Louis Philipp

Louis Philippe is a popular biography by John Stevens Cabot Abbott of the French king who ruled from 1830 to 1848. Louis Philippe d’Orleans (1773-1850) was the constitutional monarch who came to the French throne after the July Revolution of 1830 deposed the Bourbon king Charles X. His reign as the Citizen King defined the French July Monarchy until his own deposition in the Revolution of 1848.

Louis Philippe’s career was unusual. He was the son of Philippe Egalité, the Duke of Orleans who had supported the French Revolution and voted for the execution of his cousin Louis XVI in 1793 before himself being guillotined later the same year. The young Louis Philippe fled France during the revolutionary terror and spent nearly twenty years in exile in Switzerland, the United States, and various European countries. He returned to France in 1814 after the Bourbon Restoration and lived quietly until the 1830 revolution made him king.

His moderate political position made him acceptable to the French liberal opposition that brought down Charles X. The July Monarchy attempted to combine constitutional government with the institution of monarchy, on the model that Britain had developed across the previous century and a half. The arrangement worked in fits and starts across eighteen years before collapsing in the 1848 revolution. Louis Philippe fled to England, where he died in 1850.

Abbott’s biography belongs to the Makers of History series and was widely read in American schools and as general reading. French political history of the early nineteenth century had genuine interest for American readers, partly because the various French revolutions and constitutional experiments offered useful material for American thinking about republican government.

Abbott handles the material in the popular biographical mode of his period. The book is sympathetic to Louis Philippe within the limits of mid-century American understanding and provides accessible narrative of the major events.

The book runs about three hundred pages. It pairs with the other Makers of History volumes including the companion books on Napoleon III and Louis XIV.