Bourbon Restoration in France

The Bourbon Restoration returned the House of Bourbon to the French throne after the fall of Napoleon. A first restoration began in April 1814, when the victorious allied powers set Louis XVIII, the brother of the executed Louis XVI, on the throne; it collapsed in March 1815, when Napoleon escaped from Elba and seized power again during the Hundred Days. After Waterloo the kingdom was restored for a second time, in July 1815, and lasted until the July Revolution of August 1830. The government was a constitutional monarchy rather than the absolutism of the Ancien Regime: the Charter of 1814 declared all Frenchmen equal before the law while keeping wide powers for the king and the nobility, and it restricted the vote to the wealthiest taxpayers. Louis XVIII kept the Napoleonic Code, the sale of church and emigre land and the departmental administration, and he sought peace abroad. Politics swung between moderate ministries led by men such as Decazes and the ultra-royalist Ultras, whose reaction provoked persistent unrest in the south. Under Charles X the court gathered men like Polignac, tightened censorship and issued the ordinances of 1830, and the July Revolution drove the elder branch out and brought in the July Monarchy. France knew internal peace, a rebuilt road and canal network and the first steps of industry.