This is a historical story that always fascinated me and many others and recent conversation led me to dig some historical facts to showcase in my blog I will be telling you mostly about Marie Thérese de France or Madame Royale, A historical tale will be in my black and white series no pictures, Read on and hope you enjoy this post as I
At the disastrous French revolution and its devasting effect to many the Royal Family took a big hit but never out, The King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were beheaded and the absolute monarchy of France really ended in July 14 1789, Out of these couple had three children, the elder son, Louis-Joseph, died of tuberculosis at the age of seven, just before in June 1789. The younger son, Louis-Charles, the ill-fated Louis XVII, was imprisoned with his family during the revolution and died miserably at the age of ten. The king’s sister Madame Elizabeth (see post) would follow the royal couple at the guillotine in 1794, Following the French revolution, the only royal family survivor was Marie Thérèse Charlotte ,and one of only a handful of royal children to make it out of the conflict alive. Nevertheless, will make the point here the monarchy did not end, Louis XVI younger brothers Louis XVIII and Charles X. did follow up the Bourbon line.
When Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had the first child was a daughter, Marie Thérése born on December 20, 1778, in the Chapel of the Château de Versailles ; 3 years later, the long-awaited son, the dauphin of France was born, Louis Joseph on October 22 1781, and after that of Louis Charles on March 27 1785, and Sophie Beatrix (born July 9 1786 but died in June 19 1787). The children of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had no happy childhood. And 2 of the children of Marie Antoinette died prematurely, such as Sophie Beatrix and the Dauphin, Louis Joseph died at the age of 7 from tuberculosis. After his death, Louis Charles became the new dauphin of France. Marie Thérése was born and raised in the Château de Versailles, old Wardrobe room of Madame Sophie having died on March 5, 1782, her apartment was allocated in October to the other daughter of the king Marie-Thérèse of France , also known by the nickname Madame Royale. This title was given to her at her birth, in order to distinguish her from the other emblematic “Madame” of the time: the Countess of Provence, the sister-in-law of King Louis XVI.The first name given to her at birth was that of her maternal grandmother, Empress Marie-Thérèse. According to Marie-Antoinette, the little girl looked like her own mother, a real personality, The little Marie-Thérèse has more than twenty persons in her service. The most important of them is Victoire-Armande de Rohan-Soubise, princess of Guéméné, governess of the children of France. In 1788, the princess was given a new playmate, little Marie-Philippine Lambriquet, whom the queen nicknamed Ernestine. The same age as Madame Royale, the little girl has just lost her mother who was Marie-Thérèse’s maid.
You have read the story, here is mine from my extensive library at home on the history of France, When the situation became hopeless in June 1791, the royal family tried to flee the country. Dressed up as a valet and a governess to a Russian aristocrat, the king and queen tried to get out of France. Someone recognized them when they reached Varennes. This territory was part of the Austrian Netherlands, under Habsburg rule at the time. Marie Antoinette, being a Habsburger, hoped to find support and safety there. They were taken back and eventually were imprisoned in the tower of the Temple, an ancient fortress in Paris, built by the Templars in the 13C. The monarchy was already abolished in 1791, but the new rulers did not know what to do with Louis Charles. Monarchists already claimed he was King Louis XVII.
On July 3, 1793, only 8 years old, Louis Charles was separated from his mother, sister and aunt. He is individually locked in the room where his father had been before his death. Louis Charles, Dauphin of France according to the royalists, was kept in absolute isolation for the next four year. He was completely neglected. He had virtually no contact with other people and was not informed of the execution of his mother (16 October 1793) and his aunt Madame Elisabeth (10 May 1794). He was dirty and sick, his room was not cleaned nor could he wash himself or his clothes. He was beaten and humiliated, all to try to punish him for his royal descent. Louis Charles (Louis XVII ) died on June 8, 1795 at the age of 10, having spent nearly four years in solitary confinement. It is not possible to visit the Temple tower where the family was imprisoned. The building became a place of pilgrimage for followers of the Bourbon family. So it was demolished in 1808 by order of Napoleon Ier. However, when you get off the metro station “Temple” you are at the right location!
Back to Marie Thérèse ,from from August 1792 until December 1795, was locked up in the tower, forced to watch her family members been taken away one by one. She did not know what had happened to her mother, aunt and brother until her release in 1795 She could hear her brother’s cries though, when he was being beaten in another room of the castle, In December 1795, on her seventeenth birthday, she was finally released, traded for some French prisoners with the Habsburg Emperor Francis II, her uncle. She is the only one of the children of Marie Antoinette that would survive the French revolution.
Marie Thérèse is all alone. Her parents and siblings are all dead, as are most of the people she knew from her youth or in exile. She herself will also spend most of the rest of her life in exile in foreign lands. King Charles X was forced to abdicate in 1830 , and his son Louis-Antoine and Marie Thérèse became Dauphin and Dauphine of France. This resulted in his son becoming King Louis XIX and Marie Thérèse becoming Queen of France. This lasted for only 20 minutes thought, the time that Louis-Antoine needed to sign his own abdication papers. The singing of the papers was done in the Château de Rambouillet. She spends the last years of ther life in Schloss Frohsdorf, near Vienna. Marie Thérèse devoted herself to the education of the children of France: her nephew Henri d’Artois, heir presumptive to the crown, and her niece Louise d’Artois. This was her last political role, the rest of her life being spent in prayer. Her husband died in 1844,and she widowed died of pneumonia on October 19, 1851, at her nephew’s home at Frohsdorf Castle in Austria, aged 72 . They are buried in the crypt of the Kostanjevica Monastery in what is now Slovenia (than part of the Austrian Empire).
On a hill overlooking the town is the Franciscan convent of Kostanjevica. An ancient place of pilgrimage, it was built in the 17C, and a painting of the Virgin was transported there, an object of veneration for the faithful who gathered there for the liturgy. Partly destroyed during the Great War or WWI, the convent is a fairly ordinary reconstruction from the interwar period. Indeed, during WWi, while Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were at war, the convent was bombed. The Empress of Austria-Hungary, Zita of Bourbon-Parma, then had the bodies of the Bourbons evacuated from the convent to the Kapuzinergruft in Vienna while the heavy sarcophagi were placed in an outbuilding of Schönbrunn Palace. They returned to Gorizia in 1932, when the city had become Italian. Today Slovania,
The royal bodies still there are the following :
Marie-Thérèse of France aka Madame Royale, then Duchess of Angoulème , first child of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. After a childhood spent at the court of Versailles, she was the only one of the royal family to survive the French revolution. Condemned by the insurgents then reduced to exile, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, who became Dauphine of France in 1824, and who could have become Queen of France during the days of 1830, remained attached to the monarchy until the end of her life . She married her first cousin, Louis of Angoulême. It was in exile under the courtesy title of Countess of Marnes that she died.
Louis de France , Duke of Angoulême fought for the British government. In 1823, he led the victorious Spanish expedition, which won the battle of Fort Trocadero, captured Cadiz and restored Ferdinand VII of Spain as absolute monarch. During the events of the July Revolution of 1830, shortly after his father’s abdication, he himself renounced his rights in favor of his nephew Henri d’Artois (see above). He then went into exile with the courtesy title of Count of Marnes. From the death of his father until his own death, he became the eldest of the Capetians and the head of the house of Bourbon. He married his first cousin Marie-Thérèse of France.
Maria Theresa of Modena , royal princess of Hungary and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria-Este, who was the wife of the Count of Chambord. (duke of Bordeaux and possible king Henri V ), She was therefore considered Queen of France de jure by her husband’s supporters. She was the last to enter the crypt. Her husband Henri d’Artois , bearing as a courtesy title that of Count of Chambord (Henri V of France and Navarre for his supporters). Grandson of King Charles X and last representative of the senior and French branch of the House of Bourbon, he was pretender to the Crown of France from 1844 to his death 1883 . Designated as king in 1830 in the act of abdication of his grandfather, Charles X to the rise of the Duke of Orléans (Louis Philippe I) to the throne. He then went into exile with his entire family in England. Returning to France after the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, he rallied to himself the royalist majority of the new national assembly, was reconciled with the Orléans branch, and assisted to the failure of a restoration project, following the refusal of the majority of deputies to accept the white flag, and its own refusal to adopt the tricolor flag. His childless death in 1883 marked the extinction of the Artois branch of the Capetian house of Bourbon and the beginning of a quarrel (still ongoing) between the Bourbon houses of Spain and Orléans to know which has the more legitimacy to the Crown of France. As Louis de Bourbon born in Madrid as Louis XX and the illegitimate Jean d’Orléans , Count of Paris as John IV, Louise d’Artois sister of Henri, who was married to her cousin the future Duke Charles III of Parma. She was the grandmother of Zita, the last Empress of Austria.
In a niche in the corridor is the tomb of the Peer of France Pierre Louis Jean Casimir de Blacas d’Aulps. He emigrated in 1790, attached himself in exile to the representation of the Count of Provence (future Louis XVIII), who charged him with various missions. Having become king, the latter appointed him minister of the King’s Household and general intendant of Crown Buildings. During his administration, he provided assistance to the orientalist Champollion and created the Egyptian Museum at the Louvre. He accompanied him to Ghent, was appointed ambassador to Naples where he negotiated the marriage of the Duke of Berry with Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Siciles, daughter of the King of the Two Sicilies, then to Rome, where he signed the concordat of 11 June 1817. In 1830, he followed the Bourbon into exile. He was a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres.
The King of France Charles X was very attached to the conceptions and values of the absolute monarchy, leader of the ultraroyalists under the reign of Louis XVIII, he tried to embody the continuity of the state and the monarchy after the revolutionary period, without giving in to the reaction. Upon his accession, his priority was to preserve the Charter granted by his brother ten years earlier. Very pious and attached to the social concepts of Christianity, he tried to do without the parliamentary agreement by neutralizing it by ordinances: this policy caused the first riots of the Three Glorious Years. His reign was marked by the law of compensation for emigrants, and by the French expeditions to Greece (1827) and Algeria (1830). Reviving the tradition of the coronation in 1825, he was overthrown in 1830 by a new Parisian revolution. In addition to his body, an urn in the tomb contains the king’s heart.
In 2013 the association Pour le retour à Saint-Denis de Charles X et des derniers des Bourbons or For the return to Saint-Denis of Charles X and the last of the Bourbons was created. If some of the king’s descendants supported this project, Louis de Bourbon opposed it, believing that the Count of Chambord had already settled the question by wishing to be buried in the same building as his grandfather, and that the Franciscan monks have been caring for burials for over a century and a half with dedication. Another project exists, which would consist of leaving the body of Charles X in Slovenia, but bringing his heart to the Basilica of Saint-Denis in the last tomb which remains empty in the central part of the crypt. It is indeed this same association, which officially requested the return of the heart of Charles X. webpage : https://www.leretourdecharlesx.com/galerie.php
The official Château de Versailles on Marie Thérèse : https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/great-characters/madame-royale
From my Friends of the Palace of Versailles a bit on her apartment in the palace. The Duke and the Duchess of Angoulême (madame Royale) never returned to live in Versailles. Their apartments, definitively abandoned after their departure from France in 1830, were again transformed in 1834 to be integrated into the Museum of the History of France that Louis-Philippe then arranged in the palace. The rear-cabinets, fortunately excluded from the museum visit circuit, were preserved, on the other hand, the large parts on flowerbeds lost on this occasion their paneling of 1814-1816, and even some remaining vestiges of the 18C.
There you go folks, the grandeur of France before your eyes, yes lots of history and many serious questions raised over the years. The monarchy is still around waiting for long me think the country is different today. However, here in my Versailles, all was played and still ,,,, Again, hope you enjoy the post Marie-Thérèse and the history of France as I.
And remember, happy travels, good health, and many cheers to all !!!
Paris1972-Versailles2003 