Second Orleanist Kingdom

The collapse of the Second French Empire on the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War left French political life in disarray. Though Bonapartists and republics both wanted to impose their regimes in France, the thorough discrediting of the former party and the isolation of the latter made it evident to observers of the French political scene that a Bourbon constitutional monarchy was the most likely outcome. Initial disputes between the either the greater (Bourbon, or Legitimist) or lesser (Bourbon-Orléans, or Orleanist) lines of the on the succession to the throne were resolved in favour of the Orleanists, for the simple reason that the Legitimist faction did not have a viable candidate for the throne. In a referendum in October of 1871, the establishment of an Orleanist constitutional monarchy was supported by a margin of three-to-one, and the duc de Paris became King Louis-Philippe II.

The Orleanist political philosophy had been formed in the course of three generations of internecine political violence and oppression in France. Orleanists sought to synthesize the principles of the moderate phase of the French Revolution -- a rationalized and secularized administration, and adherence to the principles of classical liberalism and Enlightenment thought -- with constitutional monarchy on the British model. The First Orleanist Kingdom, founded in the 1830 revolution against the autocratic Charles X and lasting until the 1848 revolution, failed only because the French people sought gloire from an aggressive foreign policy. France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war made gloire seem rather less attractive.

The most immediate concern of the Second Orleanist Kingdom was the establishment of a stable relationship with the new German Empire. Under Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers, France paid off its indemnity to the German Empire far earlier than Bismarck expected and negotiated Germany's withdrawal from French territory by 1873. France subsequently sought to break its diplomatic isolation, succeeding in the detachment of Italy from the Dreikaiserbund in the 1880's and the establishment of the Franco-British Entente by the late 1890's.

After the damage caused by the Franco-Prussian War was repaired by the middle of the 1870's, France began a wide-ranging process of industrial modernization. The most immediately impressive form of this modernization was France's industry. Although French industry had greatly expanded under the Second Empire, overall France not only remained far behind Britain but it was even surpassed by the German states before the Franco-Prussian War. In the first decades of the Second Orleanist Kingdom, the French government placed a high priority on the modernization of existing industry and the construction of new industrial centres. Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles quickly developed into major manufacturing centres, while the Nord, Lorraine, and French Alsace became the centre of the French mining industry. By 1900, French industry was as diversified as the British, though not as productive, and the French economy was easily one of the leading world economies.

The continued prosperity of France's rural peasant landowners limited migration from the French countryside to the new industrial centres, and thus limited the growth of the urban workforce and of modern industries. To compensate for this, three million Belgian, Italian, and Spanish immigrants were sponsored by the large industrial firms by the turn of the century and settled in French industrial centres. This mass immigration contributed greatly to the growth of the French population from 41 million in 1871 to almost fifty million by the eve of the First World War. France remained the third-largest national state in Europe in terms of population after Russia and Germany.

By necessity, the Second Orleanist Kingdom had to embrace democracy: Republicans would have compromised for nothing less, while even most Orleanists far preferred a regime dominated by an elected parliament to any revival of absolute monarchy. Under the 1872 Constitutional Law, the universal manhood suffrage established under the Second Republic was confirmed, and a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate were organized to serve as the governing bodies of the French state. In the 1870's, France remained a conservative government, in reaction to the socialism of the abortive Paris Commune. By the end of the 1880's, though, the creation of a large urban proletariat dispersed throughout France encouraged the growth of the Radical and Socialist parties. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Parti socialiste français of Jean Jaurès was the single largest political party in France. The Communalist Party was less successful, but its collaboration with the Socialists in 1903 led to the creation of the first left-wing government of any European Great Power, and encouraged the further development of France's economic and cultural cooperatives.

The growing regionalization of France also was a major feature. Drawing from the doctrines of Hippolyte Taine, who favoured the restoration of regional governments and associations within France to repair France's tattered social fabric, Louis-Philippe II and the Cabinet presided over a program of decentralization. Brittany, Poitou, Gascony, and Languedoc -- all regions that firmly supported Orléanism -- were given local assemblies with some strictly limited powers. Though sensitive border regions such as French Alsace and Savoy were deprived of regional government, by the end of the century most of France had achieved some amount of self-government.

The last major concern of the French government, though subordinated to French foreign policy, was the consolidation and expansion of the French colonial empire. Private explorers and military expeditions confirmed France's sovereignty over the West African interior and Annam, and Madagascar and the Congo basin were placed under direct French administration. Although the colonies provided little impetus to French industrialization, they - the second-largest colonial empire in the world - help France maintain a high profile worldwide.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Orleanist Kingdom had been firmly and permanently established in the French body politic. Though republicans remained active in Paris and Marseilles, the French population universally accepted the legitimacy of the Second Orleanist Kingdom. This acquiescence in France's competent new regime allowed France to remain one of the most powerful Great Powers of the world, alongside Britain and Germany.