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Louis Philippe's abdication was followed by the proclamation of the Second French Republic in early 1848, which lasted only a few years before being replaced by the Second French Empire under [[Napoleon III]].
Louis Philippe's abdication was followed by the proclamation of the Second French Republic in early 1848, which lasted only a few years before being replaced by the Second French Empire under [[Napoleon III]].
==Early Life==
Louis Philippe d'Orléans was born on October 6, 1773, at the Palais Royal, a royal palace in [[Paris]] that had been in the hands of the House of Orléans since the 1660s. This house was a cadet, or junior, branch of the French royal family, the House of Bourbon. Louis Philippe's great-great-grandfather, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, was a younger brother of King [[Louis XIV]], making Louis Philippe a distant cousin of [[Louis XVI]], who would become king the year after his birth. The men of the Orléans family were legally classified as "Princes of the Blood" and thus at the very top of the French nobility.
Louis Philippe's own parents were Louis Philippe, Duke of Chartres (styled the Duke of Orléans following the death of his own father in 1785), and Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, herself a great-granddaughter of Louis XIV. He was the eldest of four children who survived to adulthood; his two brothers, Louis Antoine and Louis Charles, would die in exile during the [[Napoleonic Wars]], while his sister, Louise Marie Adélaïde, would later become his closest political confidante.<ref>https://www.geni.com/people/Louis-Philippe-I-d-Orl%C3%A9ans-roi-des-Fran%C3%A7ais/6000000002004333376</ref>
The elder Louis Philippe, unlike the more traditionalist Bourbon monarchs, was very sympathetic towards the ideas of the [[Enlightenment]], and already by the 1770s was an opponent of the system of absolute monarchy France then had; in the years before the [[French Revolution]], this would make the House of Orléans a magnet for those demanding various kinds of reform. In accordance with this attitude, he had his four children educated not by an aristocratic tutor but by Stéphanie Félicité, comtesse de Genlis, a former mistress of his and a passionate admirer of [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]]. Madame de Genlis gave the younger Louis Philippe and his siblings an experimental and strenuous education that included grueling physical exercise along with such subjects as math, literature, and philosophy. Compared to many others of their day, even among the upper French aristocracy, the Orléans children were considered especially well-educated and worldly.<ref>T. E. B. Howarth, ''Citizen-King: The Life of Louis Philippe, King of the French'' (1962), p. 4-11.</ref>
The younger Louis Philippe bore no formal title until 1785, when his grandfather (also named Louis Philippe) died. His father then inherited the title of "Duke of Orléans," while he received the title "Duke of Chartres" (being only twelve years old at the time).
==Revolution==
Louis Philippe was barely in his teens during the early stages of the French Revolution and thus was not intimately involved with their critical events (though, in keeping with the reformist tendencies of his family, he did take part in the symbolic destruction of a prison cell door in [[Mont Saint-Michel]] in 1788). He was in Paris, however, during the forced removal of the royal family from Versailles to Paris in October 1789, and watched the procession from the palace (it was also, coincidentally, his sixteenth birthday). His father, however, was openly supportive of the Revolution, championing the creation of the National Assembly and eventually changing his name to Philippe-Égalité ("Égalité" being French for "equality"). Under his influence, Louis Philippe also displayed strong sympathy for the Revolution during this time. In 1790, he joined the Jacobin Club, then known as "Society of the Friends of the Constitution" and popular among liberal members of the nobility.
==References==
{{reflist}}
[[Category:France]]
[[Category:France]]
[[Category:French Monarchs]]
[[Category:French Monarchs]]