Marie-Louise, princesse de Lamballe
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Marie Thérèse Louise de Savoie-Carignan, princesse de Lamballe (September 8, 1749 – September 3, 1792) was an Italian-French courtier and aristocrat of the House of Savoy, and one of the best-known victims of the French Revolution.
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[edit] Life
[edit] Early life
Born in Turin, she was the fourth daughter of Louis-Victor de Savoie-Carignan (died 1774; great-grandfather of Charles Albert of Sardinia) and of Christine Henriette of Hesse-Rheinfels-Rothenburg. In 1767, she married Louis Alexandre Stanislaus de Bourbon, prince of Lamballe, son of the duke of Penthièvre, a grandson of King Louis XIV's natural son, Louis Alexandre, comte de Toulouse. Her husband died the following year, and she went with her father-in-law to Rambouillet, where she lived until the marriage of the Dauphin, future king Louis XVI, when she returned to the court.
Marie Antoinette, charmed by her gentle manners, singled her out as companion and confidante, and the two became good friends. After her accession as Queen, Marie Antoinette, in spite of the king's opposition, had her appointed superintendent of the royal household. Between 1776 and 1785 the comtesse de Polignac supplanted the princesse de Lamballe as favourite - but when the queen tired of the Polignacs' intrigues, she turned again to Madame de Lamballe. From 1785 until the Revolution, she was Marie Antoinette's closest friend.
[edit] Revolution
Madame de Lamballe came with the queen to the Tuileries Palace after the outbreak of Revolutionary events. Her salon served as a meeting-place for the queen and the members of the National Assembly whom she wished to win over to the cause of the Bourbon Monarchy.
After a visit to the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1791 to appeal for help for the royal family, she wrote down her will and returned to the Tuileries, where she continued her services to the queen until August 10, when she shared her imprisonment in the Temple.
[edit] Killing
On August 19, she was transferred to La Force for refusing to take the oath against the monarchy - however, she had agreed to preach the freedom and legality of the men. Since she refused the oath, on September 3 she was delivered over to the fury of the populace.
The mob stripped and gang raped her, cut off her breasts and mutilated the rest of her body. There are further rumors that a man cut off her genitals which he impaled upon a pike and proceeded to rip out her heart which he then ate. The Princesse de Lamballe’s head was cut off, crudely stuck on a pike and carried away to a nearby café where customers were encouraged to drink to the death of the Princess. Following this, the head was replaced upon the pike and was paraded beneath Marie Antoinette’s balcony at the temple. The Paris mob were certainly responsible for her death; however, it was also five citizens of the local Section in Paris who delivered her body to the authorities shortly after her death, contrary to royalist propaganda which claimed her body was displayed on the street for a full day. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, her father-in-law finally succeeded in gaining her body and it was interred in his crypt.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. In turn, it gives the following references:
- George Bertin, Madame de Lamballe (Paris, 1888).
- Austin Dobson, Four Frenchwomen (1890).
- B. C. Hardy, Princesse de Lamballe (1908).
- Comte de Lescure, La Princesse de Lamballe d'après des documents inédits (1864).
- Letters of the princess published by Ch. Schmidt in La Revolution française (vol. xxxix., 1900); L. Lambeau, Essais sur la mort de madame la princesse de Lamballe (1902).
- Sir Francis Montefiore, The Princesse de Lamballe (1896).
- The Secret Memoirs of the Royal Family of France ... now first published from the Journal, Letters and Conversations of the Princesse de Lamballe (London, 2 vols., 1826) have since appeared in various editions in English and in French. They are apocryphal, attributed to Catherine Flyde, Marchioness Govion-Broglio-Solari.
