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Henri, comte de Chambord

(Redirected from Comte de Chambord)

Henri Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonne, Comte de Chambord (September 29, 1820 - August 24, 1883) was the grandson of King Charles X of France, the posthumous son of Charles's younger son Charles, Duc de Berry, who had been assassinated several months before Henri's birth. Until his grandfather's abdication, he was known as the Duc de Bordeaux.

In 1830, Charles and his elder son the Dauphin abdicated in favour of Bordeaux, whose supporters proclaimed him Henry V. However parliament instead decreed that the throne should go to a distant cousin, the Duc d'Orléans, who became Louis-Philippe, King of the French.

The Comte de Chambord, as he was generally known, remained the Legitimist claimant to the throne under the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the Second Republic and the Empire of Napoleon III. In the early 1870s, as the Empire collapsed following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Chambord was offered the throne by the French National Assembly. The "Legitimists" or "Bourbonists" came to an arrangement with the other monarchists, the Orleanists, whereby the Comte de Chambord would be recognised as the legitimate King and in the absence of any children, the Orleanist claimaint the Comte de Paris would succeed him, thus reuniting the two royal housess. However the Comte de Chambord set one demand that the National Assembly refused to grant: that France abandon its tricolour and return to the Bourbon fleur-de-lis.

A temporary Third Republic was established, to wait for the childless Chambord's death and his replacement by the Comte de Paris. By Chambord's death in 1883, however, public opinion had swung behind the Republic, as the form of government that 'divides us least', in the words of former President Thiers.


Preceded by:
Louis XIX
(Dauphin of France)
Claimant to the throne, Orleanist branch Succeeded by:
Philip VII
(grandson of Louis Philippe I )
Claimant to the throne, Anjou branch Jean III
(descendant of Philippe de Bourbon )





Last updated: 02-07-2005 17:14:05
Last updated: 05-03-2005 09:00:33