Well, a LOT happened to France after Napoleon was exiled. I remember that we had to learn ALL about this, and it was such a cool unit!
Anyways, when the First French Empire fell in 1814 and again in 1815, there was a Bourbon restoration and Louis XVIII (Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI died in prison but monarchists regard him as being the legitimate king while he was alive) took the throne of France until his death in 1824.
Because Louis was seen as the legitimate monarch by the European powers of the Coalition (Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia), there was reconciliation with France following Napoleon's defeat and France did not suffer too heavily under the terms of the congress of Vienna. She lost some land to the east, most significantly around Geneva, which went to the Swiss, and alone the Rhine. She was also required to pay Prussia for fortifications alone the Rhine to protect against another French attack.
Louis XVIII died in 1824 and was succeeded by Charles X who started to impliment policies that were more in line with the Ancien Regime (i.e. pre-revolution) way of thinking. He boosted the power of the nobility and the clergy, the latter of which had been particularly sidelined under the Revolution and Napoleon. Due to his trying to return to Ancien Regime values, Charles was deposed by a revolution in 1830 known as the July Revolution which placed Louis-Philippe on the throne as King of theFrench rather than King of France. Louis-Philippe was known as the "Citizen King" due to his recognition that he only had his status as king thanks to the people of France; he was actually elected king, although he was actually of royal blood. Louis-Philippe was a supporter of the revolution and served with reasonable distinction during the early years of the Revolutionary Wars before the Revolution took a turn for the worse under the Terror and his father was executed. After this he went into voluntary exile until 1815.
Unfortunately, Louis-Philippe's popularity waned and in 1848, a year that saw many revolutions across Europe, he was deposed and replaced with the Second Republic. The republic was to prove short lived; after some bickering over the leadership of the republic, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoléon was elected president by a landslide in 1848, despite the proviso in the Congress of Vienna that no relative of Bonaparte could hold power in France.
Louis-Napoléon devised an economic and political program that he believed would help restore the glory of France but he claimed that the 4-year non-renewable term in office that the president at the time held was too short for him to implement his reforms and as such tried to make the National Assembly amend the constitution to allow re-election. Fearing the possibility of a dictator being constantly re-elected or declaring himself president for life, the monarchist-dominated Assembly refused to budge. After months of stalemate, Louis-Napoléon used the issue of male suffrage to win the support of the army and launch a coup, becoming a dictator on 2nd December 1851. A year later he was to have himself crowned as Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.
