Conclusion

Abstract In one sense Stendhal was correct. Philipon’s newspapers were a central component of a broad culture of opposition which enabled civil society to cast a critical eye over government. After 1830 politicians and governments, who theoretically derived their legitimacy from the nation as much as from the king, feared public ridicule more than their predecessors under the Restoration had done; Louis-Philippe himself could not treat the murmurs of dissent with Charles X’s unfailing disdain. But Stendhal drastically overestimated the practical influence of public ridicule. The governments of the July Monarchy systematically refused to modify their policies to take account of the feelings articulated through the opposition’s various organs: the immense public sympathy for the Polish revolutionaries and the opprobrium heaped on the politicians who abandoned them to the Russians did not force Louis-Philippe to go to war; all the charivaris meted out on the ventrus did not prevent them from accepting honours and sinecures from the cabinet. The opposition’s attempts to bring public pressure to bear on the government were only successful on two major issues: the abolition of the hereditary peerage in 1831 and the project to fortify Paris in 1833. There are few recorded instances of caricature directly influencing government policy.