This paper is a consideration of an important figure of the old regime France,
Philippe duc d'Orléans, the Duke of Orleans,
who like so many other old regime notables at the time of the French Revolution,
made their way into the revolutionary elite apparently seamlessly.
And as with many others who entered that elite,
There were many aristocrats among even the radical revolutionaries.
As with many others who entered that elite, the Duke's bid for what we might call a new political economic order failed when the revolution turned against him and guillotined him.
Yet, in a sense, the order which Philippe d'Orléans hoped to shape and define did succeed, as did his related quest to displace the senior line of the House of Bourbon, or the House of Bourbon, and gain the throne for the House of Orléans.
This denouement, of course, took place only 37 years after the duke's head was chopped off,
When his son and heir, Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, was proclaimed King of France as a result of the Revolution of 1830.
I want to look at the goals and the means of Philippe d'Orléans.
And I want to argue that the House of Orléans leads us to one of the most important subplots of the French Revolution and indeed of modern times.
The French Revolution is, among other things, a collection of family histories.
Bourbons, Hoppsburgs, Lafayettes, Neckers, Rowlands, Jeffersons, and countless others.
Surely one of the strangest of these family histories is the family that we might call Orléans.
The cadet line, or the sub-line of the House of Bourbon,
founded basically by the bizarre brother of Louis XIV in the late 17th century.
This openly bisexual prince, Monsieur, as he was called at court, seems to have squabbled with and schemed with his brother, Louis XIV, almost from infancy and certainly until his death, which occurred in 1701, occurring a few hours after his last really violent argument with his brother.
Over generations, the Orléans' relatives maintained a rivalry to the rule of their cousins, and this tension was often marked by the Orléans' connections with the Paris underworld, the world of crime, poisoning, prostitution, gambling, and so forth.
Indeed, many rumors from Monsieur's life, the life of the first one, the brother of Louis XIV connected him with the well-known poison trade, which was as much a feature of the Paris pharmacopoeia as the sale of love potions.
In the struggle between the two royal branches, the Orléans branch lost some and won some.
The son of Monsieur gained the upper hand temporarily from 1715 to 1723 when Philippe II of Orléans served as regent because Louis XIV's great-grandson gained the throne at the age of only five.
This eight-year regency generated an intensive development of what we might call Orléanist policy.
Indeed, at the same time that the duke of the time, the duke of Orléans, of course, generation after generation, they were always the duke of Orléans,
but at the time that that duke regent was in power, he made sure of training the adolescent king in what can only be called sexual addiction.
At the same time that he began to shape the Orléans' program of the future,
The Duke appeared in some ways to be a reformer, but his reforms were aimed at discrediting
the old Bourbon regime and establishing himself as a new kind of ruler with a base in the
masses.
In fact, it was this Duke of Orleans who sanctioned the inflationary debacle associated with John
John Law, going beyond the inefficiencies of mercantilism to produce a much broader and
more efficient theft of wealth.
He too, it was, after whom New Orleans was named, when it was founded by the Banque Generale
du Veil, that's John Law's inflationary engine, and it's worth noting, I don't know the causality
here, but it's worth noting that New Orleans would be marked by many of the same characteristics
Under domestic mercantilism, old regime France was a picture of staggering burdens, layer
upon layer, of inequitable taxes, tributes, payoffs and rules, and at the top of the structure,
rent seeking and patronage stamped the whole economy and the bureaucracy grew.
The only relief was that the system was so inefficient that many in France prospered anyway,
especially during the corrupt but genial reign of Louis XV up to 1774.
Actually, his grandson and successor, Louis XVI, showed great promise, appointing as his
Comptroller General and First Minister the great Jacques Turgot, the proto-Austrian economist
to coin the expression laissez-faire as a prescriptive economic policy.
Unfortunately, Turgot's reforms made him many enemies as he valiantly butted heads with stock-jobbers and rent-seekers of all varieties.
His time in office lasted only 20 months, ending in fact with his inveterate opposition to plans for French intervention in the American War for Independence.
None of his successors could master the fiscal puzzle that France presented, and it was indeed
this puzzle that led directly to the revolution in 1789.
Meanwhile, what of the House of Orléans?
Well, the new duke, grandson of the regent, the one that was the regent, this duke, born
in 1747, became duke in 1785.
And this is the guy I want to talk most about, who would become Philippe Egalité.
This is a man who, you might say, lived out the Orléans lifestyle and expanded upon it.
Personally amoral, a carouser with the low of every rank, the new Duke of Orléans was
positioned to acquire every benefit that patronage and privilege could bestow.
He used the mercantilist order to his advantage, becoming manufacturer and real estate developer,
working his government connections to great advantage.
Indeed, his business approach seems at times more 20th century than 18th.
Early on, the young Philippe, not quite yet Duke, even clashed with the great Turgot.
A few years after acquiring some property in a shady manner, I think,
Philippe applied to the great Comptroller General Turgot for permission to set up a scheme
in which all the merchandise brought to the market of a town called Lievli,
today the town is called Lievli-Gargeon,
have all the merchandise brought to this market
taxed with the proceeds going to the Duke, so the
process is supposed to be the state taxes them, the state provides the security,
the collectors, and then the proceeds are handed over to the Duke because it's
is His Town.
Turgot's period in office was marked with a flood of such applications, and that was
the lifeblood of mercantilism at the local level.
As with many others, Turgot turned this one down, explaining briefly to Philippe of Orléans
that the state would no longer provide legal backing to subsidize private profits.
At times like this, the Duke of Orléans was frustrated with mercantilism, but only because
he desired to gain more from it.
Yet, Philippe had a more ambitious vision than just making money.
In fact, he set up a management team to carry out a program, which would soon be called
Orléanism, in which politics would play an even more crucial role than previously in
the family designs.
I do not mean to take up here the possibility quite widely discussed in 1789 that the Duke
Philip d'Orléans was at the base of a vast conspiracy that caused the revolution.
His actions certainly helped cause the revolution and there are concrete connections we can
make between the duke's employees and definite events in the revolution.
But the revolution was many-sided and hugely complex and we just don't have all the evidence
needed to draw any real conclusions about this, I think.
What we do know is that the team of Philippe d'Orléans ran an integrated operation to
influence business in favor of Orléanist policies and influence politics in favor of
Orléanist wealth.
The duke's machine relied on public relations and the appearance of sympathy with the masses.
The mercantilism of the old regime was bad enough, but the House of Orléans went mercantilism
has won better by selling this manipulation to the masses.
As a modern historian George Armstrong Kelly has put it, this machine mastered, quote,
the massive use of wealth, research and propaganda for the purpose of forming public opinion
and swaying public policy.
Those goals almost certainly included gaining the throne for the Orléans branch, but they
were clearly intertwined with a new kind of democratic socialist politics. In many accounts
of the revolution, the duke is called a liberal, but his attitudes had nothing in common with
proto-liberals like Turgot. The only liberalism in his program consisted of a kind of insistent
urge for personal gratification and a tendency to criticize the authoritarian aspects of
Louis XVI's reign. Indeed, in the end, Orléans would support the confiscatory policies of the revolution, the rising influence of rent-seeking entrepreneurs, the boondoggles of the national projects, and the horrible inflationary measures, some of which were the duke's ideas, and which were crusaded for by politicos in his employ. And, of course, the violence, a good deal of which the duke himself helped to stage. We might say in this group,
that's assembled here that Orleanism was something like Hamiltonianism with a
human face or would it be Hamilton without the charm? I don't know. You know I
tried to put more jokes in here especially after Gerard Casey's talk
last night but there just aren't that many French Revolution jokes going
around these days. Anyway, this Orleanist machine was headed by aristocratic and middle class
The best bureaucrats who lived large by their wits in planning for the Orléans' future.
There was a Chancellor, an Intendant of Finances, this is a private fortune, right, the Intendant
of Finances.
Among the counselors was the Duke, was the Abbé Sabatier, one of the principal promoters
of the idea of calling the Estates General in 1787, as well as Madame de Jean-Li, Orléans's
The Duke's former mistress and tutor to his children.
And of course her husband was on the staff too.
Fair is fair, after all.
In 1788, Orléans brought in a new strategist.
This was Chaudelot de Laclo, the author of Dangerous Liaisons,
if you remember that great movie based on the original book,
which is pretty much what the movie was.
And the author of that was brought in to be the principal strategist for the house of Orléans.
It is likely that either Laclo, that author, or Madame de Jonly, the former mistress, created the brand name for the Orléanist vision. They called it Orléanisme.
On the lower level, the machine included a host of journalists, politicos, criminals, and whatnot.
One of the machine's creatures, Jean-Pierre Rousseau, later leader of the Riesel 10 faction of the revolution and still later fodder for the guillotine,
left a description of their work before he died.
My work, he says, consisted of examining all the projects that the prince could carry through with his immense fortune.
We wanted to attach the intellectuals to us, to patronize the arts and the learned societies.
Thus we gave pensions to the farmer and provided aid for new research.
We created a load of philanthropic societies in the apanage of the prince.
in the properties of the Prince.
In historian Kelly's view, George Armstrong Kelly, the evidence shows that the Duke and his machine were helping to create, as he says, a new kind of politics.
Perhaps the best illustration of this new politics comes in the form of the Palais Royale, the palace, the Royal Palace.
It was called an urban real estate project.
The Palais Royale was not quite a Palais and it was not quite Royale. It was something else.
It was, in fact, a big house, a big palace, surrounded by buildings just north of the San River, right by the Louvre, if you know Paris at all.
The buildings had ended up, by clever manipulation and pressure, in the ownership of the brother of Louis XIV this year, and the Orléans family, which had lived there off and on.
off and on. But about 1780, the future Philip equality, as the Duke would be called, and
his planners worked out the geography of a very modern phenomenon, a planned and more
or less enclosed urban entertainment sphere. The centerpiece of the Palais Royaux was the
Cirque, a garden surrounded by colonnades. Under and over the colonnades were retail
There were retail stores of every variety, restaurants, cafes, drugsts and poison shops, brothels, book shops, clothing stores and much, much more.
The central colonnades connected across the Rue Richelieu formed with further extensions of the same thing.
There was dancing, there was music in the gardens under the colonnades, in the brothels.
There were themed restaurants, the famous Café Mécanique,
and dumb waiters that brought the wine up from the cellar right to your table.
There were back rooms to back rooms.
On the geographical edge of official Paris and in the less affluent arrondissement or
districts in the northeast of the city, the Palais Weillard provided a literal meeting
place for high society and the low underworld.
Organized crime bosses held court without fear in the Palais Weillard because by royal
While Grant the Duke had exclusive rights to police his own property and enforce his
own idea of laws, standing geographically on the border between official Paris and the
Paris of the dark masses in the third and fourth arrondissement, the Palais was a perfect
twilight for coordinating the forces of the two worlds.
When the revolution arrived in 1789, we know quite well that much of the cooperation between
Between the dark crowds and their leaders, the sans-culottes would be planned in the
Palais Royaux, the attack on the Bastille, the march to Versailles, and so forth.
Censorship did not reach into the bookstalls of the Palais Royaux, and anti-Bourbon propaganda
flowed freely.
This was the great age of the proliferation of pornography in Europe, and not a few pornographers
worked directly for the Duke of Orléans, portraying the duke's targets in whichever
This went above all for the Queen. Marie Antoinette, dubbed the German whore by early honest journalists,
was the star of myriad pornographic novels and illustrated stories. Much of the traditional
public image that we still maintain today of Marie Antoinette arises from the propaganda
The Revolution finally at hand, while the duke took part as a member of the third estate
in the assembly at Versailles, back at the Palais Royale, Camille Desmoulins, an employee
of the Orléans machine, climbed onto a table and cried to arms to set the crowds marching
toward the best deal.
As they marched, members of the crowd were given plaster busts of the duke of Orléans
Philip equality, Philippe égalité
Order of Democracy. That order included a process based on the old Red and Circuses
philosophy of some similar Roman leaders, but it went much farther. By catering to the
lowest, the most transient, the most violent of the population, the Orléanus machine developed
extensive insights into controlling politics through manipulating the masses. As for the
and the super-rich they could be catered to as well and stroked and brought into the fold.
As Philippe Egalité's son would proclaim on becoming King of the French in 1830,
enrich yourselves, hence a welfare state below and a welfare state above.
In his memoir, Talleyrand, the wily diplomat who was a contemporary of the Duke and saw all this happen before his eyes,
Talleyrand depicts the Duke of Orleans as a playboy not quite able to keep his attention on any one area, yet we can see something more.
Here was a man of the super-rich by various rent-seeking processes.
Here was a man not liberal but libertine.
Here was a man preparing the way for a kind of new class to lead modern democracies, leadership by propaganda, you might say.
And in the end, these goals were achieved only long after Philippe Egalité was guillotined.
With the revolution of 1830, the senior Bourbon branch of French kings fell for good, and
they fell amid calls for reform.
And Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, the son of Philippe Egalité, Philippe Qualité, was
on hand to become a reform king, a citizen king, as he called himself, to install the
and the regime of a new class of politicians and entrepreneurs of national projects and
stock jobbers and of well-connected bankers who enjoy the smiles of their political brothers.
Thank you very much.