This included some fairly
repressive laws. It's often said that you know
that even at its worst, the Bourbon Restoration was less of
a police state than France had been under Napoleon, especially
if you were a member of the elite.
Under the burn Restoration, there was a parliament where
discourse was relatively free, Awider range of voices could
(20:40):
express themselves publicly and argue that had been allowed
under Napoleon. But you know, this was still a
fairly we would today call this a managed, managed
constitutional monarchy. There's heavy vote rigging,
secret police where ubiquitous, the king meddled in in public
affairs. So it was not what we would call
a free and democratic state. But compared to what had been in
the past and what people in Europe could experience by
(21:02):
traveling to Austria or Prussia at the time, France was more
free. And arguably at some points you
could argue at some way that Restoration France was more free
than Britain at some point in certain aspects.
This is a period when of the Peterloo Massacre and all sorts
of repression against left wing activists in Britain as well.
OK, so I'm just going to try andfigure out in the six years here
award starts travel. We'll start at the beginning,
(21:24):
but Charles the 10th becomes France, King of France in 1824,
his brother Louis the 18th dies and he promotes traditional
Catholic values, aristocratic privileges, earning support from
conservatives, conservatives andhostility from liberals.
Looking back on it, is this a bad idea?
So Charles the 10th has a bit ofa honeymoon phase after he takes
(21:46):
over, like everybody knows that he's far to the right.
This is an open secret in France.
But he comes in, he makes these goodwill gestures.
He he lifts censorship, he freesa bunch of political prisoners.
He does sort of a charm offensive and things, things go
pretty well. But over sort of his first year
in office, I think the turning point is often seen as Charles's
official coronation in 1820, May1825, the city of France and the
(22:09):
cathedral there. That's sort of seen as sort of
the end of the honeymoon in the in the beginning of this this
new phase. His government led by the Comp
de Vilal, who he inherited from Louis the 18th passes several
controversial laws so-called emigres billion, which
compensated nobles who'd lost land during the restoration.
(22:30):
Ironically, a a lot of historians just deeply unpopular
as it would be today, like usingtaxpayer money to reward a bunch
of rich and famous people. It was never going to be a
politically a good idea in in the short term.
A lot of historians do see it aslike probably a good policy
because the emigrates who had had their land seized were
(22:51):
ceaselessly agitating and stirring things up to try to get
their land back. And then what they wanted was
the state to see seize their land, the people who had bought
it and give it back to them or to pressure the people who
bought it using social pressure at the local level, pressure
them to sell it back. And the mere possibility that
(23:13):
there, this could like 10% of France of French people owned
some of the Seas land. This was not a small amount of
of resources. It was the existence of this was
a huge source of instability. And the opposition played this
up that like you have to supportus or the Bourbons are going to
retake the beyond nest. You know, the seas land, the
(23:33):
national goods and by paying offthe emigres, this agitation
largely stopped. The value of this seized land
went up after the emigrates billion was passed because the
title to it was seen as more secure.
So it was probably a good policy, but it was absolutely a
self-inflicted political wound. There's also a a blasphemy law
that was that was passed. There had been a couple of high
(23:54):
profile vandalizations of Catholic churches and then it
you you get to this 1825, the coronation ceremony of Charles
the 10th, which by and large follows the millennia old
traditions of French royal coronations.
There are some compromises, someupdates.
You know, some some of the French marshals participate in
the ceremony. The king included an oath to
(24:15):
uphold the charter, which you know, Louis the 16th had Louis
the 14th had and 16th had never never done.
But it was you know, it was heldin the Catholic Church.
There was bishops involved. There's a religious ceremony the
in France, there was this, this baptismal oil that has
supposedly been brought down by heaven for I think the baptism
(24:36):
of Clovis in like more than a millennia ago.
And this had been destroyed during the revolution.
But supposedly it was rediscovered like days before
the coronation that supposedly a, a loyal devotee had saved
some of this from destruction and kept it secret.
And it came out at the exact time.
This was amazing. France can continue this
(24:58):
tradition because there's been amiracle and this has been saved
to everyone else. All this smacked of the old ways
of religious devotion and it wasit was deeply unpopular and
cemented the image of Charles the 10th at combined with things
like the Emigres billion and thethe Sacrilege Law cemented the
(25:22):
image of Charles the 10th as this backwards figure.
Widespread conspiracy theories of this time from the left and
even up to the center right about the role of the Jesuits,
famed famous target throughout centuries for conspiracy
theories. And the so-called congregation
which was widely seen as this like right wing Catholic secret
society that had its tendrils everywhere in society and was
(25:44):
plotting to manipulate France. And it was widely believed that
Charles was either a member of this group or a puppet of this
group at the time. Well, he also gets involved in
foreign policy, notably the colonization of Algeria by
France. Is this just a distraction for
the public to kind of put their focus on, or is he trying to
like, rebuild the glory of France?
(26:05):
Both. Both.
Charles was active in foreign policy as as he was not a mere
figurehead as king, he was at active powers and much of Europe
was ruled by monarchs and monarchs would write to each
other. That was that was normal.
I don't continue under the July monarchy, much to the
frustration of Louis Philippe's ministers, Charles and his
advisors like Jules de Poliniak.We'll have time to talk about
(26:26):
coming up. Pursued lots of schemes to try
to boost French national greatness.
Poland Neck at one point proposed this elaborate
fantastical scheme involving redrawing the map of Europe
where Russia would get lands from the Ottoman Empire and in
Austria lands, the Ottoman Empire.
(26:47):
And then Prussia would get otherlands and it was out of the
swap. France would get some of the
territory that had been forced to surrender after Napoleon's
downfall, sort of reclaiming thenatural borders of France that
were such an obsession across the political spectrum at the
time. This went nowhere.
You know what, none of the othercountries in Europe wanted any
part of this but Charlie, it wasgenuinely interested in this.
(27:07):
But the particular circumstancesof the invasion of Algiers, the
modern day capital city of Algeria happened.
You know, there's some particular inspirations
involved. There'd been a long standing
dispute over some unpaid debt. The French envoy had been
swatted by a fly swatter by the the leader of Algiers.
But the particular circumstanceswas that in 1829, August 1829,
(27:31):
Charles the 10th had for the past year or two been forced
basically to accept a more moderate ministry than he
wanted. All the efforts of censorship
and vote rigging had failed. In 1827, France's very tiny
electorate, about 1% of its males had the right to vote,
just determined based on wealth of the time.
France's tiny electorate had defeated ultra royalist
(27:51):
candidates forced basically forced out at the comp to Vilal,
which was after Vilal, the fairly fairly competent Prime
Minister under Louis and Charles.
Charles had been forced to accept a more moderate ministry
under V Compton Martin Yak and hated it.
He absolutely hated all these concessions.
Every day he was asked to make anew concession, a new
(28:13):
compromise. And you know, occasionally he
like some of them, but the the culminating impact of all these
concessions and he was asked to make just chafed on him.
And in August 1829, he fired Martiniak and replaced him with
a new ministry led by his old friend Jules de Poliniak.
Back friends, back to the Versailles days, just as
(28:34):
Catholic and conservative as Charles was, and a ministry
made-up entirely of far right people.
Which is mostly due to what Charles wanted, but also because
anyone who wasn't far right generally declined to be
involved when they were asked. Yeah, and that's part of my next
question. I always wondered this about
failed kings and emperors and despots.
You know, did they just have badadvisors or did they have good
(28:57):
advisors and just ignore them? I mean, certainly some of
Charles's advisors over the years were bad, probably none
worse than Jules Dapolitiak, whohad some talents, but you can't
say conclude anything other thanthat.
Jules Dapolitiak was a disastrous choice of Prime
Minister for Charles, but he also had capable leaders.
Joseste Vilal was a fairly competent administrator,
(29:18):
although he ended up alienating a lot of people by the end.
Martiniak served ably and Martiniak was an ultra, was an
ultra royalist. But when it was pragmatic and
thought that there were certain concessions that had to be made
in order to preserve the crown, and there were other people who
were close to Charles, part of his court circle and stuff like
that, who had more moderate positions and were sending him
(29:39):
letters and messages trying to urge him to take more moderate
courses. And ultimately it comes down to
what Charles wanted. He chose who he would listen to
and who he wouldn't listen to. And by the end, what we wanted
to listen to was far right figures like Jules Napoleonic,
who take an uncompromising attitude toward France's liberal
opposition. And the reforms and the changes
(30:01):
that they were demanding, which Charles felt were offensive to
his dignity as monarch and whichhe felt were a slippery slope to
a new revolution, is one of the defining memories he took out of
1789. He saw what the catastrophic
mistake that triggered everything was when Louis the
16th had agreed under pressure to fire his Prime Minister and
(30:23):
bring on bring back Jacques Nacaire.
And Charles saw that as the big mistake and was determined to
not back down and not let the mob pressure him into firing his
ministers. And he would continue to
devoutly believe this right up until he was being chased out of
France. Yeah, let's get into it. 1830
July 1830 He issues the July ordinances, they're called,
(30:46):
which suspended press freedom, dissolved Parliament, led to
public outrage. I know you and I have gone into
the subject on our Marshall Mamont episode, but why wasn't
Charles able to put down this this particular revolution?
So let's let's zoom back a little bit.
France had been sort of in a slow moving political crisis
from the moment Charles appointed the Poliniak ministry.
(31:06):
What became the Poliniak ministry, the Chamber of
Deputies in early 1830 had made a provocative declaration or
Charles had made him speech to the chambers in which he had
insisted on the rights of his throne.
And the Chamber of Deputies had then voted a response to this
speech in which they basically called for Charles to fire
Poliniak. Charles dissolved Parliament.
(31:28):
There are new elections. And why why did Charles think
that he would be able to win this new round of elections when
all the past elections have beengoing badly?
Well, one thing he did was like take a more active Charles
penned an active appeal to voters to support ultra royalist
candidates. Previously, kings had kept a
little bit of remove a sort of fictitious neutrality in all
(31:49):
this, even though everybody knewthat the kings were had had
their political preferences. Charles broke that and got
himself directly involved in politics, which should have
undermined some of the mystique around him and was probably a
mistake. But the other thing he did was
try to stir up nationalist sentiment in favor of his
ministers with a successful foreign invasion.
And he took advantage of these provocations that's been
(32:10):
building up with Algiers to senda large expedition to do
something to the leader of Algiers.
There's not quite clear what exactly that would entail.
Maybe just like a punitive expedition to force some
concessions, as it ultimately ended up being a conquest.
And this expedition just ended up coming off fairly
successfully. The French army occupied the
city of Algiers without too muchtrouble, but Charles didn't get
(32:33):
the credit for it. People were like gay France
rather than gay Charles. And the electors went out, and
they voted even an even larger liberal majority.
And at this point, Charles and his ministers decided we can't
do this electorally. They thought, you know, there is
the, there are these conspirators on the left who are
stage managing events. The, the liberal press was, as
(32:55):
they saw it, printing all sorts of falsehoods and lies,
calumnies. And they generally thought that
they need, they needed a reset, they need to get friends right
on the right track. So they passed these 4
ordinances, which, you know, dissolved parliament before it,
even the newly elected parliament before it even had a
chance to meet it, imposed widespread path press
censorship, having taken the lessons of past attempts at
(33:16):
censorship, try to close all theloopholes that newspapers had
used to to dodge the the press censorship and unilaterally
rewrote election laws to skew the elections even more in favor
of far right candidates. Which is how they thought that
this new round of elections would go better for them than
all the last couple of rounds ofelections.
They adopted this on Sunday, July 25th.
(33:37):
It was published on Monday, July26th.
And on Tuesday, July 27th, everything exploded gradually.
Lots of people in France had expected Charles to try a coup.
It was, it was just like not a complete surprise.
Royalist newspapers had been urging Charles to do a coup for
for a long time. Opposition newspapers had been
challenging this. People in the middle were like,
(33:58):
oh, we are talking coup again. It was a boy cries wolf
situation. He's never going to actually do
it. He's never asked to have the
guts to seize power. And then he did, with the four
ordinances in July 1830, widely seen as a bad move.
Yeah, we we talked about our Marshall Mamont episode.
So basically this powder keg blows up and Arlo Mormont has
(34:19):
about 10,000 troops. That's really not enough to put
down this huge. I wouldn't call it citywide, but
it's a large revolution in Paris.
Yeah, much of central Paris alsoends up consumed by this
revolution. What begins as protests, then
becomes riots, then becomes an insurgency and gradually grows
and grows until the royal army'sbeing chased out of Paris with
(34:41):
its tail between his legs. And a lot of people have
wondered, like, how could Charles and Polinac have been so
stupid as to leave only about 10,000 effective troops in Paris
at the time when they're launching a royal coup?
There were like 3 times as many troops in Paris in in July 1789
when the Bastille fell and that had been an inadequate number of
troops, right? Decades later, Napoleon.
(35:02):
When Napoleon the Third launcheshis coup, he will move with
clockwork military efficiency toblanket the streets of Paris
with soldiers, arrest all all the opposition, preemptively
suppress any chance for anythingto go wrong.
None of that happens in 1830. The announcement ordinance are
published and then people start making OK we should probably
(35:24):
start arresting some of these critics and everything was very
slowly and languorously. And my theory I I I can't say
this is like absolute hard fact,but I think it's a strong
interpretation of the available data that the reason why Charles
and Paul in the act didn't have more on hand.
We know that a reason was they didn't want to tip themselves
off. They thought if they started
(35:45):
concentrating troops in Paris, it would tip everyone off that a
coup was coming that much we know right.
I think it goes back to the the Charles and polling acts.
Decades of life in this shadowy underworld of conspiracies and
plots. They saw the world in through a
conspiratorial mindset and they believed This is also true, that
there was the so-called faction that the left opposition was a
(36:06):
centrally directed conspiracy bythe so-called comedy director,
the director, directorial committee or managing committee.
My theory is that they thought that their opposition to the
reign wasn't organic and that all they had to do was take the
comedy director by the prize andthey wouldn't be able to arrange
any response. Because even even afterwards in
the memoirs that all these attempts by Charles's former
(36:29):
ministers to say, Oh well, you know, the the bourgeois factory
owners were paying their workersto go out into the streets.
It's all directed. This is planned.
This is a plot. None of this make this is all
spontaneous. Charles pissed off the printers.
The printers went off and stirred up trouble.
But these people seriously believe this was all stage
managed. And I think that explains why
they didn't take more preparations because they
thought if if we don't give these guys a chance to plot,
(36:50):
then there won't be any responseand everything will be quiet.
I think your episode where you mentioned even the first night
of the Revolution, Charles is doing his usual thing, playing
cards with his buddies. He doesn't think it's a big
deal. Yeah.
You know, Charles is often soundclue so he's not on the ground
and he's being informed mostly by Polanyak who's sending him
regular dispatches and telling him to not listen to anybody
else except him. I'm Polanyak is just blithely
(37:13):
convinced that everything's gonna turn out OK long after
things are not OK anymore, afterour mom was telling him we're in
trouble, after other ministers, like the naval minister Baron to
house a who's just like incredulous as to how
incompetent Poliniak is. He's saying like, dude, you got
to do something. Poliniak, just like refuse,
refuses to make any compromises,even like tactical compromises
(37:36):
where you pretend to make a concession that you'll plan on
going back on later. None of this happens.
And finally the, you know, the compromise.
Charles starts making compromises way too late.
Yeah, day late and a dollar short.
Every concession he makes is a daylight and a dollar short.
The the army is on the verge of losing Paris.
And he finally says, OK, I can make some minor concessions.
And these are concessions that like 3 days ago, the opposition
(37:58):
would have said, great, this is amazing.
You're going to fire Poliniak and repeal the four ordinances.
That's all we wanted. But by this time, that was no
longer enough. They wanted more.
They couldn't trust Charles anymore.
They needed more stuff. The people of Paris weren't
going to lay down their arms forthat.
So Charles would dig in his heels and he would refuse.
And there would be a long argument.
And finally, he'd agreed to makeanother concession.
OK, I'll appoint a more moderatePrime Minister.
(38:20):
And again, this would have been more than enough a couple days
ago, but now it was too late. And this happened again and
again and again. Yeah, yeah.
Well, he's finally deposed in 1830 during the July Revolution.
He's forced to abdicate a crown,passes to Louis Philippe.
Must have been very difficult toget booted out of your home
country on three different occasions.
French Revolution, 100 days and now this.
(38:42):
I imagine it gets a little easier with each subsequent
exile. You're not caught by surprise
anymore. Right, right.
He's like, I know how to flee. Yeah.
Also, I will note that Louis the18th, having gone through the
same double exile, insisted on keeping money in a British bank
in case he ever had to go into exile again.
So he would have money on hand and wouldn't be dependent on
(39:03):
handouts. Smart.
Well, did Charles attempt ever attempt to regain his throne?
Like, what were his later years like in exile?
Yeah. Charles went to England first in
exile, eventually went to Austria.
It was this weird ambiguity there where like Charles attempt
had abdicated in favor not of his son, the Duke Dangle M, but
(39:24):
of his grandson Henry, who was more seen as more of a political
innocent who wasn't tarred by the the calamitous decisions of
the four ordinances. But for the like the remainder
of his life there, it was sort of a Gray zone as a who was
really in charge in this exile court.
Charles is basically still running things even though his
underage son was heir. And it was not not clear.
(39:45):
Like it was as if Charles was acting as a Regent, but like
people who visited and were too obsequious about praising young
Henry as my king, we get like this real cold shoulder.
There's this real ambiguity thatCharles did not want punctured
as to like who was actually kingat the time.
Henry, for his part, saw that his grandfather was king and
assisted. His grandfather was the rightful
(40:06):
king of France until his death. But there were royalist attempts
to reclaim power, none more dramatic than that, led by
Charles's daughter-in-law, the Duchesse Deberry, the widow of
the assassinated Duke Deberry, who made a landing in France and
tried to stir up a rebellion that absolutely fizzled, that
she ended going to hiding in France.
For quite some time was finally betrayed and tracked down where
(40:29):
it was discovered then that she had had a second secret marriage
and was pregnant, which for traditionalist Catholic Church
Catholics as well As for someonewhose authority came entirely
from her first marriage to Charles's son, really just like
blew everything up and that failed.
(40:51):
You know, there were continued plots and schemes, but nothing
serious. The real danger after this from
to the July monarch that came from the left from republican
plotters and uprisings. Charles, you sort of maintained
his court in exile. You focus on educating his son,
getting offended at slights fromforeign leaders we thought
wanted to treat him with royal dignity, and who saw him as a
(41:12):
real screw up, who'd hurt the cause of royal legitimacy for
all of Europe. And ultimately, he died a sad
death of disease in exile. Yeah, it's fascinating to me.
Spends the rest of his life in exile.
Dies in 1836 in Austria. Oddly, he's the only French king
who's not buried in France. What do you think his legacy is?
I mean, it's not good even if you're, even if you put yourself
(41:35):
in the position of a devoted legitimacy, someone who's
convinced that he was the rightful king of France,
ordained by God and man and remain so until his death.
Even if you put yourself in thisposition, he made a lot of
blunders. Even even if you're in the
position that the only mistake he made was not enforcing his
(41:57):
four ordinances more vigorously,the still like he's the guy who
made the blunder and try to coupwithout having the soldiers on
hand to back it up. And whether you're you think
that was his mistake, whether you think his mistake was not
being willing to compromise moreor whether you think all this
was a mistake and you're not a legitimist at all.
There's no way in which you can view him as a successful ruler
(42:17):
of France. Whether it was by being too hard
or not hard enough, he didn't dodidn't get it right, which is
why you see a lot of the, the legitimist sort of clung to this
idea that there's been a conspiracy.
The real actors in this had beenthe opposition conspiracy that
had been laying these plots in motion.
And that it's not like, you know, the sensible leaders of
the conspiracy in like, Lafayette were off at their
(42:39):
country homes when this broke out.
Many of the other prominent liberal leaders spent the first
few days of the revolution trying desperately to save
Charles's throne for him. And again, he refused to make
these small compromises that might have done it at the time.
Well, that's what it strikes me as.
It's a huge failed opportunity. Obviously you're an educated
man. You grew up in Versailles.
You're the best teachers in the world.
(43:00):
You see where your brother Louisthe 16th failed.
You see where your brother Louisthe 18th failed.
You notice that Napoleon's system of government is a good
one. So you have all these things to
learn from and you still screwedup.
The July Revolution 1830 was an entirely self-inflicted wound.
Whether Charles would have eventually run into a popular
revolution driven by the refusalto expand to the franchise to
(43:23):
let more people vote, by the economic dislocations that were
starting to hit Europe at this time.
It's entirely possible like moremore moderate regimes like the
July Monarchy ultimately fell tothese these sort of pressures.
Like, would Charles have found away to thread the circle that
there are some ultra royalists who had the idea that we should
let poor people vote because thereal enemy is the middle class.
And if we let the poor people vote, then they'll vote for us.
(43:45):
They'll vote for the king against the middle class.
Which I'm not sure how well thatwould have played out for them
in the end. But in the short term, that
might have actually worked. You know, it's possible that
Charles might have come around to something like that.
Or maybe he would have liked theyounger Charles, fought reform
tooth and nail to the very end and ultimately fall into another
revolution that wasn't self-inflicted.
Who knows. But he didn't need to fall in
(44:06):
July 1830. That was on him.
No. And I think part of that legacy,
I mean, there's obviously no clamor to get his buried remains
back to France. Even Napoleon in 1840, there was
a push to get him back in Franceand maybe there is here and
there to get him reburied in France.
But clearly he didn't do a very good job if there's no clamor
for it. Yeah, I mean, some people.
There was some diehard loyalist to Charles during his years of
(44:29):
exile and a very tiny faction who were supporters of the
Charles son, the Duke Danglem. But most most of the French
legitimist put all their emotional devotion onto Henry
the grandson, and he became the locus of legitimism.
He was free from the follies andthe blunders of July 1830.
He could. He was someone that the
(44:50):
legitimist could put their pin their hopes into and eventually
he grew up to be an adult and made his own blunders.
But that's a story for another day.
There were not a lot of die hardCharles defenders after the
fact. Well, amazing overview as
always, David. Yeah, that was just great stuff.
I didn't, I knew a little bit about Charles the 10th, but I'm
really glad you kind of opened the box on him and let us learn
(45:12):
about him. That was really good stuff.
Thank you. I've I've covered Charles
extensively, the whole range of my podcast.
Episode 26, I sort of recover the whole events of the
restoration from Charles's perspective.
I put him on the throne in episode 28 and then cover the
events of the July Revolution ingreat detail, starting with
episode 39 all the way through to episode 45.
(45:35):
Yeah, again, if you want to learn more about Charles the
10th or the background, political background France at
this time, please check out the Siegla with David Montgomery and
we thank him for his time. Thanks for having me on.
Always a pleasure. Thank you, David.
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