From the Second Restoration after Waterloo through five regimes — Bourbon, Orleanist, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic — the July barricades and the conquest of Algiers, the railway age and Haussmann's Paris, the disaster of Sedan and the Commune, the Eiffel Tower and the Dreyfus Affair, the laws of separation and the second colonial empire, to the mobilisation of August 1914. Slide across a century of revolutions, restorations, and republics.
After Waterloo, Louis XVIII re-enters Paris on 8 July. The Charter of 1814 — a constitutional compromise between throne and revolution — is restored. In the south the 'White Terror' of royalist gangs lynches Bonapartists and Protestants; Marshal Brune is murdered at Avignon, Marshal Ney shot in December at the Luxembourg.
From the Second Restoration after Waterloo through five regimes — Bourbon, Orleanist, Second Republic, Second Empire, Third Republic — the July barricades and the conquest of Algiers, the railway age and Haussmann's Paris, the disaster of Sedan and the Commune, the Eiffel Tower and the Dreyfus Affair, the laws of separation and the second colonial empire, to the mobilisation of August 1914. Slide across a century of revolutions, restorations, and republics.
After Waterloo, Louis XVIII re-enters Paris on 8 July. The Charter of 1814 — a constitutional compromise between throne and revolution — is restored. In the south the 'White Terror' of royalist gangs lynches Bonapartists and Protestants; Marshal Brune is murdered at Avignon, Marshal Ney shot in December at the Luxembourg.
On 13 February, leaving the Opéra in the rue de Richelieu, the king's nephew the duc de Berry is stabbed to death by the saddler Louvel — a lone Bonapartist who hoped to extinguish the dynasty. Decazes is dismissed; the Villèle ministry of ultras takes office; the press is muzzled and the franchise narrowed.
On the death of Louis XVIII in September, his brother the comte d'Artois becomes Charles X. He has himself anointed at Reims with the old chrism in May 1825 — the last French king crowned by the medieval rite. His reign opens with a billion-franc indemnity to the émigrés and a law of sacrilege punishing desecration with death.
On 5 July, a French expeditionary force takes Algiers — the prestige victory Charles hopes will save his ministry. On 26 July he issues the Saint-Cloud ordinances dissolving the new Chamber, suspending the press, and restricting the franchise. Paris answers with the barricades of the Trois Glorieuses (27-29 July). On 2 August, Charles abdicates and sails for England.
On 9 August, on the recommendation of Lafayette and the bankers around Casimir Périer, the Orléans cousin Louis-Philippe d'Orléans accepts the crown — no longer as 'King of France' but as 'King of the French'. The tricolore returns. The Charter is revised, the franchise widened to about two hundred thousand voters, and France becomes a constitutional bourgeois monarchy.
The Asiatic cholera reaches Paris in March and kills nearly nineteen thousand by autumn, including the prime minister Casimir Périer. At the funeral on 5-6 June of the republican general Lamarque — himself dead of cholera — students and workers throw up barricades in the Saint-Merri quarter. The National Guard crushes them within thirty-six hours.
Recovered from Saint Helena by a mission of the prince de Joinville, Napoleon's coffin is borne on 15 December in a colossal funeral car along the Champs-Élysées and laid under the dome of the Invalides. Hugo, Berlioz, the old marshals and a crowd of a million watch in the snow. The Napoleonic legend is officially adopted by the Orleanist monarchy.
After the prohibition of a reform banquet on 22 February and a fusillade on the boulevard des Capucines on the 23rd that kills more than fifty, the city rises. On 24 February Louis-Philippe abdicates and flees to England disguised as 'Mr Smith'. Lamartine, on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, proclaims the Second Republic before the red flag of the workers and the tricolore.
On 22 June the closure of the national workshops drives the workers of eastern Paris to the barricades. General Cavaignac, given dictatorial powers, smashes the rising in four days of fighting. Some five thousand insurgents are killed and four thousand transported. The Republic of the bourgeoisie has fought the Republic of the workers and won.
On 10 December, the first direct presidential election in French history gives Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte 5,434,000 votes against Cavaignac's 1,448,000. He owes his victory to the name, to the peasants' Bonapartism, and to the readers of his pamphlet on the extinction of pauperism. He swears to the Republic on 20 December.
Forbidden by the constitution to stand for re-election, the president strikes. On the night of 1-2 December — the anniversary of the coronation and of Austerlitz — his half-brother Morny seizes the printing-presses, the assembly is dissolved, two hundred deputies arrested, and the rump of the republican left massacred on the boulevard Montmartre on the 4th. A plebiscite of 20 December ratifies the coup.
A second plebiscite restores the imperial dignity. On 2 December — the third anniversary — Louis-Napoleon is proclaimed Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. The next month he marries the Spanish countess Eugénie de Montijo at Notre-Dame. The Second Empire — authoritarian then liberal, prosperous, expansive — will last eighteen years.
Napoleon III appoints Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann prefect of the Seine. For seventeen years he will gut and rebuild Paris: the great boulevards driven through the old quarters, the water and sewer systems, the parks of Buttes-Chaumont, Monceau, the Bois de Boulogne, the new opera, the markets of Les Halles, the standardised cream-coloured apartment blocks of six storeys with their iron balconies.
The Treaty of Paris of 30 March ends the Crimean War (1853-1856), in which the French army of MacMahon and Bosquet — alongside the British and the Sardinians — took the Malakoff and forced Russia to terms. The conference of plenipotentiaries meets at the Quai d'Orsay; Napoleon III is the arbiter of Europe.
Allied since the Plombières meeting with Cavour, France marches into northern Italy against Austria. At Magenta (4 June) and the bloody Solferino (24 June), the French and Sardinians defeat Franz Joseph. Horrified by the carnage of Solferino, the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant will found the Red Cross. The Armistice of Villafranca gives Lombardy to Piedmont.
On 19 June, the Austrian archduke Maximilian — installed by Napoleon III as emperor of Mexico — is shot by a firing-squad of Benito Juárez's republicans. Manet paints the execution. In Paris that same summer, the second Universal Exposition draws fifteen million visitors. The Empire is at its dazzling apogee and on the edge of disgrace.
Provoked by the Hohenzollern candidature to the Spanish throne and the inflammatory edited despatch from the spa of Ems, the French chamber votes war on Prussia on 19 July to roars of À Berlin! In fact the Prussian general staff under Moltke is ready; the French army of Bazaine and MacMahon is not.
On 2 September, encircled at Sedan with eighty thousand men, Napoleon III surrenders his sword to William I of Prussia. The news reaches Paris on the 3rd. On 4 September a crowd invades the Corps législatif; Gambetta proclaims the Republic at the Hôtel de Ville. The Empress Eugénie flees to England in a dentist's carriage; the Empire is over.
Refusing to accept the conservative National Assembly elected at Bordeaux in February and the humiliating peace it ratified at Frankfurt — losing Alsace and most of Lorraine, paying five billion francs — the Parisians proclaim the Commune of 1871 on 18 March. For seventy-two days the city governs itself. From 21 to 28 May the Versailles army of Thiers and MacMahon retakes it street by street.
The royalist majority of the Bordeaux assembly cannot agree on a king — the legitimist comte de Chambord will not abandon the white flag — and on 30 January the amendment of the moderate Wallon passes by one vote: 'the President of the Republic is elected by an absolute majority of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies'. The Third Republic is, almost by accident, a republic.
Jules Ferry, twice prime minister of the new republican parliament, carries the laws that establish free public primary education (1881), make it compulsory and lay (1882), and remove the right to teach from the unauthorised religious congregations. The 'hussars of the Republic' — the schoolteachers in their black smocks — go out to make the peasants French.
On 6 May the great Exposition Universelle opens on the Champ de Mars to mark the centenary of the Estates General. Its centrepiece, Gustave Eiffel's three-hundred-metre iron tower — built in two years and condemned by Maupassant and Garnier — becomes overnight the symbol of the modern republic.
On 22 December a closed-door court martial finds Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer from Alsace, guilty of selling secrets to the Germans. The Affaire begins. On 5 January 1895 he is publicly degraded in the courtyard of the École militaire and shipped to Devil's Island in French Guiana.
On 13 January the front page of L'Aurore carries Émile Zola's open letter to the President of the Republic — J'accuse — naming the officers and ministers who have covered up the Dreyfus forgery. Three hundred thousand copies sell. France splits down the middle: Dreyfusards against anti-Dreyfusards, intellectuals against army, republic against church.
Pushed by Aristide Briand and the Bloc des Gauches, the law of 9 December 1905 abrogates the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801. The Republic 'recognises no cult, salaries none, subsidises none'. Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish institutions become private associations; ecclesiastical property is inventoried, in some places amid resistance.
On the evening of 31 July, three days after Austria's declaration of war on Serbia, the socialist leader Jean Jaurès — the great voice against the war — is shot dead at the Café du Croissant in Paris by the nationalist Raoul Villain. The last European resistance to the conflict dies with him. The next day France orders general mobilisation.
On 1 August the church bells ring the general mobilisation. On 3 August Germany declares war on France; on the 4th, in the Chamber, René Viviani reads the message of President Poincaré: the Union sacrée — a national truce of all parties — is proclaimed. Within four weeks the Germans will be on the Marne. The long nineteenth century is over.