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'Henri V' (Henri Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonné d'Artois, comte de Chambord – September 29, 1820 – August 24, 1883) was King of France and Navarre from 2 to 9 August 1830 and afterwards the Legitimist Pretender to the throne of France from 1844 to 1883.
Henri was the posthumous son of Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry, younger son of King Charles X of France, by his wife Princess Caroline Ferdinande Louise of the Two Sicilies, daughter of Francis I of the Two Sicilies.

Contents

Birth and youth

Exile

Hope

Defeat

Ancestors

See also

External links

Birth and youth

He was born September 29, 1820, in the pavillon de Marsan, part of the Tuileries Palace which still survives in the Louvre in Paris. Henri's father the duc de Berry had been assassinated several months before his birth. At the actual moment of Henri's birth, no member of the French court was present in the room; this enabled the supporters of the duc d'Orléans to claim that Henri was not in fact a French prince.
At birth, Henri was given the title of 'Duc de Bordeaux'. Because of his posthumous birth when the senior line of the Bourbon dynasty appeared about to become extinct, he was popularly known as the 'Dieudonné' or "God-given" baby.
On 2 August, 1830, in response to the July Revolution, Henri's grandfather Charles X abdicated, and twenty minutes later Charles' elder son the Dauphin also abdicated. Henri was immediately proclaimed Henri V, King of France and Navarre. However, After a fictive reign of only 7 days, the National Assembly decreed that the throne should pass to the Regent, his distant cousin, the duc d'Orléans, who became Louis-Philippe, King of the French on August 9.

Exile

Henri and his family left France and went into exile, August 16, 1830. While some French monarchists recognized him as their sovereign, others disputed the validity of the abdications of his grandfather and uncle. Still others recognised the ''July Monarchy'' of Louis-Philippe. With the death of his grandfather in 1836, and his uncle in 1844, Henri became the genealogically senior claimant to the French throne. His supporters were called ''Legitimists'' to distinguish them from the ''Orléanists'', the supporters of the family of Louis-Philippe.
Henri, who preferred the title of 'Comte de Chambord' (from the Château de Chambord), continued to make his claim throughout the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire of Napoleon III. In November 1846 Chambord married Archduchess Marie Thérèse of Austria-Este, daughter of Duke Francis IV of Modena and Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy. Her maternal grandparents were Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia and Maria Theresa of Austria-Este; the couple had no children.

Hope

In the early 1870s, as the Second Empire collapsed following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the royalists became a majority in the National Assembly. The Orléanists agreed to support Chambord's claim to the throne, with the hope that at his death he would be succeeded by their own claimant, the Count of Paris Philippe d'Orléans. However, Henri insisted that he would only accept the crown on condition that France abandon its tricolour flag and return to the use of the white fleur-de-lis flag. Even a compromise, whereby the fleur-de-lis would be Chambord's personal standard, and the tricolour would remain the national flag, was rejected.

Defeat

A temporary Third Republic was established, to wait for Henri's death and his replacement by the Comte de Paris. But by the time this occurred in 1883, public opinion had swung behind the Republic as the form of government which, in the words of the former President Adolphe Thiers, "divides us least". Thus Henri could be mockingly hailed by republicans such as Georges Clemenceau as "the French Washington" — the one man without whom the Republic could not have been founded.
Henri died August 24, 1883 at his residence in Frohsdorf, Austria. He was buried in his grandfather Charles X's crypt at the monastery of Castagnavizza in Gorizia, Italy, now on the Slovenian side of the border in Nova Gorica.
At his death, Henri's wife and some of his supporters believed that he was succeeded as rightful king of France and Navarre by his distant cousin and brother-in-law, Juan, Count of Montizón (the senior male of the House of Bourbon). Other supporters of Henri transferred their allegiance to the Orléanist claimant, Philippe, Comte de Paris.
His personal property was left to his late sister's son Robert I, Duke of Parma. Among other things, this included the Château de Chambord.

Ancestors

See also

★ List of shortest reigning monarchs of all time

External links

★ The Birth of the Duc de Bordeaux