Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans

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Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans bigraphy, stories - Religion

Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans : biography

12 May 1725 – 18 November 1785

Louis Philippe d’Orléans known as le Gros (the Fat) (12 May 1725 – 18 November 1785), was a French prince, a member of a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon, the dynasty then ruling France. The First Prince of the Blood after 1752, he was the most senior male at the French court after the immediate royal family. He was the father of Philippe Égalité. He greatly augmented the already huge wealth of the House of Orléans.

Ancestors

Sources

Titles and Succession

Category:1725 births Category:1785 deaths Category:People from Versailles Category:French soldiers Category:House of Orléans Category:Dukes of Chartres Category:Dukes of Nemours Category:Dukes of Montpensier Category:Dukes of Valois Category:Knights of the Golden Fleece Category:Recipients of the Order of the Holy Spirit Category:18th-century French people Category:Burials at the Church of the Val-de-Grâce

Titles, styles, honours and arms

Titles and styles

  • 12 May 1725 – 4 August 1752 His Serene Highness the Duke of Chartres (Monseigneur le duc de Chartres)
  • 4 August 1752 – 18 November 1785 His Serene Highness the Duke of Orléans (Monseigneur le duc d’Orléans)

Military ranks

  • 1744 created Lieutenant General (due to partaking in the War of the Austrian Succession)

Honours

  • 1752 created Governor of Dauphiné
  • 5 June 1740 Knight of the Order of the Holy Spirit (22rd Promotion at Versailles)

Biography

Louis Philippe d’Orléans was born at the Palace of Versailles on 12 May 1725. As the only son of Louis d’Orléans, Duke of Orléans and his wife Johanna of Baden-Baden, he was titled Duke of Chartres at birth. He was one of two children; his younger sister Louise Marie d’Orléans died at Saint-Cloud in 1728 aged a year and eight months. His father, who had been devoted to his German wife became a recluse and pious as he grew older.

Louise Marie was known as Mademoiselle in her short lifetime.

Louis Philippe was hardly fifteen when he and his young cousin Princess Henriette of France (1727–1752), the second daughter of King Louis XV and Queen Marie Leszczyńska, fell in love.

After considering the possibility of such a marriage, Louis XV and his chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, decided against it because this union would have brought the House of Orléans too close to the throne.Antoine, Michel, Louis XV, Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris, 1989, p. 473.

First marriage

In 1743, his paternal grandmother, Françoise-Marie de Bourbon the formidable Dowager Duchess of Orléans, and Louise Élisabeth, Dowager Princess of Conti arranged his marriage to his seventeen-year old cousin, Louise Henriette de Bourbon (1726–1759), a member of the House of Boubon-Conti, another cadet branch of the House of Bourbon. It was hoped this marriage would close a fifty-year-old family rift.

Louis Philippe’s father, Louis le Pieux, gave his consent to the union in the belief that because the young bride had been brought up in a convent, she would be a paragon of virtue and as such be an ideal wife for his son. Louise Henriette was the only daughter of Louis Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti and the earlier mentioned Louise Élisabeth de Bourbon. Louise Henriette was a Princess of the Blood (princesse du sang) and was known at court as Mademoiselle de Conti.

The couple was married on 17 December 1743 in the chapel of the Palace of Versailles.

After a few months of a passion that surprised everyone at court, the couple started to drift apart as the young Duchess of Chartres began to lead a scandalous life. This caused her father-in-law to refuse to recognise the legitimacy of his grandchildren.Dufresne, Claude, Les Orléans, CRITERION, Paris, 1991, chapter: Un "bon gros prince", pp. 191-196.