Who Was Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King? Here at louis-philippe.eu, we’re still captivated by one of the strangest paradoxes in European royal history: a man who fought for the French Revolution as a young duke, then ended up wearing a crown as France’s last king. Louis-Philippe styled himself the “Citizen King,” swapped the fleur-de-lis for the […]
The July Monarchy Explained: Louis-Philippe and the House of Orléans How does a king who takes the throne promising a modest, business-friendly “bourgeois monarchy” end up so detested that he has to flee his own capital in disguise? That is the puzzle at the heart of the July Monarchy, the eighteen-year reign of Louis-Philippe, Duke […]
The House of Orléans: A Family Tree Why does the Orléans branch of the French royal family still fascinate British readers? Part of the answer lies just west of London, where Louis-Philippe, the last King of the French, lived out his final years in exile at Claremont House near Twickenham. Another part lies across the […]
The Early Roots of the Entente Cordiale: Louis-Philippe, the House of Orléans and the Château d’Eu When Queen Victoria stepped ashore at Tréport in September 1843, she became the first reigning English monarch to set foot on French soil since Henry VIII met Francis I at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520. Her […]
The 1848 Revolution in Brief: How Louis-Philippe Lost His Throne On the night of 24 February 1848, Louis-Philippe, King of the French, sat in the Tuileries Palace and signed away his crown. Within hours he would slip out of Paris in disguise, cross the Channel, and begin a quiet exile in England under the alias […]
Royal Museums in France Beyond Versailles: Our Journey Through Orléans History Versailles gets all the attention, and we understand why. But after years of criss-crossing France in search of royal history, our team keeps returning to the smaller, stranger, more personal sites tied to Louis-Philippe and the House of Orléans. These museums do not try […]
Reading List: Nineteenth-Century France, Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy Our bookshelves are overflowing. Between us, we have accumulated dozens of volumes on the July Monarchy, the House of Orléans and the remarkable reign of Louis-Philippe — and frankly, we have run out of shelf space. So rather than hoard them, we thought we would share […]
Queen Victoria’s Visits to Eu: A Royal Friendship Across the Channel When Queen Victoria stepped ashore at Tréport in September 1843 and travelled the short distance to the Château d’Eu, she did something no British monarch had done since 1520: meet a French king on French soil. The last occasion had been the Field of […]
Normandy Day Trips from the Channel Ports: Following Louis-Philippe and the House of Orléans If you’ve ever stood on the deck of a cross-Channel ferry watching Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower shrink behind you, or queued at Newhaven with a weekend bag and a vague plan, you already know the ritual. Three or four hours of sea […]
Exile in England: Louis-Philippe at Claremont On a cold February morning in 1848, a 74-year-old king climbed into an ordinary fiacre outside the Tuileries Palace and slipped away through the back streets of Paris. Within days, Louis-Philippe — the last King of the French — would be a refugee on English soil, and within weeks […]
