March 23, 1732: Birth of Princess Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon of France

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Fanz Xavier of Saxony, French Revolution, Louis François II of Conti, Louis XV of France and Navarre, Louis XVI of France, Marie Antoinette of Austria, Marie Leszczyńska, Pope Pious VI, Princess Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon of France

Princess Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon of France (March 23, 1732 – February 27, 1800).

King Louis XV of France and Navarre

Marie Adélaïde was born on March 23, 1737 in France as the sixth child and fourth daughter of King Louis XV of France and his wife, Marie Leszczyńska. She was named after her paternal grandmother, Marie Adélaïde, Dauphine of France, and was raised at the Palace of Versailles with her older sisters, Madame Louise Elisabeth, Madame Henriette, and Madame Marie Louise, along with her brother Louis, Dauphin of France.

Marie Adélaïde was a fille de France. She was referred to as Madame Quatrième (“Madame the Fourth”) until the death of her older sister Marie Louise in 1733, and then as Madame Troisième (“Madame the Third”); as Madame Adélaïde from 1737 to 1755; as Madame from 1755 to 1759; and then as Madame Adélaïde again from 1759 until her death.

Marie Adélaïde was never married. In the late 1740s, when she had reached the age when princesses were typically married, there were no potential Catholic consorts of desired status available, and she preferred to remain unmarried rather than marry someone below the status of a monarch or an heir to a throne.

Marriage prospects suggested to her were liaisons with the Louis François II, Prince of Conti and Prince Franz Xavier of Saxony, neither of whom had the status of being a monarch or an heir to a throne. In her teens, Marie Adélaïde fell in love with a member of the Lifeguard after having observed him perform his duties; she sent him her snuffbox with the message, “You will treasure this, soon you shall be informed from whose hand it comes.”

The guardsman informed his captain Duc d’Ayen, who in turn informed the king, who recognized the handwriting as his daughter’s, and granted the guard an annual pension of four thousand under the express condition that he should “at once remove to some place far from the Court and remain there for a very long time”.

In 1761, long after she passed the age when 18th-century princesses usually wed, she was reportedly suggested to marry the newly widowed King Carlos III of Spain. However, after she had seen his portrait, she refused, a rejection which was said to be the reason why King Carlos III never remarried.

Marie Adélaïde was described as an intelligent beauty; her appearance an ephemeral, “striking and disturbing beauty of the Bourbon type characterized by elegance”, with “large dark eyes at once passionate and soft”, and her personality as extremely haughty, with a dominant and ambitious character with a strong will, who came to dominate her younger siblings: “Madame Adélaïde had more mind than Madame Victoire; but she was altogether deficient in that kindness which alone creates affection for the great, abrupt manners, a harsh voice, and a short way of speaking, rendering her more than imposing. She carried the idea of the prerogative of rank to a high pitch.

From April 1774, Madame Adélaïde and her sisters attended to their father Louis XV on his deathbed until his death from smallpox on May 10. Despite the fact that the sisters never had the disease and the male members of the royal family, as well as the Dauphine, were kept away because of the high risk of catching the illness, the Mesdames were allowed to attend to him until his death, being female and therefore of no political importance because of the Salic Law even if they died. After the death of Louis XV, he was succeeded by his grandson Louis-Auguste as Louis XVI, who referred to his aunts as Mesdames Tantes.

Their nephew the King allowed the sisters to keep their apartments in the Palace of Versailles, and they kept attending court at special occasions – such as for example at the visit of Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, who reportedly charmed Marie Adélaïde. In 1777, Madame Marie Adélaïde and her sister Sophie were both created the Duchesses of Louvois in their own right by their nephew the King. However, they distanced themselves from court and often preferred to reside in their own Château de Bellevue in Meudon; they also traveled annually to Vichy, always with a retinue of at least three hundred people, and made the waters there fashionable.

Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor

Marie Adélaïde and her sisters did not get along well with Queen Marie Antoinette. When the queen introduced the new custom of informal evening family suppers, as well as other habits which undermined the formal court etiquette, it resulted in an exodus of the old court nobility in opposition to the queen’s reforms, which gathered in the salon of the Mesdames.

They entertained extensively at Bellevue as well as Versailles; their salon was reportedly regularly frequented by minister Maurepas, whom Adélaïde had elevated to power, by the Prince of Condé and the Prince of Conti, both members of the anti-Austrian party, as well as Beaumarchais, who read aloud his satires of Austria and its power figures.

Marie Adélaïde and her sisters Sophie and Victoire were able to escape France during the French Revolution. They arrived in Rome on April 16, 1791, where Pope Pious VI gave them an official welcome with ringing of bells, and where they stayed for about five years. In Rome, the sisters were given the protection of Pope Pope Pius VI and housed in the palace of Cardinal de Bernis.

In the Friday receptions of Cardinal de Bernis, Cornelia Knight described them: “Madame Adélaïde still retained traces of that beauty which had distinguished her in her youth, and there was great vivacity in her manner, and in the expression of her countenance. Madame Victoire had also an agreeable face, much good sense, and great sweetness of temper.

Their dress, and that of their suite, were old-fashioned, but unostentatious. The jewels they brought with them had been sold, one by one, to afford assistance to the poor emigrées who applied to the princesses in their distress. They were highly respected by the Romans; not only by the higher orders, but by the common people, who had a horror of the French revolution, and no great partiality for that nation in general.”

When news came that Louis XVI and his family had left Paris on the Flight to Varennes in June, a misunderstanding first caused the impression that the escape had succeeded; at this news, “the whole of Rome shouted with joy; the crowd massed itself under the windows of the Princesses crying out: Long live the King!”, and the Mesdames arranged a grand banquet for the nobility of Rome in celebration, which had to be interrupted when it was clarified that the escape had in fact failed.

Upon the invasion of Italy by Revolutionary France in 1796, Adélaïde and Victoire left Rome for Naples, where Marie Antoinette’s sister, Maria Carolina, was queen, and settled at the Neapolitan royal court in the Palace of Caserta. Queen Maria Carolina found their presence in Naples difficult: “I have the awful torment of harboring the two old Princesses of France with eighty persons in their retinue and every conceivable impertinence…”

The same ceremonies are observed in the interior of their apartments here as were formerly at Versailles.” When Naples was invaded by France in 1799, they left in a Russian frigate for Corfu, and finally settled in Trieste, where Victoire died of breast cancer. Adélaïde died one year later, on February 27, 1800 at the age of sixty-seven. Their bodies were returned to France by Louis XVIII at the time of the Bourbon Restoration and buried at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.

March 1, 1792: Death of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany

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Declaration of Pillnitz., Duke Francis III of Modena, Emperor Franz I, Emperor Joseph II, Emperor Leopold II, Empress Catherine II of Russia, Empress Maria Theresa, French Revolution, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Holy Roman Empire, King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, King Louis XVI of France and Navarre, Marie Antoinette of Austria

Leopold II (Peter Leopold Josef Anton Joachim Pius Gotthard; May 5, 1747 – March 1, 1792) was Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia and Archduke of Austria from 1790 to 1792, and Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1765 to 1790.

Family

Leopold was the third son of Empress Maria Theresa, Queen of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia and Archduchess of Austria and her husband, Emperor Franz I, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Archduke Leopold had many siblings, amongst them and the brother of Archduchess Marie Antoinette, Queen of France and Navarre the wife of King Louis XVI of France and Navarre.

Archduchess Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and Sicily, wife of King Ferdinand IV-III of Naples and Sicily who later became King of the Two Sicilies.

Archduchess Maria Christina, Duchesses of Teschen. Married in 1766 to Prince Albert of Saxony, the union was a true love match and the couple received the Duchy of Teschen.

Archduchess Maria Amalia, Duchess of Parma, Against her will, Amalia was married to Ferdinand of Parma (1751–1802). The marriage was supported by the future Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, whose first beloved wife had been Ferdinand’s sister, Princess Isabella of Parma. The Archduchess’s marriage to the Duke of Parma was part of a complicated series of contracts that married off Maria Theresa’s daughters to the King of Naples and Sicily and the Dauphin of France. All three sons-in-law were members of the House of Bourbon.

Archduchess Maria Amalia had fallen in love with Prince Charles of Zweibrücken, and she openly expressed her wish to marry him, in the same manner as her sister Archduchess Maria Christina had been permitted to marry Prince Albert of Saxony for love. Maria Theresa, however, forbade this and forced her to enter an arranged marriage. This caused a permanent conflict between the Empress and Maria Amalia, who never forgave her mother.

Archduke Leopold’s older brother was Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor.

Archduke Leopold of Austria, Grand Duke of Tuscany

Marriage

The Duchy of Modena was fearing extinction due to the lack of male heirs.

In 1753, a treaty was concluded between the House of Este and the House of Austria, by which the Archduke Leopold and Maria Beatrice d’Este of Modena were engaged, and the former was designated by Duke Francis III of Modena as heir for the imperial investiture as Duke of Modena and Reggio in the event of extinction of the Este male line.

Maria Beatrice d’Este of Modena was the eldest child of Ercole Rinaldo d’Este, heir to the Duchy of Modena and Reggio, and Maria Teresa Cybo-Malaspina, Duchess of Massa and Princess of Carrara.

In the meantime, Francis III would cover the office of governor of Milan ad interim, which was destined for the archduke. In 1761, however, following the death of an older brother, Archduke Charles, Archduke Leopold became heir to the throne of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as provided for the second male heir of the imperial couple, and the treaty had to be revised.

In 1763, in spite of the harsh opposition of Maria Beatrice’s father, the two families agreed to simply replace the name of Archduke Leopold with that of Maria Teresa’s fourteenth son, Archduke Ferdinand Charles of Austria, who was four years younger than his betrothed.

In January 1771 the Perpetual Diet of Regensburg ratified Ferdinand Charles’s future investiture and, in October, Maria Beatrice and he finally got married in Milan, thus giving rise to the new House of Austria-Este.

Upon the early death of his older brother Archduke Charles in 1761, the family decided that Archduke Leopold was going to succeed his father as Grand Duke of Tuscany. Tuscany had been envisioned and designated as a Secundogeniture, a territory and title bestowed upon the second born son, which was greater than an Appanage.

On August 5, 1765 Leopold married the Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain, daughter of King Carlos III of Spain and Maria Amalia of Saxony. Upon the death of his father, Empathy Franz I on 18 August 18, 1765, he became Grand Duke of Tuscany. Leopold’s older brother became Emperor Joseph II but his mother continued to rule the Austrian Hereditary lands as an absolute monarch.

Infanta Maria Luisa of Spain

For five years, Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany exercised little more than nominal authority, under the supervision of counselors appointed by his mother. In 1770, he made a journey to Vienna to secure the removal of this vexatious guardianship and returned to Florence with a free hand. During the twenty years that elapsed between his return to Florence and the death of his eldest brother Emperor Joseph II in 1790, he was employed in reforming the administration of his small state.

The death of Maria Theresa on November 29, 1780 left Emperor Joseph II free to pursue his own policy, and he immediately directed his government on a new course, attempting to realize his ideal of enlightened despotism acting on a definite system for the good of all.

Emperor Joseph II died on February 20, 1790 and was succeeded by his brother who became Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia and Archduke of Austria. Emperor Leopold II was a moderate proponent of enlightened absolutism.

When Emperor Leopold II succeeded to the Austrian Hereditary lands, he began by making large concessions to the interests offended by his brother’s innovations. He recognized the Estates of his different dominions as “the pillars of the monarchy”, pacified the Hungarians and Bohemians, and divided the insurgents in the Austrian Netherlands (now Belgium) by means of concessions. When these failed to restore order, he marched troops into the country and re-established his own authority,

Leopold lived for barely two years after his accession as Holy Roman Emperor, and during that period he was hard pressed by peril from west and east alike. The growing revolutionary disorders in France endangered the life of his sister Marie Antoinette, the Queen of Louis XVI, and also threatened his own dominions with the spread of subversive agitation. His sister sent him passionate appeals for help, and he was pestered by the royalist émigrés, who were intriguing to bring about armed intervention in France.

From the east he was threatened by the aggressive ambition of Empress Catherine II of Russia and by the unscrupulous policy of King Friedrich Wilhelm II Prussia. Catherine would have been delighted to see Austria and Prussia embark on a crusade in the cause of kings against the French Revolution.

While they were busy beyond the Rhine, she would have annexed what remained of Poland and made conquests against the Ottoman Empire. Leopold II had no difficulty in seeing through the rather transparent cunning of the Russian empress, and he refused to be misled.

On August 25, 1791, he met the King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia at Pillnitz Castle, near Dresden, and they drew up the Declaration of Pillnitz, stating their readiness to intervene in France if and when their assistance was called for by the other powers. The declaration was a mere formality, for, as Leopold knew, neither Russia nor Britain was prepared to act, and he endeavored to guard against the use which he foresaw the émigrés would try to make of it.

In face of the reaction in France to the Declaration of Pillnitz, the intrigues of the émigrés, and attacks made by the French revolutionists on the rights of the German princes in Alsace, Leopold continued to hope that intervention might not be required. When Louis XVI swore to observe the constitution of September 1791, the emperor professed to think that a settlement had been reached in France.

The attacks on the rights of the German princes on the left bank of the Rhine, and the increasing violence of the parties in Paris which were agitating to bring about war, soon showed, however, that this hope was vain. Leopold meant to meet the challenge of the revolutionists in France with dignity and temper, however the effect of the Declaration of Pillnitz was to contribute to the radicalization of their political movement.

Emperor Leopold II died suddenly in Vienna, on March 1, 1792.

Like his parents before him, Leopold had sixteen children, the eldest of his eight sons being his successor, Emperor Franz II, the last Holy Roman Emperor and first Emperor of Austria. Some of his other sons were prominent personages in their day. Among them were: Ferdinand III, Grand Duke of Tuscany; Archduke Charles, Duke of Teschen, a celebrated soldier; Archduke Johann of Austria, also a soldier; Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary; and Archduke Rainer, Viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia.

July 14, 1789: Louis XVI of France and Navarre and the Storming of the Bastille

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Bastille, Bastille Day, Citizen Louis Capet, Estates General, French Revolution, Jacques Necker, King of the French, Louis XVI of France and Navarre, Marie Antoinette of Austria, National Assembly, Storming the Bastille

Louis XVI (Louis-Augusté; August 23, 1754 – January 21, 1793) was the last King of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as Citizen Louis Capét during the four months just before he was executed by guillotine.

Louis XVI was the son of Louis, Dauphin of France, son and heir-apparent of King Louis XV, and Maria Josepha of Saxony. Louis XVI’s mother was Maria Josépha of Saxony the daughter of Augustus III, Prince-Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, and Maria Josepha of Austria, an Archduchess of Austria, the eldest child of Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor and Princess Wilhelmina Amalia of Brunswick-Lüneburg. She was named for her father.

On May 16, 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis-Augusté married the fourteen-year-old Habsburg Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria (better known by the French form of her name, Marie Antoinette), his second cousin once removed and the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Franz I and his wife, the Empress Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia.

This marriage was met with hostility from the French public. France’s alliance with Austria had pulled the country into the disastrous Seven Years’ War, in which it was defeated by the British and the Prussians, both in Europe and in North America. By the time that Louis-Augusté and Marie-Antoinette were married, the French people generally disliked the Austrian alliance, and Marie-Antoinette was seen as an unwelcome foreigner.

Archduchess Marie Antoinette of Austria

When Louis Augusté’s father died in 1765, he became the new Dauphin. Upon his grandfather’s death on May 10, 1774, he assumed the title King of France and Navarre until September 4, 1791, when he received the title of King of the French until the monarchy was abolished on September 21, 1792.

The first part of his reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to abolish serfdom, remove the taille (land tax) and the corvée (labour tax), and increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolish the death penalty for deserters.

The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation. Louis XVI implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices.

In periods of bad harvests, it led to food scarcity which, during a particularly bad harvest in 1775, prompted the masses to revolt. From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the Ancien Régime.

This led to the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. Discontent among the members of France’s middle and lower classes resulted in strengthened opposition to the French aristocracy and to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife Queen Marie Antoinette were viewed as representatives.

Tensions rose in France between reformist and conservative factions as the country struggled to resolve the economic crisis. In May, the Estates General legislative assembly was revived, but members of the Third Estate broke ranks, declaring themselves to be the National Assembly of the country, and on June 20, vowed to write a constitution for the kingdom.

On July 11, Jacques Necker, the Finance Minister of Louis XVI, who was sympathetic to the Third Estate, was dismissed by the king, provoking an angry reaction among Parisians.

Crowds formed, fearful of an attack by the royal army or by foreign regiments of mercenaries in the king’s service, and seeking to arm the general populace. Early on July 14, one crowd besieged the Hôtel des Invalides for firearms, muskets, and cannons, stored in its cellars.

That same day, another crowd stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in Paris that had historically held people jailed on the basis of lettres de cachet (literally “signet letters”), arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed and did not indicate the reason for the imprisonment, and was believed to hold a cache of ammunition and gunpowder. As it happened, at the time of the attack, the Bastille held only seven inmates, none of great political significance.

The crowd was eventually reinforced by mutinous Régiment des Gardes Françaises (“French Guards”), whose usual role was to protect public buildings. They proved a fair match for the fort’s defenders, and Governor de Launay, the commander of the Bastille, capitulated and opened the gates to avoid a mutual massacre. According to the official documents, about 200 attackers and just one defender died before the capitulation.

However, possibly because of a misunderstanding, fighting resumed. In this second round of fighting, de Launay and seven other defenders were killed, as was Jacques de Flesselles, the prévôt des marchands (“provost of the merchants”), the elected head of the city’s guilds, who under the feudal monarchy also had the competences of a present-day mayor.

Shortly after the storming of the Bastille, late in the evening of August 4, after a very stormy session of the Assemblée constituante, feudalism was abolished. On August 26, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen) was proclaimed.

The Increasing tensions and violence and the storming of the Bastille, and the subsequent riots in Paris forced Louis XVI to definitively recognize the legislative authority of the National Assembly.

Louis XVI’s indecisiveness and conservatism led some elements of the people of France to view him as a symbol of the perceived tyranny of the Ancien Régime, and his popularity deteriorated progressively.

His unsuccessful flight to Varennes in June 1791, four months before the constitutional monarchy was declared, seemed to justify the rumors that the king tied his hopes of political salvation to the prospects of foreign intervention.

The credibility of the king was deeply undermined, and the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic became an ever-increasing possibility. The growth of anti-clericalism among revolutionaries resulted in the abolition of the dîme (religious land tax) and several government policies aimed at the dechristianization of France.

In a context of civil and international war, Louis XVI was suspended and arrested at the time of the Insurrection of August 10, 1792. One month later, the monarchy was abolished and the First French Republic was proclaimed on September 21, 1792.

Louis XVI was then tried by the National Convention (self-instituted as a tribunal for the occasion), found guilty of high treason and executed by guillotine on January 21, 1793, as a desacralized French citizen under the name of Citizen Louis Capét, in reference to Hugh Capét, the founder of the Capetian dynasty – which the revolutionaries interpreted as Louis’s surname.

Louis XVI was the only king of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Thérèse, was given over to the Austrians in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.

May 10, 1774: Accession of Louis XVI on the throne of France and Navarre.

Tags

Dauphin, French Revolution, King Louis XVI of France and Navarre. Louis Auguste, Louis Capet, Marie Antoinette of Austria

Louis XVI (Louis-Auguste; August 23, 1754 – January 21, 1793) was the last king of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution.

In 1765, upon the death of his father, Louis, Dauphin of France, he became the new Dauphin. Upon his grandfather Louis XV’s death on 10 May 1774, he assumed the title King of France and Navarre, until 4 September 1791, when he received the title of King of the French until the monarchy was abolished on 21 September 1792.He was referred to as Citizen Louis Capet during the four months just before he was executed by guillotine.

On 16 May 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis-Auguste married the fourteen-year-old Habsburg Archduchess Maria Antonia (better known by the French form of her name, Marie Antoinette), his second cousin once removed and the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Franz I and his wife, the Empress Maria Theresa, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia and Archduchess of Austria.

The first part of his reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to abolish serfdom, remove the taille (land tax) and the corvée (labour tax), and increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolish the death penalty for deserters. The French nobility reacted to the proposed reforms with hostility, and successfully opposed their implementation.

Louis implemented deregulation of the grain market, advocated by his economic liberal minister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices. In periods of bad harvests, it led to food scarcity which, during a particularly bad harvest in 1775, prompted the masses to revolt.

From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the Ancien Régime.

This led to the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. Discontent among the members of France’s middle and lower classes resulted in strengthened opposition to the French aristocracy and to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, were viewed as representatives. Increasing tensions and violence were marked by events such as the storming of the Bastille, during which riots in Paris forced Louis to definitively recognize the legislative authority of the National Assembly.

Louis’s indecisiveness and conservatism led some elements of the people of France to view him as a symbol of the perceived tyranny of the Ancien Régime, and his popularity deteriorated progressively.

His unsuccessful flight to Varennes in June 1791, four months before the constitutional monarchy was declared, seemed to justify the rumors that the king tied his hopes of political salvation to the prospects of foreign intervention. The credibility of the king was deeply undermined, and the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic became an ever-increasing possibility.

The growth of anti-clericalism among revolutionaries resulted in the abolition of the dîme (religious land tax) and several government policies aimed at the dechristianization of France.

In a context of civil and international war, Louis XVI was suspended and arrested at the time of the Insurrection of August 10, 1792. One month later, the absolute monarchy was abolished and the First French Republic was proclaimed on September 21, 1792.

Louis was then tried by the National Convention (self-instituted as a tribunal for the occasion), found guilty of high treason, and executed by guillotine on January 21, 1793, as a desacralized French citizen under the name of Citizen Louis Capet, in reference to Hugh Capet, the founder of the Capetian dynasty – which the revolutionaries interpreted as Louis’s surname.

Louis XVI was the only king of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy. Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Therese, was given over to the Austrians in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.