IT was the 25th of June, 1815, when Napoleon left Paris for the last time. On July 7 the allies entered the city after some unimportant skirmishing on the outskirts, and on the next day Louis XVIII again took up his residence in the Tuileries. The Second Restoration of the Bourbons had come to pass.

Louis found himself received with even less enthusiasm than on his first appearance, and his people loved him less and less during the nine years of his reign. He confirmed his earlier charter establishing personal and religious freedom and equality before the law and the freedom of the press. He fell more and more, however, under the influence of the conservative element, with the result that he permitted a savage persecution of the Bonapartists, let education come under sectarian control, and imposed on the laboring classes a narrow ecclesiasticism which aroused their ire. When he was forced by Russia, Austria and Prussia to fight in support of the tyrannical king of Spain, Ferdinand VII, against a democratic movement, he placed the Bourbons of the Restoration on record as sympathetic with autocracy.

Paris was in no peaceful state. There were many of Napoleon’s old soldiers in town who were constantly quarreling with the monarchists in restaurants and theaters. An assassin killed the Duke of Berry, the son of Louis’ brother who succeeded him as Charles X. The execution for political conspiracy of four young men known as the “four sergeants of La Rochelle” made a great stir among the lower classes of the city, always an inflammable element.

The town was forced, also, to pay her share of the war indemnity and of the support of the garrisons with which the allies saddled the frontier and the chief cities. One hundred twenty-five thousand dollars a day was the sum which Paris expended in hospitality toward her very unwelcome guests. Needless to say there was not much ready money for improving the city.

One reverent monument, the Chapelle Expiatoire, the king did begin to the memory of his brother. The bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been buried in the graveyard behind the Madeleine. Their remains were removed to Saint Denis in 1815, but the small domed chapel, hemmed in to-day by busy Paris streets, rises in remembrance of them and sanctifies the one great grave before it in which lie the bodies of two thousand unrecorded victims of the Revolution, while the barrier on right and left is formed by the tombs of the seven hundred Swiss guards slain in defense of their sovereigns when the mob stormed the Tuileries on the tenth of August, 1792.

The renewed religious feeling introduced by the royalists expressed itself in the erection of two churches, Saint Vincent-de-Paul and Our Lady of Loretto, both in the style of Latin basilicas, though Saint Vincent’s is made majestic by two square towers not unlike those on Saint Sulpice. The approach to Saint Vincent’s is by two semicircular inclined planes, divided by a flight of steps—a handsome entrance. There are but few at all like it in all Paris. More interesting than the architecture of these churches is their position, on the north and just within the “exterior boulevards” which mark Louis XVI’s wall. Population must have increased heavily in this district to call for two churches of large size and so near together. Many of the fifty-five new streets laid out in this reign must have been in this section.

An engraving of 1822 shows that the Champs ÉlysÉes had become a field for the performances of mountebanks, jugglers, rope-walkers, stilt-walkers, and wandering musicians.

Louis died unlamented. He had been fat when first he entered the Tuileries; his manner of life was not one calculated to reduce adipose tissue. His subjects joked about his habits by punning upon his name, calling Louis Dixhuit (Louis XVIII) Louis des Huitres (Oyster Louis). He was the last king to die in Paris or even in France, and the last to be buried with his kind in Saint Denis.

That Charles X, Louis’ brother, was prepared to follow that royal custom when the time came seems proven by his immediate return to the traditions of his ancestors. He was consecrated and crowned in the cathedral at Rheims which had witnessed the coronation of Clovis and that of every French king since Philip Augustus in the twelfth century. Like the Grand Monarque he “touched for the king’s evil,” believed in the divine right of kings, and thought himself allwise in the conduct of government and his people all-foolish. He recalled the Jesuits whom Louis XV had banished and mulcted the masses to make restitution to the royalists whose property had been confiscated when they fled from Revolutionary France.

Paris forgot that she had loved him in his gay and spendthrift youth, forgot the passing amusement of his coronation festivities in the Place du Carrousel, forgot that his armies were winning some successes along the Mediterranean, forgot everything but hatred when he outraged her confidence by disbanding the National Guard, on whose loyalty and prudence the whole city relied.

When he tried to force through the legislature a bill to muzzle the press, to censor all other publications and to forbid freedom of speech in the universities, that body flatly refused to follow his instructions. So determined was Charles to have his own way that this rebuff and the victories of the liberals in the election of 1830 taught him no lesson, and on July 26 of that year he issued a proclamation which brought about a second Revolution. He declared the new liberal legislature dissolved and summoned another to be chosen by the votes of property-holders only. He appointed a Council of State from his own sympathizers, and he abolished the freedom of the press. Thiers’ paper, the National, and the Courrier issued a prompt protest against these tyrannical Ordinances, and were as promptly suppressed. Crowds gathered before the newspaper offices where Thiers showed the understanding and the grasp of the situation which later made him prime minister under Louis Philippe and first president of the Third Republic.

It was not only the excitable classes—the right bank artisans and the left bank students—always ready for a fight, who engaged in this attempt to overthrow the king; the whole city took part, either by fighting or by taking into their houses fugitives hard pressed by the royal troops. The city was heavily garrisoned and the citizens naturally were at a disadvantage against well-trained, well-equipped regulars. They fought, however, with the ingenuity and the joyousness which always has marked the Parisian when he seized such opportunities. The narrowest streets in the old sections—just north of the City Hall around the church of Saint Merri, near the markets, and on the CitÉ—were barricaded and served for three days as a bloody battleground. On the twenty-eighth the bell on the City Hall rang out its summons and the republican tricolor side by side with the black flag of death told the crowd better than words for what they were to contend. Until the afternoon there was no fiercer struggle than here and on the near-by bridge to the CitÉ, where a youth, planting the tricolor on the top of the middle arch, was shot, crying as he fell, “My name is Arcole! Avenge my death!” At least his death is remembered, for the bridge still bears his name, Arcole.

Encouraged by their successes of the day, the people on the next morning marched to the Louvre where they fought and fell and were buried by hundreds beneath Perrault’s colonnade. They poured through the Tuileries as in the days of the Revolution, and they carried the throne from the Throne Room to the Place de la Bastille where they burned it as a symbol of tyranny. By way of expressing their feeling for the dignitaries of the church they sacked the archbishop’s palace beside Notre Dame on whose towers the tricolor floated. When night fell twenty-four hours later at least five thousand Parisians had fallen in what they called, nevertheless, the Three ‘Glorious’ Days of July. Paris and Paris alone had achieved a revolution for all France.

To commemorate the dead the July Column, Liberty crowned, was raised on the site of the Bastille, and beneath it in two huge vaults lie scores upon scores of the victims of the overthrow.

The success of the revolution was a hint which even Charles could understand. He had been at Saint Cloud during the outbreak. He never went back to Paris. After his abdication he went to England and died in Austria six years later.

The political revolution was not the only sudden change of the year 1830. On the 25th of February occurred the “Battle of Hernani” when Victor Hugo’s famous play in which he embodied the principles of the new “romantic” school of writing, had its first performance. The classicists rose with howls and hisses at the very first line, in which was an infringement of classical rules, and the evening passed tempestuously, even with an interchange of blows. The piece was allowed other hearings, however, and at last the novelty became no longer a novelty but the fashion.

For all her desire for a republican form of government, France, during the great Revolution, had not been so fortunate in her leaders that she was prepared now to elevate an ordinary citizen to the headship, the more as there was no man of especial distinction with the exception of the too-aged Lafayette. It was he who, in an interview with Louis Philippe, a member of the Orleans branch of the royal house, expressed the popular wish for “a throne surrounded by republican institutions.”

Louis Philippe, who was descended from a younger brother of Louis XIV,[6] had served in the Revolutionary army, but had become entangled in a conspiracy which made it prudent for him to join his royalist friends in England. The Restoration (1814) permitted his return and he had long lived the life of a quiet bourgeois dwelling in a Paris suburb, and educating his children in the public schools. He was generally liked and it needed but small artificial stimulation to start a boom for his candidacy. On the night of the 30th of July he walked in from Neuilly and went to the Palais Royal. Three days later Lafayette presented him to the still armed and still murmuring crowds before the City Hall, and on the ninth of August the Chamber of Deputies declared him king not “of France” but “of the French” to emphasize in his title his summons from the people.

In England during this part of the nineteenth century there was much popular upheaval over the suffrage and the revolution of industry by the introduction of machinery. France was equally disturbed, but over political problems. Louis Philippe apparently had been the choice of the people, he wore the tricolor and sang the “Marseillaise” beating time for the crowd to follow, and the provisions of his government were liberal. Yet he received cordial support only from the Constitutionalists. He was opposed by the Bonapartists, by the Legitimists, who wanted a representative of the Bourbons, and by the Republicans who urged a government like America’s. To the latter belonged the Paris rabble and they never let pass an opportunity to stir up trouble for the king. Only a year after his accession when the Legitimists were holding a service in memory of the Duke of Berry in the church of Saint Germain l’Auxerrois the mob entered the building and seized the communion plate, the

crucifix and the priests’ vestments which they threw into the river as they crossed the bridge to the CitÉ where they first sacked and then destroyed the archbishop’s palace.[7] Against this demonstration good-hearted Louis turned the firemen’s hose instead of the soldier’s bayonets.

This riot was but one of many which marked the first ten years of Louis Philippe’s reign. That of the fifth and sixth of June, 1832, is well known because Victor Hugo described it in “Les MisÉrables.” The king’s life was attempted more than once, and it could have been small comfort to him to feel that his assassination was not undertaken for personal reasons but because he represented a hated party. It is not to be wondered at that the “Citizen King” ceased to beat time while the crowd sang the “Marseillaise,” and that he told an English friend who urged him to save his voice in the open air, “Don’t be concerned. It’s a long time since I did more than move my lips.”

Hated by the Republican rabble the king was no less shunned by his own class, the nobility of the left bank faubourg Saint Germain. They were so unwilling to frequent a court made up of worthy but uninteresting bourgeois that Louis is said to have remarked that it was easier for him to get his English friends from across the Channel to dine with him at the Tuileries than his French friends from across the Seine.

Added to the other troubles of this time was the cholera which swept Europe in 1832. Paris looked on it as something of a joke when it first broke out, several maskers at a ball impersonating Cholera in grisly ugliness. When some fifty dancers were attacked by the disease during the evening the seriousness of the situation began to be understood. Before it left the city twenty thousand people had died.

Such fearful mortality was enough to give matter for thought to any ruler, and enough was known then about sanitation to cause Louis to set to work clearing out some of the countless narrow streets with their unwholesome houses with which the older parts of the city still abounded, though fifty-five new streets, many of them erasing former ones, had been opened during the Restoration. The Place du TrÔne, now the Place de la Nation was completed. The handsome columns, erected just before the Revolution, mark the city’s eastern boundary. They are surmounted by statues of Philip Augustus and Saint Louis.

Before Louis Philippe’s reign ended there were some eleven hundred streets within the city limits, and the extension and improvement of the lighting system increased their safety, while they were made beautiful by many fountains. Of these the best known is that in memory of MoliÈre. It is erected opposite the house in which the great dramatist died, and was made possible by one of those public subscriptions by which the French more than any other people express the gratitude of the masses for a genius which has given them pleasure.

The water service for domestic use was poor, water-carriers bringing water in barrels to subscribers and selling it in the street.

The present fountains of the Place de la Concorde are also of this period, and the obelisk of Luxor which the pacha of Egypt presented to the king of France, was brought from its place before the great temple of ancient Thebes where it had stood for three thousand years to make the central ornament of the same huge square.

The present fortifications of Paris date from this reign. Thiers built them during his ministry and some thirty-odd years later he had the satisfaction of knowing that it was through his efforts that the city was able to hold out for nearly five months against the Prussians.

Of new works for the embellishment of the city Louis Philippe began but few. The one church of interest was twin-spired Sainte Clotilde, an accurate reproduction of thirteenth and fourteenth century Gothic. Though initiating little the king finished several important undertakings of his predecessors. One of these was the Palais des Beaux Arts where many American students now study art; another was the church of the Madeleine, and still another the Arc de Triumphe de l’Étoile. Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle were carefully restored to their original beauty by the skillful architect and antiquarian, Viollet-le-Duc, and the Palais de Justice was enlarged. A further example of the preservation of old buildings for the benefit of the people was the conversion of the HÔtel Cluny into a museum of medieval domestic life, and of the adjoining Thermes of the Roman palace into a repository of Gallo-Roman relics.

With bridges and railroads increasing the public comfort, a vigorous body of writers adding to the literary reputation of Paris, and the discovery of Daguerre introducing to the world photography whose developments have revolutionized many occupations and made possible many others, the eighteen years of Louis’ reign was a rich period. It was increasingly turbulent, however, as each riot provoked severe rulings in an effort to prevent further trouble, and each access of severity enraged the mob more than ever. The proletariat had no vote, and the suffrage advances across the Channel served only to irritate and make the French poor feel poorer than ever both in property and in political rights.

The crisis came (in 1848) as often happens, over a comparatively small matter. The king forbade a banquet of his opponents, and the mob seized upon the refusal as an excuse to fight. The National Guards should have served as a buffer between the royal garrison and the rabble, but the rabble stole their guns and the worthy bourgeois of the Guards were of small service to anybody. There was fighting here and there all over the city, but chiefly in the neighborhood of the boulevard of the Temple. There seems to have been no especial reason in these skirmishes; the coatless fought the wearers of coats without stopping to inquire their political belief. Huge crowds collected along the rue de Rivoli and along the quay, hemming into the Place du Carrousel another throng packed almost to inmovability. His wife and daughters watching him anxiously from the windows, the king, now a man of seventy-five, came from the Tuileries, mounted a horse and moved slowly through the press. Only an occasional voice cried “Long live the king,” and he soon returned to the palace. In a few minutes word flew from mouth to mouth that Louis Philippe had abdicated. It was true. An hour and a half later he left the Tuileries never to return.

With him went his family, leaving behind them all their personal belongings. At once a horde of roughs took possession of the palace, slashing pictures, breaking furniture, breakfasting in the royal dining room, and sending out to buy a better quality than the king’s coffee which they drank in exquisite SÈvres cups taken out through the broken glass of a locked cabinet. The royal cellars were emptied promptly. The princesses’ dresses adorned the sweethearts of the most persistent fighters. Again, as in 1830, the throne went up in smoke after every rascal in town had had a chance to test the softness of its cushions.

At the HÔtel de Ville the second Republic was proclaimed, the poet Lamartine at its head for the money there was in it, it is said. A minor actor who was in a general’s costume at a dress rehearsal and who put his head out of a theater window to see the cause of the uproar in the street, was haled forth, set upon a horse, escorted to the City Hall and introduced to the nondescript and self-appointed members of the provisional government there gathered as “governor of the HÔtel de Ville.” They accepted him without question and Lamartine confirmed him in his office the next day!

A republican government pure and simple, however, did not satisfy a large part of the citizens of Paris who were extreme socialists and demanded that the state provide work for everybody. So insistent were they that Lamartine established National Workshops and the actual development of the theory proved more convincing than any possible argument. Thousands of people were soon enrolled. Many proved idlers, many were ignorant, much of the output was poor; yet, such as it was, it seriously disorganized trade and so flooded the market that prices went down and wages were forced to follow. The men who received $1.00 a day at first were reduced in a few months to $1.20 a week, while the government was saddled with a debt of $3,000,000 and with hundreds of citizens less than ever able to take care of themselves after this period of what was practically living on charity. The solid citizens demanded an immediate change, the government insisted that a larger number of the beneficiaries should either seek other work or go into the army. Again Paris was a battlefield during three days when many of the streets were literally ankle-deep in blood. The Parisians could build a barricade right dexterously by this time and bourgeois and rabble killed each other heartily in the most pitiable sort of civil war. Archbishop Affre, who went in person to the faubourg Saint Antoine to use his influence with the fighters, was mortally wounded. His torn and blood-stained garments are preserved in the sacristy of Notre Dame.

Early in July an open-air mass in memory of the victims was solemnized at the foot of the obelisk, but it did not mean that peace was established, and for a few months more the country quarreled on under the provisional government until Louis Napoleon was elected president of the Republic in December, 1848.