[Guelph4ever]

The Bourbon flag was simply a symbol of larger issues. What Chambord was saying was that he was not going to be a figure-head king over a liberal country simply to keep the conservatives quiet. If he was going to put his name and his honor on the line, it was going to be for a traditional, conseravtive and Church-based monarchy in the old style, not the mongrel Citizen-king bourgeois monarchy of Louis Phillipe. He was a man of principle and France, like a few other countries, could use more like him.

Vive le roi!

[CatoRenasci]

It was a symbol of larger issues to be sure, but he surely misread the temper of French society if he thought the French were looking for another Charles X. I studied this period with Roger Williams, the distinguished mid-20th century historian of the Second Empire and early Third Republic. A small group of his graduate students and I had several discussions about the 'lost Orleanist moment'. Chambord was a damned fool in the view of most serious French historians.