Louis-Philippe was born in Paris to Louis Philippe Joseph, Duc de Chartres (later Duc d'Orléans and also known as "Philippe Égalité") and Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre. As a member of the reigning House of Bourbon, he was a Prince du Sang. He was the first of three sons and a daughter of the Orléans family, a family that was to have erratic fortunes for the next court years. The relationship between the Bourbon-Orléans junior line, to which he belonged, and the Bourbon elder line, to which the king belonged, was linked through Louis XIII. The elder line had a deep distrust of the intentions of the family which would succeed to the French throne should the senior Bourbons die out. Exiled from the royal court, the Orléans confined themselves to studies of the literature and sciences emerging from the Enlightenment. Louis-Philippe was tutored by the Comtesse de Genlis, beginning in 1782. Madame de Genlis instilled in him a fondness for liberal thought; it is probably during this period that Louis-Philippe picked up his slightly Voltairean brand of Catholicism. When Louis-Philippe's grandfather died in 1785, his father succeeded him as Duke of Orléans, and Louis-Philippe succeeded his father as Duke of Chartres. In 1788, with the 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 Madame de Genlis. From October 1788 to October 1789 the Palais-Royal, the Paris home of the Orléans family, was a meeting-place for the revolutionaries. In 1830, the July Revolution overthrew Charles X. Charles abdicated in favor of his 10-year-old grandson, the Duc de Bordeaux. Louis-Philippe was charged by Charles X to announce to the popularly elected Chambre des Députés his desire to have his grandson succeed him . Louis-Philippe did not do this in order to increase his own chances of succession. As a consequence, because the chamber was aware of Louis-Philippe's Republican policies and his popularity with the masses, they proclaimed Louis-Philippe, who for 11 days had been acting as the regent for his small cousin, as the new French king. In displacing the senior line of the House of Bourbon, Louis-Philippe succeeded where his father, Philippe Égalité, had failed.

In direct opposition to the absolutist tendencies of his Bourbon predecessors, Louis-Philippe took the style of King of the French, a constitutional innovation known as popular monarchy which linked the monarch's title to a people, not to a state, as the previous designation King of France did. In doing so, the new king sought to undercut the claims of Charles X and his family by repudiating the Legitimist theory of the divine right of kings. Louis-Phillippe ruled in an unpretentious fashion, avoiding the pomp and lavish spending of his predecessors. Despite this outward appearance of simplicity, his support came from the wealthy middle classes. At first, he was much loved and called the "Citizen King" and the "bourgeois monarch," but his popularity suffered as his government was perceived as increasingly conservative and monarchical. Under his management the conditions of the working classes deteriorated, and the income gap widened considerably. An economic crisis in 1847 led to the citizens of France revolting against their king again the following year. On 24 February 1848, during the February 1848 Revolution, to general surprise, King Louis-Philippe abdicated in favor of his nine-year-old grandson, Philippe. (His son and heir, Prince Ferdinand, had died in an accident in 1842.) Fearful of what had happened to Louis XVI, he quickly disguised himself and fled Paris. Riding in an ordinary cab under the name of "Mr. Smith", he escaped to England. According to The Times of 6 March 1848, the King and Queen were received at Newhaven, East Sussex before travelling by train to London.