The pregnant characteristics of his government revealed themselves during the first five years of his reign. There was, in the first place, that want of a decided, dignified foreign policy inevitable in a monarchy that was supported exclusively by the prosperous middle classes. The cautious, peace-loving King brought one humiliation after another upon France. For the sake of the peace of nations, he refused the throne offered by the Belgians to his second son, and with the same motive he quietly allowed Austria to suppress the Italian revolutions, which the French nation correctly regarded as the offspring of the Revolution of July. He was incapable of preventing the suppression of the Polish insurrection and the surrender of Warsaw, which occasioned real national mourning in France. The country, as one of the great powers, lost daily in prestige and influence. And in its internal relations the Government displayed an equal want of dignity. The constant demands for money which were made by the royal family and almost invariably refused by the Chambers produced a most disagreeable impression.
For a short time Louis Philippe was popular, popular as the soldier of Valmy and Gemappes, as the citizen King, the former exile and schoolmaster, whom Lafayette himself had called "the best republic." But he had not the faculty of preserving popularity, though he made an eager bid for it to begin with. He was a gifted and, essentially, a prudent man. His family life was admirable; he was thoroughly domestic, and regular in his habits; his sons attended the public schools; he himself, in the attire of an ordinary citizen, carrying the historical umbrella, walked unattended in the streets of Paris, always ready to return a bow or a "Vive le Roi!" with a friendly word or a shake of the hand. But the bourgeois virtues which he displayed are not those which Frenchmen value in their rulers. The cry: "We want rulers who ride," shouted at gouty Louis XVIII., describes one of the feelings which led to the dethronement of Louis Philippe.
For when Louis Philippe did ride, the spectacle was anything but an inspiring one. In June 1832, after one of the innumerable small insurrections in Paris, he declared the city to be in a state of siege, and on this occasion held a review of 50,000 citizen troops and regular soldiers, who were drawn up on each side of the boulevard. The King did not ride along the middle of the street, but first along the right side, where the citizen soldiers were stationed, leaning from his saddle the whole time to shake hands with as many of them as possible, and two hours later back in the same way along the line of the regular troops. He looked as if his ribs must inevitably be broken. He kept on smiling the whole time; his cocked hat slipped down over his forehead and gave him an unhappy look; his eyes wore a beseeching expression, as if he were entreating favour, and also forgiveness for having declared them all to be in a state of siege. What a spectacle for an impressionable, imaginative people, for a crowd of which the older members had seen Napoleon Bonaparte ride past "with his statuesque, Cæsar-like countenance, his fixed gaze, and his inapproachable ruler's hands."[1]
In spite of the King's eager endeavour to win popularity, there was a wider gulf between his court and the people than there had been between the people and the paternal monarchy of the Restoration. The old nobility kept away from the new court, and there was a more distinct separation of class from class. With enmity and disgust the landed proprietors saw the magnates of the stock-exchange usurping all power. Legitimists and the superior bourgeois class, politicians and artists, ceased to associate. One by one the salons of the old monarchy were closed, and with them disappeared the gaiety and naturalness of the refined beau monde. With the old form of government vanished its accompaniments of magnificent elegance and graceful frivolity, vanished the fine lady's lively wit and charming audacity. In the circle of the wealthy bankers whom the King patronised and the Crown Prince associated with before his marriage, the place of all this was taken by English sport and club fashions, a vulgar addiction to the pleasures of the table, and tasteless magnificence and luxury. The King was originally a Voltairian, and in his family alliances he had shown a leaning to Protestantism, but in his anxiety for the safety of his throne he made a hasty change of front; he humbled himself (in vain, as it proved) to win the favour of the clergy, and the tone of the court became pious. The upper middle classes simultaneously developed a half-anxious, half-affected piety, originating in fear of the Fourth Estate. Hypocrisy, which the aristocratic reactionary literature had fostered, now began to spread into the bourgeois class, and free-thought was considered "bad form" in a woman. Morals became outwardly stricter; a more English tone prevailed; but in reality men were less moral; society was lenient to the fraud of the millionaire, pharisaically severe to the woman whose heart had led her astray. "The previous generation had not," as one of the historians of the day observes, "placed under the ban of society either the priest who forsook his church or the woman who forsook her husband, so long as their motives were unselfish; now it was the sign of mauvais ton to desire the re-institution of divorce, not to mention the marriage of priests." The Faubourg St. Honoré, the quarter of the financiers, set the tone.
Little wonder that the umbrella soon became the symbol of this monarchy, and the expression Juste-milieu—which the King had once cleverly used in speaking of the policy that ought to be employed—the nickname for everything weak and inefficient, for a power without lustre and dignity.
If we take the decade 1825-35 as a whole, it is easy to understand how hopeless it must have seemed from the aesthetic point of view.
[1] Expressions used by Heinrich Heine, who witnessed the scene and instituted the parallel.