In the fewer than five decades that Baudelaire's life lasted, four different forms of government succeeded each other in France. His early childhood coincided with the end of the Restoration, the last decade of the renewed control of the Bourbons after the abdication of Napoleon. When Paris's July Revolution of 1830 brought the ancien regime to an end, and Louis XV's grandson, Charles X, was forced to abandon the throne, Charles Baudelaire was just nine years old. The hybrid bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe, who inherited the throne from the last of the Bourbons, ran from Baudelaire's tenth to his twenty-seventh year. In other words, the period of his intellectual and literary formation fell in the time in which the bourgeoisie, with its catch cry of 'the golden mean' ['le juste milieu'], and its crowned figurehead from the House of Orléans undertook in large measure to modernise France, to industrialise it and to do so above all for its own economic and political advantage. This was the time of limited franchise in which only those who were rich or who were in a position to become so were allowed to participate in politics and the decision-making process, a period in which the plutocrats took over command and the slogan of the anglophile premier Guizot, 'Make money', became the catch cry, if not even a sort of categorical imperative of the age. The victim of this policy was the broad mass of the population, who found its representatives among the thinkers and especially the spokesmen of the very diverse republican and radical leftwing opposition parties and movements. Most of these representatives were in organisations outside parliament, indeed often taking the form of secret societies. Despite numerous economic crises, uprisings, attempted assassinations, strikes, corruption cases, moral scandals and so forth, the system of the July Monarchy nevertheless seemed so well established that the revolution of February 1848 burst on the European public like a bolt from the blue.