July Revolution
The French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution, was a revolt by the middle class against Bourbon King Charles X which forced him out of office and replaced him with the Orleanist King Louis-Philippe.
When Charles X took the throne on September 16, 1824, France was progressing towards reconstruction from the Napoleonic Wars. Charles's predecessor (and brother) Louis XVIII's reign had been peaceful and had the support of most of the population. The government was still quite autocratic, but gave far more freedom than the ancien régime before the revolution. Louis XVIII based many of his decisions on popular opinion, responding in particular to the wishes of the Parisian elite. An elected assembly existed, but had little power.
Charles, on the other hand, believed that the absolute monarchy was the best form of government.
Background
Charles X's reign
The Revolt
Martignac's accession to power, however, had only meant personal concessions from Charles X, not any concession of principle: he supported his ministry but was no real stand-by. The Liberals, on the other hand, made bargains for supporting the moderate royalists, and Charles X profited by this to form a fighting ministry in conjunction with the prince de Polignac, one of the émigrés, an ignorant and visionary person, and the comte de Bourmont, the traitor of Waterloo. Despite all kinds of warnings, de Polignac tried by a coup d'état to put into practice his theories of the supremacy of the royal prerogative: and the Battle of Navarino, the French occupation of the Morea, and the Algerian expedition could not make the nation forget this conflict at home. The united opposition of monarchist Liberals and imperialist republicans responded by legal resistance, then by a popular coup d'état, to the July Ordinances of July 1830, which dissolved the intractable Chamber, eliminated licensed dealers from the electoral list, and muzzled the press. After fighting for three days against the troops feebly led by the Marniont of 1814, the workmen, driven to the barricades by the deliberate closing of Liberal workshops, gained the victory, and sent the white flag of the Bourbons on the road to exile.
The rapid success of the "Three Glorious Days" (les Trois Glorieuses), as the July Days were called, put the leaders of the parliamentary opposition into an embarrassing position. While they had contented themselves with words, the small Republican-Imperialist party, aided by the almost entire absence of the army and police, and by the convenience which the narrow, winding, paved streets of those times offered for fighting, had determined upon the revolution and brought it to pass.
But the Republican party, which desired to re-establish the Republic of 1793, recruited chiefly from among the students and workmen, and led by Godefroy Cavaignac, the son of a Conventionalist, and by the chemist Raspail, had no hold on the departments nor on the dominating opinion in Paris. Consequently this premature attempt was promptly seized upon by the Liberal bourgeoisie and turned to the advantage of the Orleanist party, which had been secretly organised since 1829 under the leadership of Adolphe Thiers, with the National as its organ. Before the struggle was yet over, Benjamin Constant, Casimir-Périer, Lafitte, and Odilon Barrot had gone to fetch the duke of Orléans from Neuilly, and on receiving his promise to defend the Charter and the tricolore flag, installed him at the Palais Bourbon as lieutenant-general of the realm, while responsibility of ministers, the suppression of hereditary succession to the Chamber of Peers, now reduced to the rank of a council of officials, the suppression of article 14 of the Charter which had enabled Charles X to supersede the laws by means of the ordinances, and the liberty of the press. The qualification for electors was lowered from 300 to 200 francs, and that for eligibility to 500 francs, and the age to 25 and 30 instead of 30 and 40; finally, Catholicism lost its privileged position as the state religion.
