Meanwhile, his sympathy with the Liberal opposition brought him again under suspicion. His attitude in the House of Peers in the autumn of 1815 cost him a two years' exile to Twickenham; he courted popularity by having his children educated en bourgeois at the public schools; and the Palais Royal was the rendezvous of that middle-class by which he was to be raised to the throne.
His opportunity came with the revolution of 183o. During the three "July days" the duke kept himself discreetly in the back ground, retiring first to Neuilly, then to Raincy. Meanwhile, Thiers issued a proclamation pointing out that a Republic would embroil France with all Europe, while the duke of Orleans who was "a prince devoted to the principles of the Revolution" and had "carried the tricolour under fire" would be a "citizen king" such as the country desired. This view was that of the rump of the chamber still sitting at the Palais Bourbon, and a deputation headed by Thiers and Laffitte waited upon the duke to invite him to place himself at the head of affairs. He returned with them to Paris on the 30th, and was elected by the deputies lieutenant-general of the realm. The next day, wrapped in a tri colour scarf, he went on foot to the Hotel de Ville—the head quarters of the republican party—where he was publicly em braced by Lafayette as a symbol that the republicans acknowl edged the impossibility of realizing their own ideals and were prepared to accept a monarchy based on the popular will. Hither to, in letters to Charles X., he had protested the loyalty of his intentions, and the king now nominated him lieutenant-general and, abdicating in favour of his grandson the comte de Chambord, appointed him regent. On Aug. 7, however, the Chamber by a large majority declared Charles X. deposed, and proclaimed Louis Philippe "king of the French, by the grace of God and the will of the people." For the trappings of authority he cared little. To conciliate the revolutionary passion for equality he was content to veil his king ship for a while under a middle-class disguise. He erased the royal lilies from the panels of his carriages; and the Palais Royal, like the White House at Washington, stood open to all and sundry who cared to come and shake hands with the head of the State. This pose served to keep the democrats of the capital in a good temper, and so leave him free to consolidate the somewhat unstable founda tion of his throne and to persuade his European fellow-sovereigns to acknowledge in him not a revolutionary but a conservative force.
But when once his position had been established, it became clear that he possessed all the Bourbon tenaciousness of personal power. When a "party of resistance" came into office with Casimir-Perier in March 183i, the speech from the throne proclaimed that "France has desired that the monarchy should become national, it does not desire that it should be powerless"; and the migration of the royal family to the Tuileries symbolized the right of the king not only to reign but to rule. Republican and Socialist agitation, cul
minating in a series of dangerous risings, strengthened the posi tion of the king as defender of middle-class interests; and since the middle classes alone were represented in Parliament, he came to regard his position as unassailable. Little by little his policy became more purely dynastic. His position in France seeming assured, he sought to strengthen it in Europe by family alliances. The fact that his daughter Louise was the consort of Leopold I., king of the Belgians, had brought him into intimate relations with the English court. Broken in 184o during the affair of Mohammed Ali, the entente with Great Britain was patched up in 1841 by the Straits Convention, and re-cemented by visits paid by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the Château d'Eu in 1843 and 1845 and of Louis Philippe to Windsor in 1844, only to be irretrievably wrecked by the affair of the "Spanish mar riages," a deliberate attempt to revive the traditional Bourbon policy of French predominance in Spain. If in this matter Louis Philippe had seemed to sacrifice the international position of France to dynastic interests, his attempt to re-establish it by allying himself with the reactionary monarchies against the Lib erals of Switzerland finally alienated from him the French Liberal opinion on which his authority was based. When, in Feb. 1848, Paris rose against him, he found that he was isolated.
Charles X., after abdicating, had made a dignified exit from France. Louis Philippe was less happily situated. Escaping with the queen from the Tuileries by a back entrance, he made his way with her in disguise to Honfleur, where the royal couple found refuge in a gardener's cottage. They were smuggled out of the country by the British consul at Havre as Mr. and Mrs. Smith, arriving at Newhaven "unprovided with anything but the clothes they wore." They settled at Claremont, placed at their disposal by Queen Victoria, under the incognito of count and countess of Neuilly. Here on Aug. 26, 185o, Louis Philippe died.
Louis Philippe had eight children. His eldest son, the popular Ferdinand Philippe, duke of Orleans (b. 181o), who had married Princess Helena of Mecklenburg, was killed in a carriage accident on July 13, 1842, leaving two sons, the comte de Paris and the duc de Chartres. The other children were Louise, consort of Leo pold I., king of the Belgians; Marie, who married Prince Alex ander of Wiirttemberg and died in 1839; Louis Charles, duc de Nemours; Clementine, married to the duke of Coburg-Kohary; Francois Ferdinand, prince de Joinville; Henri Eugene, duc d'Aumale (q.v.) ; Antoine Philippe, duc de Montpensier, who married the younger sister of Queen Isabella of Spain.