Would you agree that Louis stabilised France in the period 1815-1824?

I do not agree that Louis stabilised France in the period 1815-1824 because after 1815 he was unpopular, even though he did introduce laws such as press censorship. I was clear that his attempts to stabilise the regime were unpopular because the restored Bourbon Monarchy only lasted for 15 years before it was overthrown by Revolution.

Louis XVIII had been restored in the Restoration of 1815, but he was unpopular at this point because he had been identified with the enemies of France. Napoleon’s return in the Hundred days had caused France to support him therefore the second peace of Paris was more punitive than the first. In 1815 changes were made which were, that France was now restricted to her pre-revolutionary borders and was forced to demolish key frontier fortresses, France was forced to return the booty that Napoleon’s army had gathered through their conquests, a war indemnity needed to be paid. The second peace of Paris was a humiliation yet Louis XVIII agreed to it; therefore the allies were right that it would be difficult for him to re-establish himself.

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The Ultras and the White Terror were key issues that showed that Louis XVIII found it difficult in stabilising France. It had not been possible for a general election to occur in the Chamber of Deputies before the Hundred Days, but it took place in August 1815. Louis XVIII had been persuaded to increase the number of seats from 258 to 402 and to lower the age of eligibility for membership from 40 to 25. This resulted in the Chamber consisting of a large majority of young, inexperienced and extreme royalists who became known as the Ultras. Louis called this ‘la chamber introuvable’, because he thought that a party could not have been found. The Count of Artois who was the King’s Brother and an émigré who had fought against the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies led the Ultras. Many of the Ultras were émigrés, which were wealthy and noble refugees from the Revolution who had fled and now returned with bitter hatred. They now wished to restore the rest of the ancien regime in France by regaining the powers and privileges of the church and the nobility. As a step towards this they planned o set up a censorship of the press and to place education under the control of the Church. Under the Charter they could only do this by the Assembly therefore they were prepared to make common cause with the liberals to compel ministers to accept its authority. In the summer of 1815 a situation was produced which approached civil war, and this was the time of the ‘White Terror’. The Royalists who were enraged by the Hundred Days sought reprisals against the Bonapartists; therefore a crowd beat Avignon one of Napoleons marshals to death. Richelieu was unable to resist the pressure from the Chamber agreeing to imprisonment of suspects without trial and this was the ‘Legal Terror’. Imprisonment and exile sentences were imposed and high-ranking officers such as the Marshal Ney were executed. The activities of the Ultras caused peasants to revolt, as they feared that they would lose their land. However this alarmed Louis XVIII and he dissolved into the Chamber of Deputies in 1816. He ordered another General Election and he restored the number of deputies to 262 and the qualifying age to 40. In 1818 the Country seemed to have a stable government. Therefore it can be seen that even though Louis XVIII did not help himself initially he did take the appropriate action eventually to increase stability.

Another reason why Louis XVIII was unsuccessful in stabilising France was because of Press Censorship, which played a significant part in the downfall of the Bourbons in 1830. Between 1814 and 1822 the government had tried to control the press generally by insisting that no political news or comment was published until it had been passed by the censor. In 1815 the White Terror authors were punished in special courts for sedition and in 1816 the Ecole Polytechnique was closed as a way of silencing critics. There were expensive annual subscriptions for the papers, which meant that only the Pays Legal could afford to buy newspapers. However this was not successful because café’s bought newspapers and they were read out loud in the streets; therefore 1 copy of a newspaper could reach about 100 readers. (Pilbeam).

In 1819 and 1820 there was the experiment of doing away with censorship before publication was tried, but this was a more unworkable system.