An aristocrat who alleges that an underhand diplomatic manoeuvre deprived his family of Monaco’s throne is claiming a breakthrough in his €351 million lawsuit against Paris.
Count Louis de Causans, 47, says that a French court has signalled its intention to hear his claim that his family was denied its rights to the throne by a washerwoman’s daughter who became a royal at the behest of Parisian politicians.
De Causans’s initial lawsuit was dismissed in 2019 by Paris’s administrative court, which said he had failed to prove his ancestry. His second lawsuit, which includes a report by a genealogist, has achieved greater success, according to Jean-Marc Descoubes, his lawyer.
He said the court had demanded a written response from the French foreign affairs ministry, the first time Paris has had to state its case in the dispute. “Monaco and France always wanted this subject to remain a taboo,” de Causans told Le Parisien. “That is no longer the case.”
The dispute has its origins in the early 20th century when Paris was concerned that Prince Louis II, Monaco’s unmarried and footloose future sovereign, could die without an heir. Under the succession rules in place since the 15th century, Monaco’s throne would then have passed to Prince Wilhelm of Urach.
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Raymond Poincaré, the French president at the time, had no wish to see Monaco in the hands of a German, telling the principality that France would annex it if that happened.
Under pressure from Poincaré to find an heir, Louis agreed to adopt his daughter from a relationship with a washerwoman employed by the regiment in which he had served at the end of the 19th century. He accepted Poincaré’s advice to change the constitution to allow adopted children to enter the line of succession.
Charlotte Louvet, as his daughter had been born, became the Duchess of Valentinois and a member of European royalty. She never ruled, however, having been persuaded to renounce her rights to the throne in favour of her son, Prince Rainier, the father of Monaco’s present ruler, Prince Albert.
From the French perspective Poincaré’s intervention was a work of genius, keeping the Germans out of Monaco and placing the Mediterranean principality in the hands of a dynasty beholden to Paris. But it left two families with grievances. The first was that of Prince Wilhelm, who renounced his right to the throne in 1925.
The second was that of Count Aynard de Chabrillan, a cadet branch of the Grimaldi dynasty that has ruled Monaco for 600 years. De Chabrillan claimed that he should have been next in line for the throne after Prince Wilhelm. Historians say the count’s claims were ignored because Poincaré put Louis II’s children in power in the belief that France could influence them.
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De Cousans, the count’s great-grandson, says he has no intention of trying to replace Albert as Monaco’s sovereign, but he does want the French state to compensate him.
