The Life of Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon, Duchess of Angoulême. Conclusion

Tags

Battle of Waterloo, Charles X of France and Navarre, Comte de Chambord, Duchess of Angoulême, Henri de Bourbon, King ofvthe French, Louis Antoine, Louis Philippe, Louis XIX of France and Navarre, Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon, Napoléon of France

Exile

Marie-Thérèse arrived in Vienna on January 9, 1796, in the evening, twenty-two days after she had left the Temple.

She later left Vienna and moved to Mitau, Courland (now Jelgava, Latvia), where her father’s eldest surviving brother, the comte de Provence, lived as a guest of Tsar Paul I of Russia. He had proclaimed himself King of France as Louis XVIII after the death of Marie-Thérèse’s brother. With no children of his own, he wished his niece to marry her cousin, Louis-Antoine, duc d’Angoulême, son of his brother, the comte d’Artois. Marie-Thérèse agreed.

Louis-Antoine was a shy, stammering young man. His father tried to persuade Louis XVIII against the marriage. However, the wedding took place on June 10, 1799 at Jelgava Palace (modern-day Latvia). The couple had no children.

Princess Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon, Duchess of Angoulême

In Britain

The royal family moved to Great Britain, where they settled at Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire, while her father-in-law spent most of his time in Edinburgh, where he had been given apartments at Holyrood House.
The long years of exile ended with the abdication of Napoleon I in 1814, and the first Bourbon Restoration, when Louis XVIII stepped upon the throne of France, twenty-one years after the death of his brother Louis XVI.

Bourbon Restoration

Louis XVIII attempted to steer a middle course between liberals and the Ultra-royalists led by the Charles Philippe, Count of Artois. He also attempted to suppress the many men who claimed to be Marie-Thérèse’s long-lost younger brother, Louis XVII. Those claimants caused the princess a good deal of distress.

Marie-Thérèse found her return emotionally draining and she was distrustful of the many Frenchmen who had supported either the Republic or Napoleon. She visited the site where her brother had died, and the Madeleine Cemetery where her parents were buried. The royal remains were exhumed on January 18, 1815 and re-interred in Saint-Denis Basilica, the royal necropolis of France, on January 21, 1815, the 22nd anniversary of Louis XVI’s execution.

In March 1815, Napoléon returned to France and rapidly began to gain supporters and raised an army in the period known as the Hundred Days. Louis XVIII fled France, but Marie-Thérèse, who was in Bordeaux at the time, attempted to rally the local troops. The troops agreed to defend her but not to cause a civil war with Napoléon’s troops. Marie-Thérèse stayed in Bordeaux despite Napoléon’s orders for her to be arrested when his army arrived. Believing her cause was lost, and to spare Bordeaux senseless destruction, she finally agreed to leave.

Her actions caused Napoléon to remark that she was “the only man in her family.”

After Napoléon was defeated at Waterloo on June 18, 1815, the House of Bourbon was restored for a second time, and Louis XVIII returned to France.

On February 13, 1820, tragedy struck when Charles Philippe, Count of Artois, younger son, Charles Ferdinand d’Artois, Duke of Berry was assassinated by the anti-Bourbon and Bonapartist sympathiser Pierre Louvel, a saddler. Soon after, the royal family was cheered when it was learned that Marie-Caroline of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duchess of Berry was pregnant at the time of her husband’s death.

On September 29, 1820, Marie-Caroline of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duchess of Berry gave birth to a son, Henri, duc de Bordeaux, the so-called “Miracle child”, who later, as the Bourbon pretender to the French throne, assumed the title of Comte de Chambord.

Madame la Dauphine

Louis XVIII died on September 16, 1824, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Charles Philippe, Count of Artois as King Charles X. Marie-Thérèse’s husband was now heir to the throne, and she was addressed as Madame la Dauphine. However, anti-monarchist feeling was on the rise again. Charles’s ultra-royalist sympathies alienated many members of the working and middle classes.

On August 2, 1830, after Les Trois Glorieuses, the Revolution of July 1830 which lasted three days, Charles X, who with his family had gone to the Château de Rambouillet, abdicated in favor of his son, Louis-Antoine who was briefly King Louis XIX, but in turn abdicated in favor of his nephew, the nine-year old duc de Bordeaux. However, in spite of the fact that Charles X had asked him to be regent for the young king, Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans accepted the crown when the Chambre des Députés named him King of the French.

On August 4, in a long cortège, Marie-Thérèse left Rambouillet for a new exile with her uncle, her husband, her young nephew, his mother, the duchesse de Berry, and his sister Louise Marie Thérèse d’Artois. On 16 Augustn16, the family had reached the port of Cherbourg where they boarded a ship for Britain. King Louis-Philippe had taken care of the arrangements for the departure and sailing of his cousins.

Final exile

The royal family lived in what is now 22 (then 21) Regent Terrace in Edinburgh until 1833 when the former king chose to move to Prague as a guest of Marie-Thérèse’s cousin, Emperor Franz I of Austria. They moved into luxurious apartments in Prague Castle. Later, the royal family left Prague and moved to the estate of Count Coronini near Gorizia, which was then Austrian but is in Italy today. Marie-Thérèse devotedly nursed her uncle through his last illness in 1836, when Charles X died of cholera.

Her husband, Louis-Antoine died in 1844 and was buried next to his father. Marie-Thérèse then moved to Schloss Frohsdorf, a baroque castle just outside Vienna, where she spent her days taking walks, reading, sewing and praying. Her nephew, who now styled himself as the comte de Chambord, and his sister joined her there. In 1848, Louis Philippe’s reign ended in a revolution and, for the second time, France became a Republic.

Death

Marie-Thérèse died of pneumonia on October 19, 1851, three days after the fifty-eighth anniversary of the execution of her mother. She was buried next to her uncle/father-in-law, Charles X, and her husband, Louis XIX, in the crypt of the Franciscan monastery church of Castagnavizza in Görz, then in Austria, now Kostanjevica in the Slovenian city of Nova Gorica. Like her deceased uncle, Marie-Thérèse had remained a devout Roman Catholic.

Later, her nephew Henri, the comte de Chambord, last male of the senior line of the House of Bourbon; his wife, the comtesse de Chambord (formerly the Archduchess Marie-Thérèse of Austria-Este, daughter of Duke Francis IV of Modena and his wife, Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy); and the comte’s only sister, Louise, Duchess of Parma, were also laid to rest in the crypt in Görz. The famous antiquarian the Duke of Blacas was also buried there in honor of his dutiful years of service as a minister to Louis XVIII and Charles X.

Marie-Thérèse is described on her gravestone as the “Queen Dowager of France”, a reference to her husband’s 20 min rule as King Louis XIX of France.

August 24, 1883: Death of Prince Henri, Count of Chambord, pretender to the French throne. Part II.

Tags

Comte de Chambord, Count of Paris, Emperor Napoleon III of France, Franco-Prussian War, Henri V of France, Philippe VII of France, Third Republic

In the early 1870s, as the Second Empire collapsed following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War at the battle of Sedan on 1 September 1870, the royalists became a majority in the National Assembly. The Orléanists agreed to support the aging comte de Chambord’s claim to the throne, with the expectation that at his childless death he would be succeeded by their own claimant, Philippe d’Orléans, comte de Paris.

Henri was then pretender for both Legitimists and Orléanists, and the restoration of monarchy in France seemed a close possibility. However, Henri insisted that he would accept the crown only on condition that France abandon its tricolour flag and return to the use of the white fleur de lys flag. He rejected a compromise, whereby the fleur-de-lys would be the new king’s personal standard, and the tricolour would remain the national flag.

Defeat

A temporary Third Republic was established, to wait for Henri’s death and his replacement by the more liberal Comte de Paris. By the time this occurred in 1883, public opinion had however swung behind the Republic as the form of government which, in the words of the former President Adolphe Thiers, “divides us least”. Thus, Henri could be mockingly hailed by republicans such as Georges Clemenceau as “the French Washington” — the one man without whom the Republic could not have been founded.

Henri died on August 24, 1883 at his residence in Frohsdorf, Austria, at the age of sixty-two, bringing the Louis XV male-only line to an end. He was buried in his grandfather Charles X’s crypt in the church of the Franciscan Kostanjevica Monastery in Gorizia, then Austria, now in Slovenian city of Nova Gorica. His personal property, including the château de Chambord, was left to his nephew, Robert I, Duke of Parma (son of Henri’s late sister).

Henri’s death left the Legitimist line of succession distinctly confused. On one hand, Henri himself had accepted that the head of the Maison de France (as distinguished from the Maison de Bourbon) would be the head of the Orléans line, i.e. the Comte de Paris, recognized by most monarchists as Philippe VII of France. This was accepted by many Legitimists, and was the default on legal grounds; the only surviving Bourbon line more senior was the Spanish branch, which had renounced its right to inherit the throne of France as a condition of the Treaty of Utrecht.

However, many if not most of Henri’s supporters, including his widow, chose to disregard his statements and this law, arguing that no one had the right to deny to the senior direct-male-line male Bourbon to be the head of the Maison de France and thus the legitimate King of France; the renunciation of the Spanish branch is under this interpretation illegitimate and therefore void. Thus these Legitimists settled on Infante Juan, Count of Montizón, the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne (the Salic law having been suspended in Spain, the actual king, Alfonso XII, was not the senior descendant in the male line), as their claimant to the French crown.

Pretenders to the Throne ~ France, Part II.

Tags

Comte de Chambord, Duke of Anjou, France, French pretenders, Henri VII, Kingdom, Louis XX, Napoleon, Napoleon III, Third Republic

Picking up where we left of yesterday we saw Louis Philippe mount the throne of France. While I do admit that his succession was in violation of the traditional laws of the kingdom he did come to power during a revolution and it seems that in revolutions most laws are off the books and it in a time of upheaval the revolutionaries get to set the new rules.

Louis Philippe’s reign lasted about 18 years when once more revolution struck France and the king fell from power. The heir to the French throne, Prince Ferdinand Duc d’Orléans died in a carriage accident in 1842 leaving his son, grandson of the king, Prince Philippe d’Orléans as heir. The National Assembly of France was willing to accept Philippe as king but the tide of opinion toward the monarchy was very negative and instead France was once again proclaimed a Republic.

The second Republic was replaced by the second Empire under Napoleon III. Once that regime collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 France once again turned toward the House of Bourbon with the intent of restoring the royal line of French kings. The vast majority of French monarchists accepted the claims of Henri V, Comte de Chambord as the legitimate pretender to the throne. Henri was childless and not likely to father any children so many regarded Philippe d’Orléans as Henri’s eventual and rightful heir. The National Assembly and Henri could not reach agreement on the nature of his rule and what rights and powers he would have. Also, Henri, insisted he reign under the white flag of the House of Bourbon and not the tri-colored flag of the revolution. Unable to reach agreement a Third Republic was proclaimed. There was a belief that a restoration of Philippe to the French throne would occur after Henri’s death but Henri lived until 1883 and by that time support for the monarchy had declined (they lost the majority in Parliament in 1877) to the point where a continuation of the Third Republic was the most favorable option.

The vast majority of French monarchists supported the Orléans claimant while a faction of those that did not support the Orléans claim supported the descendents of Felipe V of Spain. These supporters, called Legitimists, believe in the fundamental laws of the kingdom and that a French prince cannot legally give up his rights to the throne. Therefore the renunciation of Philippe Duc d’Anjou (King Felipe V of Spain) of his rights were invalid according to the laws of France at the time. With the death of Henri V in 1883 the Legitimist pretender was Juan, Count of Montizón who was the senior heir general to King Louis XIV. Spain was also experiencing civil discord with the Carlists War, which did not legally recognize Queen Isabel II’s right to the Spanish throne due to Felipe V instituting the Salic Law in Spain, which was abolished by King Fernando VII in 1829 by his wife, Maria Christina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, in order for their daughter Isabel to succeed to the Crown.

Today the representative of the Spanish line for the French crown is HRH Prince Louis Alphonse of Bourbon, Duke of Anjou. He is a great-grand son of King Alfonso XIII of Spain and through his mother he is a great-grandson of Spain’s former dictator Francisco Franco. He is first cousin once removed to Spain’s current king, Juan Carlos. To his Legitimist supporters he is King Louis XX of France. All titles he holds are in pretense as he does not hold any legal title in Spain and is not a member of the Spanish Royal Family. He is married to María Margarita Vargas Santaella and they have three children, twin boys, Louis and Alphonse and a daughter Eugénie.

The Orléans representative is HRH Prince Henri VII d’ Orléans, Comte de Paris, Duc de France. He is a descendent of King Louis Philippe. His first marriage was to Duchess Marie Therese of Württemberg, daughter of HRH Prince Philipp Albrecht, Duke of Württemberg (himself a claimant to the throne of Württemberg) and Archduchess Rosa of Austria, Princess of Tuscany. They had five children. The eldest son, Prince François of Orléans, Count of Clermont, is not heir to his father’s claim due to mental difficulties developed because of toxoplasmosis during pregnancy. Henri’s heir is his second son, Prince Jean, Duke of Vendôme, and is married to Philomena de Tornos Steinhart and they have two children, Prince Gaston and Princess Antoinette.