Pretender - French Pretenders

French Pretenders

See also: British claims to the French throne

The establishment of the First Republic and the execution of Louis XVI in 1793 led to the king's son becoming pretender to the abolished throne, styled as Louis XVII. As Louis XVII was a child and imprisoned in Paris by the revolutionaries, his uncle, the Comte de Provence, proclaimed himself regent in his nephew's name. After Louis XVII died in 1795, the Comte de Provence became pretender himself, as Louis XVIII.

Louis XVIII was restored to the throne in 1814, and was succeeded by his brother Charles X in 1824. Charles X was, however, forced into exile by the July Revolution. Charles X and his son, the Dauphin Louis-Antoine, abdicated their claims in favor of Charles's grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux; however, their cousin the Duke of Orléans, a descendant of Louis XIV's younger brother, mounted the throne as Louis Philippe I.

For most of the July Monarchy, the legitimists, as supporters of the exiled senior line came to be known, were uncertain of whom to support. Some believed the abdication of Charles and his son legal, and recognized the young Chambord as king, while others maintained that abdication was unconstitutional in France of the ancien régime, and continued to recognize first Charles X and then Louis-Antoine, until the latter's death in 1844. On his uncle's death, Bordeaux proclaimed himself king as "Henry V", but remains known to history by his title of pretense, the "Count of Chambord".

In 1848, Louis Philippe was himself overthrown by the February Revolution, and abdicated the throne in favor of his young grandson, the Philippe, Comte de Paris. However, a republic was proclaimed, leaving Paris, like his cousin Chambord, merely a pretender to a no longer existing crown. Over the next several decades, there were several attempts at a so-called "fusion", to unite both groups of monarchists in support of the childless Chambord as king, who would recognize the Count of Paris as his heir. Those efforts failed in the 1850s, but after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, when a royalist majority was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, fusion again became the royalist strategy. As a result, in 1873 the Count of Paris withdrew his own bid for the throne and recognized Chambord as legitimate pretender to the French crown. In spite of this apparent unity among royalist forces, restoration of the monarchy was not to be; Chambord refused to accept the Tricolour flag, which rendered him unacceptable to most Frenchmen as a constitutional king. The monarchists hoped that after Chambord's death they could unite behind the Orléanist candidate. Chambord died in exile in 1883. But France's royalists had lost their majority in parliament by 1877. The erstwhile Orléanist Adolphe Thiers called Chambord "The French Washington", i.e. the true founder of the Republic.

In 1883 the majority of French monarchists accepted the Count of Paris as rightful pretender to the French throne. A minority of ultra-reactionaries, the so-called Blancs d'Espagne ("Spanish Whites"), continued to withhold support from the House of Orléans and chose instead Juan, Count of Montizon, the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, who also happened to be the senior male descendant of Louis XIV.

The arguments are, on one side, that Louis XIV's younger grandson, Philip de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou renounced any future claim to the French throne when he left France to become king of Spain as Philip V in 1700 (ratified internationally by the Treaty of Utrecht), leaving the Dukes of Orléans as heirs to the throne of France in the event of extinction of descendants of Louis XIV's elder grandson, Louis, Duke of Burgundy, which occurred in 1883. On the other side, Anjou's renunciation is held to be invalid because prior to the revolution it was a fundamental tenet of the French monarchy that the crown could never be diverted from the rightful heir of Hugh Capet. Moreover, although the Orléans volunteered to defer their rival claim to the throne after 1873, the regicidal vote of their ancestor Philippe Égalité in 1789 and the usurpation of Louis Philippe in 1830 are alleged to have extinguished all rights to the throne for the Orléans branch. The schism has continued to the present day, with supporters of the senior line reclaiming the title of Legitimist, leaving their opponent royalists to be known, once again, as Orléanists. The current representative of the senior line is Louis Alphonse, Duke of Anjou, the senior living descendant of Hugh Capet (and of Philip V d'Anjou of Spain) who was born and raised in Spain. The Orléanist line, which returned to live in France when its law of banishment was repealed in 1950, is represented by Henri, Count of Paris, Duke of France, senior male-line descendant of King Louis Philippe.

In addition to these two claims to the historic royal throne of France, there has also been a pretender to the imperial throne of France, created first by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 and recreated by his nephew Emperor Napoleon III in 1852. This claim is today disputed between Jean Christophe, Prince Napoléon and his own father, the self-avowed republican Prince Charles Napoléon (likewise deemed to be excluded from the succession due to a non-dynastic marriage), both descendants of Napoleon I's youngest brother, Jérôme Bonaparte.