LOUIS PHILIPPE, Duke of Orléans, King of the French. - B. 6 Oct. 1773 in Paris, d. 26 Aug. 1850 at Claremont Castle, county of Surrey (England).
in France upon the restoration of Louis XVIII, with whom he had been reconciled as early as 1799.
On the death of Louis XVIII, Charles X conferred on him the title of Royal Highness. After the promulgation of the four ordinances by Charles X, which determined the outbreak of the July Revolution, the Duke of Orléans, with the support of Thiers, became regent on 30 July 1830. On 7 Aug., in a joint session of the two Chambers, he was proclaimed King of the French and swore an oath on the new Constitution. The new King immediately found himself faced with two opponents, the legitimists and the republicans. To hold them in check he relied on ministries supported by the parliamentary majority, but after the Parisian insurrection of June 1832, put down by the army, L. P. interfered more and more in political affairs and in the government of the country and settled into a form of conservatism tending to guarantee to the bourgeoisie that had brought him to power the advantages it had acquired, shrinking from any program of reforms. Thus a gulf came to be created between the legal country and the real country, between Parliament and public opinion, which led on 24 Febr. 1848 to the King's abdication and to the proclamation of the Republic. The foreign policy of France in this period was subject to the same evolution. At first the Sovereign supported the national movements in Europe, and during the Italian risings of 1831 proclaimed the principle of non-intervention, but later, after 1840, he drew closer to Austria (whose armed intervention in the Papal State he had instead opposed in 1832 with the occupation of Ancona in order to counter Vienna's political influence in the peninsula), and in foreign policy too he adopted the rigid conservatism of his domestic policy. Too skeptical to make himself a persecutor, L. P. in his relations with the Church was in substance a prisoner of the political forces that had brought him to power, so much so that he found himself compelled, during the second part of his reign, to adopt, in the school question and toward the Jesuits, a policy contrary to the Catholic religion and to the Holy See.
Bibliography3 works
P. Martin, La nonciatura de Paris et les affaires ecclésiastiques de France sous le règne de Louis-Philippe, ibid. 1949; E. Piscitelli, Stato e Chiesa sotto la Monarchia di luglio, Rome 1950.