Bathilde d'Orléans
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Louise Marie Thérèse Bathilde d'Orléans, princesse de Condé (Saint-Cloud, July 9, 1750 - Paris, January 10, 1822), was a French princess.
She was sister of the infamous Philippe Égalité, the mother of the executed duc d'Enghien and aunt of King Louis-Philippe of the French.
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[edit] Youth
Descended patrilineally from Louis XIII and (illegitimately) from Louis XIV on her mother's side, she was a princesse du sang. This royal pedigree, however, belied her later democratic ideals.[citation needed] Her mother died in 1759 when Bathilde was just eight years old. Her father, pressured by a jealous mistress, sent her to a convent.[citation needed]
[edit] Marriage
Twenty years old in 1770, she was allowed to leave the convent to marry her younger cousin, the duc de Bourbon, son and heir of the Louis Joseph de Bourbon, prince de Condé, who was only fourteen at the time. Her husband, though, tired of her after six months. Their episodic rapprochements allowed her to give birth to a son, the future duc d'Enghien, in 1772.
The scandal of her husband's adultery came out in 1778, and the consequences fell entirely on her shoulders.[citation needed] The couple separated in 1780. As a separated spouse, she was never received at court and was forced to reorganize her life in the gilded solitude of the château de Chantilly. In her isolation, she discreetly had an illegitimate daughter with a marine officer.[citation needed] Later, she passed the child off as the daughter of her secretary, in order to keep the little girl close by.
In 1787, she purchased the Élysée Palace from Louis XVI and had hamlets constructed there, similar to Marie-Antoinette's petit hameau at the Palace of Versailles. She lapsed from Christianity and devoted herself to the occult, studying the supernatural arts of chiromancy, astrology, dream interpretation, and animal magnetism. She spent time painting and raising her son. Her salon was known throughout Europe for its liberty of thought and the brilliant wits who frequented it.[citation needed]
[edit] Revolution
During the French Revolution, just like her brother Philippe Égalité, Bathilde discovered democracy in her soul.[citation needed] She fell out with her royalist husband and son, who both chose to leave France after the storming of the Bastille. As the ancien régime crumbled, she took the name, Citoyenne Vérité (Citizeness Truth). Threatened by the new revolutionary government, she offered her wealth to the First French Republic before it could be confiscated.
In April 1793, her nephew, the young duc de Chartres, fled France and sought asylum with the Austrians. In retribution, the National Convention decreed the imprisonment in Marseille of all Bourbons remaining in France. Badly compensated for her fidelity to the democratic ideals of the revolution, she survived a year and a half in a prison cell. In November of the same year, her brother was guillotined. Miraculously spared during the Reign of Terror, Bathilde was liberated during the Thermidorian Reaction and returned to her Élysée residence in Paris. Poverty-stricken, she was forced to rent out most of the palace.
[edit] Exile
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In 1797, the Directoire decided to exile the last of the Bourbons still living in France. Bathilde was made to get into an old coach with all her remaining worldly goods and was sent to Spain with her illegitimate daughter. Despite being forty-seven years old at the time, during the months which this journey took, she had an amorous intrigue with a handsome twenty-seven year old police officer who was charged with watching over her.[citation needed] The two maintained a correspondence until he returned to France.
Relegated to a place near Barcelona, Bathilde founded, despite her small means, a pharmacy and dispensary for the poor, and her house became a gathering place for those who needed aid.[citation needed] She became completely republican during this time period, despite her exile.
In 1804, she learned that Napoléon I, whom she admired, had kidnapped her only son and had him shot in the moat of the chateau de Vincennes. For ten years, the emperor kept the mother of his most famous victim from setting foot in France. Bathilde got her revenge in 1814, when the people, seeing in her the mother of the "Martyr of Vincennes," cheered her as she traveled the route back to Paris.
[edit] Return to France
In 1815, at the start of the Bourbon Restoration, Louis XVIII traded with her the Hôtel Matignon for the Élysée Palace. Bathilde promptly installed a community of nuns on the premises and charged them with praying for the souls of the victims of the revolution. Her family, in the new moral order of the day, wanted to see her rejoin her husband after a separation of thirty-five years, but she refused. Instead, she resumed her affair with the police officer who had escorted her to Spain in 1797. Unfortunately, he was to die of an illness three years later. In 1818, upon the death of her estranged father-in-law, she became the last princesse de Condé.
[edit] Death
In 1822, while she was taking part in a march towards the Panthéon, she lost consciousness, and drew her last breath in the home of a law professor who taught at the Sorbonne. After her death, her nephew, Louis-Philippe, tried to give an air of respectability to her bohemian lifestyle by burning both the manuscript of her memoirs and a file on her young police officer located in the war archives.
She was buried in the crypt of her sister-in-law, the duchesse d'Orléans, in Dreux.
[edit] Ancestors
[edit] Sources / References:
Translated from the French Wikipedia article of the same title, which lacks sources.
Some of this information is found in the Memoires of Henriette Louise de Waldner de Freundstein, the Baroness d'Oberkirch, Volume Two.
[edit] Titles
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Bathilde d'Orléans
Born: July 9 1750 Died: January 10 1822 |
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| French royalty | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Charlotte-Godefried de Rohan-Soubise |
duchesse d'Enghien 1770–1818 |
Succeeded by Extinct |
| Preceded by Charlotte-Godefried de Rohan-Soubise |
duchesse de Bourbon 1770–1818 |
Succeeded by Extinct |
| Preceded by Charlotte-Godefried de Rohan-Soubise. |
princesse de Condé 1709–1743 |
Succeeded by Extinct |
