AS THE wife for 68 years of the Pretender to the throne of France, Isabelle Countess of Paris was a central figure in the hopes of French royalists from the 1930s onwards. Her husband, Henri Robert Ferdinand Marie Louis Philippe, Count of Paris, who died in 1999, was regarded by most legitimists as the rightful King Henri VI of France and Navarre — in the fervently hoped-for event of the French Republic and its people coming to their senses and restoring the monarchy.
Isabelle was a stylish woman, the ideal consort to such aspirations. The ex-King Ferdinand of Bulgaria (who abdicated in 1918) thought her “the most beautiful princess alive”, and into old age she retained a great and photogenic elegance. Pictures of her frequently appeared in magazines throughout the world. She was also a literate individual, and her loyalty to her husband’s cause led her to publish a number of biographies of her ancestors. Among these was Moi, a study of Marie Antoinette, written almost as if she had been its protagonist.
Isabelle Marie Amélie Louise Victoire Thérèse Jeanne was born in 1911 at the Château d’Eu, in Normandy, the daughter of Prince Pedro de Alcántara of Orléans and Bragança. The son of Dona Isabel of Brazil, he was also styled Prince of Grão and Pará. (The Brazilian royal family were at that time living in exile in France). On her mother’s side she was descended from Bohemian aristocracy.
Both she and her cousin Henri, whom she first met at the age of eight, were descended from King Louis-Philippe, whose reign had been ended by the revolution of 1848. Her childhood was spent between the Chateau d’Eu, her mother’s family in Czechoslovakia, and Brazil, where the exiled Brazilian royal family was allowed to return in 1922. It was at the chateau that she told her husband, at the age of 11 that she would marry him.
Their engagement was announced in 1930, but there were immediate impediments to their marriage being celebrated in France. By a law enacted in 1886 those claiming descent from the French monarchy were not allowed to live in France, so they were eventually married in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, on April 8, 1931. Several thousand French monarchists flocked to the city where the cry “Vive le roi” echoed in the streets.
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From then on, and during the war years, the couple lived in Belgium, Brazil, Morocco and Spain. Their first son, Henri, was born in 1932, to be followed by another four boys and six girls.
In 1950 the law of 1886 was rescinded and they were able to return to France, settling just outside Paris in that year, at a manor house at Louveciennes. Her husband became active as a proselytiser for the royalist cause, publishing news bulletins and canvassing widely for support. At one point he seems even to have nursed the fantastic hope of succeeding Charles de Gaulle as French leader. Her own contribution to the debate tended to be biographical and historical rather than political.
Alas, neither their common cause nor a large family could hold the marriage together, and since the mid-1970s they had lived apart. In the mid-1980s she shocked those whose vision of French glory still rested on the House of Orléans by filing for a judicial separation. There was a highly publicised dispute between them, with her husband declaring that her action was “informal contradiction with the tradition of the House of France”. It was all, perhaps, a sad reminder of the frailty of such grand aspirations, once exposed to the rough and tumble of a world which no longer regarded their claims as having any theological foundation. On his death, the Comte de Paris nevertheless bequeathed her all his worldly goods — though it was a legacy much reduced by his profligate spending.
As well as historical works she published two volumes of autobiography: Tout m’est Bonheur and Les Chemins Creux.
Two of her sons predeceased her, one while serving with the French Army in Algeria, a second in a hunting accident in Africa. She is survived by nine of her 11 children, the eldest of whom, her son Henri Philippe Pierre Marie, Count of Clermont, succeeded to the title of Count of Paris on his father’s death.
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Isabelle Countess of Paris was born on August 13, 1911. She died on July 5, 2003, aged 91.