The House of Bourbon
Spanish Borbón, Italian Borbone,
one of the most important ruling houses of Europe. Its members were descended from Louis I, duc de Bourbon from 1327 to 1342, the grandson of the French king Louis IX (ruled 1226–70). It provided reigning kings of France from 1589 to 1792 and from 1814 to 1830, after which another Bourbon reigned as king of the French until 1848; kings or queens of Spain from 1700 to 1808, from 1814 to 1868, from 1874 to 1931, and since 1975; dukes of Parma from 1731 to 1735, from 1748 to 1802, and from 1847 to 1859; kings of Naples and of Sicily from 1734 to 1808 and of the Two Sicilies from 1816 to 1860; kings of Etruria from 1801 to 1807; and ducal sovereigns of Lucca from 1815 to 1847.
The present article attempts a rapid survey of the dynasty as a whole, relying mainly on genealogical tables to display necessary details. In these tables the names and titles of sovereigns are mostly anglicized, but those of other persons are mostly given in the original form, except where princesses, having married into another country, are better known under that country's name for them. The tables also omit perforce the Bourbon bastards, whose multitude lends some colour to the popular notion that the “Bourbon nose? (larger and more prominent than the normal aquiline) betokens a “Bourbon temperament? or enormous appetite for sexual intercourse.
Origins
The House of Bourbon is a branch of the House of Capet, which constituted the so-called third race of France's kings. King Louis IX, a Capetian of the “direct line,? was the ancestor of all the Bourbons through his sixth son, Robert, comte de Clermont. When the “direct line? died out in 1328, the House of Valois, genealogically senior to the Bourbons, prevented the latter from accession to the French crown until 1589. The Valois, however, established the so-called Salic Law of Succession, under which the crown passed through males according to primogeniture, not through females. On this principle, the senior Bourbon became the rightful king of France on the extinction of the legitimate male line of the Valois.
Robert de Clermont had married the heiress of the lordship of Bourbon (Bourbon-l'Archambault, in the modern d&;partement of Allier). This lordship was made a duchy for his son Louis I in 1327 and so gave its name to the dynasty. From this duchy, the nucleus of the future province of Bourbonnais, the elder Bourbons, mainly through marriages, expanded their territory southeastward and southward. On their western frontier, meanwhile, the countship of La Marche (acquired by Louis I in 1322 in exchange for Clermont) was held from 1327 by a junior line of Louis I's descendants, who soon added the distant countship of Vendôme to their holdings.
The title of duc de Bourbon passed in 1503 to Charles de Bourbon-Montpensier, who was to become famous as constable of France. His later treason led to the confiscation of his lands by the French crown in the year of his death, 1527. Headship of the House of Bourbon then passed to the line of La Marche-Vendôme.
The line of La Marche-Vendôme had been subdivided since the end of the 15th century between a senior line, that of Vendôme (with ducal rank from 1515 onward), and a junior one, that of La Roche-sur-Yon. The latter line obtained Montpensier from the constable's forfeited heritage (with ducal rank from 1539).
Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme and head of the House of Bourbon from 1537, became titular king-consort of Navarre in 1555 through his marriage in 1548 to Jeanne d'Albret. The son of that marriage, titular king of Navarre in succession to his mother from 1572, became king of France, as Henry IV. (1553-1610), on the death of the last Valois king in 1589. From Henry IV descend all the Bourbon sovereigns. The great House of Condé, with its ramifications of Soissons and of Conti, was descended from Louis, prince de Condé, one of Henry IV's uncles.
The Bourbon sovereignties
Henry IV's heirs were kings of France uninterruptedly from 1610 to 1792, when the monarchy was “suspended? during the first Revolution. Most illustrious among them was Louis XIV. (1638-1715), who brought absolute monarchy to its zenith in western Europe. During the Revolution Louis XVII was made titular king (1793–95), but never reigned. Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, Louis XVIII was brought to the throne. He was followed by Charles X and the pretender Henry V (the comte de Chambord). With the accession of Louis-Philippe in 1830, the House of Orléans came to power. His descendants included not only the potential pretenders to the French succession but also the Bourbon descendants of the heiress of the last emperor of Brazil. Later princes constituted the House of Bourbon-Brazil, or of Orléans-Braganza, which is not to be confused with the House of Borbón-Braganza, a Spanish branch originating in the Portuguese marriage of the infante Don Gabriel (a son of Charles III of Spain).
The Bourbon accession to Spain came about partly because the descendants of Louis XIV's consort, the Spanish infanta Marie-Thérèse, were in 1700 the closest surviving relatives of the childless Charles II of Spain; and partly because, although at her marriage the Infanta had renounced her Spanish rights, Charles by his testament named one of her descendants as his successor. Since the other powers, however, would not have tolerated the union of the Spanish kingdom with the French, Charles named neither Louis XIV's heir apparent nor the latter's eldest son but, rather, the second of Louis XIV's grandsons, namely Philippe duc d'Anjou, who became king of Spain as Philip V. (1683-1746). After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the Peace of Utrecht (1713) left Philip in possession of Spain and Spanish America but obliged him to renounce any natural right that he or his descendants might have to France.
The infante Don Carlos, the future Charles III of Spain, was the founder of the Bourbon fortunes in Italy. The eldest son of Philip V's second marriage, he became duke of Parma in 1731 by right of his mother, heiress of the last Farnese dukes; and in 1734, during the War of the Polish Succession, he conquered the Kingdom of Naples-Sicily (Kingdom of the Two Sicilies) for himself. Though the settlement of 1735–38 obliged him to renounce Parma in order to win international recognition as king of Naples-Sicily, Parma was eventually secured for his brother Philip (Don Felipe) under the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748—with the proviso, however, that he and his heirs should renounce it in the event that they succeeded to Naples-Sicily or to Spain. Finally, when Don Carlos became king of Spain as Charles III in 1759, he resigned Naples-Sicily to his third son Ferdinand on the express condition that that kingdom and Spain should never be united under one sovereign.
The Kingdom of Etruria (1801–07) was a contrivance of the Napoleonic period. Devised by the French for the House of Bourbon-Parma in compensation for the impending annexation of Parma to France at a time when France still needed the goodwill of the Spanish Bourbons, it was dissolved as soon as Napoleon was ready to depose the latter. The Bourbon Duchy of Lucca (1815–47), on the other hand, was a creation of the Congress of Vienna: having assigned Parma to Napoleon's estranged consort Marie-Louise for her lifetime, the Congress had to find some alternative compensation for the still-dispossessed Bourbons. The Treaty of Paris of 1817, however, prescribed that on Marie-Louise's death Parma should revert to the Bourbons, who in 1847 renounced Lucca to the Habsburgs of Tuscany nine weeks before succeeding her.
In France, the senior or “legitimate? line of the Bourbons, restored to sovereignty in France after the Napoleonic Wars, was deposed at the Revolution of 1830. The House of Orléans, which took the legitimate line's place, was in turn deposed in the Revolution of 1848. The Bourbons of Parma and of the Two Sicilies were dethroned in 1859–60, in the course of the unification of Italy under the House of Savoy. The Spanish Bourbons, after many disturbances in the 19th century, lost their sovereignty in 1931; but the Law of Succession promulgated in Spain in 1947 and General Franco's subsequent choice of Don Juan Carlos as his successor resulted in the reign of Juan Carlos I, beginning in 1975.
Solidarity and discord
The accession of the duc d'Anjou to Spain would never have been secured without the resolute support of his grandfather, the French king; and similarly the Bourbon sovereignties in Italy owed their establishment chiefly to the Bourbon power in Spain. Dynastic harmony between France and Spain, however, was momentarily suspended in 1718–20, when France took part in the War of the Quadruple Alliance against Spain—for reasons arising in part from the internal affairs of the House of Bourbon. A series of sudden deaths in the French Royal House between 1704 and 1714 had produced a situation in which, on Louis XIV's death in 1715, no one but a five-year-old child, Louis XV, stood before Philip V of Spain in the natural line of succession of France; and Philip, though he had renounced that succession, still felt himself better entitled, as the child's uncle, to exercise the regency in France than the child's cousin twice removed, Philippe duc d'Orléans, against whom Spanish agents promoted a plot. The marriage (1722) of the Spanish king's son to a daughter of the French regent sealed the reconciliation.
In 1733 the Treaty of the Escorial pledged the French and the Spanish Bourbons to collaborate with each other notwithstanding any previous obligations. This treaty and the similarly conceived Treaty of Fontainebleau (1743) are sometimes called the “First? and the “Second Family Compact?; and the term Family Compact, or Pacte de Famille, was actually used in a third treaty, signed in Paris in 1761, during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). By this last treaty France and Spain not only guaranteed one another against all enemies but also promised like protection to the Bourbon states in Italy in the event of their acceding to the compact; and no state not belonging to the House of Bourbon was to be allowed to accede.
The cooperation between the French and Spanish Bourbons came to a miserable end during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the later decades of the 19th century brought new complications. A French Bourbon prince led a force into Spain in 1823 to crush the liberalism to which Ferdinand VII was succumbing; but such Bourbon solidarity could not survive two events which were to rend both the Spanish and the French houses.
First, in March 1830, Ferdinand VII of Spain announced the revocation of the Salic Law of Succession, which Philip V had introduced into Spain in 1713. This meant that the sonless Ferdinand could be succeeded not by his brother Don Carlos conde de Molina but by his elder daughter Isabella (born after the revocation); and though Ferdinand temporarily reinstated the Salic Law in September 1832, he revoked it again 13 days later. On his death in 1833 the partisans of the disappointed Don Carlos started the first of the Carlist Wars in protest against Isabella's accession.
Secondly, in France, the July Revolution of 1830 overthrew the “legitimate? Bourbon monarchy and transferred the throne to Louis-Philippe, head of the collateral line of Orléans. Odious enough already because Louis-Philippe's father, the self-styled Philippe Égalité, had voted in 1793 for the death sentence on Louis XVI, the House of Orléans became, by the usurpation of 1830, so much more odious to the Legitimists that some of the latter, when the “legitimate? male of France died out with the comte de Chambord in 1883, declined to recognize the head of the House of Orléans as the rightful pretender to France, as indeed he now was if the renunciation of 1713 was still to be observed; instead they preferred to disregard that renunciation and so to regard a Spanish prince as their rightful king. These Legitimists were known in France as “Blancs d'Espagne? (“Spanish Whites?). Most Legitimists, however, followed the final advice of the comte de Chambord by recognizing the rights of the House of Orléans to France.
While the dispossessed Bourbons—Spanish Carlists and French Legitimists—naturally sympathized with each other, their opponents—Queen Isabella and the House of Orléans—conversely gravitated together. One result was the crisis of the “ Spanish Marriages? in the 1840s. While both Queen Isabella and her sister Luisa remained unmarried, the Spanish succession was an open prospect of great interest to governments concerned with maintaining the balance of power in Europe. If both sisters had married princes of the House of Orléans, as Louis-Philippe and the sister's mother, Maria Cristina, had originally suggested, French influence over Spain would have become too strong for the liking of the British government, which proposed instead that Isabella should marry Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg (more intimately linked with Great Britain than with France). Then, in 1843, the French and the British came to an understanding: Isabella should marry some “neutral? prince, preferably a Spanish Bourbon cousin; and only after the birth of a child to Isabella should Luisa marry Louis-Philippe's son Antoine duc de Montpensier. Of Isabella's eligible cousins, the conte de Montemolín was disfavoured by the Spanish government as a Carlist; the next senior was the doubtfully virile Don Francisco de Asis, who was generally thought unlikely to become a father; the third was Don Enrique duque de Sevilla, whose outspoken liberalism recommended him to the British government but not to the Spanish. Inadvertently, however, the British government in 1846 gave the French the impression that it was still secretly trying to press Prince Leopold on Spain, and the French reacted by arranging the Spanish marriages in a way quite contrary to British desire: Isabella and Luisa were married on the same day, October 10, 1846, to Don Francisco de Asis and to Montpensier, respectively. The immediate upshot was that the House of Orléans, apparently intending that Montpensier or a son of his should eventually be king of Spain, incurred the serious resentment of its former friends in Great Britain.
Isabella, who would have preferred to marry Don Enrique, spent conspicuously long periods apart from her consort and behaved indiscreetly with other men. When she bore a son in 1857, ill-wishers had little difficulty in casting doubts on his paternity. These doubts served the purposes of the extreme Carlists when the male line of Don Carlos died out in 1936, because they could argue that Isabella's male descendants were not those of Don Francisco de Asis—whose issue, under Salic Law, would have been the next male heirs. Nearly all the other Bourbon princes, however, either had already recognized Isabella's rights or were maintaining incompatible pretensions to other thrones. The Carlists therefore had to look far afield in their search for a new pretender.
Certain princes of Bourbon-Parma responded to Carlist overtures but did not at the same time renounce their Parmesan titles, which under the settlement of 1748 were incompatible with claims to sovereignty over Spain. Thus they incurred the displeasure of the House of Orléans, which had to respect the settlement of 1748 because its own pretension to France depended on the analogous settlement of 1713.
Additional reading
An introduction is provided by Sanche De Gramont, Epitaph for Kings (1968). Those interested in genealogy may consult Henri Vrignault, Généalogie de la maison de Bourbon, 2nd ed. rev. (1957), with 12 tables, and, on the bastard branches of the House of Bourbon, Légitimés de France de la maison de Bourbon de 1594 à 1820 (1965). Vrignault's work of 1957 may be brought up-to-date through the successive volumes of the periodical Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels (irregular), whose first article “Bourbon? appeared in 1953 (vol. 2 of the series, 3 of the collection). On the physiological aspect, the reader may first consult André De Maricourt and Maurice De Bertrandfosse, Les Bourbons, 1518-1830: hérédités, pathologie, amours et grandeur, 4th ed. (1936). The story of the French Bourbon sovereigns is too vast to be addressed collectively in any single work other than a history of France. Biographies of the French kings are collected in Desmond Seward, The Bourbon Kings of France (1976). A general survey of Bourbon society is Richard M. Golden (ed.), Church, State, and Society Under the Bourbon Kings of France (1982). A comparison of the Bourbon dynasty with its predecessors can be found in Keith Cameron (ed.), From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State, and Society in Early Modern France (1989). There have been several solid examinations of the Bourbon Restoration, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, Napoleon and the Restoration of the Bourbons, ed. by Joseph Hamburger (1977); Frederick B. Artz, France Under the Bourbon Restoration (1931, reissued 1963); and Guillaume De Bertier De Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration (1967; originally published in French, 1955). Bourbon France is compared with Stuart England in John Miller, Bourbon and Stuart: Kings and Kingship in France and England in the Seventeenth Century (1987). Helpful works in English on the Spanish Bourbons and on the Neapolitan include Charles Petrie, The Spanish Royal House (1958); Theo Aronson, Royal Vendetta: The Crown of Spain, 1829-1965 (1966), on the Carlist question; Harold Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, 1734-1825 (1956, reprinted 1974), and The Last Bourbons of Naples, 1825-1861 (1961); and John D. Bergamini, The Spanish Bourbons (1974).
John Graham Royde-Smith
Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Sources
- Encylopedia Britannica 2002, Expanded Edition DVD
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