house of Bourbon

house of Bourbon, 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 Bourbons born outside of marriage, 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.

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Robert de Clermont had married the heiress of the lordship of Bourbon (Bourbon-l’Archambault, in the modern département 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.

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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, on the death of the last Valois king in 1589. From Henry IV descended 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.

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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, who brought absolute monarchy to its zenith in western Europe. During the Revolution, monarchists declared Louis XVII titular king (1793–95), but he never reigned, and he died under the Revolution’s house arrest. Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1814 by the Quadruple Alliance, Louis XVIII became king (1814–24), followed upon his death by Charles X (1824–30), who was overthrown by the Revolution of 1830. Legitimists then recognized the pretender Henry V (Henri Dieudonné d’Artois, count de Chambord), the grandson of Charles X. The 1830 Revolution brought Louis-Philippe and the house of Orléans 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 (see Habsburg; Spain, history of: The early Bourbons, 1700–53) 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. After the War of the Spanish Succession, 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 Francisco Franco’s subsequent choice of Juan Carlos as his successor resulted in the restoration of the monarchy in 1975.