July Revolution

Over three days of street fighting in Paris, from 27 to 29 July 1830, crowds of Parisian workers and opposition supporters defeated the troops of King Charles X and brought down the restored Bourbon monarchy. The French remember them as the "Three Glorious Days". Charles abdicated and went into exile, and his cousin Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans, became king under a more liberal constitution, beginning the July Monarchy. The uprising encouraged revolts elsewhere in Europe, most successfully in Belgium.

After the defeat of Napoleon, the peace settlement worked out at the Congress of Vienna put the House of Bourbon back on the French throne, which had been lost in the French Revolution. Louis XVIII ruled under the Charter of 1814, a constitution that limited royal power. When he died childless in September 1824, his younger brother succeeded him as Charles X. The new king was far more conservative, and measures such as a harsh law against sacrilege and compensation for property confiscated during the Revolution soon cost him public support.

Relations between the king and the elected Chamber of Deputies steadily worsened. Deputies threw out government bills, and in 1827 Charles disbanded the Paris National Guard on the grounds that it had insulted the crown. In March 1830 a majority of deputies, the so-called 221, passed an address of no confidence in the ministry of Jules de Polignac. Charles dissolved the Chamber, but the elections held in July returned an even stronger liberal opposition.

On 25 July the king signed four decrees, the July Ordinances. They dissolved the newly elected Chamber before it could meet, suspended press freedom, narrowed the vote so that much of the commercial middle class lost it, and called fresh elections. They were published the next day.

Journalists met on 26 July and agreed to keep publishing in defiance of the ban, while employers closed workshops and sent workers into the streets. Fighting broke out on the evening of 27 July, when crowds attacked soldiers with paving stones and roof tiles; by nightfall some twenty-one civilians had been killed. The next day Marshal Auguste Marmont, ordered to restore order, tried to hold key bridges, squares and public buildings with too few troops and too few supplies, and some soldiers began to desert. He warned the king that the unrest had become a revolution, but Charles, advised by Polignac, would not give way.

By 29 July Parisians had raised barricades across the city, reportedly more than 4,000 of them, and the tricolour flew over many buildings. The Louvre and the Tuileries palace were taken, and by the afternoon so was the Hôtel de Ville. Opposition politicians then set about forming a provisional government.

On 2 August Charles X and his son abdicated and left for Britain. Charles hoped his young grandson would succeed as Henry V, but the liberal leaders instead offered the crown to Louis Philippe, who accepted it as a constitutional monarch. Loyalists of the senior Bourbon line became known as Legitimists. The July Column on the Place de la Bastille commemorates the fighting.

Within weeks an uprising in Brussels began the separation of the southern provinces from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, leading to an independent Belgium. There was a successful revolt in Brunswick, while failed uprisings followed in parts of Italy and in Poland. In France, disappointed republicans rose in Paris in June 1832 and were quickly crushed. The July Monarchy never won broad loyalty and fell in the Revolutions of 1848.

Our 1815 map shows France as restored after Napoleon's fall, the kingdom Charles X inherited. Belgium appears as a separate state on our 1878 map.