The Bourbon Restoration was the period of French history following the fall of Napoleon in 1814 until the July Revolution of 1830. After Napoleon abdicated as emperor in March 1814, Louis XVIII, the brother of Louis XVI, was installed as king and France was granted a quite generous peace settlement, restored to its 1792 boundaries and not required to pay war indemnity. On becoming king, Louis issued a constitution known as the Charter which preserved many of the liberties won during the French Revolution and provided for a parliament composed of an elected Chamber of Deputies and a Chamber of Peers that was nominated by the king. A constitution, the Charter of 1814, was drafted; it presented all Frenchmen as equal before the law, but retained substantial prerogative for the king and nobility and limited voting to those paying at least 300 francs a year in direct taxes. After the Hundred Days, when Napoleon briefly returned to power, Louis XVIII was restored a second time by the allies in 1815, ending more than two decades of war. At this time, a more harsh peace treaty was imposed on France, returning it to its 1789 boundaries and requiring a war indemnity. There were large-scale purges of Bonapartists from the government and military, and a brief ” White Terror ” in the south of France claimed 300 victims. Despite the return of the House of Bourbon to power, France was much changed; the egalitarianism and liberalism of the revolutionaries remained an important force and the autocracy and hierarchy of the earlier era could not be fully restored. Charles X of France took a far more conservative line than his brother Louis XVIII. He attempted to rule as an absolute monarch in the style of Ancien Régime and reassert the power of the Catholic Church in France. His coronation in 1824 also coincided with the height of the power of the Ultra -royalist party, who also wanted a return of the aristocracy and absolutist politics. A few years into his rule, unrest among the people of France began to develop, caused by an economic downturn, resistance to the return to conservative politics, and the rise of a liberal press. In 1830, the discontent caused by Charles X’s authoritarian policies culminated in an uprising in the streets of Paris known as the 1830 July Revolution. Charles was forced to flee and Louis-Philippe d’Orléans, a member of the Orléans branch of the family and son of Philippe Égalité who had voted the death of his cousin Louis XVI, ascended the throne, marking the beginning of the July Monarchy, so named for the Revolution. Louis-Philippe ruled not as “King of France” but as “King of the French,” which made clear that his right to rule came from the people and was not divinely granted. Despite this and other such gestures (for example, reviving the tricolore as the flag of France in place of the white Bourbon flag that had been used since 1815), Louis-Philippe remained conservative, and reforms mainly benefited the upper-class citizens. Because of the conservative character of Louis-Philippe’s regime, civil unrest remained a permanent feature of the July Monarchy, with riots and uprising continuing throughout his rule. In February 1848, the French government banned the holding of the Campagne des banquets, fundraising dinners by activists where critics of the regime would meet (as public demonstrations and strikes were forbidden). As a result, protests and riots broke out in the streets of Paris. An angry mob converged on the royal palace, after which the hapless king abdicated and fled to England; the Second Republic was then proclaimed, ending the July Monarchy.
