July Revolution (1830): The Three Glorious Days in Paris

The July Revolution was the uprising in Paris on 27–29 July 1830 that overthrew Charles X, the last Bourbon king of France, and brought his cousin Louis-Philippe of Orléans to the throne. Known in France as the “Three Glorious Days”, it ended the attempt to restore an old-style monarchy after Napoleon, inspired revolts across Europe and gave the world Delacroix’s famous painting Liberty Leading the People.

Background: the Bourbon Restoration

After Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the great powers at the Congress of Vienna supported the return of the Bourbon dynasty. Louis XVIII governed under the Charter of 1814, a constitution that kept an elected Chamber of Deputies, although only wealthy men could vote. The electorate numbered only around 90,000 to 100,000 in a country of more than 30 million people.

Louis XVIII’s younger brother succeeded him as Charles X in September 1824. A leading figure among the ultra-royalists, Charles had himself crowned in the medieval manner at Reims in 1825 and backed measures that alarmed liberals, such as a law punishing sacrilege and an indemnity for nobles whose lands had been confiscated during the French Revolution.

The road to crisis

In August 1829 Charles brought Prince Jules de Polignac, a devout ultra-royalist, into a new ministry as foreign minister, and in November Polignac became its formal head. Polignac had little support in the Chamber. In March 1830 a majority of 221 deputies voted an address warning the king that his ministers did not have the country’s confidence.

Charles responded by dissolving the Chamber. The elections of June and July 1830 returned an even larger opposition. Neither the capture of Algiers on 5 July 1830, the start of the French conquest of Algeria, nor appeals to loyalty changed the result.

The Four Ordinances

Relying on an article of the Charter that allowed the king to issue ordinances for the safety of the state, Charles signed four decrees at Saint-Cloud on 25 July 1830. They were published the next day in the official newspaper, Le Moniteur.

The ordinances suspended the liberty of the press, dissolved the newly elected Chamber before it had met, changed the electoral law so that fewer and wealthier men could vote, and called fresh elections. Liberal journalists, led by Adolphe Thiers of Le National, issued a protest declaring the ordinances illegal and urging resistance.

The Three Glorious Days

On 27 July police tried to seize the presses of opposition newspapers, and crowds of printers, workers and students gathered in central Paris. The first shots were fired that evening. Charles, at Saint-Cloud outside the city, left the defence of Paris to Marshal Auguste de Marmont, who had only around 10,000 to 12,000 troops available and was himself unhappy with the ordinances.

On 28 July the city rose in earnest. Insurgents built barricades in the narrow streets, seized arms from gunsmiths and took the Hôtel de Ville, the town hall, where the tricolour flag of the Revolution was raised; it also flew from Notre-Dame. Marmont’s columns struggled through the barricaded streets and suffered losses from fire from windows and rooftops.

On 29 July the insurgents captured the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace. Some line regiments refused to fire on the crowds or went over to them, and Marmont withdrew his remaining forces. By the evening Paris was in the hands of the revolution. Commonly cited estimates put the dead at around 800 insurgents and about 200 soldiers, with thousands wounded, though figures vary between sources.

Choosing a new king

Many of the fighters wanted a republic, but liberal deputies and bankers such as Jacques Laffitte feared a return to the turmoil of the 1790s. Thiers and his allies promoted Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, a cousin of the king whose father had supported the Revolution and who had himself fought for the republic in 1792.

On 31 July Louis-Philippe went to the Hôtel de Ville, where the aged Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the revived National Guard, embraced him on the balcony beneath a tricolour flag. The gesture won over many republicans. Charles X abdicated at Rambouillet on 2 August in favour of his grandson, but the deputies declared the throne vacant. On 9 August 1830 Louis-Philippe swore to uphold a revised Charter and took the title “King of the French”, rather than “King of France”.

Consequences

The July Monarchy (1830–1848) was more liberal than the Restoration but far from democratic. The tricolour replaced the white Bourbon flag, censorship was eased, Catholicism ceased to be the state religion and became the religion “of the majority of the French”, and an 1831 law lowered the tax qualification for voting. The electorate rose to roughly 166,000 to 170,000, still a small minority of adult men.

Abroad, the revolution showed that the settlement of 1815 could be overturned. It helped trigger the Belgian Revolution in August 1830, the November Uprising in Poland and unrest in Italy, Germany and Switzerland. Britain and the other powers ultimately accepted Louis-Philippe, who reigned until he too was overthrown in the revolution of February 1848.

Legacy in art and memory

Eugène Delacroix, who had not fought on the barricades, began Liberty Leading the People in the autumn of 1830 and showed it at the Paris Salon of 1831. The French state bought it, but the new regime soon found its image of armed workers and students too radical, and the canvas spent long periods out of public view. It entered the Louvre in 1874 and has since become one of the best-known images of revolution in the world.

The new government also commemorated the fighters. The July Column, a bronze column topped by a gilded figure of the Spirit of Freedom, was raised on the Place de la Bastille, where the old fortress stormed in 1789 had stood. It was inaugurated on 28 July 1840, when the remains of the July victims were placed in a vault beneath it; Hector Berlioz composed his Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale for the ceremony. A patriotic song, La Parisienne, with words by Casimir Delavigne, became the unofficial anthem of the new reign.

The July Monarchy itself remained divided. Legitimists stayed loyal to the exiled Bourbons, republicans felt cheated of the revolution they had fought, and Louis-Philippe survived several assassination attempts. These tensions resurfaced in the risings of the 1830s and, finally, in the Revolutions of 1848.

Myths and facts

Liberty Leading the People is often taken to show the Revolution of 1789, but Delacroix painted it in late 1830 about the July days. The bare-breasted figure of Liberty is an allegory, not a real person, while the man in a top hat beside her is an imagined bourgeois fighter; claims that he is a self-portrait of the artist are traditional but not proven.

Another frequent confusion links the barricades of Les Misérables to 1830. Victor Hugo set those scenes in the June Rebellion of 1832, a smaller republican rising that the July Monarchy put down.

Timeline

• 1824, 16 September: Louis XVIII dies and is succeeded by his brother, Charles X.
• 1829, 8 August: Charles X forms an ultra-royalist ministry including Prince Jules de Polignac, who becomes its head in November.
• 1830, March: The “Address of the 221” deputies tells the king his ministers lack the nation’s confidence.
• 1830, 5 July: French forces capture Algiers.
• 1830, 25 July: Charles X signs the Four Ordinances at Saint-Cloud; they are published on 26 July.
• 1830, 27–29 July: The Three Glorious Days of street fighting in Paris.
• 1830, 31 July: Lafayette embraces Louis-Philippe on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville.
• 1830, 2 August: Charles X abdicates at Rambouillet.
• 1830, 9 August: Louis-Philippe swears to the revised Charter as King of the French.

Why it matters

The July Revolution ended the Bourbon dream of turning back the clock to before 1789 and established a constitutional monarchy based on the wealthy middle classes. It proved that the conservative order of 1815 could be broken in a few days of street fighting, encouraged liberal and national movements across Europe, and left an enduring image of revolution in Delacroix’s canvas.