Henry, Count of Chambord

Henri of Artois, Count of Chambord (Henri Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonné d'Artois, duc de Bordeaux, comte de Chambord; 29 September 1820 – 24 August 1883) was disputedly King of France from 2 to 9 August 1830 as Henry V, although he was never officially proclaimed as such. Afterwards, he was the Legitimist pretender to the throne of France from 1844 to 1883.

Henri was the posthumous son of Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, younger son of Charles X of France, by his wife, Princess Carolina of Naples and Sicily, daughter of King Francis I of the Two Sicilies. As the grandson of the king, Henri was a Petit-Fils de France.

Birth and youth

He was born on 29 September 1820, in the Pavillon de Marsan, part of the Tuileries Palace which still survives in the Louvre in Paris. Henri's father, the duc de Berry, had been assassinated seven months before his birth. At the actual moment of Henri's birth, no member of the French court was present in the room; this enabled the supporters of Louis Philippe, duc d'Orléans, to later claim that Henri was not in fact a French prince.

At birth, Henri was given the title of duc de Bordeaux. Because of his posthumous birth when the senior line of the Bourbon dynasty appeared about to become extinct, he was given the name Dieudonné ("God-given", in English). Royalists called him "the miracle child".

On 2 August 1830, in response to the July Revolution, Henri's grandfather, Charles X, abdicated, and twenty minutes later Charles' elder son Louis Antoine, duc d'Angoulême, also abdicated in favor of the young duc de Bordeaux. Louis Philippe of Orléans, as Lieutenant général du royaume, was supposed to proclaim Henri as Henri V, King of France and of Navarre, but deliberately did not do so. As a consequence, after seven days, during which legitimist monarchists considered that Henri had been the rightful monarch of France, the National Assembly decreed that the throne should pass to Louis Philippe, who was proclaimed King of the French on 9 August.^[2]

Exile

Henri and his family left France and went into exile on 16 August 1830. While some French monarchists recognized him as their sovereign, others disputed the validity of the abdications of his grandfather and of his uncle. Still others recognised the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe. With the death of his grandfather in 1836, and of his uncle in 1844, Henri became the genealogically senior claimant to the French throne. His supporters were called Legitimists to distinguish them from the Orléanists, the supporters of the family of Louis Philippe.

Henri, who preferred the "courtesy" title of comte de Chambord (from the château de Chambord, which had been presented to him by the nation, and which was the only significant piece of personal property he was allowed to retain ownership of upon his exile), continued to make his claim throughout the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire of Napoléon III. In November 1846, the comte de Chambord married his second cousin Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, daughter of Duke Francis IV of Modena and Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy. Her maternal grandparents were Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia and Maria Theresa of Austria-Este; the couple had no children.

Hope

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 comte de Chambord's claim to the throne, with the hope that at his 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 to be a close possibility. However, Henri insisted that he would only accept the crown on condition that France abandon its tricolour flag and return to the use of the white fleur de lys flag. Even a compromise, whereby the fleur de lys would be the new king's personal standard, and the tricolour would remain the national flag, was rejected.

Defeat

A temporary Third Republic was established, to wait for Henri's death and his replacement by the more liberal comte de Paris. But by the time this occurred in 1883, public opinion had 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 24 August 1883 at his residence in Frohsdorf, Austria, at the age of sixty-two. 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.

In terms of pretenders to the French throne, at his death, Henri's wife and some of his supporters, despite Henri's public proclamations concerning the "Maison de France" (which is not the "Maison de Bourbon"), accepted the senior male of the House of Bourbon, Henri's distant cousin. But a large minority of supporters of Henri transferred their allegiance to the Orléanist claimant, the comte de Paris.

His personal property, including the château de Chambord, was left to his late sister's son Robert I, Duke of Parma.

Ancestors

See also

• List of shortest reigning monarchs of all time

Footnotes

Further reading

• Brown, Marvin Luther. The Comte de Chambord :The Third Republic's Uncompromising King. Durham, N.C.:, Duke University Press, 1967.
• Delorme, Philippe. Henri, comte de Chambord, Journal (1846-1883), Carnets inédits. Paris: Guibert, 2009.
• "The Death of the comte de Chambord", British Medical Journal 2, no. 1186 (September 22, 1883): 600-01.

External links

• The Birth of the Duc de Bordeaux
• Obituary in The Times