Marie-Louise, princesse de Lamballe

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Portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe
Portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe

Princess Marie Thérèse Louise of Savoy-Carignan, Princess de Lamballe (September 8, 1749 – September 3, 1792) was an Italian-French courtier, aristocrat of the House of Savoy, and royal confidante to French queen Marie Antoinette. Her killing sparked a movement of anti-revolutionary propaganda, which ultimately led to the development and implementation of the Reign of Terror.

Contents

[edit] Life

[edit] Early years

Born in Turin, she was the fourth daughter of Louis-Victor of Savoy, Prince of Carignan (died 1774; great-grandfather of Charles Albert of Sardinia) and of Landgravine Christine of Hesse-Rheinfels-Rothenburg. In 1767, she married Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, Prince de Lamballe, the only surviving son of the vastly wealthy Duc de Penthièvre, the sole heir of Louis XIV's illegitimate son, the Comte de Toulouse. The Duc de Penthièvre was the head of a cadet branch of the reigning House of Bourbon called the House of Bourbon-Penthièvre.

Her husband died the following year, and she went to live with her kindly father-in-law at the Château de Rambouillet. Upon the marriage of the future king Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1770, she returned to 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, appointed the Princesse de Lamballe to be the superintendent of her royal household. Between 1776 and 1785, the Duchesse de Polignac supplanted the Princess de Lamballe as the queen's favourite. However, when Marie Antoinette tired of the Polignacs' intrigues, she turned again to the princess. From 1785 until the French Revolution, the Princesse de Lamballe was the besieged queen's closest friend.

[edit] Revolution

Portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe
Portrait of the Princesse de Lamballe

The Princesse de Lamballe accompanied the royal family to the Tuileries Palace after the March on Versailles. In Paris, her salon served as a meeting-place for the queen and the members of the National Constituent Assembly, many of whom the queen wished to win over to the cause of the Bourbon Monarchy.

After a visit to the Great Britain in 1791 to appeal for help for the royal family, the princess wrote her will and returned to the Tuileries, where she continued her services to the queen until August 10, when she was imprisoned with the queen in the Temple.

[edit] Murder

On August 19, she was transferred to La Force for refusing to take an oath against the monarchy. Instead, she agreed to preach the freedom and equality of all men. Because she refused the oath, though, on September 3, she was delivered over to the fury of bloodthirsty revolutionaries during an orgy of killing later called the September Massacres.

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 princess' head was cut off, crudely stuck on a pike and then carried away to a nearby café where the head was laid down in front of the customers, who were asked to drink in celebration of her death. It seems likely that the head was taken to a barber, in order to dress the hair to make it instantly recognisable. Following this, the head was replaced upon the pike and was paraded beneath Marie Antoinette’s prison window at the Temple. Those who were carrying it wished the Queen to kiss the lips of her favourite, as it was a frequent rumour that the two had been lovers, however, the head was not allowed to be brought into the building. Nevertheless, the Queen was very distraught at the sight.

Five citizens of the local section in Paris delivered her body (minus, of course, her head which was then being displayed on a pike) to the authorities shortly after her death. Royalist propaganda claimed her body was displayed on the street for a full day. Her heartbroken father-in-law finally succeeded in retrieving her corpse and had it interred in the Penthrièvre family crypt in the cathedral at Dreux.

The Princesse de Lamballe was the sister-in-law of the Duc d'Orléans, better known as Philippe Égalite. Philippe had married the sister of her dead husband, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre, in 1769. As a result, she was an aunt to the future King of the French, Louis Philippe.

[edit] Trivia

  • A story is told that as the princess was being killed, a letter written to her by Marie Antoinette fell from its hiding place in her hair and landed in a pool of her own blood.
  • She was sketched by the artist F Gabriel in the courtyard of La Force only hours before her death.
  • Marie Grosholz, more famously known as Madame Tussaud, was ordered to make the deathmask.

[edit] Ancestry

[edit] See also

[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.

[edit] External links