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Curzon
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Curzon

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January 23rd, 2007

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The Modern French Monarchy

Via Joe comes a heads up to the Head of State Blog, with one post that I found particularly interesting:

Presently, there are four men who all claim to be the king of France.

Henri the Seventh (born 1933) is the heir to the Capet family, them being the ones who got their heads chopped off during the revolution. He was born in Belgium, but moved to France in the 1950’s after the French government abolished a law that had previously banned members of the exiled royal family from returning to the country. He’s not particularly high-profile, but people generally know who he is, and the French tabloids enjoy covering the antics of his dysfunctional family. He tried to get elected to the European parliament in 2004 but failed.

Louis the Twentieth (born 1974) is the rival claimant to the Capet dynasty. His side of the family claims that he is more legitimate than Henri the 7th for reasons which are too complicated and boring to get into here. He was born in Spain and now lives in Venezuela with his Latino bride. Sometimes he visits France. He’s a cousin of the present King of Spain, but the Spanish royal family officially shuns him.

Napoleon the Eighth (born 1950) is the eighth successive Napoleon. Formally, he is Napoleon the first’s great-great-great nephew. Politically, he is the most successful of the pretend-kings of France. He once served on a city council and is now trying to get elected to the French parliament.

Carlo Alessandro (1952) is an Italian man distantly related to Napoleon the first. The reason why he’s Italian is because the Bonaparte family produced a lot of female heirs in the late 20th Century and they all married foreigners [CURZON: not to mention that Napoleon himself was Italian to begin with]. The family of Napoleon VIII doesn’t allow females to assume the “throne,” but this side does, hence the conflict today. According to Regnal Chronologies, Carlo’s aristocratic Italian family is most famous for the fact that they “once ran the post office of the Holy Roman Empire.”

Comments to this entry

Consul-At-Arms
January 23, 2007
9:35 am
As the guy said in the Bugs Bunny cartoon:

"But I really am Napoleon!"
Scott
January 23, 2007
3:59 pm
Interesting. I once started putting together a family tree based on the line of succession to the British throne, and it's amazing how interrelated the royal families of Europe are.

Scott
Chief Wiggum
January 23, 2007
4:35 pm
Don't forget there was an American claimant to the throne of France. This was documented in Mark Twain's _Huckleberry Finn_:

_"Bilgewater, kin I trust you?" says the old man, still sort of sobbing._

_"To the bitter death!" He took the old man by the hand and squeezed it, and says, "That secret of your being: speak!"_

_"Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!"_

_You bet you, Jim and me stared this time. Then the duke says: "You are what?"_

_"Yes, my friend, it is too true--your eyes is lookin' at this very moment
on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the
Sixteen and Marry Antonette."_

_"You! At your age! No! You mean you're the late Charlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least."_

_"Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin' rightful King of France."_

It's unclear where the line went after this, although there is some evidence it merged with the Kerry family.
dda
January 23, 2007
6:25 pm
[CURZON: not to mention that Napoleon himself was Italian to begin with].

Nope. Napoléon was born in 1769, and Corsica is French since May 15, 1768 [except for Pascal Paoli and his fellow independantists]. At any rate, Corsica doesn't belong to Genoa/Italy since that date
Dan tdaxp
January 23, 2007
10:04 pm
He was born in Spain and now lives in Venezuela with his Latino bride.


I'd fell way more comfortable with Louis XX if he lived in Venezuela with his Latina bride.
lirelou
January 23, 2007
11:10 pm
First, the Capet's ceased being Kings of France some time ago. The last royal family of France was the Bourbons, a dynasty which began with some unpleasantness between the Catholic and Reformed churches, but eventually led to King Henri of Navarre assuming the throne as Henri IV. This is a guy who loved hunting, drinking, and wenching (on disait de lui le "galant vert"), not necessarily in that order. He's also the first guy who promised to "put a chicken in every pot". Great film out which shows how Henri ended up becoming King of France, based upon Alexandre Dumas' "La Reine Margot", and with that same title.

dda. But, of course, Napoleon's parents were independentistas, and followers of Paoli, which makes the career of Napoleon "fils" all that more remarkable. Culturally, of course, Corsica is Italian, and its insular nature helps keep it that way. In New England, where some families of Corsican origin immigrated down from Canada or from France, they were identified as "Italian" by both the Italian-American and Anglohpone communities, but I noted that they initially lived within the Canadian community, always gave their children "French" first names (William, Henry, Marie, etc, instead of Guido, Anthony, Maria, etc), and got interred in the "French" cemeteries.
Curzon
January 24, 2007
12:10 am
DDA & Lirelou: True, Corsica changed hands. But from the authoritative "Wikipedia:":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon

Napoleon's noble, moderately affluent background and family connections afforded him greater opportunities to study than were available to a typical Corsican of the time. On 15 May 1779, at age nine, Napoleon was admitted to a French military school at Brienne-le-Château, a small town near Troyes. He had to learn French before entering the school, but he spoke with a marked Italian accent throughout his life and never learned to spell properly.


So Corsica may have been technically under French rule, but it remained culturally and linguistically Italian. So that there are Italian Napoleons probably has little to do with the fact that Napoleon's relatives "married foreigners."
dda
January 24, 2007
12:34 am
Puhleese. Saying Corsica was culturally Italian in the 18th Century "“ on the 17th for what's worth "“ would imply that there was such a thing A/ Italy as a unified country; and B/ Italian as a unified language. Culturally, "l'île de la beauté" was, well, is, Corsican, and linguistically, as related to that modern concept called Italian as the 17th Century Cheju dialect is related to 21st C. Modern Korean. That it was property of Genoa sure had an influence on the birth of its dialect/language and culture, but go to Sicily and try and tell them they're Italians. Many a lupara may be discharged as a result...

Buonaparte spoke with what sounded to mainlanders who'd never set foot on the island as Eye-talian "“ but it was really a Corsican accent. And as for not being able to spell [and, supposing, which I am not, that there was a unified spelling in French back then], I'll point to the blogosphere. My English is probably better spelled than that of most native bloggers...

Plus, as lirelou, our very own encyclopedia on things military and French, mentioned, The Small Corporal's family was independentist "“ so telling them they were Italians would have got you more gunfire...

Also, if you gonna start quoting Wikipedia, on such a subject, quote the French one ;-)
Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace
January 24, 2007
1:41 am
What about de Gaulle's grandsons?? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle
lirelou
January 24, 2007
4:53 am
Curzon, like the U.S., France is a country that includes people descended from many "nationalities", and in Napoleon's time, many spoke "dialects" that could be recognised as Dutch, German, Italian, Catalan, Euzkadi (Basque), and Breton. But unlike the U.S., where immigration was the primary motor that brought in Americans who spoke other than English, in France's case their boundaries extended outwards to absorb neighboring peoples who thus became French. (Perhaps akin to our expansion into the Southwest U.S.) What is now the "hectagon" is larger than the France of a millenium ago. Corsica was just another French province, though there were (and are) small groups of Corsicans who disagreed. And lets give credit where credit is due. What's the chance of a Mexican-American having been accepted as President of the United States within a generation of having annexed the Southwest? No one questioned his "Frenchness", and Italian was a charge that could be more correctly levied against some of the Valois (particularly when the Medicis were close relatives.)

dda, ouch! (blood dripping from small saber cut) Serves me right for subscribing to "Historia" all these years.
Curzon
January 24, 2007
6:50 am
DDA & Lirelou: None of what you say is new to me. All I'm saying is that Napoleon's Corsican origins (which had been under Genoan, if not "Italian" control for centuries before) don't make it all that unusual that his descendants are in Italy.
Dan tdaxp
January 24, 2007
12:41 pm
No one questioned his "Frenchness"Â?,


Really?


I recall (Robespierre?) complaining that southern French spoke Italian, and that Italian was the language of counter-Revolution.
Curzon
January 24, 2007
2:58 pm
DDA: Also, I should have used some sort of punctuation to indicate that my use of the phrase "authoritative Wikipedia" was laced with sarcasm. "My bad.":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm#Sarcasm_in_written_communication
Nick
January 25, 2007
10:44 pm
As an addendum, there's a lovely chapter dedicated to the issue of royalty and monarchism in Edmund White's wonderful memoir of Paris, Le Flaneur,