Revolutions - 3.34b- Phillippe Egalite

Episode Date: April 27, 2015

Marie Antoinette thought he was behind EVERYTHING sponsor link: lynda.com/revolutions

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 3.34B, Philippe Igallatee. As I mentioned back in episode 3.25, the Duke de Orleans, the renegade Prince of the Blood, who was now styling himself, Philippe egalite, deserves more attention than I have been able to give him. Since he is about to get his head chopped off, I figured that now would be the perfect time to try to correct this oversight. So, without further ado, let's hop in the Wayback Machine and head back into the days of the Ancian regime, because the story of the coming of the French Revolution is absolutely not complete without explaining the part played by the Duke de Orleans.

Young Louis-Philippe Joseph Dorlion was born in 1747 into the House of Orleon, the senior cadet branch of the Royal House of Bourbon. His grandfather was Philippe duke de Orleans, a younger brother of King Louis XIV, and it was to him that both the family name and their cadet branch status traced back to. The Orleans branch, being so close to the immediate royal family, but just outside of it, earned their senior male patriarchs the distinction of being the first prince of the blood, an official court position reserved for the most senior royal prince not in the king's immediate family. What this meant in practice was that if all the inner circle bourbons were to die out, the throne would pass to the house of Orleans. And that is going to be important.

When Louis Philippe was 22, he married one of his cousins, Louisa Marie, who happened to be the daughter of an insanely wealthy duke, who himself happened to be the son of one of King Louis XIV, legitimized illegitimate children, if you can follow along with that. So, Louise Marie's dowry combined with the already huge estates of the House of Orleans, meant that when Louis Philippe inherited the title duked Orleans from his father, he became one of the richest men in France. This is also going to be important.

Now, from very early on, Louis-Philippe cultivated an antagonistic edge in his dealings with the king's immediate royal family. He first ran afoul of them in the early 1770s, when Lord Chancellor Mopu made his play at shutting down the Parlamas, which we talked about way back in episode 3.3. While Louis Philippe, not yet duked Orleans, set himself up as a champion and patron of the Parlamas. For this, he earned popular acclaim and the enmity of the king's ministry, and a Lettra de Cache was issued exiling him from Paris. Not the last time that that would happen. He kept up his tweaking of the Bourbons after Louis XVI ascended to the throne, and it took no time at all for Louis Philippe and Marie Antoinette to come to utterly despise each other. When his father died in 1785, Louis-Filippe became the Duke to Orleans and First Prince of the Blood, which rankled the king's inner circle to no end. He also inherited the Palais Royal, a huge palace just a few blocks from the tuileries in Paris.

One of the subtle little quirks of Ancian regime law was that royal residences, like the Palais Royale, were not subject to official censorship laws. So when Orlyon inherited the property, he threw its doors open to the public and basically created a safe space to print and distribute material that might otherwise run afoul of the censors. The arcades of the Palais were soon brimming with shops and cafes and books, pamphlets and newspapers that advocated all kinds of crazy stuff. were distributed at will. So just as the pre-revolution was heating up,

the Palais Royale served as the great clearinghouse for any and all dangerously seditious notions like, hey, maybe we should call the Estates General again. This political and literary patronage made Orlyon very popular with the people and very unpopular with the inner royal family, most especially Queen Marie Antoinette, who saw in everything Orleon did further proof that he would, was going to try to overthrow the bourbons and set himself up as king. Now for his part,

Orleon hated the queen right back, believing her to be a frivolous spendthrift whose loyalty to France was suspect at best. So the really critical thing to understand here is that in the late 1780s, when the political and economic reform movement was running into Enlightenment philosophy, which was running into complaints about the king and the church, they were all coming together in the Palais Royale, which was owned and operated by the Duke de Orleans. So, though the Queen's paranoia about her husband's cousin went too far, I mean, she blamed him for everything, it's really not hard to see why she thought him and his money were behind all the misfortunes that were about to befall her family.

When the monarchy went bankrupt, and Comptorler General Cologne had to call the Assembly of Notables in 1787, the Duke de Orleans was of course invited, because he had to be invited. was the first print of the blood. And he, of course, became the most prominent critic of Cologne's reform package. Then, during the disastrous royal session of November 1787 that we talked about in episode 3.7, that was when the king was supposed to make nice and instead went off script and demanded fealty to his will. It was the Duke de Orleans who got up and stammered that what the king was doing was illegal. On this affront got Orlean exiled from Paris again, helping to spark another round of pointed complaints against the whole Lettra-de-Caché system that was now being used

to silence the great patron of French liberty. When the Estates General was finally called in the spring of 1789, the Duke de Orleans was, of course, elected to the second estate, and he was clearly ready to stand out as one of the liberal, noble champions of the third estate. After Louis failed to intimidate the third estate during another disastrous royal session, the Duke to Orleans was the one who led the delegation of 47 nobles into the now self-proclaimed National Assembly, which effectively ended any possibility that the estate might be kept separate. This forced Louis to call on everyone else to come together. We talked about all of this back in episode 3.10. Now, as if all this standing

up to the king wasn't bad enough, do you remember where it was that Camille de Mouloulaue gave his famous speech that roused Paris to arms and led directly to the fall of the Bastille in July 1789. That's right. He delivered it from atop a cafe table in the Palais Royale. This left no doubt in the minds of the king's immediate family, but the Duke to Orleans was orchestrating the revolution to oust them from power and get himself crowned king. But though this all looks really suspicious, Orillon is actually not much of an archpuppeteer. What's going on here is that the French Revolution was a time of rampant paranoia, when everyone, royalists and moderates and revolutionaries, whoever,

were all convinced that everyone else was a part of some vast, sinister plot to destroy them. So while the royal family was now convinced that Orlean was a revolutionary mastermind, really he was just a rich liberal noble who enjoyed tweaking his cousins. If he was really aiming to overthrow them, he certainly never did much to finally close the deal. And indeed, once things started getting a little nuts in 1789, Orlyon backed off and attempted to get right with the king and queen. He even accepted an order to leave the country and go on a little diplomatic mission up to England when the king asked him to. And then, if there was ever a moment for Orlyon to try to capitalize on all this alleged sinister plotting, it was right after the

flight to Varenne, when the king and queen were utterly discredited and suspended from power. But the Duke to Orlean made no attempt to seize the crown. He, of course, had followers pushing him in that direction. But instead of doing that, we find evidence that he actually tried to help his cousins through the crisis. But of course, by that point, they were so ticked off at him that they rejected all his overtures. After the flight to Varen, Orleon decided that the time had finally come to make a good show of his permanent commitment to the revolution, and he started publicly calling himself citizen Philippe Igallate. And it was under that name that he was elected to the National Convention in September 1792.

But once in the convention, Philip egalite discovered that the Times had really changed around him. He sat with Robespierre in the Mountain, but even as he tried to keep up with the Times, he discovered that he was now little more than an embarrassment and a liability for the mountain. This was the age of the Republic, and despite his superficial name change, everyone knew he was a prince of the blood. The charge that he had made revolution to get himself crowned king was no longer an accusation thrown at him by right-wing conservatives, but rather now by left-wing radicals. In their war on the mountain, the Gerondins twice made direct attacks on Philippe, and accused, the mountain of being his accomplices, which forced the mountain into the uncomfortable position of defending Philippe Egalate, and saying, well, now, this is all a bunch of crazy talk. He's not

really like that. But even they had doubts about his real motives. When the time came to sit in judgment on the king and Philippe Igalate voted death without appeal, it was impossible, even for his alleged allies to not believe that he wasn't still trying to pave the way for his own coronation. Whether he really wanted to be king or not is a mystery of his inner mind that we'll likely never know the answer to. But if Philippe Egalate did want to be king, he pretty much blew any shot he had at it quite a long time ago.

In the spring of 1793, he was finally brought down by events outside his control. As we talked about back in episode 3.27, when General Dumurier defected, Philippe Igalte's first born son and heir went with him. When this defection led to a general crackdown on aristocrat still in France, there was nothing Felipe Gallate could say or do to avoid getting swept up by the authorities. His son had just been an accomplice to one of the great treasonous betrayals of the whole revolution. Felipe Gallate was arrested in April 1793, and all his assets were seized. Once this is all said and done, I have some ambition to cobble together a book on the children that the revolution devoured. And the first chapter will be about the Duke to

Orleans, who did so much in the late 1780s to harbor political dissidents and create a hotbed of activism that fed directly into the revolution, and who then gave so much patronage and money to the cause in the early going. I mean, he gave it protection when no one else would. He was so involved in the early days that, as I said, the king and queen truly thought that the entire revolution was a massive plot by the Duke to Orlean to oust them from power. But that turned out to not really be the case, and it is a little bit ironic that those same accusations were the accusations that would bring him down, but they would ultimately come from the left, not the right. Belie Gallatei languished in prison until November,

but once the reign of terror got going, he was moved quickly to the front of the line, what with being a Prince of the Blood in all. On November the 6th, 1793, Philippe Igalate, formerly Duke de Orleans, was tried, convicted, and guillotined all on the same day. But there is an interesting little post-script to all this. After Napoleon went down and the brothers of Louis XVIth came back into town to restore the monarchy, they wound up running an arch-conservative kingdom that, in the words of Talleyrand, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. So after about 15 years of enduring the Bourbons attempting to turn French,

citizens back into French subjects, the French got sick of it all and overthrew the restored bourbons in July 1830. The man they turned to to lead a new constitutional monarchy was the dupe de Orleans son, Louis-Philippe. So, just as Marie Antoinette feared, the House of Orleans did eventually succeed in overthrowing and replacing the House of Bourbon. It just took a little longer than she thought. Okay, so next week there will not be an episode, because I only managed to crank out three supplementals before I left. But when we return in two weeks, I will be just getting back from the first ever American Revolution Tour, and to celebrate, I wrote up a little thing on the young French ambassador

dispatched by the National Convention in early 1793 to drum up support for revolutionary France in the new United States of America. With all of Europe now arrayed against them, it was critical that France secures support from their Republican brothers in the new world. Which is why it was so unfortunate that the young ambassador that convention sent was the needlessly provocative and endlessly infuriating citizen Jeunay.