During the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (1815–1830) that followed the downfall of Napoleon, Paris was ruled by a royal government which tried to reverse many of the changes made to the city during the French Revolution. The city grew in population from 713,966 in 1817 to 785,866 in 1831. During this period, the Parisians saw the first public transport system, the first gas street lights, and the first uniformed Paris policemen. In July 1830 (July Revolution), a popular uprising in the streets of Paris brought down the Bourbon monarchy and began reign of a constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe.
Occupation, purges and unrest Following the final defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815, an army of 300,000 soldiers from England, Austria, Russia and Germany occupied Paris, and remained until December 1815. They camped wherever there was open space; the Prussians settled on the Champs-de-Mars, around the Invalides, the Luxembourg Garden, and around the Carrousel of the Tuileries Palace. The British troops camped along the Champs-Elysées, while the Dutch troops and soldiers from Hannover settled in the Bois de Boulogne. The Russians moved into the barracks of the French Army around the city. The City of Paris was required to pay for the food and lodging of the occupiers; the bill was 42 million francs.
Louis XVIII returned to the city on 8 July 1815, and moved into the old rooms of Napoleon at the Tuileries Palace.Sarmant, Thierry, Histoire de Paris, p. 156 He was greeted with songs and dances by the royalists of the city, but indifference or hostility by the rest of the Parisians. The pre-revolutionary names and institutions were quickly restored; The Pont de la Concorde became the Pont Louis XVI, a new statue of Henry IV was put back on the empty pedestal next to the Pont Neuf, and the white flag of the Bourbons flew from the top of the column in Place Vendôme.Combeau, Yvan, Histoire de Paris, p. 56
In August 1815 a new legislative assembly was elected by a very strictly limited number of voters (only 952 in the arrondissement of the Seine), and was dominated by ultra-royalists. Under the new regime, citizens could be arrested and jailed by the government without trial. The government immediately began purging those associated with Napoleon's Empire. General Charles de la Bédoyère and Marshal Ney, who had fought for Napoleon, were executed by firing squad. The archbishop and bishops who had run the church in Paris under Napoleon were replaced by more conservative and royalist clerics. Those members of the Revolutionary convention who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI were exiled from France. Members of the Academies and Institute who had supported Napoleon were expelled, including the painter Jacques-Louis David, the mathematicians Lazare Carnot, Gaspard Monge, and the educator Joseph Lakanal. David went into exile in Belgium, and Lakanal went to the United States, where he was welcomed by President James Madison and became president of the University of Louisiana, now Tulane University.
Opposition to the royal regime was harshly repressed; in June and July 1816, members of a failed anti-regime conspiracy, called "the Patriots" were arrested and tried. The three leaders each had one hand cut off, the medieval punishment for those who killed their fathers, before being executed by the guillotine. The other seven members were put on public display attached to the pillory in front of the Palace of Justice.
During the Restoration, Paris did not have an elected government; it was ruled directly by the national government. New national elections for the legislature were held in 1816 and 1817, under strict rules; only men at least years old who paid direct taxes of at least 300 francs a year could vote. 9,677 Parisians were eligible to vote, and they voted largely for liberal candidates in opposition to the government, which was dominated by royalist and ultra-royalists. Three of the eight Paris deputies were prominent bankers: Jacques Laffitte, Benjamin Delessert and Casimir Perier.
Parisians found many occasions to express their displeasure with the new government. In March 1817 theatre audiences cheered the actor Talma when he appeared on stage as a character resembling Napoleon; the play was banned. In July 1818, the students of the Ecole polytechnique were confined to the school to prevent them from attending the funeral of the mathematician Monge. In July 1819, students in the Latin quarter rioted against the dismissal of a liberal professor from the law school of the University of Paris. A more serious incident took place on 13 February 1820; the assassination of the Duke de Berry, the nephew of the King, and the only hope of the dynasty for providing a male heir to the throne. His murder led to even more serious repressive measures by the government. But on 18 November 1822, students protested again against the very conservative rector of Academy of Paris, the Abbé Nicolle, who had no scientific or medical background.
The government had a brief period of popularity in 1823 when a French military expedition to Spain succeeded in restoring another deposed monarch, Ferdinand VII, to the Spanish throne in Madrid. The French army defeated the Spanish revolutionaries at the battle of Trocadero, which gave its name to a new Paris square. King Louis XVIII died on 16 September 1824, and was replaced by his brother, Charles X. The king's Coronation in Reims in May 1825 was celebrated with major festivities in Paris. The new King surrounded himself with ultra-conservative ministers, and opposition continued to grow, particularly in Paris, until the French Revolution of 1830.
The aristocrats who had emigrated returned to their town houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the cultural life of the city quickly resumed, though on a less extravagant scale. A new opera house was constructed on rue le Peletier. The Louvre was expanded in 1827 with nine new galleries, putting on display the antiquities collected during Napoleon's conquest of Egypt.
The Parisians
According to the official census, the population of Paris grew from 713,966 in 1817, shortly after the Restoration of the monarchy, to 785,866 in 1831, shortly after its end. Most of the new Parisians were immigrants from the nearby French regions, seeking work as the city's economy recovered from the long years of war under Napoleon. At the top of the social structure of Paris was the nobility, led by the King and his court. Both Louis XVIII and Charles X lived in the Tuileries Palace, and used the Chateau of Saint-Cloud as their main secondary residence. The ancient and decayed Tuileries was not a comfortable residence; it had no basement or sewers, and the lack of modern plumbing made it foul-smelling; one noblewoman, the Countess of Boigne, reported that "one is almost suffocated climbing the staircases of the Pavillon de Flore and crossing the corridors of the second floor." The Kings did not carry on the elaborate social protocols and festivities of their predecessors; both had lived many years in exile, and they were used to a simpler life. The formal and grand ceremony of the King's waking up and going to bed was replaced by a simple ceremony each evening at nine clock, when the King gave the order of the day to the commander and captains of the King's guards. The King had to live within a household budget, fixed at the beginning of each year; twenty five million livres for Louis XVIII and twenty million for Charles X.
High society, composed of two to three hundred families of the old aristocracy, government officials, army officers and high clergy, was also much less glittering than it had been at Versailles under the old regime; it was led by the Duchess of Angoulême, the daughter of Louis XVI, who always dressed in black and detested anything modern. Society met in weekly "cercles" on the first floor of the Tuileries, or in the salons of the magnificent townhouses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and Faubourg Saint Honoré. Their income came mostly from their estates or from the State Treasury, from the various official positions they held, but their salaries were less generous than under the Old Regime.
Just below high society, and growing in status and influence, were the bankers, including Casimir Perier, the Rothschilds, Benjamin Delessert and Hippolyte Ganneron, and new industrialists, including François Cavé, Charles-Victor Beslay, Jean-Pierre Darcey, and Jean-Antoine Chaptal. Unable to become part of the aristocracy, many were elected to the Chamber of Deputies and advocated liberal economic policies and democratic principles, which eventually brought them into growing conflict with the royal government. While the aristocrats lived on the left bank in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, most of the newly wealthy chose to live on the right bank, often in new neighborhoods that were constructed during the Restoration; the Chaussée-d'Antin was the home of the bankers Rothschilds, Laffitte; Casimir Perier's hôtel was on the rue Neuvre du Luxembourg (now the rue Cambon); Delessert lived on rue Montmartre, Ganneron on rue Bleu in the faubourg Montmartre; Beslay and Cavé on rue Faubourg Saint-Denis and rue Neuve-Popincourt.
Below them was a growing middle class of merchants, lawyers, accountants, government clerks, teachers, doctors, shopkeepers, and skilled artisans.
The largest number of Parisians were working class, either artisans in small enterprises, domestic servants, or workers in the new factories. They also included a large number of women, many of them working at home in the clothing industry, sewing and embroidering or other manual labor.
The Administration of the city and the police While the King quickly replaced the symbols of Napoleon's reign, he kept most of Napoleon's city administration; he kept Napoleon's efficient chief of the city government, the prefect of the Seine, Chabrol de Volvic, and also kept Napoleon's president of the General Council of the Seine, Bellart. As under Napoleon, there were no municipal elections and no elected city government; all were chosen by the national government.
On March 29, 1829, near the end of the Restoration, the government created the corps of Sergeants de Ville, the first uniformed police force of the city. They wore long blue coats with buttons decorated with the coat of arms of the city. During the day, they were armed only with a cane with a white handle. At night, they carried a saber. Most were former sergeants of the army; when the corps was created, it numbered just one hundred men.
One of the weaknesses of the city administration, which in the Revolution of 1830 proved fatal to the royal government, was the small number of police to maintain order. Aside from those in administrative jobs, the police on the streets numbered only two to three hundred men. In 1818, of the three hundred police posts around the city, fifty-seven were manned by the national guard, sixteen by gendarmes, and seven by firemen, a total of one thousand nine hundred men. The national guard of thirty-two thousand men was composed of the middle class; most were not wealthy enough to vote and were hostile to the government. Within the city, the King depended upon the fifteen hundred gendarmes and the army garrison of fifteen thousand men, most of whom deserted his cause in July 1830.
Monuments and architecture