Princess Amalie Zephyrine of Salm-Kyrburg - Life

Life

In 1782, on her parents' request, she married erbprinz Anton Aloys, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Her new home city was not to her taste, however, and three weeks after the birth of her son Karel she returned in 1785 to her native city of Paris. There her brother, who would become prince Frederik III, was busy with the building of the Hôtel de Salm as the Paris residence of the Salm-Kyrburg family and a gathering place for many members of the high nobility. During the French Revolution, her brother Frederick III and her lover Alexandre de Beauharnais were guillotined, but Amalie Zephyrine knew how to survive the Revolution. In 1797, she bought the cemetery in which her brother and lover had been buried in a mass tomb. Despite everything, the princess maintained good relations with a number of influential figures of the Revolution, as Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand and Joséphine de Beauharnais, widow of her lover Alexandre and later wife of Napoleon Bonaparte.

A few years later Amalie Zephyrine successfully used her contacts at the court of Napoleon to broker the Mediatisation of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Hohenzollern-Hechingen. She also became guardian to her nephew Frederick IV of Salm-Kyrburg (1789-1859) during his minority, who had become the prince of Salm-Kyrburg in 1794 after his father's downfall.

After twenty years in Paris the princess returned in 1822 to Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, where she first lived in an annex of the former monastery Inzigkofen and later on in a residence called Prinzenbau, that her husband had built for her at Sigmaringen. A cliff face in the Donautal in Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen is named the Amalienfelsen after her.