When King Louis XVI of France was deposed in September 1792 and a French Republic proclaimed, it looked like the Bourbon dynasty was finished. After Louis and his wife Marie Antoinette were executed the next year and their 10-year-old heir (styled Louis XVII by royalists) was abused to death in prison, few anticipated a return to power of the family that had ruled France since 1589.
When the all-conquering Napoleon Bonaparte dispensed with the Republic and crowned himself emperor in 1804, there was little reason to think that in 10 years an obese, gout-ridden invalid living in poverty-stricken exile would restore the Bourbons to the throne.
Louis Stanislas Xavier, Count of Provence, was the younger brother of Louis XVI and second in the line of succession when the French Revolution broke out in July 1789. He did not cut an imposing figure: he was a spendthrift and always in debt, remarkably fat, unable to produce an heir with a wife he despised, and politically maladroit. In 1791 he fled France and began a life in exile that would last for 23 years, bouncing from the Netherlands, to Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, and finally to England, sometimes housed in a foreign place, sometimes living in a small apartment above a shop. After the death of his nephew in 1795, he called himself Louis XVIII and was the centre of plans and plots to revive the House of Bourbon’s claim to France.
Louis’ hopes were illusory as long as Napoleon ruled, but when Bonaparte overstretched himself in a disastrous attempt to conquer Russia in 1812 and found himself facing a formidable coalition of European enemies that pushed his armies back to Paris, the Bourbon cause flickered to life. From his English exile, Louis issued proclamations that promised a liberal constitution for his country and no retributions against the enemies of his family. In April 1814, allied armies entered the French capital, Napoleon abdicated, and Louis XVIII was proclaimed King of France.
Instead, Louis was saddled with a constitution that maintained the legal system of the Napoleonic Code with the king ruling through a bicameral legislature—an upper house of aristocrats and a lower chamber elected by the votes of prosperous males (about 1 percent of the population). The king largely left the civil service untouched and freed political prisoners.
It was a compromise that seemed to please no one. Long-time monarchists resented their inability to take revenge on the revolutionaries that had driven them away and seized their land, the clergy lamented the loss of Church lands and buildings, holders of property seized during the revolution went in fear of being forced to return it, liberals resented the replacement of the national tricolour flag with the white Bourbon banner, and the army protested at massive cuts to its budget and manpower after years of war. Tepid enthusiasm for Louis’ return shrank as the countryside fell into an economic slump.
- 9th March, the Cannibal has quitted his den
- 10th, the Corsican Ogre has landed at Cape Juan
- 11th, the Tiger has arrived at Gap
- 12th, the Monster slept at Grenoble
- 13th, the Tyrant has passed through Lyons
- 14th, the Usurper is directing his steps towards Dijon, but the brave and loyal Burgundians have risen en masse and surrounded him on all sides
- 18th, Bonaparte is only sixty leagues from the capital; he has been fortunate enough to escape the hands of his pursuers
- 19th, Bonaparte is advancing with rapid steps, but he will never enter Paris
- 20th, Napoleon will, tomorrow, be under our ramparts
- 21st, the Emperor is at Fontainebleau
- 22nd, His Imperial and Royal Majesty, yesterday evening, arrived at the Tuileries, amidst the joyful acclamations of his devoted and faithful subjects.
