First Restoration

Louis XVIII had spent twenty-three years in exile, in Prussia, in Russia, then in England. He returned on 3 May 1814, preceded by his brother the comte d'Artois, and installed himself in the Tuileries, the palace where his brother had been arrested in 1792 and where Napoleon had just governed for ten years.

He refused the constitution voted by the Senate, which would have made him an elected king, and dated his acts from the nineteenth year of his reign — that is, from the death of his nephew Louis XVII in 1795. The principle was clear: legitimacy is not conferred by an assembly.

He did, however, concede a charter, 'granted' and not negotiated. It established two chambers — a nominated chamber of peers, a chamber of deputies elected on a very narrow property franchise — the king's responsibility to God alone, and Catholicism as the state religion.

It kept, on the other hand, the essentials of the legacy: the Civil Code, equality before the law and before taxation, freedom of worship, the abolition of feudalism and, decisively, the irrevocability of the sales of national land. The social compromise of 1802 was renewed.

What ruined the Restoration was not the Charter but the rest. The white flag replaced the tricolour; returning émigrés pressed their claims; the reconstituted royal military household humiliated the Guard; and twelve thousand officers were put on half-pay, watched and unemployed.

The army, the one institution the regime could not afford to humiliate, became the focus of discontent. On 1 March 1815, when Napoleon landed at Golfe-Juan with a thousand men, it was the regiments sent to stop him that brought him back to Paris.