Charles X

Charles X (Charles Philippe; 9 October 1757 – 6 November 1836) was King of France from 16 September 1824 until 2 August 1830, when he was overthrown during the July Revolution. He was the last of the French rulers from the senior branch of the House of Bourbon.

Charles X (circa 1825)

Quotes

• Where are you going, foreign traitor? Is this were you belong, misplaced bourgeoisie? Return to your little town, or you will perish by my hand.
  • Remarks to Jacques Necker as Necker entered the royal council (10 July 1789), recorded in Charles-Henri, Baron de Gleichen, Souvenirs (1868), p. 63, quoted in Vincent W. Beach, 'The Count of Artois and the Coming of the French Revolution', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (December 1958), p. 323

Quotes about Charles X

• It is a fact that universal suffrage, formerly feared by the Government as a species of monster, no longer frightens it to-day. Instructed by the examples of Napoleon III and Bismarck, statesmen finally came to understand that universal suffrage was essentially an approbative and ratificatory suffrage, while all the limited or property suffrages were disputative, unstable, and anarchical. In France two monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, made the experiment of the limited suffrage, and died of it; so that a wit was inspired to remark, not without justification, that if Charles X had granted the right of the vote to every Frenchman he would still have been on the throne.
  • Jacques Bainville, Italy and the War (1916), pp. 136-137

• Charles X, that much-diffamed King, and of whom M. Émile Ollivier was enabled to say that he was "aflame for the national revival," retook the road of exile without manifesting a shadow of the surprise and sorrow expressed by his minister Villèle, when he said that the Restauration had put France back in her place in Europe, giving her again order, rest, prosperity, though France did not seem to be aware of these benefits.
  • Jacques Bainville, Two Histories Face to Face: France versus Germany (1919), pp. 216-217

• More attractive than Louis XVIII, but less prudent also, his brother, the Count d'Artois, Charles X, did not know, as he did, how to be patient. He suffered and grew impatient over the reproach that liberals hurled at the monarchy, and which was their most efficacious weapon, that it had returned in "the caissons of the enemy," and that it had given its support to the shameful treaty of 1815. To efface these treaties as much as possible and to give grandeur and glory to France was the dominant idea of Charles X. He believed that he could in that way disarm an opposition whose "systematic" character he did not perceive.
  • Jacques Bainville, History of France (1926), p. 369

• This insurrection had something in common with the ideas of the doctrinaires, of the liberals who had drawn up the Address, and of the middle classes who had elected them. It was an explosion of sentiments which Charles X had wished to appease through the glory of conquest; but Algeria was a ridiculous diversion for a people so addicted to tradition. The republican and Bonapartist ideas were confounded with the hatred for the treaties of 1815. "The combatants of the days of July," said Emile Bourgeois, "were not engaged in a riot like that of 1789. They had taken up arms against Europe at least as much as against Charles X and dreamed, above all, of a victorious Republic and of the Empire."
  • Jacques Bainville, History of France (1926), p. 374

• [You are] the son of Saint-Louis.
  • Aimé, duc de Clermont-Tonnerre to Charles X shortly before the French conquest of Algeria (14 October 1827), quoted in Adam Knobler, 'Holy Wars, Empires, and the Portability of the Past: The Modern Uses of Medieval Crusades', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 48, No. 2 (April 2006), p. 295

• It [anti-clericalism] was the major current in a rising tide of hostility against Charles X and his government.
  • Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France: From the First Empire to the Second Empire, 1799–1871: Volume Two (1961), p. 87