Welcome back to Generals and Napoleon.

We are super excited and very happy to have the great David Montgomery joining us from the SIECLA podcast once again.

Hello, David.

Hey John, thanks for having me back.

Yeah, my pleasure.

My pleasure.

For those of you not familiar with David, one of the best French history podcasts in the world, this Siecla.

And for the uninitiated, David, what is your podcast about?

So the the Siecla is looking at sort of the overlooked century in French politics between the downfall of Napoleon in World War One.

Obviously Napoleon sticks around for a little bit spectacularly in one case, but this part that doesn't get as much coverage, at least not from like, you know, high politics reasons and sort of going through in order trying to understand and tell the stories of things like the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy where a lot of interesting things were happening that most people never know anything about from their history books.

So it's just seemed like a perfect gap in people's understanding that all the information was there and it was just take a little bit of work to popularize it.

How much you define a little bit has maybe since I first conceived this a few years ago.

Yeah.

Well, what I like about it is, you know, my podcast obviously is focused on the Napoleonic era, kind of 1789 to 1815, and yours kind of picks up the story.

But it also has a lot of recurring characters, cameo appearances by guys like Marshall Marmont and the guy we're talking about today, King Charles the 10th, right?

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of these figures were active through much of this whole period, the whole revolutionary generation, Lafayette, Louis the 18th, Charles the 10th, people who were active in 1789, and a lot of them weren't, were gone by 1830, but some were still around and we're still playing really big roles.

Lafayette and Charles the 10th, bigger than any of them, as well as Louis Philippe, the Duke Dorleon.

Yeah, we're going to dive into Charles the 10th.

That's our focus for today.

Before I do that though, I want to mention David has a great Patreon, a lot of bonus content, a lot of interesting stuff.

If you want to support the Siecla on his Patreon, please go check that out.

And of course, the Generals.

A Napoleon Patreon.

Yeah, support John's Patreon as well.

That's right, that's right.

So I want to start off with an episode I I listened to recently of yours.

It was an episode with Mike Duncan, the host of the Revolutions podcast, and he it was really intriguing.

It was a nice hook to get me to listen to it.

So it says basically, do you think Charles the 10th might go down as quote, one of the greatest idiots of history?

End Quote.

Yeah, that was that was Mike's great phrase, and I'm not sure if he's the single greatest idiot of history, but it's always bad when you can make a case that you should be included.

Surely there have been bigger idiots who've ruled.

Ferdinand the 7th of Spain comes to mind, a big dumb dumb.

But Charles, the 10th, He might appreciate this somewhat, given that he was a big gambler, but he was playing with bigger stakes than most as the ruler of France, a big country, and through an ultimately entirely preventable a self-inflicted wound, ended up losing his throne and losing his cause.

Yeah, if those unfamiliar Charles the 10th, that was his kingly name, but he was the successor of Napoleon, successor Louis, correct?

Yeah.

So Louis the 16th, you might know, is the king of France during the French Revolution, married Marie Antoinette, was guillotined.

Louis the 16th had two younger brothers.

The Comp de Provence, who later took the throne as Louis the 18th, was the middle brother and the youngest brother, the Compt Artois, who we're talking about today.

After Louis the 18th died without any children, Charles then took the throne as the third of the Bourbon brothers to rule France.

He ruled from 1824 to 1830, after Louis the 18th had well claimed to rule for several decades, but actually ruled for most of 18, 1814, most of 1815, and then all the way to 1824.

Right, right.

Those don't know.

Louis the 18th claimed he was ruling from abroad while he was in exile while Napoleon was running the show.

But we'll get into all that.

OK, let's dive into the subject matter.

Born in 1757 as Charles Philippe Compter, Count de Artois, he's the younger brother of both Louis the 16th and Louis the 18th.

What was his upbringing like?

Lavish.

He grew up in Versailles.

You know, the system that had been constructed by Louis the 16th and by Louis the 14th, and refined by Louis the 15th as the most glamorous court in all of Europe, one that hung on to that glamour even as a lot of other courts were becoming more austere, more military in style in the 18th century.

This was an era of elaborate court customs, elaborate court costumes, powdered wigs, all this stuff.

And the competent Trois grew up in this atmosphere.

He was fantastically rich, something of a Playboy, loved gambling and horse and hunting, fairly dissolute one might say, enjoying all the pleasures of his position.

He was, even as a young man, always on the right wing, even within ancient regime politics, which is saying something.

He was always among the most conservative of this conservative regime.

Right, and I would say that it's going to be both his greatest strength and fatal flaw.

He's a staunch royalist and ultra conservative even before the French Revolution happens.

What does that mean exactly?

And why did this conflict with the Jacobins on the other side?

So before the French Revolution, what that meant was that he was, generally speaking, an opponent of reform.

In the latter decades of the onsenal regime, there were also France was in a rough state as a country.

It was deeply in debt.

Its revenues weren't meeting expenses.

The system was sclerotic.

It was impossible to get anything done.

And there were these ideas that were coming out left and right.

Well, we got if we do this, we can fix things.

If we do that, we can fix things.

And with every idea there were people saying, oh, we can't do that.

That would be too disruptive.

That would undermine the power of the king.

That would undermine the power of our ancient traditions, and pretty reliably whenever there's a group of people saying we can't do that.

The Compter Trois was one of that group, along with Marie Antoinette, who is also a leader of the conservative faction, the Compter Provence.

The future Louis the 18th was relatively more progressive.

He was certainly no radical, sort of like the Dabble and Reform projects and stuff like that.

So even for this early age, there was this sort of political difference and none of none of these were Democrats.

They were all committed royalists.

It's just a question of what's the best approach for this absolute monarchy to take.

Yeah, and it's interesting.

I mean, as you mentioned, it's kind of the youngest of the family.

His brother Louis the 16th has a son.

Oh, do you think he ever had an inkling that he might be king one day?

Because he's pretty far down the list of succession been even after the French Revolution.

The odds that Charles would ever become king, you know, especially before the French Revolution, were pretty low.

But, like, low in the sense of a royal family, Right?

Like, he was still just a couple steps away from the throne.

You know, they say that like, every cardinal imagines himself being Pope and every senator imagines of themselves being president.

I have to imagine that every Bourbon imagined themselves becoming king.

And Charles is probably no exception, even when he was fifth or sixth in the line of succession.

Yeah.

And of course, you know, the Bourbons had for several generations had been very long lived and had passed their throne from grandfather to grandson rather than father to son.

So it was entirely possible, if that had continued, that, you know, Charles would have died before ever having the chance to become king.

But on the other hand, Charles did have sons relatively early on.

The middle brother, Louis the 18th, never had children, and especially after the French Revolution happened and Louis the 16th was killed, and then Louis the 16th son, dubbed by royalist Louis the 17th, died in fairly miserable captivity.

At that point, it became fairly likely that Charles would become king.

All he had to do is outlive his brother at that point, and if Charles didn't become king, then Charles's son was in line to become king.

Right.

And for those who don't know, Louis the 18th was never the portrait of healthiness.

No, he was.

Even as a young man, he tended to being overweight, as opposed to Charles, who's always slim, elegant, eventually something of a silver fox.

By the time Louis the 18th was king, he was massively overweight, was in a wheelchair from many of the last years of his life, suffered from gout that was so debilitating and sometimes prevented him from engaging in politics at fairly crucial times.

Generally had, you know, it was it was never in great health.

And there was never any idea that, like Louis, the 18th is going to live to be 90 or anything like that.

Yeah.

Whereas, you know, Charles the 10th was, as I said, much more active physically, in much better health.

So, you know, at a certain point he was the heir apparent to the throne, and it seemed fairly likely that he would get a chance to become king.

Let's.

Talk about his family.

In 1773 he gets married to Mary Teresa.

How was their marriage and did they have kids?

So their marriage was OK as far as aristocratic arranged marriages go.

They pro managed to procreate, which is more than you could say for some of these.

These couples.

They had two sons, became the the Duke Danglem, who was something of a fail son, ultimately not as bright as his father, a fairly bumbling.

And the Duke de Berry, who took after his father's youthful Playboy ways and eventually partied and philandered his way across Europe, eventually left a string of illegitimate children, including, at the time of his death in 1820, stabbed by an assassin outside the Paris Opera.

His wife and multiple mistresses were all pregnant at that time with posthumous children, which, you know, was embarrassing, but also for a royal family that had not had a lot of children, was at least a good sign that at least one of these guys was fertile.

Yeah.

And ultimately this, the Duke to Berry's posthumous son Henry, would become the heir of the Bourbon line.

And would we continue to claim the Bourbon, make the Bourbon claim to the throne as late as the Third Republic?

Yeah, Duke to Berry was stabbed, I believe, by Bonaparte.

So there's a lot of hatred, but you can see between Bonaparte's factions and the Bourbons, but we'll get into that in a minute.

So the French Revolution happens, the future Charles of the 10th has to flee France and become a leader of the emigre opposition to the revolution.

I mean, it must have been very upsetting.

His one brother, the King, Louis the 16th, is guillotined and he's basically in exile with his other brother, the future Louis the 18th.

How close were these brothers?

Not especially close Charles the 10th the Carpenter trois was essentially the first emigre.

He left France the day after the Bastille fell.

Widely reported that you know he left because of his devotion to conservative politics.

News to discuss what was happening.

Other historians suggest this might have been a You can't fire me I quit situation because Louis the 16th was extremely annoyed that Artois, his younger brother, by being so flamboyantly reactionary, was stirring up opposition and trouble and just wanted him off the scene.

So whether he left entirely voluntarily or was pushed out, he left.

In 1789, Louis the 18th, the Provence wouldn't leave France for several more years, leaving successfully at the same time as the famous flight to Varenne, when Louis the 16th also tried to flee and was caught and captured and brought back from exile.

Artois just intrigued constantly, even against direct orders from Louis the 16th to can it and stop doing that.

He was convinced that he knew better than his brother what was in the best interest of the monarchy, and he pursued his idea of the best interest of the monarchy even against the implied and sometimes direct commands of the monarch himself.

And he continued to do this after Louis the 16th died and Louis the 18th was the head of the family.

Our trial was something of a free agent to took instructions from his brothers under advisement but rarely as direct commands and often was pursuing sort of his own agenda to promote the family as he saw best.

Yeah, I was going to ask you.

Obviously Napoleon takes over in 1799.

Depending on who I ask, who do you think was involved in some of these assassination plots against Napoleon?

Obviously the famous one, the gunpowder infernal machine plot.

Was it the royalists?

Was it, you know, Compt Deretois?

Was it the British agents?

Like who?

Who was plotting these assassination attempts?

I mean, lots of people were, the Jacobins and the royalists were both involved in some of these various plots.

How involved Artois was is a little hard to pin down.

Certainly if you go up the ladder enough chains everything.

All these royalist conspiracies pretty much came back to him.

He was in England for a lot of the the polianic regimes, much closer to the scene than Louis the 18th, who was in Germany or Russia for a lot of this time was sort of much more out of things.

Our trial was sort of on the scene and much more actively collaborating was tied up to all these networks of royalist conspirators in France, some of whom were merely spying or trying to influence opinion, but others who were actively involved in what I call direct action.

And how much, you know, Charles was giving direct orders to people or how much just saying like, go help, help about my cause against the usurper and leaving it up to the conspirators to decide what they wanted to do was hard to say.

I don't think he would have been upset if a royalist had managed to kill the usurper Napoleon.

And it's certainly not implausible that he talked to one of the people and told him to go do your best to kill him.

You know, I mean, Charles was an inveterate conspirator.

He, it was an national world of plotting up until the very end.

And I think we'll, I'll talk about that a little bit later about this sort of conspiratorial mindset and how that's contributed to his downfall.

But some of that was shaped during his long exile when that's basically all he had to do was plot.

He, he, he had no armies.

He could not use the conventional tools of statecraft to try to get what he wanted.

All he had was the world of skullduggery and plots and conspiracies and assassinations.

Yeah, and you wonder during that time, and we'll get to post 1830 as well.

Did you go back to those old ways?

Like, oh man, how do I get my throne back?

But we'll get into that the.

Other thing I should mention you talk, we have talked about his wife and their relatively distant relationship.

They they separated basically during the revolution and never reunited.

Charles had no interest really in reuniting and I believe there's a request that she could join him and he said basically no.

He also had this time had he had a long term mistress, Louise de Paul Estrone, who he was with for many, many years devoted to her.

And she died while they were in exile in England.

And the story goes that on her deathbed, she demanded that after that he promised to devote himself only to God after she was gone.

And whether that actually happened or just a just so story, about this time, Charles the 10th, the youthful Playboy, did become devoutly religious, a devoutly religious Catholic, and would remain devoutly religious through to the end of his life.

That's interesting.

Yeah, maybe he had an awakening or, or maybe he just wanted to keep his promise.

I mean, Napoleon had Marie Valeska, he had a mistress that he was very infatuated with.

So maybe, maybe Charles the 10th was similarly infatuated with this this person and and wanted to honor her in that way.

A lot of these old aristocrats, you know, they had their formal marriages, which often were cold and people separated relatively young in life.

Often the people get married, they would have the air, maybe a second child, and then they just separate and go have their own affairs of both husband and wife.

Not not uncommon at all.

Yeah, well, not to jump too far ahead in the story, but I'm trying to get to the reign of Charles and 10th and we still have some background to lay.

He returns to France during the Bourbon Restoration 1814 and supported his brother Louis the 18th.

Do you think King Louis the 18th and his brother, the future Charles the 10th, were trying to restore stability to France or turn back the clock on the Revolution?

Both.

You know, Louis the 18th is just a really fascinating figure who went through a lot of twists and turns in his life that he was, he was something of a reformer before 1789, after going to exile, went hard to the right and became sort of an uncompromising reactionary, demanding the complete and full restoration of the old ways.

But gradually over the long exile, Louis the 18th, bit by bit would moderate and come to recognize that we have to make some concessions.

We can't continue to demand everything goes back the way it was.

Which also ended up being convenient when he finally took power and inherited the administrative state that Napoleon had built and discovered that a lot of this was actually very nice for the person at the top and that he didn't want to get rid of the council of State and the prefects and the disciplined army and all that.

So Lou, the 18th, under pressure from the Allies, issued a constitution for France, the Charter of 1814, which well, framed as a free gift that could implicitly be revoked at any time.

I still did sort of create a sort of semi constitutional form of government for France.

And even though Louis the 18th was sort of pressured into it and other people wrote it and he just sort of signed off on it, he did come to genuinely sort of view the charter as his child.

There's a famous quote that he gave telling the intermediary, the King of Naples, that it was better to issue a constitution than to have one forced on you.

And besides, it was the spirit of the age, which I think sums up Louis the 18th's attitude fairly well.

Left his own devices, he absolutely would have brought back the ASEAN regime of his youth in all its pleasure and grandeur.

But he recognized that times have changed and that there are certain things he had to compromise on if he wanted to keep the other aspects of the the old order that he wanted.

Charles the 10th was never quite so open to these changes.

By this time, he had acknowledged some things had changed.

You couldn't or didn't want to undo literally everything and turned the clock all the way back to 1789.

But Charles the 10th was much less in tune with the spirit of the age that his brother had made his peace with.

Throughout Louis the 18th reign the Compt Artois was the leader of the right wing faction, the so-called ultra royalists or the Pures or the Pontoos, the sort of the the pointed ones.

Sometimes he kept it a little distance because he was obliged to formally support his brother.

But it was an open secret that our Artois was the spiritual and social center of this a hard right faction and sometimes engaged in active participation in politics, much to his brother's frequent frustration, especially earlier in the Louis the 18th reign.

Near the end, as Louis the 18th health started to fail, political situation in France had changed.

Louis the 18th had moved to the right a little bit, and also simultaneously gave Charles a larger role in the governance of France.

11 Wag said something to the effect of poor Louis the 18th will guess to see his brother as king before he even dies because of Artois larger role.

Although Louis the 18th was an ornery fellow who remained stubborn to the end when he wanted to be involved in something.

But you know, Artois was well known as a hard right leader.

This is not, you know, this had some things that can be surprising to some people.

For a lot of this period, the ultra royalists were actually opposed to censorship because partly because it was felt the ultra royalists had better writers than some of these other factions.

And some also like some of these ministries that Louis the etieth had were more moderate and censorship might have been used against the ultra royalists.

So Charles, you know, was sort of anti censorship in this period and one of the first things he did upon becoming king was end of the censorship that had been currently in place.

You look at it and you look at some of the mistakes they made along the way, and we're going to get to more of those here in a minute.

Obviously, the killing of Marshall Knave by firing squad was 1.

And I think if you're too strict and you try to stamp things out too much, like they were trying to avoid Bonapartism for forever.

And then sure enough, in 1848, Napoleon's nephew comes back on the throne.

So it's it's almost like perhaps they were too harsh in their measures and if they were just got a more moderate path, things have turned out differently.

In 1824, France was fairly stable politically.

The restoration was fairly entrenched.

There were still deeper currents moving.

No country in Europe would end up immune to the demands for wider suffrage than the demands for sort of we called social reform, for efforts to help workers who were impoverished as the industrial revolution transformed the continent.

Those would have come to France regardless.

But the Bourbon restoration in the middle of the 80s was fairly stable and secure.

It had survived a number of crises, some near death experiences, an arguable death experience in 1815, but it had come through and was on relatively stable footing.

This included some fairly repressive laws.

It's often said that you know that even at its worst, the Bourbon Restoration was less of a police state than France had been under Napoleon, especially if you were a member of the elite.

Under the burn Restoration, there was a parliament where discourse was relatively free, A wider range of voices could express themselves publicly and argue that had been allowed under Napoleon.

But you know, this was still a fairly we would today call this a managed, managed constitutional monarchy.

There's heavy vote rigging, secret police where ubiquitous, the king meddled in in public affairs.

So it was not what we would call a free and democratic state.

But compared to what had been in the past and what people in Europe could experience by traveling to Austria or Prussia at the time, France was more free.

And arguably at some points you could argue at some way that Restoration France was more free than Britain at some point in certain aspects.

This is a period when of the Peterloo Massacre and all sorts of repression against left wing activists in Britain as well.

OK, so I'm just going to try and figure out in the six years here award starts travel.

We'll start at the beginning, but Charles the 10th becomes France, King of France in 1824, his brother Louis the 18th dies and he promotes traditional Catholic values, aristocratic privileges, earning support from conservatives, conservatives and hostility from liberals.

Looking back on it, is this a bad idea?

So Charles the 10th has a bit of a honeymoon phase after he takes over, like everybody knows that he's far to the right.

This is an open secret in France.

But he comes in, he makes these goodwill gestures.

He he lifts censorship, he frees a bunch of political prisoners.

He does sort of a charm offensive and things, things go pretty well.

But over sort of his first year in office, I think the turning point is often seen as Charles's official coronation in 1820, May 1825, the city of France and the cathedral there.

That's sort of seen as sort of the end of the honeymoon in the in the beginning of this this new phase.

His government led by the Comp de Vilal, who he inherited from Louis the 18th passes several controversial laws so-called emigres billion, which compensated nobles who'd lost land during the restoration.

Ironically, a a lot of historians just deeply unpopular as it would be today, like using taxpayer money to reward a bunch of rich and famous people.

It was never going to be a politically a good idea in in the short term.

A lot of historians do see it as like probably a good policy because the emigrates who had had their land seized were ceaselessly agitating and stirring things up to try to get their land back.

And then what they wanted was the state to see seize their land, the people who had bought it and give it back to them or to pressure the people who bought it using social pressure at the local level, pressure them to sell it back.

And the mere possibility that there, this could like 10% of France of French people owned some of the Seas land.

This was not a small amount of of resources.

It was the existence of this was a huge source of instability.

And the opposition played this up that like you have to support us or the Bourbons are going to retake the beyond nest.

You know, the seas land, the national goods and by paying off the emigres, this agitation largely stopped.

The value of this seized land went up after the emigrates billion was passed because the title to it was seen as more secure.

So it was probably a good policy, but it was absolutely a self-inflicted political wound.

There's also a a blasphemy law that was that was passed.

There had been a couple of high profile vandalizations of Catholic churches and then it you you get to this 1825, the coronation ceremony of Charles the 10th, which by and large follows the millennia old traditions of French royal coronations.

There are some compromises, some updates.

You know, some some of the French marshals participate in the ceremony.

The king included an oath to uphold the charter, which you know, Louis the 16th had Louis the 14th had and 16th had never never done.

But it was you know, it was held in the Catholic Church.

There was bishops involved.

There's a religious ceremony the in France, there was this, this baptismal oil that has supposedly been brought down by heaven for I think the baptism of Clovis in like more than a millennia ago.

And this had been destroyed during the revolution.

But supposedly it was rediscovered like days before the coronation that supposedly a, a loyal devotee had saved some of this from destruction and kept it secret.

And it came out at the exact time.

This was amazing.

France can continue this tradition because there's been a miracle and this has been saved to everyone else.

All this smacked of the old ways of religious devotion and it was it was deeply unpopular and cemented the image of Charles the 10th at combined with things like the Emigres billion and the the Sacrilege Law cemented the image of Charles the 10th as this backwards figure.

Widespread conspiracy theories of this time from the left and even up to the center right about the role of the Jesuits, famed famous target throughout centuries for conspiracy theories.

And the so-called congregation which was widely seen as this like right wing Catholic secret society that had its tendrils everywhere in society and was plotting to manipulate France.

And it was widely believed that Charles was either a member of this group or a puppet of this group at the time.

Well, he also gets involved in foreign policy, notably the colonization of Algeria by France.

Is this just a distraction for the public to kind of put their focus on, or is he trying to like, rebuild the glory of France?

Both.

Both.

Charles was active in foreign policy as as he was not a mere figurehead as king, he was at active powers and much of Europe was ruled by monarchs and monarchs would write to each other.

That was that was normal.

I don't continue under the July monarchy, much to the frustration of Louis Philippe's ministers, Charles and his advisors like Jules de Poliniak.

We'll have time to talk about coming up.

Pursued lots of schemes to try to boost French national greatness.

Poland Neck at one point proposed this elaborate fantastical scheme involving redrawing the map of Europe where Russia would get lands from the Ottoman Empire and in Austria lands, the Ottoman Empire.

And then Prussia would get other lands and it was out of the swap.

France would get some of the territory that had been forced to surrender after Napoleon's downfall, sort of reclaiming the natural borders of France that were such an obsession across the political spectrum at the time.

This went nowhere.

You know what, none of the other countries in Europe wanted any part of this but Charlie, it was genuinely interested in this.

But the particular circumstances of the invasion of Algiers, the modern day capital city of Algeria happened.

You know, there's some particular inspirations involved.

There'd been a long standing dispute over some unpaid debt.

The French envoy had been swatted by a fly swatter by the the leader of Algiers.

But the particular circumstances was that in 1829, August 1829, Charles the 10th had for the past year or two been forced basically to accept a more moderate ministry than he wanted.

All the efforts of censorship and vote rigging had failed.

In 1827, France's very tiny electorate, about 1% of its males had the right to vote, just determined based on wealth of the time.

France's tiny electorate had defeated ultra royalist candidates forced basically forced out at the comp to Vilal, which was after Vilal, the fairly fairly competent Prime Minister under Louis and Charles.

Charles had been forced to accept a more moderate ministry under V Compton Martin Yak and hated it.

He absolutely hated all these concessions.

Every day he was asked to make a new concession, a new compromise.

And you know, occasionally he like some of them, but the the culminating impact of all these concessions and he was asked to make just chafed on him.

And in August 1829, he fired Martiniak and replaced him with a new ministry led by his old friend Jules de Poliniak.

Back friends, back to the Versailles days, just as Catholic and conservative as Charles was, and a ministry made-up entirely of far right people.

Which is mostly due to what Charles wanted, but also because anyone who wasn't far right generally declined to be involved when they were asked.

Yeah, and that's part of my next question.

I always wondered this about failed kings and emperors and despots.

You know, did they just have bad advisors or did they have good advisors and just ignore them?

I mean, certainly some of Charles's advisors over the years were bad, probably none worse than Jules Dapolitiak, who had some talents, but you can't say conclude anything other than that.

Jules Dapolitiak was a disastrous choice of Prime Minister for Charles, but he also had capable leaders.

Joseste Vilal was a fairly competent administrator, although he ended up alienating a lot of people by the end.

Martiniak served ably and Martiniak was an ultra, was an ultra royalist.

But when it was pragmatic and thought that there were certain concessions that had to be made in order to preserve the crown, and there were other people who were close to Charles, part of his court circle and stuff like that, who had more moderate positions and were sending him letters and messages trying to urge him to take more moderate courses.

And ultimately it comes down to what Charles wanted.

He chose who he would listen to and who he wouldn't listen to.

And by the end, what we wanted to listen to was far right figures like Jules Napoleonic, who take an uncompromising attitude toward France's liberal opposition.

And the reforms and the changes that they were demanding, which Charles felt were offensive to his dignity as monarch and which he felt were a slippery slope to a new revolution, is one of the defining memories he took out of 1789.

He saw what the catastrophic mistake that triggered everything was when Louis the 16th had agreed under pressure to fire his Prime Minister and bring on bring back Jacques Nacaire.

And Charles saw that as the big mistake and was determined to not back down and not let the mob pressure him into firing his ministers.

And he would continue to devoutly believe this right up until he was being chased out of France.

Yeah, let's get into it.

1830 July 1830 He issues the July ordinances, they're called, which suspended press freedom, dissolved Parliament, led to public outrage.

I know you and I have gone into the subject on our Marshall Mamont episode, but why wasn't Charles able to put down this this particular revolution?

So let's let's zoom back a little bit.

France had been sort of in a slow moving political crisis from the moment Charles appointed the Poliniak ministry.

What became the Poliniak ministry, the Chamber of Deputies in early 1830 had made a provocative declaration or Charles had made him speech to the chambers in which he had insisted on the rights of his throne.

And the Chamber of Deputies had then voted a response to this speech in which they basically called for Charles to fire Poliniak.

Charles dissolved Parliament.

There are new elections.

And why why did Charles think that he would be able to win this new round of elections when all the past elections have been going badly?

Well, one thing he did was like take a more active Charles penned an active appeal to voters to support ultra royalist candidates.

Previously, kings had kept a little bit of remove a sort of fictitious neutrality in all this, even though everybody knew that the kings were had had their political preferences.

Charles broke that and got himself directly involved in politics, which should have undermined some of the mystique around him and was probably a mistake.

But the other thing he did was try to stir up nationalist sentiment in favor of his ministers with a successful foreign invasion.

And he took advantage of these provocations that's been building up with Algiers to send a large expedition to do something to the leader of Algiers.

There's not quite clear what exactly that would entail.

Maybe just like a punitive expedition to force some concessions, as it ultimately ended up being a conquest.

And this expedition just ended up coming off fairly successfully.

The French army occupied the city of Algiers without too much trouble, but Charles didn't get the credit for it.

People were like gay France rather than gay Charles.

And the electors went out, and they voted even an even larger liberal majority.

And at this point, Charles and his ministers decided we can't do this electorally.

They thought, you know, there is the, there are these conspirators on the left who are stage managing events.

The, the liberal press was, as they saw it, printing all sorts of falsehoods and lies, calumnies.

And they generally thought that they need, they needed a reset, they need to get friends right on the right track.

So they passed these 4 ordinances, which, you know, dissolved parliament before it, even the newly elected parliament before it even had a chance to meet it, imposed widespread path press censorship, having taken the lessons of past attempts at censorship, try to close all the loopholes that newspapers had used to to dodge the the press censorship and unilaterally rewrote election laws to skew the elections even more in favor of far right candidates.

Which is how they thought that this new round of elections would go better for them than all the last couple of rounds of elections.

They adopted this on Sunday, July 25th.

It was published on Monday, July 26th.

And on Tuesday, July 27th, everything exploded gradually.

Lots of people in France had expected Charles to try a coup.

It was, it was just like not a complete surprise.

Royalist newspapers had been urging Charles to do a coup for for a long time.

Opposition newspapers had been challenging this.

People in the middle were like, oh, we are talking coup again.

It was a boy cries wolf situation.

He's never going to actually do it.

He's never asked to have the guts to seize power.

And then he did, with the four ordinances in July 1830, widely seen as a bad move.

Yeah, we we talked about our Marshall Mamont episode.

So basically this powder keg blows up and Arlo Mormont has about 10,000 troops.

That's really not enough to put down this huge.

I wouldn't call it citywide, but it's a large revolution in Paris.

Yeah, much of central Paris also ends up consumed by this revolution.

What begins as protests, then becomes riots, then becomes an insurgency and gradually grows and grows until the royal army's being chased out of Paris with its tail between his legs.

And a lot of people have wondered, like, how could Charles and Polinac have been so stupid as to leave only about 10,000 effective troops in Paris at the time when they're launching a royal coup?

There were like 3 times as many troops in Paris in in July 1789 when the Bastille fell and that had been an inadequate number of troops, right?

Decades later, Napoleon.

When Napoleon the Third launches his coup, he will move with clockwork military efficiency to blanket the streets of Paris with soldiers, arrest all all the opposition, preemptively suppress any chance for anything to go wrong.

None of that happens in 1830.

The announcement ordinance are published and then people start making OK we should probably start arresting some of these critics and everything was very slowly and languorously.

And my theory I I I can't say this is like absolute hard fact, but I think it's a strong interpretation of the available data that the reason why Charles and Paul in the act didn't have more on hand.

We know that a reason was they didn't want to tip themselves off.

They thought if they started concentrating troops in Paris, it would tip everyone off that a coup was coming that much we know right.

I think it goes back to the the Charles and polling acts.

Decades of life in this shadowy underworld of conspiracies and plots.

They saw the world in through a conspiratorial mindset and they believed This is also true, that there was the so-called faction that the left opposition was a centrally directed conspiracy by the so-called comedy director, the director, directorial committee or managing committee.

My theory is that they thought that their opposition to the reign wasn't organic and that all they had to do was take the comedy director by the prize and they wouldn't be able to arrange any response.

Because even even afterwards in the memoirs that all these attempts by Charles's former ministers to say, Oh well, you know, the the bourgeois factory owners were paying their workers to go out into the streets.

It's all directed.

This is planned.

This is a plot.

None of this make this is all spontaneous.

Charles pissed off the printers.

The printers went off and stirred up trouble.

But these people seriously believe this was all stage managed.

And I think that explains why they didn't take more preparations because they thought if if we don't give these guys a chance to plot, then there won't be any response and everything will be quiet.

I think your episode where you mentioned even the first night of the Revolution, Charles is doing his usual thing, playing cards with his buddies.

He doesn't think it's a big deal.

Yeah.

You know, Charles is often sound clue so he's not on the ground and he's being informed mostly by Polanyak who's sending him regular dispatches and telling him to not listen to anybody else except him.

I'm Polanyak is just blithely convinced that everything's gonna turn out OK long after things are not OK anymore, after our mom was telling him we're in trouble, after other ministers, like the naval minister Baron to house a who's just like incredulous as to how incompetent Poliniak is.

He's saying like, dude, you got to do something.

Poliniak, just like refuse, refuses to make any compromises, even like tactical compromises where you pretend to make a concession that you'll plan on going back on later.

None of this happens.

And finally the, you know, the compromise.

Charles starts making compromises way too late.

Yeah, day late and a dollar short.

Every concession he makes is a daylight and a dollar short.

The the army is on the verge of losing Paris.

And he finally says, OK, I can make some minor concessions.

And these are concessions that like 3 days ago, the opposition would have said, great, this is amazing.

You're going to fire Poliniak and repeal the four ordinances.

That's all we wanted.

But by this time, that was no longer enough.

They wanted more.

They couldn't trust Charles anymore.

They needed more stuff.

The people of Paris weren't going to lay down their arms for that.

So Charles would dig in his heels and he would refuse.

And there would be a long argument.

And finally, he'd agreed to make another concession.

OK, I'll appoint a more moderate Prime Minister.

And again, this would have been more than enough a couple days ago, but now it was too late.

And this happened again and again and again.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, he's finally deposed in 1830 during the July Revolution.

He's forced to abdicate a crown, passes to Louis Philippe.

Must have been very difficult to get booted out of your home country on three different occasions.

French Revolution, 100 days and now this.

I imagine it gets a little easier with each subsequent exile.

You're not caught by surprise anymore.

Right, right.

He's like, I know how to flee.

Yeah.

Also, I will note that Louis the 18th, having gone through the same double exile, insisted on keeping money in a British bank in case he ever had to go into exile again.

So he would have money on hand and wouldn't be dependent on handouts.

Smart.

Well, did Charles attempt ever attempt to regain his throne?

Like, what were his later years like in exile?

Yeah.

Charles went to England first in exile, eventually went to Austria.

It was this weird ambiguity there where like Charles attempt had abdicated in favor not of his son, the Duke Dangle M, but of his grandson Henry, who was more seen as more of a political innocent who wasn't tarred by the the calamitous decisions of the four ordinances.

But for the like the remainder of his life there, it was sort of a Gray zone as a who was really in charge in this exile court.

Charles is basically still running things even though his underage son was heir.

And it was not not clear.

Like it was as if Charles was acting as a Regent, but like people who visited and were too obsequious about praising young Henry as my king, we get like this real cold shoulder.

There's this real ambiguity that Charles did not want punctured as to like who was actually king at the time.

Henry, for his part, saw that his grandfather was king and assisted.

His grandfather was the rightful king of France until his death.

But there were royalist attempts to reclaim power, none more dramatic than that, led by Charles's daughter-in-law, the Duchesse Deberry, the widow of the assassinated Duke Deberry, who made a landing in France and tried to stir up a rebellion that absolutely fizzled, that she ended going to hiding in France.

For quite some time was finally betrayed and tracked down where it was discovered then that she had had a second secret marriage and was pregnant, which for traditionalist Catholic Church Catholics as well As for someone whose authority came entirely from her first marriage to Charles's son, really just like blew everything up and that failed.

You know, there were continued plots and schemes, but nothing serious.

The real danger after this from to the July monarch that came from the left from republican plotters and uprisings.

Charles, you sort of maintained his court in exile.

You focus on educating his son, getting offended at slights from foreign leaders we thought wanted to treat him with royal dignity, and who saw him as a real screw up, who'd hurt the cause of royal legitimacy for all of Europe.

And ultimately, he died a sad death of disease in exile.

Yeah, it's fascinating to me.

Spends the rest of his life in exile.

Dies in 1836 in Austria.

Oddly, he's the only French king who's not buried in France.

What do you think his legacy is?

I mean, it's not good even if you're, even if you put yourself in the position of a devoted legitimacy, someone who's convinced that he was the rightful king of France, ordained by God and man and remain so until his death.

Even if you put yourself in this position, he made a lot of blunders.

Even even if you're in the position that the only mistake he made was not enforcing his four ordinances more vigorously, the still like he's the guy who made the blunder and try to coup without having the soldiers on hand to back it up.

And whether you're you think that was his mistake, whether you think his mistake was not being willing to compromise more or whether you think all this was a mistake and you're not a legitimist at all.

There's no way in which you can view him as a successful ruler of France.

Whether it was by being too hard or not hard enough, he didn't do didn't get it right, which is why you see a lot of the, the legitimist sort of clung to this idea that there's been a conspiracy.

The real actors in this had been the opposition conspiracy that had been laying these plots in motion.

And that it's not like, you know, the sensible leaders of the conspiracy in like, Lafayette were off at their country homes when this broke out.

Many of the other prominent liberal leaders spent the first few days of the revolution trying desperately to save Charles's throne for him.

And again, he refused to make these small compromises that might have done it at the time.

Well, that's what it strikes me as.

It's a huge failed opportunity.

Obviously you're an educated man.

You grew up in Versailles.

You're the best teachers in the world.

You see where your brother Louis the 16th failed.

You see where your brother Louis the 18th failed.

You notice that Napoleon's system of government is a good one.

So you have all these things to learn from and you still screwed up.

The July Revolution 1830 was an entirely self-inflicted wound.

Whether Charles would have eventually run into a popular revolution driven by the refusal to expand to the franchise to let more people vote, by the economic dislocations that were starting to hit Europe at this time.

It's entirely possible like more more moderate regimes like the July Monarchy ultimately fell to these these sort of pressures.

Like, would Charles have found a way to thread the circle that there are some ultra royalists who had the idea that we should let poor people vote because the real enemy is the middle class.

And if we let the poor people vote, then they'll vote for us.

They'll vote for the king against the middle class.

Which I'm not sure how well that would have played out for them in the end.

But in the short term, that might have actually worked.

You know, it's possible that Charles might have come around to something like that.

Or maybe he would have liked the younger Charles, fought reform tooth and nail to the very end and ultimately fall into another revolution that wasn't self-inflicted.

Who knows.

But he didn't need to fall in July 1830.

That was on him.

No.

And I think part of that legacy, I mean, there's obviously no clamor to get his buried remains back to France.

Even Napoleon in 1840, there was a push to get him back in France and maybe there is here and there to get him reburied in France.

But clearly he didn't do a very good job if there's no clamor for it.

Yeah, I mean, some people.

There was some diehard loyalist to Charles during his years of exile and a very tiny faction who were supporters of the Charles son, the Duke Danglem.

But most most of the French legitimist put all their emotional devotion onto Henry the grandson, and he became the locus of legitimism.

He was free from the follies and the blunders of July 1830.

He could.

He was someone that the legitimist could put their pin their hopes into and eventually he grew up to be an adult and made his own blunders.

But that's a story for another day.

There were not a lot of die hard Charles defenders after the fact.

Well, amazing overview as always, David.

Yeah, that was just great stuff.

I didn't, I knew a little bit about Charles the 10th, but I'm really glad you kind of opened the box on him and let us learn about him.

That was really good stuff.

Thank you.

I've I've covered Charles extensively, the whole range of my podcast.

Episode 26, I sort of recover the whole events of the restoration from Charles's perspective.

I put him on the throne in episode 28 and then cover the events of the July Revolution in great detail, starting with episode 39 all the way through to episode 45.

Yeah, again, if you want to learn more about Charles the 10th or the background, political background France at this time, please check out the Siegla with David Montgomery and we thank him for his time.

Thanks for having me on.

Always a pleasure.

Thank you, David.