A conservative liberal[1][2] who opposed the attempt by King Charles X to usurp legislative power, he worked to sustain a constitutional monarchy following the July Revolution of 1830.

After twenty years as Russian Ambassadress to London, she had separated from her husband and sought refuge in Paris, where from 1835 she had held an increasingly influential salon occasionally attended by Guizot.

Her role in supporting and influencing his aims in aristocratic, political and diplomatic circles was considerable, aided by her retaining many contacts in England and her brother being Chief of Secret Police in Russia and a confidant of the Tsar.

These works recommended him to the notice of Louis-Marcelin de Fontanes, grand-master of the University of France, who selected Guizot for the chair of modern history at the Sorbonne in 1812.

He omitted the customary compliment to the all-powerful emperor, in spite of the hints given him by his patron, but the course which followed marks the beginning of the great revival of historical research in France in the 19th century.

He had now acquired a considerable position in Paris society, and the friendship of Royer-Collard and leading members of the liberal party, including the young duc de Broglie.

Absent from Paris at the moment of the fall of Napoleon in 1814, he was at once selected, on the recommendation of Royer-Collard, to serve the government of King Louis XVIII, in the capacity of secretary-general of the ministry of the interior, under the abbé de Montesquiou.

They hoped to subdue the elements of anarchy through the power of a limited constitution based on the suffrage of the middle class and promoted by the literary talents of the time.

During the succeeding years he played an important part among the leaders of the liberal opposition to the government of Charles X, although he had not yet entered parliament, and this was also the time of his greatest literary activity.

Guizot was called upon by his friends Casimir Perier, Jacques Laffitte, Villemain and Dupin to draw up the protest of the liberal deputies against the royal ordinances of July, while he applied himself with them to control the revolutionary character of the late contest.

Personally, Guizot was always of opinion that it was a great misfortune for the cause of parliamentary government in France that the infatuation and ineptitude of Charles X and Prince Polignac rendered a change in the hereditary line of succession inevitable.

In 1831 Casimir Périer formed a more vigorous and compact administration, terminated in May 1832 by his death; the summer of that year was marked by a formidable republican rising in Paris, and it was not until 11 October 1832 that a stable government was formed, in which Marshal Soult was first minister, Victor, 3rd duc de Broglie took the foreign office, Adolphe Thiers the home department, and Guizot the department of public instruction.

Some of the old members of this learned body – Talleyrand, Sieyès, Roederer and Lakanal – again took their seats there, and a host of more recent celebrities were added by election for the free discussion of the great problems of political and social science.

As he himself remarked, he was a stranger to England and a novice in diplomacy; the embroiled state of the Syrian War question, on which the French government had separated itself from the joint policy of Europe, and possibly the absence of entire confidence between the ambassador and the minister of foreign affairs, placed him in an embarrassing and even false position.

For some weeks Europe seemed to be on the brink of war, until the king ended the crisis by refusing his assent to the military preparations of Thiers, and by summoning Guizot from London to form a ministry and to aid his Majesty in what he termed "ma lutte tenace contre l'anarchie."

The fall of Peel's government in 1846 changed these intimate relations; and the return of Palmerston to the foreign office led Guizot to believe that he was again exposed to the passionate rivalry of the British cabinet.

Determined to resist any such intrigue, Guizot and the king plunged headlong into a counter-intrigue, wholly inconsistent with their previous engagements to Britain and fatal to the happiness of the queen of Spain.

By their influence she was urged into a marriage with a despicable offset of the house of Bourbon, and her sister was at the same time married to the youngest son of the French king, in direct violation of Louis Philippe's promises.

Its immediate effect was to destroy the Anglo-French alliance, and to throw Guizot into closer relations with the reactionary policy of Metternich and the Northern courts.

He despised money; he lived and died poor; and though he encouraged the fever of money-getting in the French nation, his own habits retained their primitive simplicity.

Of finance he knew nothing; trade and commerce were strange to him; military and naval affairs were unfamiliar to him; all these subjects he dealt with by second hand through his friends, Pierre Sylvain Dumon (1797–1870), Charles Marie Tanneguy, Comte Duchâttel (1803–1867), or Marshal Bugeaud.

Guizot found a safe refuge in Paris for some days in the lodging of a humble miniature painter whom he had befriended, and shortly afterwards escaped across the Belgian frontier and from there to London, where he arrived on 3 March.

The society of England, though many people disapproved of much of his recent policy, received the fallen statesman with as much distinction and respect as they had shown the king's ambassador in 1840.

The greater part of the year he spent at his residence at Val Richer, a former cistercian monastery near Lisieux in Normandy, which had been sold at the time of the first Revolution.

His voice had the greatest weight in the choice of new candidates; the younger generation of French writers never looked in vain to him for encouragement, and his constant aim was to maintain the dignity and purity of the profession of letters.

But though he adhered inflexibly to the church of his fathers and combated the rationalist tendencies of the age, which seemed to threaten it with destruction, he retained not a tinge of the intolerance or asperity of the Calvinistic creed.

He respected in the Church of Rome the faith of the majority of his countrymen, and the writings of the great Catholic prelates, Bossuet and Bourdaloue, were as familiar and as dear to him as those of his own persuasion, and were commonly used by him in the daily exercises of family worship.

[17] However, it is more accurate to describe Guizot as a proponent of the juste milieu or political centrism that defended representative government against absolutism and the excesses of democracy.

[19] His ideas influenced subsequent liberal reformers throughout Europe such as József Eötvös in Hungary, Johan Rudolph Thorbecke in the Netherlands, and José Ortega y Gasset in Spain.

[15] In recent years, the scholarship of Pierre Rosanvallon, Larry Siedentop, Ivo Mosley and Aurelian Crăiuțu has renewed interest in Guizot's political thought and the Doctrinaires more generally.