Charles X was King of France from 1824 to 1830, when he abdicated in the face of a popular revolt. Before his reign as king, Charles spent several years living in exile in Britain from the late 1790s. Between 1805 and 1814 he lived at 72 South Audley Street, London, where he is commemorated with a blue plaque.

On it, he is commemorated as ‘last Bourbon king of France’; at the time that the plaque went up, the historical interest in the fact that a French king lived in exile in London was considered to outweigh the lack of positive legacy associated with him.

Early life and exile

Charles X was born Charles Philippe, Comte d’Artois, the younger brother of two reigning kings, Louis XVI (r.1774–92) and Louis XVIII (r.1814–24). In 1773 he married Marie Therese of Savoy.

At the first signs of revolution in 1789, Charles went into self-imposed exile and devoted his time to galvanising anti-revolutionary forces among French émigrés. He encouraged the revolt of the Vendée (a coastal region in western France) in 1795, but soon fled from Brittany.

From the late 1790s, Charles spent his exile in Britain: in 1799 he stayed for a period at Holyrood House, Edinburgh before moving to London. His brother, who later became Louis XVIII, also lived in England but was not permitted to reside in the capital.

Charles’s London residences included a house at 46 Baker Street (now demolished) and 72 South Audley Street. Here the widower Charles lived, it seems, in reduced circumstances: the writer Fanny Burney called it a ‘dusty, dirty abode’, and another contemporary diarist described ‘a small two-roomed house’.

This Grade II-listed house was originally built in the 1730s by Edward Shepherd on the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair. It was considerably altered in the 1830s, in 1887 and also more recently.

King of France

Charles returned to Paris on the abdication of Napoleon in 1814 and soon assumed leadership of the Ultras, the extreme right wing of the royalist movement in France at that time.

He succeeded his brother in 1824 as King Charles X. His appointed governments passed controversial policies such as the compensation of former émigrés for confiscated land, the restriction of press freedoms, and the reintroduction of the death penalty for various ‘sacrilegious acts’.

In 1825, Charles demanded that Haiti, which had declared independence from France in 1804, begin paying enormous ‘reparations’ to the French slaveholders it had overthrown. He threatened invasion and sent war ships to the island nation, which had little choice but to agree to the demands.

Ignoring majority public opinion, Charles appointed the extreme monarchist Prince Jules de Polignac to form a government, who initiated a French invasion of Algeria in 1830. Growing agitation soon culminated in the July Revolution of 1830, in which Charles was driven from Paris. He abdicated in favour of his grandson, but it was Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, a distant cousin, who was proclaimed king by the Chamber of Deputies.

Charles’s last years were spent mainly in Bohemia, and he died of cholera near Trieste in 1836.