The family that ruled France for two centuries, lost the throne and won it back
A branch of France’s old royal line, the Capetians, named after the lordship of Bourbon in central France. Its kings ruled France from Henry IV in 1589 to Louis XVI, whom the Revolution overthrew in 1792, and again from 1814 to 1830; a cousin line, the Orléans, reigned until 1848. Through Philip V, a grandson of Louis XIV, the house has also given Spain most of its kings since 1700.
Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X were brothers, the sons of Louis, Dauphin of France, who died before he could reign.
The Bourbons took their name from the lordship of Bourbon, around the town of Bourbon-l’Archambault in central France. They were Capetians, descended from Robert, Count of Clermont, the youngest son of the crusader king Louis IX — Saint Louis — who married the heiress of Bourbon. Their son Louis was made the first Duke of Bourbon in 1327. For two and a half centuries the family served the crown from well below it, while the Valois, another Capetian branch, reigned.
Then the Valois ran out of sons. When Henry III’s last brother died in 1584, the heir under the Salic law, which passed the crown only through men, became Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre — a Protestant, in the middle of the Wars of Religion. When Henry III, stabbed by a friar, died on 2 August 1589, the Catholic League refused to accept a heretic king. Henry IV had to fight for his kingdom, converted to Catholicism in 1593 and entered Paris the next spring. (The line “Paris is well worth a mass” is almost certainly legend.) In 1598 the Edict of Nantes gave the Protestants freedom of conscience and the right to worship in set places, and ended the wars. On 14 May 1610 Henry was stabbed to death in his carriage, in a Paris street, by François Ravaillac, a Catholic fanatic.
Henry’s son Louis XIII ruled with Cardinal Richelieu and built up the power of the crown. His own son, Louis XIV, became king at four in 1643 and reigned for 72 years, the longest reign of any French king. He tamed the nobility, fought war after war and, in 1682, moved the court and the government to the Palace of VersaillesPlace: Palace of Versailles. Seat of the court until October 1789. In 1700 his grandson Philip, Duke of Anjou, inherited the throne of Spain; the long war that followed ended with Philip keeping Spain and giving up any claim to France.
Louis XIV outlived both his son and his eldest grandson, so in 1715 the crown passed to a five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XVFigure: Louis XV. The Well-Beloved who lost an empire and left his grandson the debts. His son and heir, Louis, Dauphin of FranceFigure: Louis, Dauphin of France. The heir who never reigned, father of three kings, died in 1765, more than eight years before him; the Dauphin’s three surviving sons would all be kings: Louis XVIFigure: Louis XVI. The king who called a meeting and lost a monarchy, Louis XVIII and Charles X.
Rounded. Louis XVIII’s ten years include the Hundred Days of 1815; Louis-Philippe was of the Orléans branch.
The Revolution swept the house away. After the storming of the TuileriesEvent: Storming of the Tuileries. The day Paris overthrew its king on 10 August 1792 the monarchy was abolished, and on 21 January 1793 Louis XVI was guillotinedEvent: Execution of Louis XVI. The morning the Republic beheaded its king; Marie AntoinetteFigure: Marie Antoinette. The queen France loved to hate followed in October. Their son, whom royalists called Louis XVII, died in the Temple prison in 1795, aged ten, without ever reigning. In the autumn of 1793 the royal tombs at Saint-Denis, where the Bourbon kings had been buried since Henry IV, were opened and the bodies thrown into common pits.
The dead king’s brothers lived on in exile. When NapoleonFigure: Napoleon Bonaparte. The officer the Revolution made, and the ruler who ended it abdicated in 1814, the Count of Provence returned as Louis XVIII and granted a charter with an elected chamber. In January 1815 he had the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette reburied at Saint-Denis. Two months later Napoleon’s return sent him fleeing to Ghent for the Hundred Days; after Waterloo he came back for good.
His brother Charles X, crowned at Reims in 1825 in the old rite, tried to rule as the kings had before 1789. His ordinances of July 1830, which muzzled the press and cut the electorate, set off three days of fighting in Paris, and he abdicated. The crown went to his distant cousin Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, of the branch descended from Louis XIV’s brother — the son of a duke who had voted for Louis XVI’s death. He took the title King of the French and was overthrown in turn in February 1848. France never had another king. The main line died out in 1883 with Charles X’s grandson, the Count of Chambord, who in 1873 had wrecked a last chance of restoration by refusing to give up the white flag of the Bourbons for the tricolour.
Philip V founded a Spanish line that has held the throne of Spain ever since, with breaks — the longest from 1931 to 1975; King Felipe VI, who came to the throne in 2014, is a Bourbon. Other branches ruled Naples and Sicily from the 1730s, later as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, until 1861, and the Duchy of Parma, with breaks, until 1859.
The name outlived the French throne. A “Bourbon” came to mean a diehard reactionary who, as was said of the returning émigrés, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
