Louis-Philippe, king of the French, born in Paris, 6th October 1773, was the eldest son of Louis Philippe Joseph, Duke of Orleans. He received at his birth the title of Duke of Valois, and afterwards that of Duke of Chartres. His education was entrusted to the care of the cele- brated Madame de Genlis. He entered the National Guard, and became a member of the Club of Friends of the Constitution, afterwards that of the Jacobins. Along with his father, he renounced his titles, and assumed the surname of Egalité. He showed both courage and capacity in the wars of the republic; but his situation became very dangerous after the unsuccessful battle of Neerwinden (1793), in which he commanded the centre. He was included in the order for arrest issued against his general-in-chief, Dumouriez, and on the 4th April escaped along with him into the Austrian territory. He sought in Switzerland a place of security for his sister Adelaide, wandered about amongst the mountains for four months, and accepted a situation as teacher of geography and mathematics in a school at Reichenau, near Chur, assuming the name of Chabaud-Latour. He afterwards wandered for some time in the north of Europe, and then went to the United States, where he spent three years. In 1800 he took up his abode at Twickenham, near London, with his two younger brothers, both of whom soon after died. In 1809 he married Marie Amelie, daughter of Ferdinand I. of the Two Sicilies. On the fall of Napoleon he hastened to Paris, where he was received with distrust by Louis XVIII. After the second Restoration he recovered his great estates, which the imperial government had sequestered. Disliked by the court, he was very popular in Paris. The revolution of 1830—the 'July revolution'—having ended in a victory of the constitutional party over the republicans, he was appointed lieutenant-general, mainly on the proposal of the banker Lafitte and of General Lafayette. Throwing to the winds the divine right of the Bourbons, he accepted to reign as the elect of the sovereign people, under the tricolor flag of the republic and of Napoleon. He had against him the ultra-royalists and the republicans, and identified his rule with the bourgeoisie, who supplied him with a policy, ministers, and money, in return for their ascendancy. He was dubbed with the nickname of roi-citoyen, his system was called that of Juste-milicu, and his advisers were set down as doctrinaires. He reigned for the material interests of France, and for those of the House of Orleans; himself a most wealthy king, the country prospered under his rule, and the middle classes amassed considerable riches. Unfortunately, his kingship rested on a democratic basis, to which it grew more and more untrue. The revolution of 1830 had been an event of European importance, and rang in a revival of liberalism in many states where Louis-Philippe would have thought it quixotic to give it diplomatic or military assistance. Nor could he countenance the socialistic and communistic doctrines made popular among the republicans at home by Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and others. The parliamentary franchise rested on a franchise which limited the electors to the aristocracy of wealth and their hangers-on. The peasantry and working-classes were ignored, and left a prey to political agitators. The political corruption of the bourgeoisie, and its wholesale bribery by the king, united all extremists in a cry for electoral reform. Louis-Philippe ran the gauntlet of eight attempts at murder, which all failed. A man of great ability, but of little character, he was by fear carried, with his ministers, into paths of reactionary violence. The royalistic statesman Royer-Collard joined Odilon Barrot and the republican Left in resistance to the muzzling of newspapers. Trial by jury was tampered with. Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte seized this opportunity of acting twice the part of a pretender (1836, 1840). The Duke of Orleans' death in 1842 left the throne without a direct heir-apparent.
Republicans, socialists, communists became more and more threatening. In vain did Louis-Philippe provide, by campaigning in Algeria, an outlet for the military spirit of his subjects; in vain did he fix their attention on foreign affairs by supporting the kingship of Mehemet Ali in Egypt. A home-policy of reform banquets, hit upon by the republican leaders as their most suitable form of attack, and severely repressed on the part of the government by recourse to an obsolete law of the 'ancien régime,' led to violent debates in the Chamber, in which Thiers, then in the opposition, helped to weaken the position of the prime-minister Guizot. Yet parliamentary means were about to foil the republican deputies, when the Paris mob rose in arms on the 22d and 23d of February 1848, with the complicity of the regular troops, the national guards, and the municipal police. Louis-Philippe dismissed Guizot, and promised reforms; but it was too late. He was compelled to abdicate, and, amidst the indifference of almost every Frenchman to his fate, ended a reign remarkable for the wave of liberalism in which it took its rise and the whirlwind of democracy that swept it away. Deserted by his courtiers, he fled to the coast of Normandy along with his queen, concealed himself for some days, and at length escaped to Newhaven under the name of Mr Smith. He died at Claremont, 26th August 1850.
See the articles BOURBON, FRANCE, GUIZOT, ORLEANS (DUKE OF); works by the Marquis de Flers (1892) and Imbert St Amand (1893), Crétineau-Joly (2 vols. 1862), A. Dumas (2 vols. 1852), Nouvion (4 vols. 1861), Villault de Gerainville (3 vols. 1870-76), Vantibault (1889), Villeneuve (1889), and Hamel (1890).