[citation needed] Louis Philippe was the eldest of three sons and a daughter, a family that was to have erratic fortunes from the beginning of the French Revolution to the Bourbon Restoration.

In 1788, with the French Revolution looming, the young Louis Philippe showed his liberal sympathies when he helped break down the door of a prison cell in Mont Saint-Michel, during a visit there with the Countess of Genlis.

The Duke of Biron wrote to War Minister Pierre Marie de Grave, praising the young colonel, who was promoted to brigadier general; he commanded the 4th Brigade of cavalry in Nicolas Luckner's Army of the North.

With the French government falling into the Reign of Terror about the time of the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal earlier in March 1793, Louis Philippe decided to leave France to save his life.

Meanwhile, Louis Philippe was forced to live in the shadows, avoiding both pro-Republican revolutionaries and Legitimist French émigré centres in various parts of Europe and also in the Austrian army.

Finally, in October 1793, Louis Philippe was appointed a teacher of geography, history, mathematics and modern languages, at a boys' boarding school.

The school, owned by a Monsieur Jost, was in Reichenau, a village on the upper Rhine in the then independent Grisons league state, now part of Switzerland.

Louis Philippe is also thought to have met Isaac Snow of Orleans, Massachusetts, who had escaped to France from a British prison hulk during the American Revolutionary War.

In 1839, while reflecting on his visit to the United States, Louis Philippe explained in a letter to François Guizot that his three years there had a large influence on his political beliefs and judgments when he became king.

Unable to find passage to Europe, the brothers spent a year in Cuba (from spring 1798 to autumn 1799), until they were unexpectedly expelled by the Spanish authorities.

They sailed via the Bahamas to Nova Scotia, where they were received by the Duke of Kent, son of King George III and (later) father of Queen Victoria.

[15] After the news of the outbreak of the Peninsular War reached Sicily in July 1808, he sailed for Gibraltar of his own initiative with the prince, but was directed to London and prohibited entry into Spain on pain of losing his allowance.

[16] He passed the winter in Malta and returned to Sicily in March 1809 upon receiving British authorisation for a military campaign in Italy against Joachim Murat, but instead he spent two months in Cagliari (from April to June 1809) trying to persuade Victor Emmanuel I to launch an attack against Napoleon in the Po Valley.

[17] During this time, he finally gave up on marrying Princess Elizabeth and unsuccessfully lobbied the Bourbons of Sicily to obtain the Ionian Islands as a principality for himself.

However, his resentment at the treatment of his family, the cadet branch of the House of Bourbon under the Ancien Régime, caused friction between him and Louis XVIII, and he openly sided with the liberal opposition.

On 6 March 1815, after the news of Napoléon's return to France reached Paris, Louis Philippe was dispatched to Lyon with the Comte d'Artois (the future Charles X) to organize a defense against the Emperor, but the hopelessness of the situation soon became apparent and he was back in the capital by the 12th.

Charles X named Louis Philippe Lieutenant général du royaume, and charged him to announce his desire to have his grandson succeed him to the popularly elected Chamber of Deputies.

As a consequence, because the chamber was aware of his liberal policies and of his popularity with the masses, they proclaimed Louis Philippe as the new French king, displacing the senior branch of the House of Bourbon.

Linking the monarchy to a people instead of a territory (as the previous designation King of France and of Navarre) was aimed at undercutting the Legitimist claims of Charles X and his family.

Because he owed his elevation to a revolution in Paris and a faction of liberal deputies in the parliament of Charles X, Louis Philippe's rule "lacked...the mystical appeal of its Divine Right predecessor.

Louis Philippe also commissioned the creation of a national history museum at the Palace of Versailles, where famous Napoleonic battles were painted by important artists.

[26] In parliament, the narrow, property-qualified electorate of the time (only about 1 in every 170 citizens was enfranchised at the beginning of the reign) provided Louis Philippe with consistent support.

[citation needed] According to William Fortescue, "Louis Philippe owed his throne to a popular revolution in Paris, he was the 'King of the Barricades', yet he went on to preside over a regime which rapidly gained notoriety for political repression of the left, class oppression of the poor and rule in the interests of the rich.

Often, in the midst of his gravest souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do?

He took a death sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner.

During the king's annual review of the Paris National Guard commemorating the revolution, Louis Philippe was passing along the Boulevard du Temple, which connected Place de la République to the Bastille, accompanied by three of his sons, Ferdinand Philippe, Duke of Orléans, Prince Louis, Duke of Nemours, and François d'Orléans, Prince of Joinville, and numerous staff.

[39] The National Assembly of France initially planned to accept young Philippe as king, but the strong current of public opinion rejected that.

Louis Philippe and his family remained in exile in Great Britain in Claremont, Surrey, though a plaque on Angel Hill, Bury St Edmunds, claims that he spent some time there, possibly due to a friendship with the Marquess of Bristol, who lived nearby at Ickworth House.

In 1876, his remains and those of his wife were taken to France and buried at the Chapelle royale de Dreux, the Orléans family necropolis his mother had built in 1816, and which he had enlarged and embellished after her death.

The company responsible for the endeavour received Louis Philippe's signature on 11 December 1839 as well as his permission to carry out the voyage in line with his policy of supporting colonial expansion and the construction of a second empire which had first commenced under him in Algeria around a decade earlier.