In June 1673, the French Army laid siege to the Dutch city of Maastricht, a key crossing point of the river Meuse—they would take and hold the city for several years, aided by an English force commanded by a young Duke of Monmouth and the future Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, and with the participation of the King, Louis XIV, himself, and the King’s brother, Philippe, Duke of Orléans. It was a glorious victory worthy of the Sun King. But one of his most celebrated commanders was killed during the siege, the Comte d’Artagnan, a captain of the Musketeers. It is believed he was buried in the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Maastricht’s western suburb of Wolder, where Louis XIV’s camp was during the siege—and in March 2026, bones were discovered under the main altar during repair work being done to that church which archaeologists and historians think may be the remains of the famous musketeer. Samples have been sent to labs for testing, so we shall see what they discover…

The famous d’Artagnan at the Siege of Maastricht of 1673 was not the dashing young hero immortalised in the Three Musketeers novels by Alexandre Dumas—he would have been about 63 years old. Nor was his name in fact d’Artagnan, but Charles Batz de Castelmore. He had ‘borrowed’ the name from his mother, Françoise de Montesquiou d’Artagnan, and it would retain some of its notoriety as a name in the decades after his death through use by his first cousins, Joseph de Montesquiou, another captain of the Musketeers, and Pierre de Montesqiou, known as the Maréchal d’Artagnan.

So the name that is central of this blog post, and which qualifies d’Artagnan for inclusion within this website for dukes and princes, is Montesquiou. It linked him also to one of the most celebrated military commanders of the age, also a distant Montesquiou cousin, Blaise de Monluc. It does not, however, connect him to one of the most prominent philosophes of the Age of Enlightenment, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (d. 1753), who was from a family of magistrates of Bordeaux. The much more aristocratic Montesquiou dynasty, also from the south of France, in fact claimed to be linked to one of the most ancient dynasties in France, the counts of Fezensac, and through them, to the House of Gascony, who have roots as far back as the eighth century, or possibly even the seventh.

The early history of the House of Gascony is fragmentary and sometimes contradictory. As Gaul fell to various invaders after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the southern part of the old province of Aquitania was invaded by Vascons, a tribe of people from Iberia who later were known as Basques south of the Pyrenees and Gascons north of the mountains. In the conflicts between the Franks, the Burgundians and the Visigoths, they tried to forge their own territory, and around 600 were governed by a duke appointed by a Frankish king. This duke or military governor was probably a Frank or a Gallo-Roman, but in 670 we see a duke called Lupus who may have been a Vascon, and he changed the name of the region from the Roman Novempopulania to Vasconia. He extended his rule north to the Garonne river and fought off Visigoths to the east—chroniclers write that he wanted to be named king, but was murdered in 675 before achieving this goal.

The name Lupus means ‘wolf’ in Latin, and later became Loup in French and Lobo or Lope in Spanish (in Basque, wolf is otxoa). A century later, a second Loup (from the same family?) allied with the Franks to preserve his country from the invading Umayyads and swore an oath of loyalty to Charlemagne in 769—who then reversed the tide and pushed the Arabs back across the mountains in the 770s-80s.

In the 820s, Loup III Centelle, ‘Prince of the Gascons’ rebelled against the Franks and asked the King of Asturias for protection. The King appointed the Prince’s son Sance as governor or consul. Sance (or Sancho) already had a reputation for fighting against Saracens in Iberia, and the grateful Gascon people proclaimed his family’s rule would be hereditary. In the 830s-40s, he and his successors fought off several waves of attacks by Vikings (Northmen), but succeeded in capturing the city of Bordeaux, which became the new capital of Vasconia or Gascony. The name Sance derived from the Roman Sanctius, a holy person. Using the patronymic naming systems prevalent in those days, sons of Lope would be named Lopez, while sons of Sancho would be Sanchez—two of the most common Spanish surnames were born.

A few years later Sance II reunited different parts of Gascony, both the inland valleys and along the Atlantic coast, and thus revived the title ‘duke’ in about 851, establishing a de facto independent state in defiance of any loyalty to the Frankish empire. His son (or at least relative) Garcia Sanchez (or as he’s known in French, Garsie-Sance, or Gassia Sans in Gascon) was called Duke of Gascony, but also Count and Marcher Lord of the Ocean Coast and Count of Bordeaux. When he died in about 925, his lands were divided into three parts for his sons. The eldest, Sance-Garcie, continued the line of dukes of Gascony until 1039 when the duchy passed into the possession of their more powerful neighbours to the north, the dukes of Aquitaine (of the House of Poitiers), whose heiress, Eleanor of Aquitaine, took it to the House of England through her marriage to Henri of Anjou in 1152. The third son, Arnaud-Garcie received the county of Astarac and founded a lineage that ultimately included—or so they claimed—the family of Saint-Lary, which will have a blog post due to the Duke of Bellegarde. The middle son, Guillaume-Garcie (or Guillermo), was given parts of central Gascony called the counties of Fezensac and Armagnac. The latter split off in the next generation and would form the House of Armagnac, the most powerful medieval noble family in southern France, and for a time in all of France (the fifteenth century), gaining ducal status as dukes of Nemours, before dying out in 1503.

The County of Fezensac, with its capital at Vic-Fezensac (vic simply being a local word for ‘main town’), is a region today known for its amazing Gascon cuisine, with duck, rabbit and garlic, not mention foie-gras and Armagnac brandy (today’s Département of the Gers). Its counts in the tenth and eleventh centuries left behind records as donors to local bishops of Condom and archbishops of Auch. According to later genealogical assertions, Count Guillaume (d. 1074) divided his estates between his eldest son Aimery, who received the county, and Aysin, who received the lordship of Montesquiou. The elder line did not survive long and the county of Fezensac was re-integrated with the county of Armagnac from about 1140. The line of Montesquiou, in contrast, continues to the present. Whether the connection is genuine or not, it was formally recognised as so by Louis XVI in 1777, and the name was changed to Montesquiou-Fezensac.

The lordship took its name from a fortified village in the County of Armagnac, southwest of Auch, which seems to have taken its name from a local Occitan (or Gascon) word esquiu (‘savage’) to indicate a wild hill; but it may be that there was a family with this savage name who attached it to a hill on which they built their castle, the Mont d’Esquiou. There is only a trace of an eleventh-century castle here—it was last occupied in the 1570s, then passed to the Monluc family (see below). The ruins were sold and demolished during the Revolution, and its materials reused in local building projects.

The coat-of-arms of the early Montesquiou lords is seen in accounts of the Crusades, and is quite simple, one of the best marks for genuine ancientness in French heraldry: two red balls or roundels on gold. They were titled as barons from at least the 1090s, and were vassals of the counts of Armagnac.

With lands so close to the borders with Spain, some of the barons crossed the Pyrenees and gained military glory in service of the kings of Navarre in campaigns against the Moors. One of these, Aysinus (or Assieu), was rewarded with the title ‘son and canon of the Cathedral of Auch’, which became attached to the family’s barony of Anglès (or Saint-Jean d’Anglès) which was considered one of the four baronies of Armagnac—succeeding generations thus held a prominent place in the local estates and in the metropolitan church of Auch. Early prominent churchmen include a bishop of Tarbes (in one of the Pyrenean valleys to the south) in the mid-twelfth century, and Pierre de Montesquiou, Bishop of Albi and Cardinal (d. 1262). A generation later, a nephew with the unusual name of Pictavin became Bishop of Bazas then of Albi (both a bit to the north, in Aquitaine), then also a Cardinal (d. 1355). While the Cardinal’s older brother continued the main line, the younger brother Odet, married Aude de Lasseran, in 1318, heiress of the lordships of Massencomme and Monluc. The former was local, in the County of Fezensac, and formed a separate cadet line (extinct in the fifteenth century); while the latter was located further north in the Agenais (also in Aquitaine). This family, who used the surname Lasseran-Massencomme, leads to the Marshal Blaise de Monluc, or so his family said, as we will see below.

The history of the Montesquiou barons in the next two centuries largely follows that of their overlord the count of Armagnac, fighting with him versus the counts of Foix or the kings of England or France. In the 1470s, the inheritance was divided and two branches formed: the elder based at Montesquiou and the latter at the château of Marsan. The senior line died out in 1569 with the death of François, Baron de Montesquiou, a gentleman in the household of the Duke of Anjou (the future King Henri III), and Captain of his Swiss Guards. His sister and heir Anne married Fabien de Monluc, thus connecting that family more genuinely to the Montesquious.

Fabien de Monluc was the son of one of the most famous military commanders in French history, Blaise de Monluc, and later published genealogies asserting that he was himself descended from the Montesquiou family, in a branch who split off in the fourteenth century and changed their name to Lasseran de Massencome. Changing your name to match that of your principal fief was not uncommon in the Middle Ages, but it does make the genealogists’ job a bit more complicated. This story was accepted by official royal genealogists in the eighteenth century, but by the nineteenth century it had come under doubt, and now it is thought that the Monlucs were a minor gentry family from the Armagnac region who made a good marriage at the start of the sixteenth century to the heiress of the lordship of Estillac, a bit further to the north in the Agenais, near the mighty Garonne river, and attached their name to its castle. Today it is called the Château de Montluc, spelled with a t probably by mistake, assuming it applied to a ‘mount’, whereas the actual spelling Monluc seems to have derived from an earlier Roman name bono luco (and the b changed over time to an m). The thirteenth-century fortification was expanded and re-fortified along modern military lines by the Maréchal de Monluc in the 1570s, then in the 1640s passed to his heirs in the Escoubleau de Sourdis family. It was sold several times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is still in private hands.

Blaise de Monluc was born around 1500 and by his twenties was in service of King François I in his wars in Italy, acted as military governor of the city of Siena—which he defended against an Imperial siege in 1555—and by 1558 was appointed Captain-General of the Infantry of France by Henri II. He maintained his prominence as a client of the Guise family leading Catholic troops in the Wars of Religion, and was appointed Lieutenant-General of Guyenne in 1562. He became an almost independent force in the southwest of France, besieging Protestant strongholds, like La Rochelle in 1573, gaining a reputation for brutal but efficient acts. He was shot in the face in 1570, so he wore a mask for the rest of his life. When Henri III came to the throne in 1574, he rewarded Monluc’s long and illustrious career—serving five reigns—with the baton of a Marshal of France. This was a reward, but also in a sense an indication that it was time to retire, since accusations of brutality and corruption were mounting. He therefore set about recording his memoirs as a soldier in the Commentaries, published in 1576 and ever since regarded as a sort of ‘soldier’s bible’. He died a year later.

The Marshal had two brothers, Jacques and Jean. Jacques, known as ‘the Young Monluc’ was also a soldier, a captain of the royal men-at-arms, lieutenant for the King in the Piedmont, and governor of the city of Albi. He is most interesting for this website as he acquired a curious title ‘Prince of Chabanois’, one of several small lordships to take such a title in the region contested by the English and French kings during the Hundred Years War (Poitou, Angoumois, Saintonge, Limousin). Now spelled Chabanais, the ancient lordship in the Angoumois (today’s Charente) had belonged to various families but rose to prominence under the Rochechouarts in the fourteenth century, then a branch of the counts of Vendôme, who used the title ‘prince’. As with the château of Monluc above, this property passed to the Escoubleau family in the seventeenth century, then the Colbert family (for whom it was more formally erected into a marquisate, the princely title never being official) who held it until the nineteenth century. Its tenth-century castle was mostly a ruin by that point, and its vestiges were removed in the 1890s to make way for public buildings in the town.

Brother Jean was also interesting: as a younger son, he pursued as career in the church and eventually was elected Bishop of Valence and Die (in France’s southeast) in 1553. He was better known, however, as a diplomat, and was sent by François I to Constantinople in 1540, Venice, 1545, and later by Catherine de Medici to Poland to help get her son Henri elected as king there in 1572-73. He was one of the Queen-Mother’s most trusted advisors, and like her, was more interested in maintaining the peace than defending orthodox Catholicism in France. So unlike his brother Blaise, he was accused of defending or even supporting Protestant heresy, and was removed from his diocese by the Pope in 1574.

The Bishop also had an illegitimate son, who followed in his uncle’s footsteps to become a military commander. Jean de Monluc, Seigneur de Balagny, was a commander for the Catholic League in the north of France, and when he agreed to come to terms with King Henri IV, the King rewarded him with the rank of Marshal of France, 1594, and an appointment as governor of the city of Cambray. This city recently occupied by the French held the rank of prince-archbishopric, so Maréchal de Balagny took the unprecedented title ‘Prince of Cambray’. This meant the Monluc family now held two principalities! This presumption, and his heavy-handed government, led the citizens of Cambray to revolt and aided the Spanish in driving out the French by 1595—it would remain in Spanish hands until definitively attached to France in 1678. Balagny continued to integrate himself into the King’s inner circle by taking as his wife Diane d’Estrées, the older sister of the King’s mistress Gabrielle. He died in 1603 and left descendants, titled Marquis de Balagny (based on the lordship in Beauvasis, north of Paris), who died out later in the century.

Blaise de Monluc also had sons. Most of them predeceased him in various battles—one, Pierre-Bertrand, in attempting to take French troops to Congo, Mozambique or Malindi on the east coast of Africa to set up a trading post. Stopping first at Madeira, he briefly took it over, but was killed when the Portuguese, fearing French incursions into their sphere of trade, retook the island in 1568. The youngest son, Fabien, had been willed the principality of Chabanais by his uncle the Bishop of Valence, but was killed in 1573 while serving as governor of the fortress of Pignerolo in Piedmont.

It was this Fabien who had married Anne, Dame de Montesquiou, which led their son Adrien to put forward the idea that the Lasseran de Massencome de Monluc family was in fact already related to this more prestigious Gascon family. He published a genealogy in the 1620s with the aim to secure his eligibility to be appointed to the highest royal orders (St-Michel and St-Esprit). According to the royal genealogist Père Anselme writing later in the century, Adrien had been nominated to receive the St-Esprit in 1613, but for some reason did not receive it, and by the 1630s, had fallen out with Cardinal Richelieu and was sent to the Bastille, accused of plotting a coup. Earlier in his life he had been a favourite of King Henri IV, a fellow Gascon, one of the court gallants of this very randy court known as ‘les Intrépides’ or ‘les Dangereux’. Back in 1592, he had married very well, to Jeanne de Foix-Carmain, heiress of a very valuable property in the Lauragais, the grain-basket of Languedoc, the county of Carmain (today spelled Caraman). He was also named governor of the county of Foix, at the time still fairly independent from the Kingdom of France.

Carmain (or Carmaing) had long been a prominent lordship, on the road between Toulouse and Béziers, elevated to a viscounty for the Lautrec family in 1310, then to a county for the Foix in the 1480s. It would pass to Adrien’s daughter who used the illustrious styling Jeanne de Montluc de Foix, Comtesse de Carmain, Princesse de Chabanais, Dame de Montesquiou. In 1612, her father had arranged her marriage to Charles d’Escoubleau, Marquis de Sourdis, from a family on the rise in the west of France, notably through Charles’ brother François, the warrior Cardinal-Archbishop of Bordeaux, and they inherited all of these territories. Carmain, however, was sold in 1670 to Pierre-Paul Riquet, from Béziers, who built the famous Canal du Midi. His descendants ultimately inherited the Principality of Chimay in 1804, and are now one of the leading families of the Belgian nobility as princes of Chimay and dukes of Caraman.

So, while the barony of Montesquiou had passed out of the family’s possession, the junior branch was based in the lordship of Marsan. Its château was built by the Montesquious in the twelfth century in the town of that name, northeast of the regional capital of Auch. Damaged across centuries of conflict with the counts of Armagnac or the archbishops of Auch, the family rebuilt it entirely as a more grandiose country house in the 1750s in a neoclassical style. In 1906 it was given by the now senior branch to another junior branch, whose descendants still live there.

In the 1480s, the House of Montesquiou-Marsan divided again into several more sub-lineages: Marsan for the eldest, then Salles (in the Lauragais), and others. We will return later to the line of Marsan, which includes the ducal line, and focus first on the line of Salles, which became the line of d’Artagnan in the 1540s when Jacquette d’Estaing, Dame d’Artagnan (daughter of a wonderfully named Sauvage d’Artagnan), willed her estates to her husband, Paul de Montesquiou, Seigneur de Salles, an equerry to Henri II d’Albret, king of Navarre. This lordship thus passed to his son from a second marriage.

The lordship of Artagnan was even further south, in the County of Bigorre, one of the semi-independent counties in the Pyrenees that were only fully brought under control of the French monarchy in the seventeenth century. Known as Artanhan in Occitan, it took its name possibly from an ancient Gaulish word for bear, artos, which formed a personal name Artanius. It doesn’t seem to have had a castle, though I’ve found some old postcards showing a house in Artagnan claiming the famous Musketeer was born here, probably because the character in Dumas’ novel comes from Tarbes, which is nearby, whereas the real d’Artagnan was likely born in the château of Castelmore (see below).

One of the lordships in this wild and remote region of Bigorre that claimed to be a ‘free lordship’, with no feudal overlord at all (much like we can see with the ‘principality’ of Bidache for the Gramont family) was Tarasteix, acquired by Henri de Montesquou d’Artagnan in 1664. He had been appointed royal governor of the Château of Montaner in Béarn in 1630 and the King’s Lieutenant in the city of Bayonne. More importantly in terms of his family’s rise to prominence, he had married the sister of the Marshal de Gassion, one of the leading French commanders of the 1630s-40s. It was probably Gassion who supported the early career of Henri’s sister’s son, Charles de Batz de Castelmore.

The Batz family were merchants in one of the towns near Auch, Lupiac, and Charles de Batz’s grandfather was ennobled for holding an office in the local magistracy and bought a nearby château called Castelmore in order for his family to ‘live nobly’ (which was in itself one of the qualifications for being noble in the early seventeenth century). The château was only recently constructed, not a medieval fortress, and it remains mostly unaltered today, still in private hands (though reports suggest it has recently been sold to owners who want to open it up for Three Musketeers tourism).

In about 1630, young Charles travelled to Paris using his mother’s name and her connections—his older brother Paul was already serving in the Musketeers there, alongside three other Gascon noblemen whose names sound suspiciously like Athos, Porthos and Aramis. The newly minted d’Artagnan joined the Musketeers, the elite unit of the French Guards formed as part of the royal household in the 1620s which fought in the various military campaigns of the 1630s-40s. He then shifted his focus to acting as a secret agent and diplomat for Cardinal Mazarin (for whom he also served as one of the gentlemen of his household), until his Musketeer regiment was re-formed in the late 1650s. D’Artagnan lived in a house in Paris on rue du Bac, in the fashionable faubourg Saint-Germain, immersed himself in the world of the literary salons there, and became increasingly attached to the young Louis XIV, with whom he travelled through Gascony on his way to the Spanish border to meet his new wife, the Infanta Maria Teresa. The King thus gave this trusted soldier the task of arresting Nicolas Fouquet, suspected of government embezzling on a spectacular scale, and of personally guarding him for the several years of the trial of the century. In 1667, d’Artagnan (now sometimes using the title ‘count’) was named Captain-Lieutenant of the First Company of Musketeers, which meant he was its real commander, since the nominal captain was the King himself. He was appointed governor of the newly captured city of Lille in 1672, but was pulled away to attend the King during the siege of Maastricht, where, as we have seen, he was killed. His life inspired a novel by Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, published in 1700, which was then used by Dumas to write his novels in the 1840s.

The name d’Artagnan was kept in the public eye by the famous Musketeer’s first cousin, Joseph de Montesquiou, Comte d’Artagnan, who became a Musketeer in 1669, then rose through the ranks until he too was Captain-Lieutenant of the First Company in 1702, and led his brigade in various campaigns of the War of the Spanish Succession. After the war he was appointed governor of the southern city of Nîmes in 1719, and died a decade later.

An even more prominent career was forged by another first cousin, Pierre de Montesquiou d’Artagnan, who was sent to Paris to be looked after by d’Artagnan in 1660 and was established in the King’s household as a page, then joined the Musketeers in 1666. He too rose through the ranks of the Guards to become a Maréchal de camp in 1691, and was named governor of the city of Arras and lieutenant-general of the surrounding province, Artois—French since the 1660s, but still a sensitive frontier zone during the Nine Years War. When at court, Pierre was close to the King’s second wife, Madame de Maintenon, and the King’s favourite son, the Duke of Maine. When the next war broke out (the Spanish Succession), his closeness to this inner royal circle led the King to entrust him with the mission of guiding his grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, in his first command, leading French armies into Flanders. In 1709, Montesquiou commanded one wing of the infantry at the Battle of Malplaquet and shortly afterwards was named a Marshal of France, the highest rank in the military—he was known, possibly to honour his famous cousin, as the Marshal d’Artagnan. During the disastrous winter of 1710, when everything froze and France was brought to its knees, he was left in the field guarding the Flanders frontier against potential invasion by the Allies. After the war, he was given the prestigious post of Governor of Brittany, 1716-20, and was appointed as a member of the Regency Council, 1721, which ran the Kingdom on behalf of the young Louis XV. The Marshal retired with full honours and died at his country estate in the southern suburbs of Paris, Le Plessis-Picquet.

Le Plessis-Picquet had been built in 1410 by a Parisian financier and counsellor of Charles VI, Jean Picquet. It passed through the hands of various Parisian magistrate and parliamentary families, notably the Potier (a senior family of the Paris Parlement), until it was acquired by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s first minister—it was conveniently located between Colbert’s estate at Sceaux and the estate of Meudon, soon to be the residence of the Dauphin. When Pierre de Montesquiou acquired it in 1699, it was thus in the heart of the royal suburbs, a short drive to Versailles, and made it easy to socialise with his friends the Duke and Duchess of Maine who had established their court and salon at Sceaux. Montesquiou’s heirs would sell the château in 1755, and it passed through many more hands—including briefly to the Duke of Massa, one of Napoleon’s dukes, 1814-17—until it became the home of the Hachette family of Parisian publishers from 1853 (and took the name Château de Hachette). They sold it in 1915 to a government agency, and today it serves as the Hôtel de Ville for the town of Le Plessis-Robinson. When I lived in Paris, I had to follow the signs for ‘Robinson’ every day as I headed home on the RER B, and I always thought it such a strange name for a French town.

An even more oddly named estate had been acquired by Joseph de Montesquiou d’Artagnan: Mauperthuis, from malus, ‘bad’ and pertusium, ‘passage’. This estate in Brie, the region to the east of Paris, was in fact rich agricultural land, and brought the next generation great wealth. Joseph never married and had no sons, but he had five nephews, who also inherited lands from their uncle the Marshal d’Artagnan (who also had no surviving sons). All five forged advanced careers in the French military, including two in the Musketeers. One of these, Louis, Comte de Montesquiou, nearly added a third princely title to the family’s collection, by marriage in 1713 to Louise-Alphonse de Berghes, Princesse de Râches (an estate in Flanders that had been genuinely elevated into a principality by the King of Spain before this territory was lost to France in the 1670s). Soon after she died, heavily pregnant, she willed the principality to her husband, but the courts overruled this and returned it to her paternal heirs. Louis became Sub-Lieutenant of the First Company of Musketeers in 1729 and died in 1743. His brother’s son, Anne-Pierre, thus inherited all of the family properties of this branch of the family (the younger or d’Artagnan branch).

Anne-Pierre was raised as a menin or companion to the royal children of France, but unlike them, he embraced more of the teachings of the Enlightenment and became affiliated with a group called the Physiocrats who believed that wealth did not come from trade but from improving the land—when he inherited Mauperthuis, he built a grand new château there in the 1760s, and used the rich lands to develop new agricultural methods, and bred a new strain of merino sheep. A park was also laid out along newly fashionable English garden lines and became a renowned place to visit for a drive from the capital into the country—indeed, it was not far from Le Raincy, the country residence of the Duke of Orléans, who shared many of Montesquiou’s enlightened ideas, and they would be allies in the revolutionary period to come. Nevertheless, the château of Mauperthuis would be seized by revolutionary authorities in 1793 and destroyed. The park was eventually recovered by the family then sold in 1817.

Anne-Pierre took the title Marquis de Montesquiou and would be formally authorised to add the name Fezensac by Louis XVI in 1777. Interestingly, his mother’s dowry had included the original lordship of Montesquiou, bought by her father from its heirs. Like all men in his family, he joined the army and rose through the ranks in the 1750s-60s, and was appointed Premier Equerry of the Count of Provence (Monsieur), Louis XVI’s younger brother. Both men enjoyed reading and patronising the arts, and the Marquis became part of the Prince’s inner circle, more elevated and literate than the court of Versailles, and more focused on Paris. Here he built a residence on the rue de Monsieur (not far from the Invalides, and near his workplace of Provence’s stables), the Hôtel de Montesquiou, in 1781. After 1851, it housed a Benedictine convent, and from 1938 was used by the French state for offices (and they built a very modern façade that obscures the building from the street), notably, between 1959 and 1999 the Ministry of Cooperation, an agency set up to maintain good relations with France’s former colonies. Since 2012, the hôtel has housed the Embassy of China.

The Marquis de Montesquiou-Fezensac published verse and comedies which earned him a seat in the Académie française in 1784, and he was eager to act as a deputy for Second Estate (the nobility) for the Paris district at the Estates General of 1789. Here he swiftly joined the Third Estate to form the National Assembly in June, along with his ally the Duke of Orléans, and would later be appointed President of the Constituent Assembly, as that body became by 1791. His family’s military reputation and his own successful career made him a good choice to lead the newly created Army of the South in the summer of 1792, and he conquered Savoy for the new French Republic in September, then was instructed to invade Geneva. Rather than use force, he chose to negotiate with the magistrates of the city—perhaps respecting it as the land of Rousseau and Necker?—for which he was accused of treason in November. He fled abroad, and although he returned in 1795, kept his head down and died a few years later.

His sons however would continue their father’s legacy of support for the Revolution. Both had been set up at a young age to continue in royal services in the households of the King’s brothers, Provence and Artois, but both rallied to the cause of Napoleon and the proclamation of the Empire of the French in 1804. The elder, Pierre, was appointed Grand Chamberlain of the Imperial court in 1809, and was President of the Legislative Corps in 1810-13. He received a new imperial title, Count of the Empire, in 1810. His intimacy with the imperial court was strengthened further when his wife was appointed Governess of the king of Rome, Napoleon’s son, in 1811. Louise-Charlotte Le Tellier de Courtanvaux, known by her charge as ‘Maman Quiou’, also brought to the marriage another large château, Courtanvaux.

The Château de Courtanvaux is one of France’s great country houses. Built in the province of Maine (between Normandy and the Loire valley) in the fourteenth century, it was renovated in the fifteenth century and retains much of this characteristic high gothic style. The powerful Souvré family held it from 1500, known for the Marshal de Souvré, companion of Henry IV and preceptor for his son, Louis XIII. Now a marquisate, the estate and château passed by marriage to the Le Tellier family in 1661, but no one lived there for over a century until it was re-occupied and restored by Pierre and Louise-Charlotte de Montesquiou after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. Courtanvaux remained the family’s principal seat throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, until it was sold by Aymeri de Montesquiou (below) in 1978. It is now owned by the local town and opened up for visitors.

Pierre’s son Anatole was an ardent Bonapartist, a soldier in many of the Emperor’s campaigns and his aide-de-camp from 1813, and went into exile in 1815. He was reconciled with the new regime in 1816 and appointed aide-de-camp of the Duke of Orléans (and his wife appointed dame d’honneur of the Duchess), so when that Duke became King Louis-Philippe in 1830, Anatole de Montesquiou became an ardent supporter of Orléanism. Louis-Philippe gave him a seat in the Chamber of Peers in 1841, and elevated his military rank to general in 1848…but in that same year the Orléans Monarchy fell and Montesquiou went into exile once more. He did return in the 1850s and devoted himself to local politics in the area around Courtanvaux, and in the 1860s was a director of the Société de Secours aux Blessés Militaires, the organisation that would eventually become the French Red Cross.

Of the many descendants of this branch of the Montesquiou family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two stand out. Count Robert de Montesquiou (d. 1921) was a well-known dandy of the Belle Epoque: a poet and literary critic, he was a supporter of the Avant-Garde at his Hôtel de Montesquiou-Fezensac (not to be confused with the nearby Hôtel de Montesquiou, which today houses a Chinese cultural centre), where he lived fairly openly with his companion, the Argentinian Gabriel d’Yturri. Both men are cited as models for one of the more outrageous characters immortalised by Proust.

In the next generation, Count Léon de Montesquiou was at first a historian, writing a doctoral dissertation on the suppression of the noble duel, then from 1900 a leading member of the far-right nationalist and royalist party, Action Française. Vocally opposed to the government that had overturned the Dreyfus judgment in 1906, his comments calling for violent overthrow caused him to be removed from his post in the army reserve. Perhaps ironically, and in the spirit of the Musketeers, he was involved in a duel with a political opponent in November 1911. When war broke out, Montesquiou was re-integrated into the army and was killed in combat in September 1915.  

The senior line, who used the title Marquis de Montesquiou-Fezensac for the head (and count for younger sons), continue to the present and will be looked at again once they take up the title ‘Duke of Fezensac’ after 1913. But first we need to see where this ducal title came from, and for that we need to go all the way back to the senior line of the House of Montesquiou, the lords of Marsan.

As we’ve seen, this line split from the line of d’Artagnan in the 1480s. There is not much remarkable to note about this branch in the next two centuries. Marc-Antoine was the first to adopt a higher title, Comte de Montesquiou-Marsan, and became a Captain in the French Navy in the mid-eighteenth century. The family’s rise in society is signalled by his marriage in 1752 to Françoise-Catherine de Narbonne-Lara, whose brothers were prominent at the court of Louis XV, and whose sister-in-law was one of the King’s favoured mistresses (and whose son, possibly the King’s, was briefly Minister of War under Louis XVI). Marc-Antoine’s eldest son Philippe rose to the rank of Maréchal de Camp in 1791, and eventually Lieutenant-General at the Restoration in 1814.

It was his younger brother, François-Xavier-Marc-Antoine, who brought the family—remember, one of the oldest in all of France—to the premier rank in 1821. But unlike most dukes, he was not a soldier, but a churchman. The Abbé de Montesquiou was two times over abbot of Beaulieu: one near Langres from 1782, and one near Le Mans from 1786. In 1785, he was appointed one of two agents-general of the clergy, an administrative role at the top of the French Church hierarchy (so we can assume he was headed for appointment as a bishop). He was then selected to represent the First Estate for the Paris district at the Estates General, and unlike his distant cousin noted above, he did not at first agree to join the Third Estate to form the National Assembly. He eventually came around and was elected several times to act as that body’s president, for monthly terms in 1790 and 1791. He remained conservative however, and opposed the adoption of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (making it a strictly French Church, severing dependency on Rome) in July 1790. When things got hot after the popular attack on the Tuileries Palace in August 1792, he fled abroad, first to England, then to the United States. His journeys there were later recorded and published. The Abbé returned to France in 1795 after the end of the Terror, and acted as a royalist agent for the titular king in exile, Louis XVIII. As a reward, he was part of the provisional government set up in April 1814 before the return of the King, and he urged Louis not to accept a constitution from the Senate—reaffirming the old idea that kings grant rights to the people, not the other way round. He was appointed Minister of the Interior, and began to reform the nation’s education system, but was run out with the King in the Hundred Days in 1815. When the monarchy was restored for the second time, Montesquiou retained the title of Minister of State.

The Abbé de Montesquiou was a member of the Académie française from 1816, and appointed to the Chamber of Peers as Count of Montesquiou-Fezensac in 1817. This was then raised in rank to Duke of Fezensac (sometimes written Montesquiou-Fezensac) in 1821, though I’m not certain why: perhaps the fairly moderate Louis XVIII wished to keep him on side in the face of the increasingly conservative opposition led by his brother Artois, the future Charles X. When ultimately Charles X was toppled in 1830, the Duc de Fezensac at first remained in his seat in the Chamber of Peers under the new liberal regime, but resigned in 1832 and died soon after.

Before he died, the first Duke resigned his peerage to his nephew, Raymond. Initially not sharing his uncle’s fervent royalist views, he had joined the army in 1804, and served as aide-de-camp for Marshal Ney from 1806. In 1808 he married Henriette Clarke, daughter of Napoleon’s Minister of War, and in 1809 was created a baron of the Empire. He was appointed a general in 1813, and led campaigns in Germany and Bohemia. But despite these close Napoleonic ties, he did swiftly assimilate into the Restoration court, like so many nobles of the Old Regime, and was appointed a Major-General in the Royal Guard in 1815. In 1838, now as 2^nd Duke of Fezensac, he represented King Louis-Philippe as Ambassador to Spain.

A generation is skipped since the 2^nd Duke’s eldest son Roger-Aimery predeceased him, so in 1867 the title passed to his grandson, Philippe. Interestingly, another ducal title passed through this line, with Henriette Clarke, the 2^nd Duchess, ultimately passing her father’s Napoleonic dukedom (Feltre) to one of her daughter’s sons. Philippe, 3^rd Duke of Fezensac, was active in politics in the French Third Republic, representing the Department of the Gers in the Senate for a decade (1887-97) in support of the conservative monarchist faction. After his retirement, he became President of the exclusive Jockey Club of Paris, 1908 until his death in 1913. He had two daughters, but the dukedom expired with him.

As noted above, before he died, the 3^rd Duke donated several properties including the Château of Marsan in the ancient family heartland to a very distant cousin from the junior d’Artagnan line, Joseph, Marquis de Montesquiou-Fezensac, who assumed the title 4^th Duke of Fezensac without any legal basis, since he wasn’t descended from the original grantee. Joseph and his wife Victoire Masséna de Rivoli were part of the avant-garde society of turn of the century Paris and were both painted by Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka.

Joseph was succeeded in 1939 by his son Pierre (‘5^th Duke’) who took on various political roles in the Gers, including the post of mayor of Marsan, then served at the national level as a deputy from the Gers, 1958-76. Taking an interest in European politics, in the 1960s he was appointed to the Council of Europe and the Assembly of the Western European Union, where he presided over its liberal members. He inherited the Château of Courtanvaux in 1964, but also lived at Marsan until his death in 1976.

His son, Aymeri de Montesquiou (b. 1942), is considered to be the 6^th Duke of Fezensac. He too has been for many years mayor of Marsan, where he resides, a deputy in the National Assembly and the European Parliament, and Senator for the Gers, 1998 to 2015. In the Senate, he sat as a Union Centriste (centre-right), but in 2015 his senatorial re-election was invalidated as he was accused of money laundering and trafficking influence with foreign agents, notably from Kazakhstan. Since 2012 he legally changed his name to Montesquiou-Fezensac d’Artagnan—and perhaps he can get a career re-launch with the renewed interest in his famous Musketeer ancestor buried in a church in far-off Maastricht.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

Shortly after his marriage to his first cousin, Princess Henrietta of England, in March 1661, Philippe de France, second son of Louis XIII and younger brother of Louis XIV, was given the Orléans apanage (for its earlier history, see Part I). Philippe had, as Gaston had before him, been known as Duke of Anjou, but just as a courtesy title. He was now formally Duke of Orléans, Duke of Chartres and Duke of Valois. Louis XIV restricted his brother’s access to the full wealth of the apanage however, by keeping the castles of Blois and Chambord for the Crown. Later Philippe’s apanage was augmented (at the time of his second marriage in 1671) with the Duchy of Nemours, and eventually (though many years later) he inherited significant properties from Gaston’s daughter, La Grande Mademoiselle, notably the Duchy of Montpensier and the Principality of Joinville—these latter two were not part of the apanage, but held as private property (ie, they could pass to a daughter or could be sold).

Philippe, Duke of Orléans, is different to his predecessors in that he had very little to do with the Orléannais. He did build the Orléans Canal, connecting the Loire to the Seine (via the Loiret) in the 1680s, but his life was lived almost exclusively at court or his preferred residences: the Palais-Royal in the heart of Paris, or the Château of Saint-Cloud on the road towards Versailles. The former was initially the grand palace built close to the Louvre by the First Minister of Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, in 1629, so was known as the Palais Richelieu. After he died in 1642, it was taken over by Queen Anne and her two little boys, Louis XIV and Philippe, as a more comfortable residence compared to the old fortress of the Louvre. Renamed the Palais-Royal, it was given as a residence to Philippe after he married in 1661, then added more completely to his apanage in 1692—it thus remained part of the Orléans patrimony until the middle of the nineteenth century. Since the proclamation of the Third Republic it has housed various government institutions, notably the Council of State as well as the Ministry of Culture, which is appropriate since once wing still houses the Comédie-Française, which, in one form or another, has existed here since the Duke of Orléans installed the theatre troupe of Molière in the 1660s.

The Château of Saint-Cloud, initially built by the Gondi family of Florentine bankers on the outskirts of the city of Paris, it was purchased for Philippe by Cardinal Mazarin in 1658. It became his pride and joy, and the focus of his herculean patronage efforts in the 1670s-80s. Perched high above a bend in the river Seine, its chief glory was a grand waterfall called La Cascade, which is the only part of Saint-Cloud to remain visible today. Inside the château was a golden chamber where Philippe received guests, a gallery for Chinese porcelains and Japanese lacquers, and even a hall of mirrors, built several years before the more famous hall of that name at Versailles. Unfortunately, the Château of Saint-Cloud burned down in the turmoil at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

If Philippe wanted to go further afield, unlike Gaston he did not go south to the Loire valley, but north to his Duchy of Valois and its chief château, Villers-Cotterêts. Built as a royal castle by François I in the 1530s on the site of an old hunting lodge, it was the site of a significant edict, in 1539, by which the King decreed that French, not Latin, would henceforth be the language of government and law. In 1661, it was given to Philippe as part of his apanage, and he spent much time here in the time of his first marriage to Henrietta of England, particularly at times when he left the court to protest against a decision made by his brother the King. Villers-Cotterêts remained in the Orléans family until the French Revolution when it was confiscated and given over for use by the French army, then in the nineteenth century was used as a home for the poor, and later a retreat for the elderly. This lasted until 2014 when the building was basically abandoned and was left to rot, until the French president established a Cité Internationale de la Langue Française—to commemorate the edict of 1539—and re-opened a renovated palace in 2023.

The Duke of Orléans had a huge apartment at Versailles as well, adjacent to the central core apartments of the King and the Queen. Known simply as ‘Monsieur’ as the brother of the King, Philippe was known as a prince who was loyal and fun, even frivolous and scandalous due to his fairly open sexual preference for men and his long-term relationship with the Chevalier de Lorraine. But he could be serious and reliable, offering support and counsel to his brother when needed on issues of court etiquette and proving himself as a commander on the battlefield, notably at the Battle of Cassel in Flanders where he defeated the Prince of Orange in 1677.

Philippe also did his duty in terms of the dynasty. He had a male partner for over thirty years, the Chevalier de Lorraine, but married twice, both for diplomatic reasons, and produced seven healthy children. His first wife was Henrietta, sister of the King of England, and his second was Elisabeth-Charlotte, daughter of the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Naturally his focus was on having a son, to pass on the Orléans apanage. Philippe-Charles, Duke of Valois, was born in 1664, but died 2½ years later. Another Duke of Valois was born in 1673, Alexandre-Louis, followed by a second son, Philippe-Charles, called the Duke of Chartres, in 1674. Valois died in 1676, but Chartres survived, and as Philippe II, succeeded his father as Duke of Orléans in 1701.

**

A new House of Orléans was born—the first since the fifteenth century—and survived and thrived throughout the eighteenth century as the second royal family of France. Thanks to the work of Philippe I, a financial empire had been created that allowed them to be autonomous from the French Crown, a factor that irked their cousins Louis XV and Louis XVI.

From 1709, the Orléans princes added a new title: ‘First Prince of the Blood’. This was not given to Philippe II, since he already held a higher rank, ‘Grandson of France’, but to his son, Louis, born in 1703, and as his father had been, titled Duke of Chartres. This elevation in status meant that the Prince of Condé no longer held the prestigious title (and its pension) of ‘First Prince of the Blood’, and these two branches of the royal family, Bourbon-Orléans and Bourbon-Condé, would be rivals for the rest of the century. This rivalry was fiercest early on, when Philippe II was named Regent of France in 1715, in charge of the government during the minority of Louis XV (born in 1710), and Condé (known by his secondary title Duke of Bourbon) was given a seat on the Regency Council, but also looked after the King’s household as Grand Master of France. The two men were also brothers-in-law, both having married illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV. The Regency of the Duke of Orléans was a period of experimentation in government, mostly unsuccessful, though the King kept him on as First Minister when the Regency formally ended in 1722. When Orléans died in 1723, he was succeeded in this role by the Duke of Bourbon, who swiftly undid most of his rival’s policies, particularly in foreign policy.

For Orléans had not only solidified the King’s position abroad by arranging a marriage with the daughter of the King of Spain, he also ensured that the House of Orléans shared in this glory, by sending two of his own daughters to wed Spanish princes. Despite loathing his wife, Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, from the very start of their marriage (he called her ‘Madame Lucifer’), Philippe II had seven healthy children. Aside from the son and heir noted already, the eldest daughter ‘Mademoiselle’ (as the eldest unmarried daughter of the cadet line was always known) had been married to Louis XIV’s grandson, the Duke of Berry, while ‘Mlle de Valois’ was sent abroad to marry the Duke of Modena, before ‘Mlle de Montpensier’ and ‘Mlle de Beaujolais’ were sent off to Spain in 1723 to marry Crown Prince Luis and his brother Infante Felipe. The Crown Princess, Louise-Elisabeth, became Queen of Spain briefly in 1724, but due to her husband’s sudden death and her universally loathed behaviour, she (and her sister) were sent back to France, like unwanted packages. Once Louis XV began having children of his own, the children of the House of Orléans would return to their secondary position, as princes of the blood with the style of ‘Serene Highness’.

The new Duke of Orléans, Louis, was of a very different character to either his intellectual father or his vivacious grandfather. He seemed to have inherited some of his grandmother Madame de Montespan’s headstrong passions: as a young man he loved and he fought with vigour, not always forethought, and in middle age, he threw himself completely into a life of religious contemplation, retiring from the world of the court and becoming known as the ‘Hermit of Sainte-Geneviève’ (the abbey near the Latin quarter in Paris). Louis ‘the Pious’ had a short marriage to a German princess, Jeanne de Bade (Baden), which produced one child, a son, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Chartres (b. 1725).

Louis-Philippe, 4^th Duke of Orléans, succeeded to this title in 1752. When he came of age in 1740, he had initially been proposed as a groom for Louis XV’s second daughter, Madame Henriette, and the teen-aged couple had even displayed real affection for each other; but it was decided that such a marriage would emphasise the Orléans cousins too much as potential heirs to the French throne and antagonise strained relations with Philip V of Spain. So the prince was married instead to another, more distant, Bourbon cousin, ‘Mlle de Conti’, in 1743, in an effort to heal the breach between the Orléans and Condé/Conti branches of the family. This marriage was not more successful than his grandparents’ had been, and they produced only two children, Louis-Philippe II, Duke of Chartres, and Bathilde. Orléans revealed his attachment to the ideas of the French Enlightenment through the education of these children, and in 1756 they were made examples of for the entire court by being inoculated for smallpox. Orléans was also an ally of his brother-in-law, the Prince of Conti, an influential member of the ‘loyal opposition’ to the King’s inclinations towards continued absolutism rather than the fresh political ideas of the era.

The 4^th Duke of Orléans set out to expand the already vast Orléans empire, adding the county of Soissons to his apanage in 1751, and the nearby lordships of La Fère, Marle and Ham in Picardy. Like his great-grandfather, he increased his revenues by developing a waterway, the Ourcq Canal, to bring supplies and fresh water to Paris from his duchy of Valois; and developed the area around the Palais-Royal in Paris for commercial enterprise. His wife died in 1759, and the widowed Duke settled far from court at a large château he purchased in the countryside east of Paris, Le Raincy. This château had been built in the mid-seventeenth century and owned by the Princess Palatine (Anne de Gonzague) then her daughter the Princess of Condé. The Duke of Orléans now redesigned the château and developed its gardens in the newly fashionable English style.

Orléans moved here with his mistress, the widowed Marquise de Montesson. They forged a committed relationship and the King agreed to their marriage in 1773, as long as it remained secret and she was not given any rights or titles. The Duke was mocked by members of high society, who quipped that “unable to make Madame de Montesson a Duchess of Orléans, he made himself Monsieur de Montesson”. The new couple acquired yet another château, Sainte-Assise, southeast of Paris on the road to Fontainebleau. Here the Duke put on great entertainments for his guests, with plays written and acted by the Marquise. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette refused to visit what they saw as a shocking set up, which further distanced Orléans from his support of the Crown. This château has survived, modified, passing through many hands until it was owned by the princes of Beauvau, but since the 1920s property of a radio broadcasting company.

The Duke of Orléans was already annoyed with the royal family since he had tried to negotiate a marriage for his son with Princess Kunigunde of Poland in 1769, but was blocked by the King who thought that Chartres was not of sufficient rank to marry the daughter of a king. The Duke arranged instead a wedding to the daughter of the Duke of Penthièvre, a Bourbon, but from an illegitimate branch. Members of the court mocked him again, scorning this marriage as a mésalliance. A convincing factor was of course the bride’s vast fortune: a dowry worth about four million livres in real estate, and some of the finest châteaux of the Loire valley.

The union of two of the grandest fortunes in France, Orléans and Penthièvre, in 1769, ensured that the family could act independently of the Crown, and both the Duke of Orléans and the Duke of Chartres shocked the court by signing a letter of protest against the King’s plans to dismiss the parlements of France in 1771—along with several other princes of the blood, they were exiled from court. The Palais-Royal became a focal point for political discontent against the troubled regime of Louis XV.

As a new reign began in 1774, the Duke of Orléans retreated to the Château de Sainte-Assise with his wife, Madame de Montesson. The Duke of Chartres, named formally Louis-Philippe II but referred to generally as Philippe, was also socially isolated, despite his early friendship with Marie-Antoinette and the bright young things at court. Like them, he too accumulated debts through lavish living and grand patronage of artists and architects. One of his early projects was the pleasure gardens at Monceau, on the northern edge of Paris. This ‘fantasy park’ brought together elements from around the world: a Chinese pagoda, an Egyptian pyramid, a Roman colonnade, a Dutch windmill… The Duke’s servants walked around the park dressed in Chinese costume or as animals. He later added a large rotunda, the Pavillon de Chartres, with offices on the ground floor and an apartment above for himself and his mistresses.

Meanwhile Chartres was raising two families. With his wife Marie-Adélaïde (the former ‘Mlle de Penthièvre’), he had a son, Louis-Philippe III, Duke of Valois, in 1773, followed by another, Antoine-Philippe, Duke of Montpensier, in 1775. These boys were followed by twin girls in 1777, Mlle d’Orléans and Mlle de Chartres, and then another son, Louis-Charles, Count of Beaujolais, in 1779. The Duke was also raising two foundling daughters with his mistress, the Comtesse de Genlis, a niece of Madame de Montesson who had been appointed as a lady-in-waiting to his wife. The more well-known of these daughters, Paméla, was officially an orphan, but may have been Chartres’ child. All the children were raised together, with Madame de Genlis as their governess. She already had a reputation as an educationalist; her aim was to mould the young princes with values of humility and public service. They read Voltaire and Rousseau, and she encouraged them to gain confidence and poise through theatre—she even published an educational tract on this theme, amongst her other works on the education of princes and of women.

Madame de Genlis’ focus on educating young women had the most impact on Mlle d’Orléans, Adélaïde, who became a respected intellect as an adult; she never married and remained a constant figure at the side of her brother Louis-Philippe well into the nineteenth century. Paméla went abroad during the Revolution and married Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a leader of the Irish Revolt of 1798, during which he was arrested and died in prison.

The Duke and Duchess of Chartres lived mainly at the Palais-Royal in Paris and sometimes at their suburban residence the Château of Saint-Cloud. But Saint-Cloud had been neglected, and just before he died in 1785, the old Duke of Orléans sold it to the Crown. The new 5^th Duke of Orléans was able to use these funds therefore to focus his attentions on expanding the gardens at his father’s favoured country retreat, the Château of Le Raincy. Already the most English of the Bourbon princes, Philippe d’Orléans refashioned the gardens along the latest English styles. He even built a small café for visitors in which the waiters spoke English. He also had a new English mistress, the well-known socialite Grace Elliott. Ever the anglophile, the prince spent a good deal of time in London, with a house on Portland Place, living incognito as the ‘Count of Joinville’. He desired nothing more than to live as a ‘Milord Anglais’, investing in business, betting on horses at Newmarket, and gambling with his old friend, and fellow liberal, Charles James Fox.

With two families and expensive building projects, Orléans thus needed employment. As part of his marriage arrangements with the daughter of the Duke of Penthièvre, Admiral of France, it was understood that Philippe would embark on a naval career and ultimately succeed his father-in-law in this prestigious post. He had begun service in the navy in 1772, served in a few campaigns, and by 1778 was a junior admiral. But that summer he made a crucial command error during the battle of Ouessant (‘Ushant’ in English) off the coast of Brittany that allowed the British navy to escape. He was not given another command, further alienating him from Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

By the mid-1780s, Orléans had a significant political faction of his own, supporting opponents of the Crown known as the ‘Patriot Party’. In 1784, he allowed a banned play, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ to be put on at the Comédie française, the theatre supported by him at the Palais-Royal. He took part in the Assembly of the Notables in 1787, where he protested against the Crown’s fiscal proposals and called for an Estates General. The King clashed violently with his cousin the Duke, publicly, in Parlement: when the Duke questioned the legality of a new law being presented, the King shouted ‘It is legal because I wish it!’ Orléans was once again forbidden from appearing in Parlement, and two of his supporters were arrested. In the winter of 1788-89, the Palais-Royal hummed with activity, printing pamphlets to agitate the public.

As Revolution broke out in Paris in the summer of 1789, the Palais-Royal remained the nerve centre for popular radicalism, where cries for reform became ever louder. The Estates General proclaimed itself a National Assembly on 20 June, and most of the clergy defied the King by joining it on 25 June, followed the next day by nearly fifty nobles—led by Philippe, Duke of Orléans, First Prince of the Blood. He was soon asked to preside over that body, but refused. He also rejected—at least publicly—calls to name him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom or regent for the Dauphin, or even king himself. Orléans at first tried to act as a mediator between the Assembly and his cousin the King, but was pushed away by the court. The King sent him as a diplomatic envoy to Great Britain, where he tried to use his popularity in high society in London to forge a career as international diplomat. By mid-1790 his popularity in Paris was fading as the revolution radicalised and anyone with connections to the Old Regime, no matter how liberal their personal politics, became suspect. Many found it suspicious that much of his private fortune had been moved into British banks and investments.

Nevertheless, the Duke of Orléans continued to demonstrate his devotion to the Revolution. He joined the Jacobin Club, and after the King’s attempted flight from France in June 1791, formally asserted his loyalty and again dismissed ideas of making him regent or king. He even changed his name: after the proclamation of the Republic in September 1792 and his election as a deputy to the Convention, he took the name ‘Philippe Égalité’. His eldest son Louis-Philippe eagerly followed his father’s lead; he joined the Army of the North in the summer of 1791, and swiftly gained glory, notably at one of the first victories of the revolutionary armies at Quiévrain, April 1792. In January 1793, Égalité made his most powerful mark on the history of France by voting for the death of Louis XVI, and opposing any efforts to amend the sentence to exile or life imprisonment.

But only a few months later, the defection of General Dumouriez into Austrian service, prompted the start of the Terror. Crucially, Dumouriez had convinced Égalité’s son, the former Duke of Chartres, to go with him. This defection made it clear to the revolutionary government that no one of royal blood could be trusted. On 1 April 1793, a decree was passed in the National Convention that condemned to death anyone with connections to counter-revolution. Philippe Égalité had voted in favour, yet just seven days later, he himself was arrested and taken to prison. He was put on trial on 6 November and guillotined the same day.

The new (if nominal) Duke of Orléans, Louis-Philippe III, age 20, headed to Switzerland where he moved from place to place, teaching classes to earn much-needed money, then began several years of far-reaching—and rather extraordinary for a Bourbon prince—peregrinations in Europe and North America. After a year in Scandinavia in 1795, he travelled to the United States, settling at first in Philadelphia. Joined by his brothers Montpensier and Beaujolais, he spent time in New York City and Boston, and travelled as far as Tennessee and Maine. In early 1798, hearing that their mother had been deported from France, the brothers travelled south to New Orleans, the city named for their great-great-grandfather, the Regent Orléans, hoping to return to Europe. After a year, they finally made their way back and settled in Twickenham, in the western suburbs of London. Here they watched as the Napoleonic wars unfolded, maintained by the British government as potential political or diplomatic pawns.

In 1809 the Duke of Orléans journeyed to Sicily where he met and married his cousin, Maria Amalia, daughter of King Ferdinand IV. The marriage had been fiercely opposed by Queen Maria Carolina—the sister of Marie-Antoinette—who harboured great anger against the regicide Philippe Égalité, the groom’s late father. The new couple remained in Palermo, in a residence near the Royal Palace, the ‘Palazzo Orléans’, where three of their children were born before they finally returned to France in 1814. The Palazzo Orléans would remain an important Orléans residence until it was seized by the Italian state in 1940—today it serves as the seat of the president and the Regional Council of Sicily.

Sadly, neither of the Duke’s brothers survived the revolutionary period. Both Montpensier and Beaujolais had been kept in prison in Marseilles for several years after their father’s arrest, and both suffered long-term damage to their health. After their adventures in America, Montpensier’s health worsened and he died near Windsor in 1807; while Beaujolais, who had joined the British Navy in 1804, tried to improve his health by visiting the Mediterranean, but he too died, on Malta, in 1808. The Dowager Duchess of Orléans also survived the Revolution. Despite her disinterest in revolutionary politics, following her husband’s execution, the ‘Veuve Égalité’ had been brought back to Paris in late 1793 and imprisoned in the Luxembourg Palace; here she met and fell in love with a disgraced Girondin deputy, Jacques-Marie Rouzet, who later obtained Marie-Adélaïde’s freedom and lived with her in Paris until both were exiled in 1797. They resided first in Spain, then in 1809 joined the small Orléans court in Palermo, then returned to France in June 1814.

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At the Restoration of the French Monarchy in Spring 1814, Louis XVIII made every effort to reconcile the two branches of the royal family. The 6^th Duke of Orléans, Louis-Philippe III, returned to France from Sicily with his wife and children. At first an eager supporter of his royal cousin’s regime, when Napoleon returned from Elba in March 1815, Orléans did not accompany the King and his court to Ghent, and instead established connections with the Bonapartist government. Thus the hereditary mistrust of the two branches was rekindled and continued to fester in the second Bourbon Restoration through minor but very public humiliations, like denying Orléans the use of the royal box at the Opera. Although an avowed liberal, Orléans was strongly attached to etiquette and hated being slighted socially, for example being treated as a ‘Serene Highness’ when, in comparison, visiting foreign princes from junior ruling houses like Bavaria and Saxony were now ‘Royal Highness’. When Charles X took the throne in 1825, he tried to balance this by decreeing that all princes of the blood would be Royal Highnesses.

The Orléans family residence was re-established at the Palais-Royal in the centre of Paris, where Duchess Marie-Amélie was formally hostess. She had a relatively reserved personality, and society looked instead to the Duke’s sister, Adélaïde, ‘Mademoiselle’, as the real political hostess. She ran a salon attended by Parisian liberals and clashed with the senior women of the royal family. The Duke’s mother, the Dowager Duchess Marie-Adélaïde set about asserting her possession of the numerous properties she had inherited from her father, the Duke of Penthièvre. One of the major châteaux added to the Orléans holdings at this time was Amboise, in the Loire valley. Amboise, in Touraine, had been a royal property since Charles VII confiscated it from the powerful Amboise family in 1434. It had been part of the apanage of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, between the 1620s and 1660s, but was otherwise maintained as a royal, not ducal, property—associated probably the most with King Francis I and his invited Italian master, Leonardo da Vinci (who lived in the smaller château next door 1516-19). Gifted by Louis XV to his First Minister the Duke of Choiseul, and after his death purchased by the Duke of Penthièvre, it thus entered the portfolio of the dukes of Orléans. In the nineteenth century the family set out to restore it to its former glory, and the family foundation, the Fondation Saint-Louis continues to do so today.

Besides the Dowager Duchess’s recouping of properties like Amboise, but also the Norman estates of Eu and Aumale, her most enduring contribution to the House of Orléans was the construction of a new site, the Royal Chapel of Saint-Louis, built at Dreux from 1816, a fantastic example of Neo-Gothic architecture, about an hour west of Paris. It became the necropolis for the Orléans family and a centre for royal ritual and memory—which it remains to this day.

The Orléans family also acquired a new country residence: the Château of Neuilly, in the western suburbs of Paris. Neuilly had been built in the 1750s and passed through various hands until it was bought by Marshal Joachim Murat in 1804 who expanded it then gave it to Napoleon’s sister Pauline in 1808. In 1819, the Duke of Orléans acquired the château and its extensive parklands for his summer residence. It remained a centre of Orléanism for the next three decades until it burned down in 1848 and its estate auctioned off. Part of it survives today as a convent.

Further afield Mademoiselle purchased a château of her own far to the south in rural Auvergne, Randan, which she rebuilt as a neo-gothic fantasy. This castle had been built by local lords in the thirteenth century who took the name ‘Château-Randan’, then passed to the Viscounts of Polignac, another Auvergnat family in the sixteenth century who rebuilt it in a Renaissance style. It passed to the La Rochefoucauld and Bauffremont families, under whom Randan was erected into a curious dukedom for mother and daughter (for whom there will be a future blog post), before it passed through several other ducal families: Foix-Candale, Caumont, Durfort and Choiseul. An heir to the later sold it to Mademoiselle in 1821. The Orléans family held on to the property until the 1920s when a terrible fire destroyed most of the building. An heiress took it to the Huarte family from Spain until the regional government purchased the ruins in 1999.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Orléans’ personal fortune had continued to grow. Already one of the richest men in France, he inherited the vast estates of his mother in 1821. Then in 1829, the last Prince of Condé made a will naming Orléans’ fifth son Henri his universal heir, bringing an even larger fortune into the collective arms of the House of Bourbon-Orléans. This included in particular the spectacular domain of Chantilly, north of Paris. An ancient lordship of the Montmorency family, Chantilly had been turned into a princely seat by the princes of Condé in the eighteenth century, famous notably for its stables built on a royal scale. Henri d’Orléans, created Duke of Aumale by his father, rebuilt the château entirely in the 1870s in a deliberately historicist style. When he died in 1897, Aumale donated the château and its estates to the Institut de France, which still owns it today. It maintains some of the finest elements of the Condé-Orléans art collections and a great library—a treasure-trove to historians of Bourbon history.

In Paris, the Palais-Royal continued to buzz as a centre of Orléanism. It was the setting for a huge party in May 1830, just as a political crisis was brewing that would bring down the senior branch of the Bourbons just over a month later. Orléans made headlines by celebrating in style the visit of his brother-in-law, the King of the Two Sicilies. There were 3,000 guests, but there were also crowds shouting against the King’s new ultra-royalist ministry. When political events spiralled out of control for Charles X in July, the King attempted to preserve the throne by appointing the Duke of Orléans—his cousin and old friend from their far-off youth at Versailles, but by now on far ends of the political spectrum—as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, and hopefully as regent for his grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux. Louis-Philippe hesitated between accepting these proposals, or suggestions that he accept the French crown himself. His family was divided: his sister Adélaïde urged him to take the throne, against the views of his more conservative wife Marie-Amélie. Orléans himself was at the Château of Le Raincy, while the two women were both at Neuilly—so when the delegation from the provisional government came there, Adélaïde accepted the crown on her brother’s behalf.

Back in Paris, Louis-Philippe was unsure what to do following this ‘July Revolution’. He was very popular, as a moderate option between ultra-royalism, militant Bonapartism or radical republicanism. On 8 August the Chamber of Peers invited him not to be regent, but king, and he accepted. He chose the regnal name Louis-Philippe I, and adopted the title ‘King of the French’ (not ‘of France’) indicating that his throne came from popular sovereignty, not divine will or ancient conquest. He was officially proclaimed king by the French legislature at the Palais Bourbon on 9 August 1830. He was escorted during the ceremony by two of his sons, the dukes of Chartres and Nemours. A few days later, Chartres was re-branded as Duke of Orléans and ‘Prince Royal’—not Dauphin, another sign of the new approach for this ‘July Monarchy’.

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The rest of the story of King Louis-Philippe is the history of the French monarchy rather than the dukes of Orléans—though it should be noted that several more conservative foreign royal families continued to refer to him as the Duke of Orléans, seeing him as no more than a usurper—so we should move on to his son and anticipated successor.

Prince Ferdinand-Philippe, born in Palermo in 1810, had been named for his grandfathers, King Ferdinand of Naples and Philippe d’Orléans. During the Restoration he had been educated in Paris and steered towards a military career. Once he became Duke of Orléans in 1830, Ferdinand swiftly became a quite popular prince, helping to put down a revolt of silk workers in Lyon without violence and visiting cholera patients in Paris. He earned military glory through his service in military ventures in Belgium (1831-32) and in three campaigns in the French conquest of Algeria (1835-36, 1839 and 1840). He was seen as a great hope for the future of Orléanism in France and therefore needed to marry and produce an heir. In 1836, Ferdinand went on tour to the capitals of Europe—Brussels, Berlin, Vienna—but did not find a suitable Catholic bride. The search was widened to include Protestant princesses with links to the ruling houses of Denmark or Prussia. Here the Duke of Orléans finally found his match, Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a niece of the King of Prussia. They were married in May 1837, in a civil ceremony at Fontainebleau since the Archbishop of Paris refused to preside over a wedding to a Protestant in Notre Dame Cathedral. They soon had two sons, Philippe and Robert, and set themselves up in the Tuileries Palace, where the prince established a large collection of medieval art and East Asian porcelains.

Just as things were looking rosy for the next generation of the House of Orléans, in July 1842, the Duke was injured in a carriage accident on the road to Neuilly and died several hours later. All of France went into mourning, and eventually several grand memorial statues were erected to his memory. Perhaps the most touching is the memorial on his tomb at the Saint-Louis Chapel at Dreux, finished only when his widow died in 1858; as a Protestant, Hélène could not be interred within the chapel, so her sarcophagus sits just outside, and her outstretched arm reaches through the wall for the hand of her beloved.

There was already hope for the next generation, however. After 1842, the Duke of Orléans’ son, Philippe, became the ‘Prince Royal’, as heir to his grandfather. He was given the courtesy title ‘Count of Paris’, a deliberate re-assertion of the ancientness of the dynasty, one of the very first titles used by Hugh Capet before his rise to the French throne in 987. His younger brother, Robert, was given the title Duke of Chartres. There were also numerous other dynastic titles regularly seen in the House of Orléans, now in use for the King’s numerous sons and grandsons (Nemours, Joinville, Aumale, Montpensier, Penthièvre), and new ones added from the succession of the Prince of Condé (Guise, Alençon or Condé itself). Louis, Duke of Nemours would become head of the family after their father’s death in 1850 (since his nephews were children), while Henri, Duke of Aumale later became its intellectual head, as a historian and political writer. Antoine, Duke of Montpensier married a Spanish infanta and established a separate branch that meddled in internal affairs in Spain, and remains a part of the extended Spanish royal family today.

The Orléans monarchy fell in 1848. There would be no more formal dukes of Orléans, but the title was used again, as a ‘courtesy’ by later members of the family.

The previous Duke of Orléans’ son, Philippe, Count of Paris, died in 1894, he was succeeded as head of the royal family in exile by his son, Philippe, who took the title ‘Philip VIII’. Born in Twickenham in 1860, he returned to France with his family in 1871 at the fall of the Second Empire, but was exiled again by the Third Republic in 1886. In 1880, his father gave him the title ‘Duke of Orléans’, and sent him to complete his education at Sandhurst—he then served as a staff officer to Lord Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India. In 1890 he came of age, and demanded he be allowed to fulfil his required military service like any young Frenchman. Instead, French officials arrested him and imprisoned him in the Conciergerie in Paris. But here he was well housed and well fed; he received high-ranking visitors and even carried on an affair with a Parisian dancer. He was soon pardoned and evicted from France, mocked by the French press for being such a pampered prisoner.

While the family had resided in Paris in the 1870s, they lived at the Hôtel de Galliera in the fashionable faubourg Saint-Germain. This enormous hôtel particulier was built for the princes of Monaco in the 1720s and called the Hôtel de Matignon (the princes’ former surname before they adopted Grimaldi). Confiscated during the Revolution it was later given the Crown to the Orléans family, who eventually sold it to the Duke of Galliera (like the Grimaldi, from a family of Genoese bankers), whose widow then generously opened it up for the Count of Paris and his family (since they no longer owned the Palais-Royal). After her death it became the Embassy of Austria-Hungary, then was acquired by the French government for use as a residence of the head of government. Renamed Hôtel de Matignon, it still houses the Prime Minister of France.

In 1886, when the news came that the Orléans family had to leave France, they were spending the summer at their preferred country residence, the Château of Eu. Like Chantilly and Amboise, Eu is one of the finest remainders of the glories of France’s country houses. It was built in the 1570s by the Duke of Guise on the site of an ancient fortress—watching over this area of the Norman coast since the tenth century. The Guise family passed it in 1661 to La Grande Mademoiselle (Gaston d’Orléans’ daughter, seen above), who was forced by Louis XIV to give it to his illegitimate son, the Duke of Maine. From Maine’s heirs it passed to the Duke of Penthièvre and thus back into the House of Orléans, along with its vast forests—a significant source of revenue for the family. It was the favoured country retreat of Louis-Philippe during the July Monarchy, and was where he received Queen Victoria and her family in a famous meeting of the monarchs that established an entente cordiale in 1845. From 1905 to 1940, it was the residence of one branch of the Orléans family who were also (by marriage) the claimants to the imperial throne of Brazil (Orléans-Bragance). Sold by their heirs in 1964 to the town of Eu, the château now houses a very grand Musée Louis-Philippe. Interestingly, some of the estate is still owned by the last Duke of Orléans (below) and his cousin.

Over the next two decades, the exiled Duke of Orléans became an explorer, notably in the Arctic, discovering new parts of northeast Greenland (‘Duke of Orléans Land’ and nearby ‘Cape Philippe’). Boatloads of stuffed wildlife were brought back to England and to his new residence in Worcestershire, Wood Norton. He was elected to the Royal Geographic Society in 1893. Just before the First World War, however, he moved to Belgium, to a residence dubbed the ‘Manoir d’Anjou’ at Putdaël, near Brussels. Huge dioramas of natural scenes had been created at his museum in Wood Norton, which eventually were donated to the National History Museum in Paris (the ‘Gallerie du duc d’Orléans’—built in 1928, torn down in 1959). Politically he had tried to keep Orléanism alive, but distanced himself from the far right wing monarchist party, Action française. The Duke of Orléans died in 1926 in the Orléans Palace in Palermo, Sicily. In 1896, he had married Archduchess Maria Dorothea of Austria, but they soon separated and had no children.

The headship of the House of Orléans passed to a cousin, whose son ultimately took over as Henri, Count of Paris. His second son Prince François was killed in Algeria in 1960 and was posthumously given the title of Duke of Orléans. A few years later, in 1969, the title was revived for the fourth son, Prince Jacques. Born in 1941 in Rabat in the French Protectorate of Morrocco, Jacques was the younger of a pair of twins. Michel, the older brother, was moved to a lower position in the order of succession by their father when he married a woman of unequal rank. Jacques married the daughter of a French duke, Gersende de Sabran-Pontevès, which was deemed appropriate—and the reversal of their birth order was confirmed by later heads of the family. It was said that the ducal title of Orléans was given as a snub to his twin (titled merely Count of Evreux), and in consequence, Jacques’ sons would be given higher ranking titles: Duke of Chartres (b. 1972) and Duke of Aumale (b. 1974). Prince Jacques also has a daughter who married the second son of the Duke of Mouchy (a Noailles).

In the 1990s, the Duke of Orléans led his siblings in a revolt against their father, in an attempt to block his sales of some of the family properties (and to raid the private fortune of his wife, their mother). Orléans would publish a tell-all book about it in 1999. At the time, the family still owned property worth about 15 million euros, including art and jewels, the Château of Amboise, and the domain of Dreux with the family necropolis. Other items had been sold long before, notably the Manoir d’Anjou in Belgium and the Palais d’Orléans in Sicily in the 1940s.

The current Duke of Orléans’ children are considered by Orléanist monarchists to hold the rank of ‘first prince of the blood’. Somewhat confusingly, those who support the Legitimists in case of a restoration of the French throne (the House of Anjou in Spain) consider instead that the head of this branch of the family, Prince Jean, is not the Count of Paris, but in fact the 13^th Duke of Orléans, by right of primogeniture established by Louis XIV for his brother Philippe all the way back in 1661.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

France and England share a tradition of using a select group of ducal titles for their second sons—most often York for England and Orléans for France. But not always, since, in both cases, if the holder of the second son title had his own son it carried on into the next generation, so the Crown would turn to another title for the second son, like Gloucester in England or Anjou in France.

The most famous dukes of Orléans are those younger brothers of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, Gaston and Philippe, the latter of which founded a dynasty that continues to the present day (the House of Bourbon-Orléans). But the title stretches back much further into the history of the French monarchy as a dukedom, and even further, to the very foundations of the monarchy, as a county and a kingdom.

The Orléannais is one of the richest, most agriculturally productive regions of France, conveniently watered by the broad river Loire which also served as an efficient means to transport grains and grapes from France’s interior to its Atlantic ports. So it was a natural spot to base the centre of one of the early Frankish kingdoms under the Merovingians and Carolingians, and eventually became the prized possession and power base of the family that eventually unseated the Carolingians: the Capetians.

The city of Orléans itself is ancient, built at a good crossing spot on the Loire, so it developed into a trading centre for the people of Gaul, Cenabum, as far back as the second century BC. It was destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, then rebuilt several centuries later by the Emperor Aurelian (d. 275 AD), who renamed it after himself: Civitas Aurelianorum. By the Middle Ages it had become one of the three richest cities in France. Several important battles were fought here across the centuries, at this strategic crossing of the river: from Atilla the Hun versus the Franks and Visigoths in 451, to Joan of Arc versus the English a thousand years later in 1429.

The Merovingians and Carolingians divided and re-divided their Frankish kingdom into sub-kingdoms, including one based in Orléans, from the 510s until the reign of Charlemagne. Probably the most famous of these was Guntram, king of Orléans from 561-592, who ruled a fourth of the Kingdom, including much of the east (Burgundy). Two centuries later, Charlemagne reunited all of the various pieces of the Frankish realms, and granted the region of Orléans as a county to loyal Frankish generals. One of these, Odo (d. 834), was related to the royal family, and was a key support in their fight against the Viking invasions from the North Sea. Odo’s son Guillaume succeeded him as Count of Orléans, and his daughter Ermentrude became a queen, as wife of Charles the Bald, who later accused William of treason and executed him (866).

The County of Orléans was given to another Frankish lord, called Robert, founder of the Robertians who gathered a significant land power base in Orléans, Anjou, and Touraine (the old ‘March of Neustria’, a block of territory that protected the Frankish heartlands from Vikings and Gascons), and importantly the County of Paris and the area around it, which became known as the Duchy of France, or the Ile de France. This power allowed them to take the throne of France several times, and then more permanently under Robert’s descendant Hugh Capet, who had himself crowned in the Cathedral of Orléans in 987. Orléans remained the preferred seat of the Capetian monarchy well into the eleventh century.

But where did they reside? There’s little evidence of a royal palace in Orléans, but it was likely located on the riverbanks, next to what became known as the Châtelet—as in Paris, the name given to the seat of justice and its prison. Vestiges of the Châtelet of Orléans remain today. Like many cities in the Middle Ages, effective local power was exercised by the local bishop, who had a palace next to the Cathedral, while the counts and later dukes resided in the countryside in increasingly magnificent castles, for example Beaugency (see below). One significant early building in the city is the ‘King’s House’ (built in the early fifteenth century); constructed on the northeast edge of the old walled city, it was the administrative centre of the Orléannais, a law court, and housed princes or cardinals when they passed through the city. Rebuilt in the early sixteenth century as the Hôtel Brachet, then renamed the Hôtel de la Vieille Intendance in the eighteenth century, it has housed the tribunal court for Orléans since 1989.

Orléans and Paris became the two most important parts of the royal domain in the period when most of France was dominated by its feudal magnates. The first time the County of Orléans was given to a second son was in 1250, for Prince Philippe, son of King Louis IX. This was the era when French kings were creating the system of ‘apanage’: the lands and revenues could be enjoyed by a junior prince with a great deal of autonomy, but they remained ultimately part of the royal domain and would return to the pot if the apanagiste had no legitimate heir (they hadn’t yet learned that these should be males only titles, but they soon would, once Artois was lost through female inheritance…). Young Philippe (about fifteen) retained this title when his older brother Louis died in 1260 (there not yet being a tradition to name the heir ‘dauphin’), and went with his father on crusade to North Africa in 1270. The King died in Tunis, so Orléans became King Philip III (‘the Hardy’).

In 1344, Orléans was made a duchy-peerage and given to another Philippe, second son of King Philip VI, when he was about eight years old. He was also Count of Valois, another important part of the royal domain to the north of Paris, and Count of Touraine, immediately downriver from Orléans, which was also raised into a duchy-peerage. His father also married him (still age eight) to his cousin Princess Blanche of France, daughter of Charles IV. After Philip VI died in 1350, Philippe d’Orléans became an important supporter for his older brother, King John II. He fought alongside him at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 (where John was taken prisoner), then was exchanged as a hostage of the peace forged by the Treaty of Bretigny, 1360—and remained in England until 1365.

One of Duke Philippe’s residences in his apanage was the Château de Beaugency, a few miles downriver from the city of Orléans. This was a stronghold built by the lords of Beaugency in the eleventh century, later acquired by the Crown in 1292, and given to Philippe in 1344. It is still one of the most impressive medieval castles in the Loire Valley, though much of what we see today was built slightly later by the Count of Dunois (below). His descendants, the Orléans-Longueville family, also made new additions, in the Renaissance style, in the 1520s, and it was held by subsequent dukes of Orléans until the French Revolution.

The 1^st Duke had also acquired, at the start of King John’s reign, a grand residence in Paris from his brother, so he could also live like a prince in the Kingdom’s chief city. This was the Hôtel de Navarre, on the rue St-André des Arts (in the area between what’s now the Metro stops of St-Michel and Odéon). This princely residence had been built in the 1260s on the Left Bank (most other princes, notably the Duke of Burgundy, lived closer to the Louvre, on the Right Bank) by Thibaut, King of Navarre (held at that time by the French family of Blois-Champagne). When his descendant King Charles of Navarre clashed with King John of France, his estates, including the Hôtel de Navarre, were confiscated. This site would be the main Parisian residence for the dukes of Orléans until the era of Louis II in the 1480s, then was sold to various other proprietors until it was divided into two lots in the 1640s (and became the hôtels de Châteauvieux and Vieuville, entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century).

The first Duke of Orléans died in 1375, at only 39 years old, leaving no legitimate children from his wife Blanche, though there were several illegitimate sons, including Louis d’Orléans, who became Bishop of Poitiers and Bishop of Beauvais, and died in 1397 on a trip to the Holy Land.

So the Duchy-Peerage of Orléans was re-created in 1392 for the first Duke’s great-nephew, Louis, the younger brother of King Charles VI. He had already been given lands from the royal domain, the Duchy of Touraine, in 1386, which he now exchanged for Orléans as well as the County of Valois (which was later raised to a duchy as well, 1406). Louis continued to acquire even more feudal estates, like the County of Château-Thierry and other lands in Champagne (the only other region of France equal to the Orléannais in the richness of its agriculture), the counties of Blois and Dunois (to add to his block of Orléans and Touraine), and the counties of Angoulême and Périgord, stretching his influence down towards the southwest of France—and spaces contested by the King of England.

In 1389, Louis married Valentina Visconti, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. She brought with her as a dowry the County of Asti, a small territory but strategically wedged between Piedmont, Lombardy and Genoa. She also ultimately became heiress to the Duchy of Milan itself—a factor that affected the histories of both France and Italy for a century—but not until the 1440s, well after her death.

Louis and Valentina became known as organisers of grand fêtes. In Paris they lived at the Hôtel de Navarre (or Hôtel d’Orléans), noted above. He was also given a smaller residence, the Hôtel du Petit-Musc, purchased for him by his brother in 1378, just inside the Paris city walls near the Porte Saint-Antoine (today’s Place de la Bastille). This building named for the street or district ‘Petit-Musc’ could refer to a small hidden street, or it may have been ‘pute et muse’, a hidden place to promenade with prostitutes. Nothing of it remains today as it was entirely rebuilt as the Hôtel de Boisy by the dukes of Roannais in the 1560s, then acquired by the Duc de Mayenne in 1605. A member of the House of Lorraine-Guise, Mayenne enlarged it into how we see it today, and it bears his name, so is part of the story of the dukes of Guise.

Outside Paris, Louis I preferred to reside not in his Duchy of Orléans, in a château like Beaugency, but his County of Valois, northeast of Paris in a region favoured by French royals for its excellent hunting grounds in the large royal forests of Compiègne and Villers-Cotterêts. The Duke rebuilt an ancient castle here, Pierrefonds, built by local nobles and acquired by the royal domain in the late twelfth century. Duke Louis rebuilt it completely in the 1390s, a massive structure with seven grand towers. Pierrefonds was later given to various nobles in the sixteenth century, then was dismantled on orders of Louis XIII in 1617—its ruins became a fashionable Romantic tourist spot in the nineteenth century, then the castle was almost entirely rebuilt on the orders of Napoleon III in the 1860s (in what is known as ‘Troubadour Style’, a sort of Romanticised vision of Medieval architecture), which is how we see it today.

Not far away was the Château of La Ferté-Milon, also a much older castle, acquired by the Crown for the County of Valois in the 1290s, and now added in the 1390s to the Orléans apanage. Louis also planned to rebuild this into a more elaborate residence, but it was still incomplete at the time of his death, and his successors took little interest in it. La Ferté-Milon was dismantled in 1594 on the orders of Henry IV, and remains a ruin.

The Duke of Orléans was thus a very powerful magnate, with bases in the Loire valley, the Valois and in Paris, and able to step in when his brother needed him in 1392 when he was attacked by debilitating mental illness. The royal brothers’ uncle, Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, had been Regent of France while Charles VI was a child (1380-88), and he now re-asserted his power, pushing out the Duke of Orléans from any attempt to be regent for his unwell older brother. This starts a long and bloody feud between the houses of Burgundy and Orléans that continued for the next two generations. As part of this rivalry, in 1402, Orléans made yet another acquisition, the Duchy of Luxembourg, to spite uncle Burgundy’s desire to unite the northern and southern halves of his domain (but also perhaps to connect to his domains in Valois, on the road from Paris to Luxembourg). Philippe of Burgundy died in 1404, and was succeeded by his son Jean who continued to wield his father’s control over the King and his council. In frustration, the Queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, made an alliance with the Duke of Orléans and the Duke of Berry (another of the King’s uncles), December 1405, and by 1407 managed to push Burgundy and his supporters out of government and out of Paris. In response, Duke Jean got his men to assassinate the Duke of Orléans in the street near the Hôtel de St-Pol (the favoured royal residence, on the eastern edges of the city of Paris), in November 1407.

This murder provoked a civil war in France, Burgundians versus Armagnacs, so called for the new Duke of Orléans’s father-in-law, mentor and war commander, Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac. The new Duke, only 13, was named Charles. His marriage to Bonne d’Armagnac in 1410, at age 16, was in fact his second marriage, having married at first when he was 12 Isabelle of France, daughter of Charles VI (herself already the widow of King Richard II of England), in 1406. She died in childbirth in 1409, only 19 years old. The 2^nd Duke of Orléans (of the second creation) made a bold debut on the battlefield at Agincourt in 1415, where miraculously he was not killed or maimed, but was captured and taken to England—where he remained for the next 24 years.

The Duke of Orléans, as hostage of the King of England, moved around a lot: the Tower of London, Bolingbroke Castle, Pontefract and others. Henry V refused to allow him to be ransomed, but the French prince was relatively free in his daily life, and spent this time becoming a poet—in fact, he is regarded as one of the leading poets of this period, in both French and English. Over five hundred of his poems survive, some of which were set to music in the late nineteenth century during a revival of all things medieval—notably the ‘Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans’, premiered by Debussy in 1909.

Orléans was finally freed in 1440 thanks to the intervention of the Duke of Burgundy (and lots of ransom money). In return, he had to promise to stop the vendetta seeking vengeance for his father’s murder. He solidified this new bond with a third marriage, now to Burgundy’s niece, Marie de Clèves, daughter of Adolf, Duke of Cleves (and it was her dowry that secured the ransom). He settled into his château at Blois where he nurtured a court of art and music and poetry. He died in 1465.

The 3^rd Duke of Orléans, Louis II, was born from this third marriage, so was only three when he succeeded to his elderly father’s titles. But before we look at this generation, we need to look at Duke Charles’s brothers, Vertus and Angoulême, and his half-brother, one of the most famous men of this period, Dunois.

Philippe, second son of the 1^st Duke of Orléans, was known as the Count of Vertus. This county in central Champagne had in fact been given as a dowry to a French princess who married into the ducal family of Milan, then returned with Valentina of Milan as part of her dowry. Both he and his older brother Charles quartered Orléans and Visconti in their coat-of-arms. Vertus took over as head of the Armagnacs while his older brother was held hostage in England, and supported the Dauphin Charles in his campaigns to recover his claims to the Kingdom after he had been disinherited by the Treaty of Troyes (between Henry V and Charles VI) in May 1420; but he died unmarried only a few months later.

Jean, the third son, was given the County of Angoulême as his part of the Orléans succession in 1407. He was sent to England as a hostage even before the Battle of Agincourt, in 1412, in an attempt to broker a peace. He was only 13. Like his oldest brother, he stayed in England for a very long time—33 years! Also like Charles, he was bookish, and when he returned to France finally in 1444, he brought back quite a library, some of which is still at the core of the National Library of France today. His son Charles, Count of Angoulême, did not make much of a mark himself, but was the progenitor of the House of Valois-Angoulême, fully royal once his son François succeeded to the French throne in 1515. But that’s a different story. Angoulême also joined the Dauphin’s campaigns versus the English in the 1440s, notably alongside his illegitimate half-brother Dunois.

Jean, ‘Bastard of Orléans’, is famous as one of the companions and generals of Jeanne d’Arc at the siege of Orléans, 1429, after which he helped the Dauphin, now calling himself Charles VII, drive the English out of France. In thanks, his brother (still in England) gave him the County of Dunois (west of Orléans, centred on the town and castle of Châteaudun, or ‘Château Dun’). The King augmented this with the County of Longueville in Normandy, by which title his descendants (who continued to use the surname ‘d’Orléans’) are known—they were raised to the rank of dukes in 1505, so will have a post of their own. Their coat-of-arms is a fascinating example of the intersection of cadency and bastardy: Dunois bore a three-point silver label of the House of Orléans ‘bruised’ by a silver bend sinister denoting bastardy. This bend was then reversed to become a bend dexter once the Orléans-Longueville family obtained legitimation as princes of the blood by the King of France in the sixteenth century—though their exact status as princes of the blood remained contested, much to their chagrin.

Inheriting the Orléans apanage at such a young age, Louis, 3^rd Duke of Orléans was raised under the watchful eye of his mother, Marie de Clèves, and through her, the Duke of Burgundy. This new alliance—a complete reversal of family politics at the start of the century—worried the new King of France, Louis XI, who is remembered as one of the most politically manipulative kings in French history. As such, in a juicy anecdote that is often told, worthy of ‘Game of Thrones’, the King is said to have forced his young cousin Orléans in 1476 (when he was 14) to accept the honour of marriage to a royal princess, his own daughter Jeanne, despite knowing that she suffered from disfigurement that would prevent her from having children. A perfect way to kill off a rival dynasty. Specialists of the era now cast doubts on this story, pointing out that it was circulated during Orléans’ later proceedings to get this marriage annulled for political reasons, and that the ‘evidence’ he presented to the ecclesiastical courts also included accusations of witchcraft, so the story may have simply been part of the campaign concocted to blacken the reputation of Jeanne and her father. The marriage was indeed annulled, but in the long run, Jeanne won a rather large victory (in terms of the celestial and the eternal) as she was canonised as a saint in 1950.

As he matured, Louis of Orléans became known as a reformer, displayed at the Estates General of 1484, held in the city of Tours, where he supported demands for an end to corrupt taxation practices and to foreign influence in the French church and military. He also put himself forward as the best man to lead the Kingdom as regent, since Louis XI had died and his son Charles VIII was only 13 and temporarily being governed by his older sister, Anne, Dame de Beaujeu. The Estates General sided with Anne, and Louis and his reform ideas were pushed aside. The next year, Orléans joined a revolt against Anne’s regency, known as ‘the Mad War’ (la Guerre Folle), in league with the Duke of Brittany and other disgruntled grandees. He was defeated at captured at St-Aubin du Cormier, in eastern Brittany, in July 1488.

Pardoned in 1491, Orléans patched things up with his now adult cousin Charles VIII by going on campaign with him to Italy in 1494. The King was invited to the Italian peninsula by the Pope, to stake a claim on the Kingdom of Naples (to keep it out of the hands of the King of Aragon), but also by the Duke of Milan, who sought protection from his enemies in Venice and Florence—unwittingly reviving the Duke of Orléans’ claims to that Duchy himself in the name of his grandmother Valentina Visconti.

Suddenly, Charles VIII died, in April 1498. Though he and his wife, Anne of Brittany, had had several children, none of them survived, and there was no one else in line of succession, so Louis, Duke of Orléans, became Louis XII, King of France. Right away he marched back to Italy and finally took the Duchy of Milan in the Autumn of 1499. A year before, he had successfully arranged for his first marriage to Jeanne de France to be annulled, and he married the late King’s widow, Anne of Brittany, ensuring that Brittany remained a part of France. Domestically, Louis XII also put into place many of the reforms he had tried to champion at the Estates General back in 1484. The last Duke of Orléans of this line had a good reign as Louis XII, but is overshadowed in popular memory by his cousin and successor, Francis I. Lovers of Tudor history remember Louis XII as the elderly king who married Henry VIII’s sister Mary, and died shortly after from an excess of marital passion…

One of the chief castles Louis II of Orléans had inherited in his apanage was the Château of Blois. Not in the Orléannais, it was in the county next door, and had been built in the tenth century by the powerful Counts of Blois—one of the major feudal dynasties of the Middle Ages in France. It had been given to Louis I, first Duke of Orléans, when his apanage was created in 1392, and was inhabited in the 1440s by Duke Charles, the poet-duke, who made it a court of poets and musicians. But it wasn’t until Louis II became King that he began major renovation works and created the ‘Louis XII Wing’ of the château as we see it today, in flamboyant gothic style. The more famous wing at Blois is that built by Louis XII’s successor, Francis I, in a dramatic Renaissance style (with its famous twisting staircase). It remained a royal, not ducal residence, a favoured nursery for royal children, first for Queen Claude then for Queen Catherine de Medici, until it was given again as part of the Orléans apanage to Louis XIII’s brother Gaston (see below), who built a third magnificent wing in the 1630s, and had plans to demolish the other two wings and rebuild if and when (he assumed) he became king. The birth of Louis XIV in 1638 scuppered those plans (thank goodness!), then the French Revolution interrupted other plans to demolish the château in 1788 (!), so Blois remains mostly untouched, one of the finest heritage sites in the Loire Valley.

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The reign of Francis I, starting in 1515, is usually seen as the turning point between the Late Medieval and Renaissance eras of French history. A few years later, in 1519, Francis and his queen, Claude (the daughter of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany), celebrated the birth of a second son, Henri, who was—as was now tradition—created Duke of Orléans. The young Duke, only 7, was sent to Spain as a hostage in 1526, along with his brother the Dauphin, in exchange for their father’s freedom following the shocking Battle of Pavia. Henri was said to be sulky and often melancholic after his return to France in 1530, hardly cheered by his marriage three years later to Catherine de Medici, a strategic marriage since she was niece of Pope Leo X (and also heiress of a significant chunk of central France) but not someone of rank deemed sufficient to marry a royal prince of the House of Valois. This discrepancy in rank became even more awkward in 1536, when the Dauphin François died, and Henri became the new Dauphin. The Orléans apanage was transferred to the next brother, Charles, three years younger.

Prince Charles had first been called Duke of Angoulême, inheriting this apanage on the death of his grandmother, Louise de Savoie, in 1531. After he became Duke of Orléans in 1536, his father continued to build up his estates, granting him the counties of La Marche and Clermont in 1540, as well as the Duchy of Châtellerault (in Poitou, a less prestigious title, but it came with a peerage, which gave Charles a seat in the Parlement of Paris). He was very much his father’s favoured son, and a court favourite, some say because of his more sunny disposition, having not suffered the three years of imprisonment in Spain as the Dauphin Henri did. The court even divided into rival factions in the early 1540s, presided over by the King’s mistress, the Duchesse d’Etampes (with Orléans) and the Dauphin’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers. This was exacerbated when the Duke of Orléans was successful in his early military career in 1542 while the Dauphin was not, and even more so when the King opened negotiations in September 1544 to secure a peace treaty with Emperor Charles V by means of a marriage between Orléans and a Habsburg (further highlighting the Dauphin’s low-born wife). The Emperor even offered as a dowry the Duchy of Milan, which the Dauphin thought should be his by right of his senior descent from Valentina Visconti. The King counter-offered by giving Orléans yet another duchy, Bourbon, a rich territory in the centre of France recently confiscated from the junior branch of the royal house. Negotiations dragged out until the Emperor finally agreed in September 1545, only to discover that the Duke of Orléans had died a few days before, of plague while on campaign near Boulogne. He was only 23.

The Dauphin Henri became Henri II in 1547, and despite their rocky start, he and Catherine de Medici had numerous sons. As before, the eldest, François, was named Dauphin, while the second son, Louis, was created Duke of Orléans (1549). He died only a year later (not yet two years old), and the apanage was transferred to the third son, another Charles. After the brief reign of Francis II, Charles became king as Charles IX in 1560, so the Duchy of Orléans was given to the next brother, Henri, who later exchanged it (in 1566) for the Duchy of Anjou.

The Orléans estates were given to their mother, Catherine, to add to her own estates, which included the Château of Chenonceau—famous for its long gallery extending across the river Cher—in the Duchy of Touraine. She had big plans to expand this royal residence, but the Wars of Religion caused delays, until her death in 1589 brought all these properties back into control of the Crown.

The next creation of the Duchy of Orléans as a royal apanage was in 1626, for Gaston de France, younger brother of Louis XIII. There had been a brief ‘Duc d’Orléans’ as a courtesy title (not a formal investiture as an apanage) for an unnamed second son of King Henry IV (lived 1607-1611, and sometimes erroneously assumed by genealogists to be named ‘Nicolas’, from the N. (‘not named’) printed in royal genealogies of the time), so Gaston (b. 1608) had been given the title Duc d’Anjou as a baby. His apanage of Orléans was given in 1626 as part of a marriage and peace deal after brief revolt against his brother (though he was only 18, so was mostly being manipulated by powerful courtiers). This marriage was to Marie de Bourbon-Montpensier, an incredibly wealthy heiress (owning huge chunks of central France). His apanage also included the duchies of Chartres and Valois and the County of Blois.

It was at Blois that Gaston, Duke of Orléans, focused much of his energies as a princely patron. He spent many years residing here in the 1630s-50s, as he had made himself very unwelcome at the court of Louis XIII. For years he remained, awkwardly, in the position as heir to the throne, from 1611 until his sister-in-law Queen Anne finally produced a male heir (Louis XIV) in 1638. He tried to be loyal, but continually got dragged into court intrigues and rebellion, which mostly ended badly…for his friends, since he himself could not be severely punished since he was, as ever, the heir to the throne. The Conspiracy of Chalais of 1626, the Day of Dupes of 1630, the Montmorency rebellion of 1632… Retiring to Blois from 1634, the Duke of Orléans hosted a number of artists, musicians and political exiles—men and women who had fallen foul of the King and his first minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Gaston had grand plans to expand this into a very grand royal residence, as we’ve seen above.

Gaston also had plans to build a much grander château at Chambord, located within the Duchy of Orléans itself. Chambord was at the centre of one of the largest royal hunting parks in France (which, incidentally, it still is), a part of the Orléans apanage since the 1390s, returned to the Crown in 1498, and favoured by Francis I, who built an entirely new château here in the 1520s. It was rarely used after the 1550s, so was due for renovation when Gaston set his eyes on it in the early 1640s. Chambord was held by the royal family once more after Gaston’s death in 1660, and was given as residence to various people in the next century—notably Louis XV’s father-in-law, the exiled King Stanislas of Poland—and remained property of the Bourbons even after the Revolution, finally being sold to the nation in 1930. In Paris, Gaston lived in his mother Marie de Medici’s grand new palace, the Palais du Luxembourg, which was called at this time the Palais d’Orléans.

Though he had two wives, Gaston died without a male heir. Marie de Montpensier had died soon after giving birth to a daughter, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, better known to history as ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’. She and her father had a fraught relationship—he cherished her (and her money, as sole heir of her mother), but also very much wanted a son, to whom he could pass on the Orléans apanage. His second marriage, to Marguerite de Lorraine, sister of Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine and Bar, had been blocked by his brother the King, so he was not allowed to live with her until after his brother’s death in 1643. The Duke and Duchess of Lorraine once again made their home at Blois and started a family. A son, Jean-Gaston, was born in 1650, given the title Duke of Valois, but died only two years later. So Gaston and Marguerite focused on raising their three daughters, Marguerite-Louise, Elisabeth, and Françoise. These could not inherit the throne however, so when Gaston died in February 1660, the Orléans apanage returned once more to the Crown, and was given out again in 1661, to Philippe de France, younger brother of Louis XIV. Philippe d’Orléans is the founder of the House of Orléans that persists today.

To be continued in Part II

(images Wikimedia Commons)