Rule
Louis Philippe ruled in an unpretentious fashion, avoiding the pomp and lavish spending of his predecessors. Despite this outward appearance of simplicity, his support came from the wealthy bourgeoisie. At first, he was much loved and called the "Citizen King" and the "bourgeois monarch," but his popularity suffered as his government was perceived as increasingly conservative and monarchical, despite his decision of having Napoleon's remains returned to France. Under his management, the conditions of the working classes deteriorated, and the income gap widened considerably. An economic crisis in 1847 led to the 1848 Revolutions, and Louis Philippe's abdication. The dissonance between his positive early reputation and his late unpopularity was epitomized by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables as an oxymoron describing his reign as "Prince Equality", in which Hugo states that:
bear in his own person the contradiction of the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of the revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power ... He had been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in France had sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gave lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage of Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV. He was the companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Danton had said to him: "Young man!"What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. —Victor Hugo
Read more about this topic: Louis Philippe I
Famous quotes containing the word rule:
“The rule for every man is, not to depend on the education which other men have prepared for him,—not even to consent to it; but to strive to see things as they are, and to be himself as he is. Defeat lies in self-surrender.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? it is not to save time, but to squander it.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)