The Political Crises of the Bourbon Restoration

Abstract

Paradoxically, the Bourbon Restoration, with only modest support in France at the outset, developed a stability, making the revolution which overthrew it in 1830 an accident almost as much feared by the victorious liberals as by their royalist opponents. In 1814, and again in 1815 after the emperor’s second defeat at Waterloo, it was France’s victorious enemies who appointed the guillotined king’s brother Louis XVIII. There was only modest and localised support in France for a monarchist restoration, chiefly in the Midi and the west. Napoleon’s defeat was followed by the setting up of a constitutional, representative regime in which a tolerable working compromise was reached, combining the imperial framework with the restored Bourbons, harnessed to a two-chamber parliament. Louis agreed to govern within the terms of a constitutional charter, worked out by a group of primarily Bonapartist notables, including the liberal thinker, Benjamin Constant. France retained all but the political institutions of the revolutionary and imperial years. Louis was made hereditary head of the executive, appointed his own ministers and shared legislative power with a parliament consisting of two assemblies, one hereditary and one elected.