passion for equality he was content to veil his kingship for a while under a middle-class disguise. He erased the royal lilies from the panels of his carriages; and the Palais Royal, like the White House at Washington, stood open to all and sundry who cared to come and shake hands with the head of the state. This pose served to keep the democrats of the capital in a good temper, and so leave him free to consolidate the somewhat unstable foundation of his throne and to persuade his European fellow-sovereigns to acknowledge in him not a revolutionary but a conservative force. But when once his position at home and abroad had been established, it became increasingly clear that he possessed all the Bourbon tenaciousness of personal power. When a “party of Resistance” came into office with Casimir-Périer in March 1831, the speech from the throne proclaimed that “France has desired that the monarchy should become national, it does not desire that it should be powerless”; and the migration of the royal family to the Tuileries symbolized the right of the king not only to reign but to rule. Republican and Socialist agitation, culminating in a series of dangerous risings, strengthened the position of the king as defender of middle-class interest; and since the middle classes constituted the pays légal which alone was represented in Parliament, he came to regard his position as unassailable, especially after the suppression of the risings under Blanqui and Barbès in 1839. Little by little his policy, always supported by a majority in a house of representatives elected by a corrupt and narrow franchise, became more reactionary and purely dynastic. His position in France seeming to be unassailable, he sought to strengthen it in Europe by family alliances. The fact that his daughter Louise was the consort of Leopold I., king of the Belgians, had brought him into intimate and cordial relations with the English court, which did much to cement the entente cordiale with Great Britain. Broken in 1840 during the affair of Mehemet Ali (q.v.) the entente was patched up in 1841 by the Straits Convention and re-cemented by visits paid by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the Château d’Eu in 1843 and 1845 and of Louis Philippe to Windsor in 1844, only to be irretrievably wrecked by the affair of the “Spanish marriages,” a deliberate attempt to revive the traditional Bourbon policy of French predominance in Spain. If in this matter Louis Philippe had seemed to sacrifice the international position of France to dynastic interests, his attempt to re-establish it by allying himself with the reactionary monarchies against the Liberals of Switzerland finally alienated from him the French Liberal opinion on which his authority was based. When, in February 1848, Paris rose against him, he found that he was practically isolated in France.
Charles X., after abdicating, had made a dignified exit from France, marching to the coast surrounded by the cavalry, infantry and artillery of his Guard. Louis Philippe was less happily situated. Escaping with the queen from the Tuileries by a back entrance, he made his way with her in disguise to Honfleur, where the royal couple found refuge in a gardener’s cottage. They were ultimately smuggled out of the country by the British consul at Havre as Mr and Mrs Smith,[1] arriving at Newhaven “unprovided with anything but the clothes they wore.” They settled at Claremont, placed at their disposal by Queen Victoria, under the incognito of count and countess of Neuilly. Here on the 26th of August 1850, Louis Philippe died.
The character of Louis Philippe is admirably traced by Queen Victoria in a memorandum of May 2, 1855, in which she compares him with Napoleon III. She speaks of his “vast knowledge upon all and every subject,” and “his great activity of mind.” He was, unlike Napoleon, “thoroughly French in character, possessing all the liveliness and talkativeness of that people.” But she also speaks of the “tricks and over-reachings” practised by him, “who in great as well as in small things took a pleasure in being cleverer and more cunning than others, often when there was no advantage to be gained by it, and which was, unfortunately, strikingly displayed in the transactions connected with the Spanish marriages, which led to the king’s downfall, and ruined him in the eyes of all Europe” (Letters, pop. ed., iii. 122).
Louis Philippe had eight children. His eldest son, the popular Ferdinand Philippe, duke of Orleans (b. 1810), who had married Princess Helena of Mecklenburg, was killed in a carriage accident on the 13th of July 1842, leaving two sons, the comte de Paris and the duc de Chartres. The other children were Louise, consort of Leopold I., king of the Belgians; Marie, who married Prince Alexander of Württemberg and died in 1839; Louis Charles, duc de Nemours; Clementine, married to the duke of Coburg-Kohary; François Ferdinand, prince de Joinville; Henri Eugène, duc d’Aumale (q.v.); Antoine Philippe, duc de Montpensier, who married the Infanta, younger sister of Queen Isabella of Spain.
Authorities.—F. A. Gruyer, La Jeunesse du roi Louis-Philippe, d’après les pourtraits et des tableaux (Paris, 1909), édition de luxe, with beautiful reproductions of portraits, miniatures, &c.; Marquis de Flers, Louis-Philippe, vie anecdotique, 1773–1850 (Paris, 1891); E. Daudet, Hist. de l’émigration (3 vols., Paris, 1886–1890). Of general works on Louis Philippe’s reign may be mentioned Louis Blanc, Hist. de Dix Ans, 1830–1840 (5 vols., Paris, 1841–1844), from the republican point of view; J. O. d’Haussonville, Hist. de la politique extérieure de la monarchie de juillet, 1830–1848 (2 vols., Paris, 1850); V. de Nouvion, Hist. de Louis-Philippe (4 vols., Paris, 1857–1861); F. Guizot, France under Louis Philippe, 1841–1847 (Eng. trans., 1865); Karl Hillebrand, Geschichte Frankreichs von der Thronbesteigung Louis Philippes, 1830–1841 (2 vols., Gotha, 1877–1879); V. du Bled, Hist. de la monarchie de juillet (2 vols., Paris, 1887); P. Thureau-Dangin, Hist. de la monarchie de juillet (Paris, 1887, &c.); A. Malet, “La France sous la monarchie de juillet,” in Lavisse and Rambaud’s Hist. Générale, vol. x. ch. x. (Paris, 1898); G. Weill, La France sous la monarchie de juillet (Paris, 1902); Émile Bourgeois, “The Orleans Monarchy,” ch. xv. of vol. x., and “The Fall of Constitutionalism in France,” ch. ii. of vol. xi. of the Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge, 1907 and 1909). Further works will be found in the bibliographies attached by M. Bourgeois to his chapters (vol. x. p. 844, vol. xi. p. 874; the latter including works on the revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic). To the list of published correspondence and memoirs there mentioned may be added the Chronique of the duchesse de Dino (Paris, 1909).
Louis Philippe himself published the Journal du duc de Chartres, 1790–1791; Mon Journal, événements de 1815 (2 vols., 1849); Discours, allocutions et réponses de S. M. Louis-Philippe, 1830–1846; and after his death was issued his Correspondance, mémoire et discours inédits (Paris, 1863). (W. A. P.)
LOUISBURG, a town and port of entry of Cape Breton county, Nova Scotia, Canada, on the Sydney & Louisburg railway, 39 m. from Sydney. Pop. (1901) 1588. Under the French régime, Louisburg was second only to Quebec. A fortress was erected at enormous expense, and the city was the centre of the cod-fisheries. The fortress was, however, captured in 1745 by the American colonists, under Sir William Pepperrell (1696–1759), assisted by the British fleet, and again in 1758 by a British land and sea force under General Jeffrey Amherst (1717–1797) and Admiral Boscawen. The jealousy of the British settlement of Halifax led to its almost utter destruction, and only a few casemates now remain. Under English rule a fishing village grew up on the other side of the harbour, and has now become the winter shipping port of the Dominion Coal Company. The harbour is deep, spacious and open all the year round, though occasionally blocked by drift ice in the spring.
LOUISE [Auguste Wilhelmine Amalie Luise] (1776–1810), queen of Prussia, was born on the 10th of March 1776 in Hanover, where her father, Prince Charles of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, was field-marshal of the household brigade. Her mother was a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt. In 1793 Louise met at Frankfort the crown prince of Prussia, afterwards King Frederick William III., who was so fascinated by her beauty, and by the nobleness of her character, that he asked her to become his wife. They were married on the 24th of December of the same year. As queen of Prussia she commanded universal respect and affection, and nothing in Prussian history is more pathetic than the dignity and unflinching courage with which she bore the sufferings inflicted on her and her family during the war between Prussia and France. After the battle of Jena she went with her husband
- ↑ There is a vivid account in Mr Featherstonhaugh to Lord Palmerston, Havre, March 3, 1848, in The Letters of Queen Victoria (pop. ed., ii. 156).
