Revolutions of 1830
A revolution in Paris in July 1830 set off risings across Europe and permanently damaged the settlement of 1815. Charles X of France had been restoring the pre-revolutionary order — compensating émigré nobles, giving the church control of education, and governing against a chamber that kept returning liberals. In July 1830 he issued the Four Ordinances, dissolving the newly elected chamber, cutting the electorate by three-quarters and imposing censorship. Paris rose over three days, the Trois Glorieuses, with printers and workers building barricades and the National Guard refusing to fire. Charles abdicated. The liberal deputies then blocked a republic and offered the crown to Louis Philippe of Orléans as king of the French rather than of France — the July Monarchy, a bourgeois settlement that doubled a very small electorate and satisfied almost nobody. Belgium followed in August. The Congress of Vienna had attached the Catholic, French- and Flemish-speaking southern Netherlands to a Protestant Dutch kingdom as a barrier against France, and the union had never worked. A rising in Brussels became a war of independence, and the powers — with Britain and France agreeing — recognised an independent and permanently neutral Belgium in 1831. Poland rose in November against Russian rule, held Warsaw for most of a year, and was crushed; the constitution was abolished and thousands emigrated. Risings in Italy and in the German states were suppressed by Austria. The lesson drawn on both sides was that the Vienna order could be broken in places, and it produced 1848. Louis Philippe was himself overthrown eighteen years later.
- Year: 1830 CE
- Category: Political
