Paris during the reign of King Louis Philippe I (1830–1848) was the city described in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo. Its population increased from 785,000 in 1831 to 1,053,000 in 1848, as the city grew to the north and west, while the poorest neighborhoods in the center became even more crowded.

The heart of the city, around the Île de la Cité, was a maze of narrow, winding streets and crumbling buildings from earlier centuries; it was picturesque, but dark, crowded, unhealthy and dangerous. A cholera outbreak in 1832 killed 20,000 people. Claude-Philibert de Rambuteau, prefect of the Seine for fifteen years under Louis-Philippe, made tentative efforts to improve the center of the city: he paved the quays of the Seine with stone paths and planted trees along the river. He built a new street (now the Rue Rambuteau) to connect the Marais district with the markets and began construction of Les Halles, the famous central food market of Paris, finished by Napoleon III.

Louis-Philippe lived in his old family residence, the Palais-Royal, until 1832, before moving to the Tuileries Palace. His chief contribution to the monuments of Paris was the completion in 1836 of the Place de la Concorde, which was further embellished on 25 October 1836 by the placement of the Luxor Obelisk. In the same year, at the other end of the Champs-Élysées, Louis-Philippe completed and dedicated the Arc de Triomphe, which had been begun by Napoleon I.

The ashes of Napoleon were returned to Paris from Saint Helena in a solemn ceremony on 15 December 1840, and Louis-Philippe built an impressive tomb for them at the Invalides. He also placed the statue of Napoleon on top of the column in the Place Vendôme. In 1840, he completed a column in the Place de la Bastille dedicated to the July 1830 revolution which had brought him to power. He also sponsored the restoration of the Paris churches ruined during the French Revolution, a project carried out by the ardent architectural historian Eugène Viollet-le-Duc; the first church slated for restoration was the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Between 1837 and 1841, he built a new Hôtel de Ville with an interior salon decorated by Eugène Delacroix.

The first railway stations in Paris (then called embarcadères) were built under Louis-Philippe. Each belonged to a different company, and they were not connected to each other; all were located outside the city center. The first, the Embarcadère Saint-Germain, was opened on 24 August 1837 on the Place de l'Europe. An early version of the Gare Saint-Lazare was started in 1842, and the first lines from Paris to Orléans and to Rouen were inaugurated on 1–2 May 1843.

As the population of Paris grew, so did discontent in the working-class neighborhoods. There were riots in 1830, 1831, 1832, 1835, 1839, and 1840. The 1832 uprising, which followed the funeral of a fierce critic of Louis-Philippe, General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, was immortalized by Victor Hugo in his novel Les Misérables.Manéglier, Hervé, Paris impérial, p. 19

The growing unrest finally exploded on 23 February 1848, when a large demonstration was broken up by the army. Barricades went up in the eastern working-class neighborhoods. The king reviewed his soldiers in front of the Tuileries Palace, but instead of cheering him, many shouted "Long Live Reform!" Discouraged, he abdicated and departed for exile in England.

Parisians

Population The population of Paris grew rapidly during the reign of Louis-Philippe, from 785,866 recorded in the 1831 census, to 899,313 in 1836, and 936,261 in 1841. By 1846, it had grown to 1,053,897. Between 1831 and 1836, it grew by 14.4% within the city limits and by 36.7% in the villages around the city that became part of Paris in 1860. The largest number of immigrants came from the twelve departments around Paris: 40% came from Picardy and the Nord department; 13% from Normandy; and 13% from Burgundy. A smaller number came from Brittany and Provence, and they had greater difficulties assimilating, since few of them spoke French. They tended to settle in the poorest neighborhoods between the Hôtel de Ville and Les Halles.

Following earlier foreign immigration, a large wave of immigrants from Poland, including Frédéric Chopin, arrived after the failed Polish revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

The most densely populated neighborhoods were in the center, where the poorest Parisians lived: Les Arcis, Les Marchés, Les Lombards and Montorgueil, where the population density reached between 1000 and 1500 persons per hectare. However, during the reign of Louis-Philippe, the middle class gradually moved away from the center toward the west and north of the Grands Boulevards. Between 1831 and 1836, the population of the 23 neighborhoods of the center dropped from 42.7% to 24.5% of the city's population, while the corresponding percentage for the outer neighborhoods grew from 27.3% to 58.7%. The population of the Left Bank remained steady at about 26% of the total.

Social classes The nobility, composed of several hundred families, continued to occupy their palatial town houses in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and held a prominent place in society, but exercised a much smaller role in the government and business of the city. Their place at the top of the social order was taken by the bankers, financiers and industrialists. The novelist Stendhal wrote: "The bankers are at the heart of the State. The bourgeoisie has taken the place of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the bankers are the nobility of the bourgeoisie." The new leaders of Paris lived on the Right Bank, between the Palais Royal and the Madeleine to the north and west of the city. The Rothschild family and the bankers Jacques Laffitte and Casimir Perier lived on the Rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, north of the Place Vendôme, just outside the boulevards. The industrialist Benjamin Delessert lived on the Rue Montmartre. The upper middle class, those who paid more than 200 francs in direct taxes each year, numbered 15,000 families in a city of about a million inhabitants. The growing middle class also included owners of shops, merchants, artisans, notaries, doctors, lawyers, and government officials.

The reign of Louis-Philippe also saw a large increase in the number of working-class Parisians employed in the new factories and workshops created by the Industrial Revolution. A skilled worker earned three to five francs a day. An unskilled worker, such as those employed to use wheelbarrows to move earth during the construction of new streets, earned 40 sous, or two francs, a day. The workers were mostly from the provinces and rented rooms in crowded hôtels garnis, or lodging houses. The population of the lodging houses grew from 23,000 to 50,000 between 1831 and 1846. They constituted the class most subject to the fluctuations of the business cycle and were the principal participants in the growing number of strikes and confrontations with the government.

There was also a growing under-class in Paris of the unemployed or marginally employed. These included such occupations as the chiffonniers, who searched the trash at night for rags or old shoes that could be resold. Their number was estimated at 1800 in 1832.Fierro, Alfred, Histoire et Dictionnaire de Paris, (1996), article on Chiffonniers, page 771 There was also a very large number of orphans who lived by any means they could find in the streets of Paris. They are memorably described by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables.

Bohemians

A new social type appeared in Paris in the 1840s; le bohème, or the "Bohemian". They were usually students or artists, and were generally described as joyous, careless about the future, somewhat lazy, boisterous, and scornful of middle-class standards. They wore a distinct costume, careless and flamboyant, to stand out from the crowd. The name was taken from the Romani people who originally immigrated to France from eastern Europe in the 15th century and were mistakenly believed to come specifically from Bohemia; they were numerous in Paris at the time. The character was first introduced into literature by Henri Murger in a series of stories called Scènes de la vie de Bohème (Scenes of Bohemian Life) published in Paris between 1845 and 1849, which in 1896 was made into the opera La Bohème by Puccini. The term spread from Paris to the rest of Europe, and came to be used for anyone who lived an artistic and unconventional life.

Prostitution Prostitution was common in Paris. Beginning in 1816, prostitutes were required to register with the police. Between 1816 and 1842, their numbers grew from 22,000 to 43,000. They were mostly young women from the French provinces who had come to Paris seeking regular work, but were unable to find it. At the beginning of the reign of Louis-Philippe, the prostitutes were usually found in the arcades of the Palais-Royal, but they were gradually moved by the police to the sidewalks of the Rue Saint-Denis, the Rue Saint-Honoré, the Rue Sainte-Anne, and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Houses of prostitution, marked with red lanterns, were called maisons de tolerance or maisons closes. They were mostly found on the boulevards at the edges of the city, in Belleville, Ménilmontant, La Villette, La Chapelle, Grenelle, Montparnasse, and at the Place du Trone. They numbered 200 in 1850, just after the fall of Louis-Philippe.

Governing

Louis-Philippe had a very different style from previous monarchs; he did not move from his residence in the Palais-Royal to the Tuileries Palace until 1 October 1831. Except on ceremonial occasions, he dressed like a banker or industrialist rather than a king, with a blue coat, white waistcoat and top hat, and carried an umbrella. Formal court dress was no longer required at receptions. The royal guards were replaced by soldiers from the National Guard. His children attended the best Paris schools, rather than having tutors. He spent as little time as possible in Paris, preferring the royal residences at Fontainebleau, Versailles and the Château de Neuilly.

As soon as he came to power, Louis-Philippe dismissed the old Prefect of the Seine, the Prefect of Police, the mayors of the arrondissements and their deputies, and the 24 members of the General Council of the Seine. On 29 July, he appointed a temporary municipal commission to run the city, under the authority of the Minister of the Interior. The new council was named on 17 September, and was made up mainly of bankers, industrialists, magistrates and senior government officials. The successive French governments since the Ancien Régime had feared the fury of the Parisians, and a repeat of the Reign of Terror. Parisians had not been allowed to elect a city government from 1800 until 1830; it was always directly under the rule of the national government. In 1831, Louis-Philippe organized the first municipal elections, but under conditions that ensured that the Parisians would not get out of control. Under a law of 30 April 1831, the Chamber of Deputies created a new General Council of the Seine, with 36 elected members from Paris, three per arrondissement, and eight from the neighboring arrondissements of Saint-Denis and Sceaux. Only Parisians who paid more than 200 francs a year in direct taxes were allowed to vote, although they numbered less than 15,000 in a city with a population of more than 800,000 persons. A few other selected categories of Parisians were also allowed to vote, including judges, notaries, members of the Institut de France, retired officers who received a pension of at least 1200 francs, and doctors who had practiced in Paris more than ten years. This added another 2000 to the number of eligible voters.