French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy: Redefining Women and Power

By Heta Aali

This book examines public discussions around France's four most prominent royal women during the first and second Restoration and July Monarchy: the duchesse d’Angoulême, the duchesse de Berry, Queen of the French Marie-Amélie, and Adélaïde d’Orléans. These were the most powerful women of the last decades of the French monarchy, but the new roles women were assigned in post-revolutionary France did not permit them to openly exercise political influence. This book explores continuities and variations in narratives of royal legitimacy, and how historians, authors, and politicians used national history - particularly medieval and early modern history - to either legitimize or undermine the French monarchy, and to define women's social and political roles. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Jun 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9783030597542

Book preview

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

H. AaliFrench Royal Women during the Restoration and July MonarchyQueenship and Powerhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2_1

1. Introduction

Heta Aali¹  

(1)

University of Turku, Turku, Finland

Heta Aali

Email: [e-mail]

Keywords

RestorationFranceJuly MonarchyRoyal womenQueenshipPowerGender historyPolitical historyCultural history

Historical narratives can be powerful political weapons. Medieval and early modern history offered, and still offers today, a gold mine of narratives and examples for historians, politicians, and authors to draw on in order to either denounce or eulogize members of a royal family. A royal woman could be portrayed as loyal and as fierce as Joan of Arc or virtuous as Blanche of Castile . Another, less popular, royal woman could be represented as unnatural as the Merovingian queen Fredegund or as immoral as Lucrezia Borgia. The use of historical references in a political context was common during the Restoration period (1814/1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848) as polemical parties debated over the legitimate ruler of France. In 1814, the French monarchy had not been able to assume the sacred position it had had prior to the 1789 Revolution, and it had to find new means to justify its existence.¹ History was the most popular source of (de-)legitimation used by all political sides.

This volume will analyse the ways in which historical characters were capitalized on in public discourse in order to define, promote, or defame the four most prominent royal women of the French monarchy during its dying decades. These four women were the duchesse de Berry , Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Siciles (1798–1870, daughter-in-law of the King Charles X), the duchesse d’Angoulême , Marie-Thérèse de France (1778–1851, only surviving child of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, daughter-in-law of the King Charles X), the Queen of the French, Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Siciles (1782–1866), and Madame Adélaïde d’Orléans (1777–1847), King Louis-Philippe’s sister (see also Annex 1).

As this volume shows, the history of England also had a high profile in France during the Restoration and the July Monarchy era. The legitimists, as the supporters of the Bourbon dynasty were called after 1830, saw a parallel between the Bourbon and the Stuart families as both had known regicide and misfortune.² The supporters of the duchesse de Berry, for example, compared her to Marie Stuart (also known as Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542–1587) and to Jeanne d’Albret (1528–1572), the Queen of Navarre, and mother of Henri IV (1553–1610), the first Bourbon king of France.³

The nineteenth-century authors, historians, and politicians constantly reused and formed interpretations of well-known historical characters. This, in turn, reduced the historical characters such as Henri IV, Marie Stuart, or the Merovingian King Clovis I (died in 511) to narrow representations and stock characters.⁴ Moreover, each shift in power, dynasty, and governance affected the use of historical imagery. Starting from the 1814 Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, this volume traces how each shift of regime influenced, and was visible, in the historical imagery relating to the most important royal women of the Bourbon and Orléans families.

Royal women are at the heart of this volume, because in the level of representations, they have often played a crucial part in the popularity, or lack thereof, of dynasties and monarchies. For example, during the late eighteenth-century revolutionary years, Queen Marie-Antoinette was represented as the evil queen of the French monarchy. Publications such as Antoinette d’Autriche ou Dialogue entre Catherine de Médicis et Frédégonde, reines de France, aux enfers […] (1789) drew parallels between the three evil queens of France , Marie-Antoinette, Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), and Fredegund (died in 597) to emphasize the long history of injustices the nation had had to endure at the hands of brutal queens.⁵ Similar historical references to the Merovingian queens and the Medicis were made during Marie-Antoinette’s trial in 1793, where she was accused, among other things, of incest and scheming with her Austrian family.⁶ Catherine de’ Medici, Marie de’ Medici (1575–1642), Anne of Austria (1601–1666), and Marie-Antoinette were all represented as evil foreign queens with the help of history and particularly Merovingian history, as historian Katherine Crawford has convincingly demonstrated.⁷ The use, and abuse, of history was an essential part of these representations and the use of history in this manner only increased in the nineteenth century.

French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy – Redefining Women and Power serves three principal purposes. Firstly, it brings to the spotlight four royal women from a lesser-known period and analyses the way they were represented both by their supporters and their adversaries. Two of the women in particular, Queen Marie-Amélie and Madame Adélaïde, have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Historian Munro Price has described Madame Adélaïde as the most powerful French woman of the nineteenth century, and yet the most recent biography of her was published in 1908. Price has also called Louis-Philippe’s reign as a political partnership with Adélaïde, but she was not a popular person either during her lifetime or in later literature.⁸ This volume addresses this gap and analyses the reception and reactions to the four women’s different ways of using (indirect) political power. This is the first time the four women are examined side by side, and the historical imagery is comprehensively analysed.

Secondly, the volume offers new interpretations of the ways the supporters and opponents of the Restoration regime and the July Monarchy employed historical imagery to either advocate or criticize the regime’s right to rule. Even though there is a significant number of political histories about the Restoration and the July Monarchy, there are very few studies on the way historical imagery relating to royal women was used to legitimize or undermine each regime. It is a topic that is mentioned in many political histories about the first half of the nineteenth century, but no scholar has consistently examined the changes and continuities in historical representations relating to royal woman. Moreover, these representations require a systematic analysis to comprehend the interplay between gender, power, and history at this time. Gender, in particular, is a key concept, as these royal women were, first and foremost, defined by their gender. It was only women, at this time, who were imagined as having a gender and by this reasoning, the means to surpass its constraints. As we will see, the four royal women were often depicted as typical women on the one hand, and extraordinary, even nearly as good as men, on the other. History was used to reproduce representations emphasizing the repellent nature of the public woman, a woman interested in politics or la vie extérieure.⁹

Thirdly, the volume sheds light on the uses of medieval and early modern history as sources of legitimation and on the way these uses changed during the last thirty years of the French monarchy. The representations and uses of the 1789 Revolution in early nineteenth-century political discourse have been examined thoroughly in previous research. However, the uses of medieval and early modern history have been largely ignored.¹⁰ In fact, no studies have consistently analysed the way medieval and early modern characters were used as sources of legitimation, especially concerning royal women.¹¹ Even though the volume will not focus on the representations of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette , it is impossible to ignore the role of the Revolution when examining the Restoration and July Monarchy period. This is because all medieval and early modern history was reflected through the prism of the Revolution and the deaths of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette . For example, in the 1820s, the English revolution became increasingly popular due to its perceived similarities with the French Revolution.¹² This popularity contributed to the Stuart dynasty’s visibility in political literature in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Redefining Women and Power draws together extensive source material to bring forth a comprehensive picture of the ways historical imagery and royal women were tied together in public political discourse to legitimize or de-legitimize the French monarchy.

1.1 Using National Memory

This volume approaches the uses of history through the concept of memory. It is seen as a dynamic cultural practice, which in itself forms and negotiates social and political relations, as historian Natalie Scholz has argued.¹³ The historical representations used in political discourses relating to the four royal women were dynamic and continuously under negotiation. Again, in Scholz’s words, this is because the process of constructing references to the past is about remembering, forgetting, appropriating and redefining.¹⁴ The remembering occurs through re-interpretation in which the depictions allude to the cultural values of the point in time when they were created.¹⁵ While detecting changes in the uses of historical representations is important, it is equally significant to highlight the continuities. Indeed, specific historical imagery was reused by multiple regimes, such as representations relating to national saints like Saint Clotilde (died in 545) and Saint Louis IX of France (died in 1270), and foreign dynasties such as the Stuarts. The Stuarts were linked to national memory through their ostensibly similar fate with the (older branch of the) Bourbons.

When writing about French history and memory, one has to acknowledge the concept of lieu de mémoire. French historian Alain Boureau drew on this concept in his analysis of the institution of French kingship. Even though lieu de mémoire, a concept first made famous by Pierre Nora, mainly refers to physical sites of remembrance, Boureau applied it to the very fluid concept of king. This volume does not examine the nineteenth-century concepts of kingship or queenship as such, but rather the mechanisms that Boureau presents in his analysis. According to Boureau, there are three mechanisms at work when (past) royal characters are evoked: representation, projection, and identification.¹⁶ He adds that [t]he collective memory concerning kings has elaborated a veritable family romance with stock characters and situations […].¹⁷ Boureau gives several examples such as unworthy wives like Marie-Antoinette or Isabeau of Bavaria, and scheming mistresses such as Agnès Sorel .¹⁸ Like the king, these stock characters are not stable representations, but constantly negotiated and redefined within the parameters of collective memory. Competing political blocs adapted these figures to suit fluid political circumstances.

History, and especially national history, was extremely popular in different formats throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁹ History could be a political weapon, and there were constant debates in the press for and against the charter, where both sides used history to advance their arguments.²⁰ Education became more widespread and the growth in literacy served to increase the number of potential consumers as history evolved into an academic discipline. Many politicians and authors were historians during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Two well-known historians, François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, both served as Prime Ministers during the July Monarchy. Political debates thus extended to the pages of history books,²¹ and historiography became a political act for men like Thiers , as art historian Petra ten-Doesschate Chu has argued.²² History and historiography were both gendered: a man was seen as the historical neutral and the woman was the exception. As this volume will illustrate, historical women were assigned the same roles as those bestowed upon nineteenth-century women in an effort to create a precedent. Early medieval queens, for example, could be portrayed as politically powerless in historiography, so that there was some justification for continuing to prevent nineteenth-century women from taking a more active role.²³ As we will see in each chapter, the aforementioned historical stock characters corresponded to each period’s anxieties and (social, cultural, and political) needs.

Be it in academic or popular publications, contemporaries recognised the political dimension of history. According to French historian Paule Petitier, history was, at the beginning of the Restoration, a means to create a positive image of royalty. The past enabled the reconciliation between the people and kingship because it underlined their long union. Furthermore, the positive royal figures of collective memory such as Henri IV and Saint Louis were objects of intense propaganda.²⁴ We encounter Henri IV and Louis IX multiple times in early nineteenth-century texts about the four royal women. The first Bourbon king and the only saint King of France became, together with characters such as Louis XIV and Clovis I, nearly obligatory symbols of legitimate power which were used by all political sides supporting the monarchy.²⁵ Louis XVI considered Henri IV as a role model and worried he might have the same destiny as Charles I of England.²⁶

The 1820s marked the beginning of the liberal historiography that led to new interpretations of the history of France. At this time, history was not so much about the past, but rather it was about the present. Guizot and his contemporaries made it possible for larger audiences to learn French history, even events that had occurred long ago. The 1820s brought about multiple readings of French history and these were all visible in the narratives relating to the contemporary royal women.²⁷ These narratives illustrate the various uses, and abuses, of medieval and early modern history.

This analysis of the gendered uses of historical narratives in public discourse in the era of the constitutional monarchy draws on the concept of the king’s third body.²⁸ The king’s first body was the physical body, the second one was the state, and the third body can be considered public opinion.²⁹ The third body was only partially in the control of the monarch himself. Already in early nineteenth-century France, despite the monarchs’ best efforts, the press grew increasingly influential. From 1814 to 1848, the monarchy needed constant re-enforcement and was, at times, heavily attacked from several fronts within French society. Politicians and historians used the newspapers and various forms of publications to show their support or dissatisfaction towards the governing monarch. A royal woman also had a third body: public opinion. In a similar manner, public opinion was shaped by the contemporary cultural and political field. The queen’s second body was the maternal body, as her most important duty was to produce an heir.³⁰ As we will see, especially in the case of Marie-Thérèse , physical motherhood could be replaced with symbolic motherhood in which the royal woman became the mother of the French.

1.2 The Four Royal Women

The duchesse de Berry , Marie-Thérèse de France, Queen Marie-Amélie, and Madame Adélaïde are at the centre of this volume because they were closest figures to the last three kings to rule France. This proximity made them prone to politically motivated criticism. Each of the women could, and did, wield indirect power through their male family members, though this use of power was often concealed in their public representations. According to French historian Jean-Clément Martin, several early nineteenth-century royal French women held considerable discreet power as intermediaries of times and traditions.³¹ After 1814, women were excluded from the throne of France, the same way they had been excluded before 1789. The exclusion from the line of inheritance was re-enforced during the Restoration and July Monarchy, first in the charter of 1814 and again in 1830. Women’s exclusion from the throne or public power did not change in France until the cataclysm of the Second World War.³² Yet, as we will see throughout the volume, the Revolution and Napoléon’s reign resulted in drastic redefinition of the French queenship.

The 1789 Revolution had driven most members of the Bourbon and Orléans families (see Annex 1) to exile either to England or to continental kingdoms. King Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, and Queen Marie-Antoinette in October of the same year. These events were annually commemorated during the Restoration. The sister of Louis XVI, Madame Élisabeth , was executed in 1794, and Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI’s only son, named by the exiled royalists as Louis XVII after his father’s death, died while imprisoned in the Temple in 1795. Louis XVI’s younger brothers had both left France before Louis’ execution: the comte de Provence (the future King Louis XVIII, 1814/1815–1824) in 1791, and the comte d’Artois (future King Charles X, 1824–1830) already in 1789.³³ The comte de Provence, uncle of the young Louis XVII, proclaimed himself as King Louis XVIII in 1795. That same year Marie-Thérèse de France, Madame Royale, the only surviving child of Queen Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI , was sent into exile in Austria and into the care of her maternal family. While in exile, Marie-Thérèse married her cousin the duc d’Angoulême, son of the comte d’Artois .³⁴ When the Bourbons returned to France in 1814, most of them had been in exile for over 20 years. They had been gone from France for so long that the younger generation had almost forgotten them.³⁵ Neither Louis XVIII nor the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême had any children.

Marie-Caroline, the duchesse de Berry was the youngest of the four women. She married the duc de Berry , youngest son of the comte d’Artois , in 1816. The duc was assassinated in February 1820 and in September the duchesse gave birth to a son.³⁶ As the mother of the heir to the French throne, Marie-Caroline enjoyed a significant degree of popularity, and she travelled widely in France during the 1820s. At the same time, the king oversaw the education and upbringing of the royal children. As a young and beautiful widow, she featured in many popular publications. According to the pro-Bourbon legitimists, Marie-Caroline’s son was the only true heir to the French throne following the abdication of Charles X in 1830, which made the duchesse a potential regent. In 1832, however, she was imprisoned after a failed coup.³⁷ While in prison, the duchesse de Berry gave birth to a child whose father was allegedly an Italian nobleman whom she had secretly married. This marriage destroyed any hope she or the legitimists might have had for her to become a regent for her son. After her release, the duchesse de Berry left France and settled in Italy and later Austria, where her children from her union with the duc de Berry lived. On her father’s side, she was niece to the Queen of the French, Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile.

Marie-Thérèse de France, Madame Royale, was married to Louis-Antoine , the duc d’Angoulême, the oldest son of Charles X, who was a widower like his older brother Louis XVIII. Marie-Thérèse had a significant role in the Bourbon Restoration since she was a constant reminder of the regicide that had occurred as well as the link of legitimation between her father, Louis XVI, and her uncles, Louis XVIII and Charles X. The conflict between remembering, forgetting, and pardon haunted the two Restorations.³⁸ During the (second) Restoration, she assumed the role of a queen in many situations and supported the conservative and religious politics of Charles X in the late 1820s.³⁹ Her marriage to the duc d’Angoulême bore no children, which made the son of the duchesse de Berry even more crucial to the continuation of the (older branch of the) Bourbon dynasty. In 1830, Marie-Thérèse was exiled along with the rest of Charles X’s close family, first to England and Scotland, and later to Austria where she spent the rest of her days.⁴⁰

Queen of the French Marie-Amélie, whose husband rose to the throne following the July Revolution, is the third royal woman. The daughter of Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, married Louis-Philippe the duc d’Orléans in 1809, and over the next fifteen years, she gave birth to ten children. The Orléans were a younger branch of the Bourbon family and descended from the younger brother of Louis XIV. Louis-Philippe had left France in 1793 after he had served in the French army. Marie-Amélie was both the niece of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the aunt of Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Siciles. In contrast to the role of the Bourbon queens prior to the 1789 Revolution, she devoted herself to private family life (her children), religious activities, charity, and refrained from public political comments.⁴¹ Marie-Amélie assumed the role of an ideal bourgeois queen as the spouse of the bourgeois citizen king. This, however, did not mean that she did not influence her husband’s political decisions. In fact, her apolitical public image was a conscious construction, designed to emphasise that the role of a queen was simply to be the king’s spouse. Following the 1848 Revolution, she was exiled to England with her family.

Madame Adélaïde d’Orléans, the sister-in-law of Marie-Amélie, is the fourth prominent royal woman. Adélaïde left France in 1792 with her governess, the famous Madame de Genlis. Though she remained unmarried, Madame Adelaide was actively involved in politics. She assumed the role of a confident and political advisor to her brother Louis-Philippe, especially during the July Monarchy, and actively corresponded with politicians in her network. She was perhaps the most politically powerful woman at that time, a fact which did not go unnoticed by the political adversaries of Louis-Philippe and July Monarchy.⁴² Adélaïde and Louis-Philippe were the children of the unpopular Philippe Égalité who had not only supported the Revolution, but also voted for the death of King Louis XVI before he himself was guillotined in 1793. Philippe Égalité’s role in the downfall of Louis XVI intensified the chasm between the Bourbon and Orléans dynasties during the Restoration and resulted in a deep sense of mistrust between the two families. Madame Adélaïde died in December 1847.

The roles, positions, expectations, and possibilities to use power for royal women were frequently redefined between 1814 and 1848, not only by those in the political field, but also by the women themselves. Since the monarchy was not the same in 1814 as it had been before 1789, the positions these women held also changed. Despite women being excluded from inheriting the French throne, there was a continual debate on the role royal women should and could assume within the French monarchy. The discussion revolved around the extent to which and the manner in which royal women should and could influence politics as well as how public their role should be. A popular way to criticize and de-legitimize a dynasty was to defame its women. The question was often not even about the royal women themselves, but about politics, where they were so often used as instruments of criticism.

Each of these four women could be used as an instrument of legitimation or criticism for their respective royal family: A young and beautiful mother of an heir, the only surviving daughter of a guillotined king, a religious bourgeois queen, and a politically active unmarried sister of a king. Equally instrumental were the references and remembrances of past kings and queens as well as princes, and princesses that penetrated discussions on the monarchy’s legitimacy during these tumultuous and eventful decades. The debaters employed different reference points and sought legitimacy from different moments of French and European history.

1.3 Publications and Biographies

Redefining Women and Power focuses on public discourse relating to four royal women. Given that most public debaters were men of a particular social standing and background, there is a limit in regards to whose voice will and can be heard. Therefore, the volume is mainly about early nineteenth-century men, imagining royal women, both contemporary and historical. The four royal women had a voice of their own, but the public voice often belonged to men. No doubt, the four royal women could and would influence their public image, but they did not often publish articles, letters, or books where they would refer to themselves in historical terms. This volume includes opposing political views, but it is not possible to cover a discussion spanning all levels of French society. There are, however, three principal groups of sources analysed: magazines, biographies, and short treatises.⁴³

The first group of sources includes magazines published between 1814 and 1848, notably La Mode and the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires. The first one was a well-known legitimist magazine, especially in the 1830s and 1840s. The second one was, according to French historian Benoît Yvert, the most influential newspaper in the 1820s and mostly supportive of the government.⁴⁴ The number of magazines, and issues available, increases towards the end of the period, which does slightly distort the samples’s representativeness. However, since there are many magazines available representing various political opinions, it is possible to develop a comprehensive picture of the uses of historical imagery relating to royal women of the Restoration and July Monarchy era. Art historian Andrew Carrington Shelton has classified a significant number of the July Monarchy era publications based on their political views on each regime.⁴⁵ This categorization serves as a valuable point of departure for this volume. According to it, La Mode, for example, was politically to the Right during the July Monarchy whereas the Journal des Débats and Le Constitutionnel were supportive of the July Monarchy. However, the aim is not to reduce the used historical imagery to simple opinions but to examine the way the references were used to advocate certain political views. This volume also sheds light on historical references used across different publications and those limited to a particular time and place.

The second group of sources contains individual and collective biographies such as Alfred Nettement’s Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, fille de Louis XVI (1843), an anonymously penned Histoire scandaleuse, politique, anecdotique et bigote des duchesses d’Angoulême et de Berry (1830), and Notice biographique de Madame Adélaïde, princesse d’Orléans, soeur de S. M. Louis-Philippe, roi des Français, née à Paris le 23 avril 1777 (1832) by Léon Pillet . These biographies mostly focus on anecdotes relating to the central figure and often recycle the same narratives from one biography to another and from one decade to another. Only rarely did the biographies, or memoires in some cases, venture to discuss political events in a thorough way. However, the benefits of including publications such as these lie in the fact that they represent a wide array of political views, both for and against a regime, as well as their use of historical references.⁴⁶

The third group of sources includes miscellaneous treatises that concern the royal families such as E. Pascallet’s Notice biographique sur sa majesté la reine des français (1847) and Annales historiques de la maison de France ⁴⁷ (1815) by Claude-Philbert Simien Despréaux. These treatises expressed explicit political opinions, and the authors actively took part in discussions on the legitimacy of each regime. Moreover, as Yvert has argued, the Restoration was a golden age for political literature, visible in the large number of various pamphlets published during the period.⁴⁸ The treatises, similar to biographies, often described the life of the royal families in detail. The treatises varied in length: some contained less than twenty pages, some included multiple volumes. They could include images but not always, and in many cases, they were published to mark a special event such as coronation or birthday.

The sources span from 1814 to 1848, and cover all sides in terms of debates on the dynasty’s legitimacy and even the entire monarchy. The majority of the writings were openly political because it would simply not have occurred to anyone to hide their political opinions, as French historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel has stated.⁴⁹ Due to varying degrees of censorship imposed at different points in time, there is less vocal criticism in some of the publications. Even though it is difficult to estimate how widely each publication was diffused and read, they are useful for analysing the uses of historical references. The period also saw a significant number of historical themes on the stage, both theatre and opera, but the analysis of performance art falls out of this volume’s scope. The focus is on textual imagery which is why art and images are only discussed in relation to textual sources.

According to the sources, the power and positions of the four royal women examined in this volume were tied to the status of the men close to them. Marie-Thérèse’s central role in legitimizing the restored monarchy was due to her father and uncles, whereas duchesse de Berry’s position was linked to her husband, son, and father-in-law. Marie-Amélie and Madame Adélaïde, on the other hand, owed their positions to Louis-Philippe . Contemporary and historical kings and male members of French royal families had more independent visibility than royal women, who were often represented within the family sphere in public. However, this state of affairs in no way diminishes the value of analysing historical imagery relating to royal women. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to deconstruct these representation and write a new narrative of royal women.

1.4 Structure of the Volume

The volume has a chronological structure, allowing for a systematic analysis of the historical references. The first chapter investigates the way Marie-Thérèse’s position was defined in terms of national history and her ancestry, and Marie-Caroline as a young wife and mother(-to-be). The grand paradox of the Restoration and Bourbon family was their desire to forget the entire Revolution, while at the same time celebrating its martyrs and saints. Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde spent most of the 1810s outside France. They had very little visibility in France, which is why the first chapter will only focus on Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Caroline .

The second chapter examines the period following the murder of the duc de Berry in February 1820, which was a defining point in the lives of the four royal women. During this decade, Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde entered the public spotlight as the spouse and sister of the duc d’Orléans who supported the liberal politicians and whose wealth equaled that of the king. The third chapter analyses representations after the July Revolution. After Charles X had been forced into exile and Louis-Philippe had risen to power, several publications favoured the Orléans dynasty. They attacked the previous regime by vilifying the royal women, notably the duchesse de Berry and the duchesse d’Angoulême .⁵⁰ Simultaneously, legitimist magazines fiercely campaigned for the Bourbons’ right to the French throne. The chapter examines whether Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde were used to legitimize the new dynasty and whether the Orléans dynasty and its supporters used the same type of medieval and saint-like imagery the Bourbons had used in the 1820s.⁵¹

The final chapter focuses on the last decade of the French monarchy. After imposing new censorship laws and forming a stronger association with the Catholic Church in the 1840s, the Orléans dynasty started to reflect