Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre

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Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon
Duchess of Orléans
Louise Marie Adélaïde by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun
Louise Marie Adélaïde by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun
Spouse Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans
Issue
Louis Philippe of Orléans, King of the French
Louis Antoine Philippe of Orléans
Louise Marie Adélaïde Eugénie of Orléans
Louis Charles Alphonse Léodgard of Orléans
Titles and styles
Madame la Princesse
HSH the Dowager Duchess of Orléans
HSH the Duchess of Orléans
HSH the Duchess of Chartres
Mademoiselle de Penthièvre
Mademoiselle d'Ivoy
Father Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, Duke of Penthièvre
Mother Princess Maria Theresa Felicity of Modena
Born 13 March 1753(1753-03-13)
Hôtel de Toulouse, Paris, France
Died 27 June 1821 (aged 68)
Château d'Ivry-sur-Seine, Ivry-sur-Seine, France

Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, Duchess of Orléans, (13 March 1753 – 23 June 1821), wife of the so-called "royal regicide" Philippe Égalité, was the mother of France's last King, Louis-Philippe I, King of the French. She was perhaps the wealthiest heiress in France prior to the French Revolution.

Her father was Duke of Penthièvre, son and heir of Louis XIV of France's legitimised son, Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, the Count of Toulouse. Her mother was Princess Maria Theresa Felicity of Modena, a granddaughter of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, her husband's great-grandfather. She was the last member of the Bourbon-Penthièvre family.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Marie-Adélaïde was born on 13 March 1753 at the Hôtel de Toulouse – the family Paris residence since 1712 when the Count of Toulouse bought it from Louis Phélypeaux, marquis de La Vrillière. Her mother died in childbirth the following year.[1] Styled Mademoiselle d'Ivoy[2] initially and, as a young girl, until her marriage, Mademoiselle de Penthièvre (derived from dukedom inherited by her father).

[edit] Education

From her birth she was put in the care of Madame de Sourcy. As was the custom for many girls of the nobility, she was raised in a convent, the Abbaye de Montmartre, overlooking Paris[3][4], where she spent twelve years.

Marie-Adélaïde was pretty, shy, and pious. As a child, she was encouraged to take an active part in the charities for which her father had become known as "Prince of the Poor"[5] in France. His reputation for beneficence made him popular throughout the country and, subsequently, saved him during the Revolution[6].

[edit] Marriage

At the death of her brother, the Prince of Lamballe, on 8 May 1768, Marie-Adélaïde became heiress to one of the largest fortunes of France, if not the largest. Her sister-in-law, the princesse de Lamballe, was a close friend of Marie Antoinette. It was decided that it was time to find her a suitable husband and to be presented to the Court at the Palace of Versailles.

Mademoiselle de Penthièvre was presented to the court on December 7, 1768 by the comtesse de la Marche to the Louis XV, the Dauphin (later Louis XVI of France) and other members of the Royal family and on the next day was baptised and given the names Louise-Marie-Adélaïde[7] and was aged 17. After being at the court, the young Louise Marie Adélaïde, usually known as Marie-Adélaïde, attracted the attention of the court for her beauty and her good values of virtue. Years later, when the future Paul I of Russia and his wife, Maria Feodorovna, would look forward to meeting the shy and quiet princess on their visit to France in 1782. The main candidate for her husband was the son of her fathers cousin, the Duke of Orléans and then the head of the House of Orléans – cadet branch of the House of Bourbon and also the house from which her maternal grandmother Charlotte Aglaé of Orléans was from.

Her wedding to the Louis Philippe Joseph of Orléans, Duke of Chartres, took place at the Palace of Versailles on April 5, 1769 on a lavish seen with all of the Princes of the Blood attending. The marriage contract was signed by all of the Royal Family and during one of the ceremonies which accompanied the wedding, the King supped with all the Royal Family and all of the Princes of the Blood – something which happened very rarely.

Mlle de Penthièvre brought to the already wealthy House of Orléans a dowry of six million livres, an annual income of 240,000 livres (later increased to 400,000 livres), and the expectation of much more upon her father's death.

[edit] Children

The couple had six children:

[edit] Gallery

Louise Marie Adélaïde as the Duchess of Chartres

The Count of Toulouse

The Duke of Penthièvre

Louis Philippe Joseph of Orléans

Louis-Philippe of Orléans, King of the French

Louis Antoine Philippe of Orléans

Louise Marie Adélaïde Eugénie of Orléans

Louis Charles of Orléans

[edit] The comtesse de Genlis

During the first few months of their marriage, the couple appeared devoted to each other but, soon, the Duke of Chartres went back to the life of a libertin he had led before his marriage. It is during the summer of 1772, a few months after his wife had given birth to a stillborn daughter, that began Philippe’s secret liaison with one of her ladies-in-waiting, Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St-Albin, comtesse de Genlis, the niece of Madame de Montesson, the morganatic wife of Philippe’s father. Passionate at first, the liaison cooled within a few months and, by the spring of 1773, was reported to be “dead”[8]. After the romantic affair was over, Félicité remained in the service of Marie-Adélaïde at the Palais-Royal, a trusted friend to both Marie-Adélaïde and Philippe. They both appreciated her intelligence and, in July 1779, she became the governess of the couple twin daughters born in 1777[9].

It was the custom in the French royal and noble families to “turn the boys over to the men” when they were seven years old. In 1782, the young Louis-Philippe was already nine and in dire need of discipline. The Duke of Chartres could not think of a man better qualified to “turn his sons over to” than… Mme de Genlis. This is how, nine years after their passionate liaison had ended and turned into deep friendship, Félicité became the “gouverneur” of the duc and duchesse de Chartres’ children. Teacher and pupils left the Palais-Royal and went to live in a house built specially for them on the grounds of the Bellechasse convent (couvent des Dames de Bellechasse) in Paris[9],[10].

Félicité was an excellent teacher; however, like the Orléans family in general, and the duc de Chartres in particular, her liberal views, which she passed to her pupils, made her choose the side of the Revolution, managing in the process to alienate the children from their own mother who, on the other hand, was very conservative. Marie-Adélaïde began to contest the education given her children by her former lady-in-waiting. The relationship between the two women became unbearable and reached a point of no return when Louis-Philippe, on 2 November 1790, one month after his seventeenth birthday, joined the revolutionary club des Jacobins. Marie-Adélaïde's relationship with her husband was also at its worst and the only way the two would “talk” to each other was through letters.[11]

In the memoirs of the baronne d'Oberkirch, the duchesse d'Orléans is described as:

...always wearing a melancholic expression which nothing could cure. She sometimes smiled, she never laughed....

[12]

Upon the death of her father-in-law Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans in 1785, her husband became Louis Philippe II d'Orléans, duc d'Orléans, and First Prince of the Blood, taking rank only after the immediate family of the king. As the wife of a prince du sang she was addressed as Your Serene Highness, a style to which her own illegitimate branch of the Bourbons had not been entitled.[13].

[edit] Revolution

The Palais du Luxembourg where Marie-Adélaïde was imprisoned from November 1793 to July 1794.

On April 5, 1791, Marie-Adélaïde finally left her husband[14], and went to live with her father at the château de Bizy[15] overlooking the town of Vernon[16] in Normandy. In September 1792, having joined the new régime, the Duke of Orléans was elected to the National Convention under the name Philippe Égalité. He had chosen the side of the Mountain (La Montagne), which made him from the very beginning a suspect in the eyes of the Girondists (Girondins) who wanted all the Bourbons, including the d'Orléans family, to be banished out of France. Their fate was sealed when the Duke of Chartres, "Général Égalité" in the Army of the North commanded by Dumouriez, passed to the side of the Austrians in March 1793. The result was the arrest, on April 6, of all the members of the Orléans family still in France.

After their arrest in Paris, Philippe Égalité and his son, the Count of Beaujolais, first imprisoned in the Abbey prison (prison de l'Abbaye) in Paris[17],[18], were transferred to the prison of Fort Saint-Jean in Marseille where they were soon joined by the duc de Montpensier who had been arrested while serving as an officer in the Army of the Alps. The day before his father and brothers were arrested in France, the duc de Chartres had rushed to Tournai, a town in today's Belgium, near the French border[19], where his sister Adélaïde and Mme de Genlis had been living since Philippe Égalité had made them emigrate in November 1792. The Duke of Chartres brought them to safety in Switzerland[20]. In the meantime, because of her poor health, Marie-Adélaïde was allowed to stay, under guard, at the château de Bizy, where her father had died one month earlier, on March 4. Her inheritance was confiscated by the revolutionary government.

Despite having voted for the death of his cousin Louis XVI of France, and having denounced his son's defection, Philippe Égalité was guillotined on November 6, 1793.

[edit] Veuve Égalité

Upon the execution of her husband, Marie-Adélaïde, now known as "Veuve Égalité" (Widow Égalité), was incarcerated at the Luxembourg Palace, which had been transformed into a prison during the Revolution. There she met the man who was to become the "love of her life", a former member of the National Convention named Jacques-Marie Rouzet[21], who had been imprisoned at the fall of the Girondins. Nearly executed before the fall of Robespierre, in July 1794 at the end of the Terror[22], she was then transferred to the "Pension Belhomme", a former mental institution that had been turned into a "prison for the rich" during the Revolution[23]. After Rouzet, who after his liberation had become a member of the Council of Five Hundred, succeeded, in 1796, to secure her liberation and that of her two sons still imprisoned in Marseille[24], the two never left each other and lived together in Paris until 1797, when a decree banished the remaining members of the House of Bourbon from France.

Marie-Adélaïde was sent to Spain, as was her sister-in-law Bathilde of Orléans, the last Princess of Condé. Rouzet accompanied them to the Spanish border and managed to secretly join them in Barcelona where he became her chancellor and she obtained for him the title of comte de Folmont[25]. Marie-Adélaïde was never to see her two younger sons, Montpensier and Beaujolais, who would die in exile before the first Bourbon Restoration in 1814.

[edit] Death

The Chapelle royale de Dreux.

Marie-Adélaïde, Rouzet and the Orléans exiled in Spain returned to France in 1814 at the time of the first Bourbon Restoration. After legal battles which lasted until her death, the bulk of her inheritance was eventually recovered. Her last years were embittered by disputes with her children over money.[citation needed] She died in her castle at Ivry-sur-Seine[26] on June 23, 1821, after having suffered terribly from breast cancer. Rouzet had died nine months before, on October 25, 1820, and she had him inhumed in the new family chapel she had built in Dreux in 1816, as the final resting place for the two families, Bourbon-Penthièvre and Orléans.[27], [25]. The original Bourbon-Penthièvre family crypt in the Collégiale de Saint-Etienne de Dreux had been violated during the French Revolution and the bodies thrown together into a grave in the Chanoines cemetery of the Collégiale. She also was buried in the new chapel which, after the accession to the throne of her son Louis-Philippe, was renamed "Chapelle royale de Dreux" and became the necropolis for the royal Orléans family.

She did not live to see Louis-Philippe, become King of the French in 1830.

[edit] The painting

On the eve of the French Revolution, in 1789, Louise Marie Adélaïde was painted by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, the favourite portrait painter of Queen Marie Antoinette. The painting, illustrated at the top of this page, was titled Madame la Duchesse d'Orléans. Vigée-Le Brun made use of the lonely duchess's well-known melancholia in the pose. Dressed in virginal white, a reminder of her candor, the head of the duchess is supported on her upraised arm. She is shown with a languid, sad expression. Below the breast is a Wedgwood medallion which Colin Eisler has identified as Poor Maria, possibly a reference to the life of the duchess, which was later destroyed because of the revolution. The painting is now at the Palace of Versailles. There is another copy in the musée de Longchamp, Marseille. Versailles also has a third copy which has been incorrectly described as a replica.

[edit] Ancestry

[edit] References

  1. ^ G. Lenotre, Le Château de Rambouillet : six siècles d'histoire, Denoël, Paris, 1984, (215 pages), chapter 5: Le prince des pauvres, p. 71.
  2. ^ from seigneurie d'Ivoy-Carignan: http://books.google.com/books?id=0q4FAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PA233&lpg=RA1-PA233&dq=Ivoy-Carignan&source=web&ots=MTOhNUrhiE&sig=004PFu90FObaquloHJiGbZXgKsw&hl=fr
  3. ^ André Castelot, Philippe Égalité le Régicide, éd. Jean Picollec, Paris, 1991, p. 95
  4. ^ Le quartier Montmartre - L'Histoire en Ligne
  5. ^ ib. G. Lenotre.
  6. ^ ib. G. Lenotre
  7. ^ http://books.google.fr/books?id=2oEBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA283&lpg=PA283&dq=SAS+madame+la+duchesse+d'Orl%C3%A9ans&source=web&ots=daOmOckb35&sig=jto7BmTs1ufUm8w9KozaChODb64&hl=fr&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result#PPA52,M1
  8. ^ ib. Castelot, pp. 73–80 & 86–87
  9. ^ a b ib. Castelot, p. 124
  10. ^ http:::fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_de_Bellechasse
  11. ^ ib. Castelot, pp. 206–210
  12. ^ memoirs of Baronne d'Oberkirch (Paris, 1869, II, 67–68)
  13. ^ Tables synchroniques de l'histoire de France, ou chronologie des princes
  14. ^ ib. Castelot, p. 213
  15. ^ Giverny Vernon Chateau
  16. ^ Vernon France
  17. ^ ib. Castelot, pp. 273–274
  18. ^ http:::fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_de_l%27Abbaye
  19. ^ Tournai, within the Netherlands, which had become Austrian territory at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, was occupied by French troops since 1792.
  20. ^ ib. Castelot, p. 271.
  21. ^ Étienne Léon de La Mothe-Langon, Jean Théodore Laurent-Gousse, Biographie toulousaine, ou Dictionnaire historique des personnages qui, par des vertus, des talens, des écrits, de grandes actions, des fondations utiles, des opinions singulières, des erreurs, etc. se sont rendus célèbres dans la ville de Toulouse, ou qui ont contribué à son illustration, Paris, Chez L. G. Michaud, 1823, tome 2, p. 338–343
  22. ^ http:;;fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiration_des_prisons
  23. ^ Claude Dufresne, Les Orléans, Criterion, Paris, 1991, p. 314.
  24. ^ Upon their liberation, Montpensier and Beaujolais joined their brother Chartres in the United States where they traveled until sailing for England where they landed in January 1800. (ib. Dufresne, p. 325–326)
  25. ^ a b ib. Étienne Léon de La Mothe-Langon, Jean Théodore Laurent-Gousse
  26. ^ Ivry-sur-Seine, a former village a little over 5 km south of the center of Paris, is now a suburb of the French capital.
  27. ^ Adolphe Robert, Gaston Cougny, Dictionnaire des parlementaires français de 1789 à 1889, Paris, Bourloton, 1889, tome 5, de Roussin à Royer, p. 216–217

[edit] Styles

The arms of Louise Marie Adélaïde's family, the house of Bourbon-Penthièvre.
  • Mademoiselle d'Ivoy from 1753
  • Mademoiselle de Penthièvre till 1769
  • S.A.S Madame la duchesse de Chartres from 1769 to 1785
  • S.A.S Madame la duchesse d'Orléans from 1785 to 1822
  • Madame la Princesse or
  • S.A.S Madame la duchesse douairière d'Orléans from 1793 to 1821
  • Veuve Égalité from 1793 to 1797

[edit] Titles

Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre
Cadet branch of the House of Bourbon
Born: March 13 1753 Died: June 27 1821
French nobility
Preceded by
N/A		 Mademoiselle d'Ivoy
1753–1769		 Succeeded by
N/A
Preceded by
N/A		 Mademoiselle de Penthièvre
1753–1769		 Succeeded by
N/A
Preceded by
Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon-Penthièvre		 Countess of Eu with Louis Philippe II d'Orléans
1793–1821		 Succeeded by
House of Orléans
French royalty
Preceded by
Louise Henriette de Bourbon-Conti		 Duchess of Chartres
1769–1785		 Succeeded by
Françoise Marie d'Orléans daughter-in-law of Ferdinand Philippe Louis d'Orléans
Preceded by
Louise Henriette de Bourbon-Conti		 Duchess of Orléans
1785–1793		 Succeeded by
Marie Amélie Thérèse de Bourbon, after the Revolution
Preceded by
Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon-Penthièvre		 Princess of Carignan
1793–1821		 Succeeded by
House of Orléans
Royal titles
Preceded by
Louise Henriette de Bourbon-Conti		 Madame la Princesse
1785–1793		 Succeeded by
Revolution
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