[1815 - 1870] Restorations and Revolutions

In the year 1815, the smoke finally clears from the fields of Waterloo, and with it, the grand, terrifying dream of Napoleon Bonaparte. France is on its knees. After more than two decades of revolution and continent-spanning war, the nation is exhausted, bled dry of its young men, and occupied by foreign armies. The throne, empty for a generation, is once again filled by a king. Louis XVIII, a Bourbon, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, returns not in triumph, but as a condition of peace. He is a portly, gout-ridden, but pragmatic man who understands that you cannot simply turn back the clock. He grants a Charter, a constitution of sorts, that preserves many of the gains of the Revolution: equality before the law, a parliament, and the land seizures that created a new class of property owners. Yet, a tension crackles in the Parisian air. The returned aristocrats, the émigrés, want their old world back completely. They want vengeance. A 'White Terror' sees royalist gangs hunt down suspected Bonapartists and revolutionaries in the south, a bloody settling of old scores that reminds everyone the past is never truly buried.

For a time, Louis XVIII holds the fragile center. But upon his death in 1824, his brother, Charles X, takes the throne. Where Louis was a realist, Charles is a true believer. He is a man of the Ancien Régime, convinced he rules by the grace of God alone. His coronation at Reims is a spectacle of medieval pageantry, a deliberate rejection of the modern world. He empowers the church and compensates nobles for land lost during the Revolution, paying for it with bonds that anger the middle-class financiers who must foot the bill. He is a king marching resolutely backwards into the past, and he is pulling a reluctant France with him. By July 1830, he has had enough of opposition. He issues the 'July Ordinances,' dissolving the elected chamber, strangling the free press, and rigging the voting system to favor his wealthy, landed allies. It is a fatal miscalculation.

Paris explodes. For three days—Les Trois Glorieuses, the Three Glorious Days—the city becomes a battlefield. But these are not the grand armies of Napoleon; this is a revolution of the streets. Students, printers thrown out of work by censorship, shopkeepers, and laborers tear up the cobblestones, felling trees and overturning carts to build hundreds of barricades. The narrow, winding alleys of medieval Paris are perfect for guerilla warfare. The familiar tricolor flag of the Revolution, unseen for fifteen years, reappears, hanging from windows and raised over the barricades. Charles X, stunned by the speed and fury of the uprising, quickly abdicates and flees to England. The Bourbons have been ousted for a second, and final, time. But what comes next? The radical republicans who fought on the barricades are outmaneuvered. The wealthy bourgeoisie, the bankers and industrialists, want stability, not another 'Terror'. They find their man in Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans. A cousin of the deposed king, he presents himself not as a divine monarch, but as a 'Citizen King'. He strolls the boulevards carrying an umbrella, sends his sons to public schools, and accepts the tricolor flag. His reign, the July Monarchy, is the triumph of the upper middle class. The motto of the era, spoken by his minister François Guizot, is simple: 'Enrichissez-vous'—get rich.

And for some, France does get rich. The first railways begin to stitch the country together, chugging out from Paris. Coal mines and iron foundries belch smoke, creating immense fortunes. This is the world of Balzac's novels, of lavish parties and ruthless financial speculation. But beneath this gilded surface, a new France is being forged in misery. The Industrial Revolution creates a new urban working class, the proletariat, crammed into squalid, disease-ridden slums in Paris, Lyon, and Lille. In 1832, a cholera epidemic sweeps through Paris, killing nearly 20,000 people, disproportionately in the poorest quarters. Workers in Lyon's massive silk industry, the 'Canuts', rise up twice, in 1831 and 1834, under the banner, 'Live working, or die fighting'. Both revolts are brutally crushed by the army. To the government of Louis-Philippe, these people are invisible. To vote, you had to pay a certain amount in taxes, a threshold so high that only about 240,000 men in a nation of 35 million had any say in their own governance. Discontent simmers for eighteen years, a low boil of failed plots, assassination attempts, and poor harvests.

By February 1848, the pressure is unbearable. The government, fearing unrest, bans a series of political 'banquets'—dinners used by reformers as a clever loophole to get around laws forbidding assembly. It is the final spark. Once again, the cry goes up, 'To the barricades!' Louis-Philippe, who never commanded the loyalty or mystique of his predecessors, loses his nerve. He abdicates and flees, disguised, to England, just as Charles X had done. France is, almost accidentally, a Republic once more. The Second Republic is born in a wave of romantic idealism. Universal male suffrage is declared, expanding the electorate from 240,000 to over 9 million. The death penalty for political crimes is abolished. To deal with mass unemployment, 'National Workshops' are created, guaranteeing work for the jobless. But the dream sours quickly. The Workshops are a costly failure, and the conservative peasants and provincial bourgeoisie resent having their taxes pay for what they see as Parisian laziness. In June, the government closes the Workshops. The workers of Paris see this as a betrayal. For four horrific days—the 'June Days'—they wage a desperate war of the barricades against the army. It is a class war, raw and brutal. Over 1,500 rebels are killed in the fighting; another 3,000 are summarily executed. Thousands more are arrested and deported to Algeria. The June Days Uprising terrifies France and creates an unbridgeable chasm between the working class and the rest of the nation.

Into this climate of fear and division steps a man with a famous name: Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of the great Emperor. He is a curious figure, a one-time revolutionary adventurer who now promises order, stability, and national glory. The name 'Bonaparte' is magic. To the peasants, it means glory and the protection of their land. To the bourgeoisie, it means an end to socialist threats. In December 1848, he is elected President of the Republic by an overwhelming landslide, winning 5.5 million votes. For three years he plays the part of the President, but his ambition is imperial. On December 2nd, 1851, the anniversary of his uncle's coronation and his victory at Austerlitz, he launches a coup d'état. The army occupies Paris, crushes resistance, and arrests political opponents. A year later, after a carefully managed referendum, he sheds the title of President and declares himself Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. The Second Republic is dead. The Second Empire has begun.

The reign of Napoleon III is one of profound contradiction. It is an authoritarian police state, yet it is also a period of dazzling modernity and economic growth. The Emperor's greatest legacy is etched into the very stone of his capital. He unleashes Baron Haussmann on Paris, ordering him to demolish the city's dark, cramped, and rebellious medieval core. In its place, Haussmann carves out the city we know today: a magnificent network of wide, straight boulevards, grand squares, and lush parks. These new avenues are not just for beauty and sanitation; they are too wide to be barricaded and are perfect for moving troops and artillery to crush any future uprising. A new sewer system, miles of gas lighting, and grand buildings like the Opéra Garnier transform Paris into the glittering capital of Europe. The economy booms. Railway tracks explode from 3,000 to 17,000 kilometers, connecting the entire nation. Great universal expositions in 1855 and 1867 showcase French industrial power to the world.

For nearly two decades, the formula of authoritarian rule and economic prosperity holds. Napoleon III gives France order and a renewed sense of global importance, intervening in Crimea and Italy. But the glamour masks a growing rot. The Emperor's foreign adventures become reckless, most notably a disastrous attempt to install a puppet emperor in Mexico. At home, he begins to liberalize the regime in the 1860s, but it is too little, too late. His true undoing comes from a new, powerful state rising to the east: Prussia, ruthlessly guided by its brilliant and cynical Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. In 1870, Bismarck baits a sick and indecisive Napoleon III into a war France is utterly unprepared to fight. The Franco-Prussian War is a swift and humiliating catastrophe. At the Battle of Sedan on September 2nd, the main French army is encircled, and the Emperor himself is captured on the battlefield. When the news reaches Paris, the Second Empire evaporates overnight without a single defender. Crowds flood the streets, and a new Republic—the Third—is proclaimed. The fifty-five-year cycle of restorations and revolutions is over. The age of kings and emperors in France is finished, not with a bang, but with the shame of total military defeat, leaving a new, uncertain republic to face the wrath of a besieging German army.