A little bit of history to entertain your day : on May 20th 1824, two hundred years ago, Charles X was crowned as King of France. He would be the last ruling absolutist monarch in France, and the last to get a coronation in the Reims Cathedral. Charles X was the last surviving brother of Louis XVI, who lost his head on the guillotine, 31 years earlier. The latter’s only son, Louis VII, had died ten years old in captivity, also during the revolution. After the fall of Napoleon in 1815, France had restored the absolutist monarchy from before the revolution, as if nothing had happened. With no more male issue from Louis XVI alive, the throne went to the latter’s oldest living brother, Louis XVIII, who died in 1824. Since he had neither male issue, the throne went to the next younger brother, Charles X.
However, the revolutionary spirit was not dead in France. In July 1830, an uprise forced Charles X to abdicate. In an attempt to rescue the monarchy, he passed the throne to his son, Louis XIX, but whose reign only lasted…twenty minutes, before he abdicated in turn, in favour of his 4 years old nephew, Henry V. The latter’s formal ‘reign’ would last only seven days. Ultimately, it was a distant family member of the Bourbons, Louis-Philippe, who became king, but who was forced to accept a constitutional reign, instead of ruling as an absolutist monarch.
The next decades, “Henry V” would maintain his claims on the throne, throughout the July-monarchy (1830-1848), the Second Republic (1848-1852), and the Second Empire (1852-1870). In 1873, in the chaos following the defeat in the French-Prussian War, the fall of the empire, and the Paris Commune, he saw his chance to seize power. From the Chambord Castle he prepared his March on Paris. But even before he started, he was already confronted with so many conditions and restrictions of power he should have to accept, preventing him to become an absolutist monarch, that he gave up his plan. In the Chambord Castle, the carriages in which he wanted to drive to Paris, are still exposed today.