474 Chapter 24
duke of Orleans, as a new king. Louis-Philippe pos-
sessed moderate liberal credentials. He had initially
supported the French Revolution and served in its
armies, then fled France during the Reign of Terror. His
father had even served in the Convention and voted for
the execution of Louis XVI. Louis-Philippe had courted
the liberal opposition during the restoration and con-
vinced many of them that he represented “the republic
in a single individual.”
The Orleanist Monarchy, also called the July
Monarchy (1830–48), began with a liberalized consti-
tution but few dramatic changes. Louis-Philippe ex-
panded voting rights from 90,000 to 170,000 (0.5
percent of the nation). He relaxed censorship but still
tried to control the press. He brought new social strata
into the government, but that chiefly meant that an
elite of wealth was joined to that of the aristocracy.
Louis-Philippe did select many of his chief ministers,
such as Thiers and the historian François Guizot from
middle-class liberals, but they were cautious men who
feared democracy. Guizot became the chief architect of
the Orleanist version of the French compromise, and
he achieved greater success than Louis XVIII in creating
a liberal constitutional monarchy comparable to the
government in Britain.
The July Monarchy became so reknowned for sup-
porting banking, business, and industrial interests that it
was also called “the Bourgeois Monarchy.” One of
France’s keenest political observers during the 1840s,
Alexis de Tocqueville, saw this at once: “Posterity will
perhaps never know to what degree the government of
this time is a capitalist enterprise in which all action is
taken for the purpose of profit.”
Orleanist sympathies for business and industry had
two important consequences. France experienced an
important era of banking growth, railroad building, and
industrial expansion after 1830, and the new regime de-
serves credit for its role in French industrialization and
modernization. Simultaneously, however, the workers,
shopkeepers, and students who had formed the crowds
that drove Charles X into exile realized that the
revolution of 1830 had made little difference in their
existence. So France experienced further upheavals. In
1834, Louis-Philippe needed a tenth of his army to
control a silk weavers’ strike in Lyon. In 1835 an embit-
tered radical built an “infernal machine” of twenty-five
rifles in an iron rack and fired them with a single trig-
ger. He killed eighteen people in a royal procession but
only bruised the king. While France remained prosper-
ous, such assaults remained isolated events; in the mid-
1840s, however, a severe depression led to yet another
French revolution.
The Revolutions of 1830
Metternich once observed that when Paris caught a
cold, Europe sneezed. In 1830 that meant revolutions
across Europe (see chronology 24.1). The sneezing
began in August 1830 with unrest in the Belgian
provinces of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The
French-speaking, Catholic population of Belgium was
larger than the Dutch-speaking, predominantly Calvin-
ist population of Holland. The king was Dutch, the
capital was Amsterdam, officeholders were chiefly
Dutch, and national institutions predominantly Dutch.
As a Belgian nationalist asked in the summer of 1830,
“By what right do two million Dutchmen command
four million Belgians?” The Belgian revolution of 1830
followed the French pattern: An insurrection of workers
forced the issue, but the educated elite seized control of
the situation. A national congress proclaimed Belgian
independence in October 1830, but reluctant, middle-
class Belgians supported the revolution only after the
Dutch army bombarded Antwerp.
Though Louis-Philippe gave the Belgians military
assistance, they won their independence at the negoti-
ating table. The British sympathized with Belgian na-
tionalism but feared French influence. When the
Belgians accepted a German prince (an uncle of
Queen Victoria) as their ruler instead of a French
king, British support assured Belgian independence.
Belgium adopted a liberal constitution, more advanced
than either the British or French constitutions, in- It guaranteed freedom of the press and freedom
of religion, then promised many other “inviolable” in-
dividual liberties (such as the right of association in
unions), and it promoted secularization by establish-
ing civil marriage.
Insurrection spread across Europe from France and
Belgium. German antitax and food riots in 1830 re-
vealed dissatisfaction with Metternichian Germany, but
they produced no major revolution. A few smaller
states, notably Saxony (1831), Brunswick (1832), and
Hanover (1833), granted constitutions. Metternich
considered granting a constitution in Austria, but the
emperor Francis I insisted that he would tolerate “no
innovation,” so Metternich used the Germanic
Confederation to stop the revolutions and to impose a
new series of repressive laws, known as the Six Articles.
The revolution of 1830 reached Poland a few
weeks after crossing the Rhine. The Polish November
Rising did not seek a constitution (which already ex-
isted), but an end to Russian rule. It began with a Polish
army mutiny provoked when the czar prepared to send