Charles X of France - The Bourbon Restoration

The Bourbon Restoration

In January 1814, Charles covertly left his home in London to join the Coalition forces in southern France. Louis XVIII, by then wheelchair-bound, supplied Charles with letters patent creating him Lieutenant General of the Kingdom. On 31 March, the Allies captured Paris. A week later Napoleon I abdicated. The Senate declared Louis XVIII restored. Charles arrived in the capital on 12 April and acted as Lieutenant General of the Kingdom until Louis XVIII arrived from England. During his brief tenure as regent, Charles created an ultra-royalist secret police, that reported directly back to him without Louis XVIII's knowledge. It operated for over five years.

Louis XVIII was greeted with great rejoicing from the Parisians and proceeded to occupy the Tuileries Palace. His brother, the Count of Artois, lived in the Pavillon de Mars, the Duke of Angoulême in the Pavillon de Flore, which overlooked the River Seine. The Duchess of Angoulême fainted upon arriving at the palace, as it brought back terrible memories of her family's incarceration there, and of the storming of the palace and the massacre of the Swiss Guards on 10 August 1792.

Following the advice of the occupying allied army, Louis XVIII drafted a liberal constitution, the Charter of 1814, which entailed a bicameral legislature, an electorate of 90,000 men and freedom of religion.

After the Hundred Days, Napoleon's brief return to power in 1815, the White Terror swept across France, when 80,000 Napoleonic officials and generals were removed from their positions and some even killed, most notably the Marshals Ney, who was executed for treason, and Brune, who was murdered.