Louise Henriette de Bourbon

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Louise Henriette de Bourbon
Roman Catholicism
SignatureLouise Henriette de Bourbon's signature

Louise Henriette de Bourbon (20 June 1726 – 9 February 1759), Mademoiselle de Conti at birth, was a French princess, who, by marriage, became Duchess of Chartres (1743–1752), then

Duchess of Orléans (1752–1759) upon the death of her father-in-law. On 4 February 1752, her husband became the head of the House of Orléans
, and the First Prince of the Blood (Premier prince du sang), the most important personage after the immediate members of the royal family.

The new Duke of Orléans and his wife were then addressed as

.

Background

Louise Henriette was born in Paris, the only daughter of

princesse du sang). In her youth she was known at court as Mademoiselle de Conti.[citation needed
]

Her father died in 1727 due to a "chest swelling". Her father was known to have been abusive to his wife and left her without even having apologised to his wife. As such her oldest surviving brother

Louis François de Bourbon
(1717–1776) became the Prince of Conti. At the time of her father's death, she was one of three children; her brother the Prince; and another brother Louis Armand de Bourbon, the Duke of Mercœur (1722–1730).

Marriage

One of Louise Henriette's cousins,

]

Louise Henriette's mother, Louise Élisabeth de Bourbon, hoped the marriage would put an end to conflict between the House of Bourbon-Condé and the House of Orléans, the source being animosity between Louise Élisabeth's mother,

Louise-Françoise de Bourbon, Dowager Princess of Condé, and her aunt, Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, Dowager Duchess of Orléans, who were sisters and legitimised daughters of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan.[clarification needed][why?
]

In 1731, a marriage between the two families had already taken place, that of Henriette's elder brother

Louis François I de Bourbon, prince de Conti to Louise Diane d'Orléans. The Duke of Chartres' father, Louis d'Orléans, Duke of Orléans, known as the Pious, accepted his wife's choice because of the princess' upbringing in a convent; however, after a much passionate beginning, Louise Henriette's scandalous behaviour caused the couple to break up.[2]

Among her extramarital affairs, she is said to have had a relationship with the Count of Melfort whom she met at the Château de Saint-Cloud after the birth of her son. During the Revolution of 1789, Philippe-Égalité publicly claimed that his real father was not his mother's husband at all but instead a coachman at the Palais-Royal.[2] This assertion was likely for political reasons to distance the ambitious Duke from the ancien regime. However DNA testing in a 2014 established the Y-chromosome haplogroup and ySTR pattern of the House of Bourbon, and has indeed confirmed the biological legitimacy of Louise Henriette's eldest son, Philippe-Égalité. As part of this project samples were taken from 3 living genealogical descendants of Louis XIII, namely Axel, Prince of Bourbon-Parma; Henri, Prince of Bourbon-Parma, and João Henrique, Prince of Orléans-Braganza. The former 2 are documented male line descendants of Philip V of Spain, who was a grandson of Louis XIV.

The latter is a direct male line descendant of Philip I, Duke of Orleans - a younger brother of Louis XIV and the ancestor of Louise Henriette's husband. All 3 testers were a genetic partilineal match on a ySTR comparison, and were assigned to sub-haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1b*(R-Z381), now deemed the upstream patrilineal snip of the House of Bourbon.[3]

Issue

Duke of Chartres, on the far right. Painted by François-Hubert Drouais
.

The couple had three children:

Death

Louise Henriette died on 9 February 1759 at age 32, with her husband and children at her side, at the

marquise de Montesson, whom he married after she became a widow. Like her mother, who had inherited the title through her Condé's ancestry, Louise Henriette was the duchesse d'Étampes in her own right, having inherited the title on the occasion of her husband's rise to the head of the House of Orléans in 1752. At her death, her son inherited the ducal title, which he held until it became extinct in 1792, during the French Revolution.[4]

In June 1759, shortly after his twelfth birthday, Louis Philippe, her only son, was presented before the court at Versailles, officially meeting King

Louis XV and the royal family. Despite their detached relationship, the Duke of Orléans was greatly affected by his wife's death, and so was their son. Louise Henriette was buried at the Val-de-Grâce in Paris.[citation needed
]

Ancestry

Notes and references

  1. ^ "The Spring (La Source)". Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  2. ^ , pp. 190-196.
  3. .
  4. ^ Profile, corpusetampois.com; accessed 15 April 2014.
  5. ^ Genealogie ascendante jusqu'au quatrieme degre inclusivement de tous les Rois et Princes de maisons souveraines de l'Europe actuellement vivans [Genealogy up to the fourth degree inclusive of all the Kings and Princes of sovereign houses of Europe currently living] (in French). Bourdeaux: Frederic Guillaume Birnstiel. 1768. p. 45.

External links