Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans

French noble

• Born: April 13, 1747
• Birthplace: Saint-Cloud, France
• Died: November 6, 1793
• Place of death: Paris, France

Although a Bourbon prince, the duc d’Orléans encouraged opposition to royal absolutism and supported the French Revolution of 1789.

Early Life

Louis-Philippe-Joseph, the duc d’Orléans (dewk dawr-lay-ah), was the cousin of King Louis XVI and the son of Louis-Philippe and Louise-Henriette de Conti. He was born in 1747 into the junior branch of the royal family, the one closest to the throne and historically the principal rival. The lineage of Louis-Philippe-Joseph (hereafter, simply Philippe) was distinguished by a tradition of patronage of science and art and an interest in new ideas.

Indolent by temperament but gifted with a quick intelligence, Philippe received a superficial education from his tutors. Following family custom, he became duc de Chartres in 1752. He was formally presented to King Louis XV on October 6, 1759, and baptized November 18 the same year, with the king and queen acting as godparents. In 1761, he attended his first session of the Parlement of Paris, foremost in power and honor among the high courts of France. Within four years, he had become the colonel of a regiment of infantry and two regiments of cavalry.

He was a brave, handsome, amiable man and an accomplished libertine. His marriage in April, 1770, to Louise-Marie-Adélaïde Bourbon-Penthièvre was a match of convenience, uniting the princely rank of the House of Orléans with the greatest family fortune in France.

Philippe’s position, fourth in line of succession to Louis XV after the king’s three sons, made him suspect in the king’s eyes of rivaling the royal family. The lack of any hope of meaningful public employment had the unfortunate effect of encouraging irresponsibility in the newly married prince. At the same time, it made him the preferred alternative heir to the throne for those discontented with the ruling family. Philippe’s Paris residence, the Palais Royal, became the center of subversive discussion and writing.

Life’s Work

Together with his father, Philippe took part in the aristocratic movement of protest against the royal suppression of the parlements in 1771 for their opposition to arbitrary government by the king. The princes’ reconciliation with the king the next year was temporary and superficial. From this episode developed the hostility between Philippe and Marie-Antoinette that would grow more virulent in the following years.

In June, 1771, Philippe became grand master of the Freemasons, a position that brought him into contact with the most enlightened, well-connected men of the day. In 1772, he fell in love with Madame de Genlis, a very beautiful, learned, and ambitious woman, who became his mistress and the tutor of his children, including his son, Louis-Philippe, the future king of the French, born in October, 1773.

Family tensions continued with Louis XVI, who succeeded his father in 1774. Nonetheless, when France joined the American colonies at war with England, Philippe sought the opportunity to serve at sea, hoping to succeed his father-in-law as grand admiral of France. In July, 1778, Philippe commanded a squadron against the English in the Battle of Ouessant, in which the French had the advantage. His performance was less than stellar: He became strangely inactive at a critical point in the conflict. His enemies at court unfairly criticized him, and his naval career came to an end. He returned to the pursuit of pleasure, making frequent expensive visits to England, where the prince of Wales was among his best friends.

In 1781, Philippe had received from his father the Palais Royal, a large Baroque palace built in the seventeenth century by Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal de Richelieu, in the heart of Paris. In the 1780’s, as a commercial venture, Philippe undertook to build a vast rectangular complex of uniform buildings that enclosed the garden behind the palace. At ground level, he provided space for shops, restaurants, and theaters. The upper levels were occupied by residences and meeting halls. The new buildings, together with the garden and the palace, immediately became the social center of the city.

The complex also served Philippe as a secure base from which he could dispense patronage from his fortune to a loose coterie of like-minded enemies of Louis XVI’s government. Some were aristocrats opposed to reforms that threatened their privileges. Most were middle-class journalists and lawyers, who, together with a few reform-minded aristocrats, demanded greater freedom and equality and an end to arbitrary government and privilege. Many of these men—Georges Danton, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, Camille Desmoulins, Antoine-Pierre Barnave, the comte de Mirabeau, Jérôme Pétion, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, and Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand—distinguished themselves in the revolution that grew out of their intrigues at the Palais Royal.

Upon the death of his father in 1785, Philippe inherited the titles duc d’Orléans and first prince of the blood. The sons and grandsons of kings of France were known as Children of France, members of the royal family. Great-grandsons and their descendants, like Philippe, who was descended from Louis XIII, were called princes of the blood. Because of his strained relations with the royal family, Philippe avoided the royal court of Versailles, residing instead in his apartments in the Palais Royal.

During the conflicts that arose in 1787 between Louis XVI and the nobles over the government’s attempts to increase its revenues, Philippe assumed the leadership of the opposition. As an honorary member of the Parlement of Paris, he declared the king’s forced registration of an edict to be illegal. For this challenge to his authority, the king exiled Philippe for five months to his estates outside Paris and forbade him to receive any visitors other than members of his family.

This experience of arbitrary arrest only strengthened Philippe’s detestation of his cousin’s regime. Subsequently, Philippe came under the influence of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, an army officer and author notorious for his scandalous novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782; Dangerous Acquaintances, 1784; also known as Dangerous Liaisons), who served as the duke’s secretary at the Palais Royal. Using the duke’s name and wealth, Laclos exposed the follies of the royal court and campaigned for greater personal liberty, fairness in taxation, and an end to privilege.

Philippe was elected a representative for the nobles to the Estates-General, which convened on May 5, 1789, in a heightened atmosphere of crisis. The royal government was virtually bankrupt. Nobles and commoners alike demanded sweeping reforms as the condition for supplying any remedy.

Philippe supported the unprivileged Third Estate (bourgeoisie, or commoners) against the two privileged orders (nobles and clergy). On June 25, he and a small group of nobles joined the Third Estate, which had on June 17 proclaimed itself a national assembly. Philippe’s Paris residence, the Palais Royal, became a center of popular agitation, and he was viewed as a hero by the crowd that stormed the Bastille on July 14. Feeling threatened by the adulation bestowed on his rival, the king sent him off to England on a spurious diplomatic mission, a disguised if pleasant exile.

On returning from England in July, 1790, Philippe won a seat in the National Assembly. His wife, Marie-Adélaïde, from whom he had been estranged for many years and who had remained devoted to the royal family, deeply resented the revolutionary attitudes being inculcated in her children by Madame de Genlis. When her son, Louis-Philippe, was admitted to the politically radical Jacobin Club, she protested in the strongest terms. Consequently, Philippe expelled her from the Palais Royal early in 1791. He followed his son into the club that same year.

In June, 1791, Louis XVI attempted to escape from Paris, where he could no longer function like the divine-right monarch he believed he was. Having badly bungled his flight, he was captured at Varennes and brought back discredited to Paris. A republican regime was not yet a serious alternative to the constitutional monarchy Louis had betrayed. This opened an opportunity for Philippe to assume the royal executive power as regent, the head of a popularly based monarchy, shunting his royal cousin into oblivion. To seize such an opportunity, however, called for greater strength of character and a stronger sense of purpose than Philippe could muster. On June 29, he rejected the idea of a regency, declaring he preferred to remain a simple citizen.

As France drifted into war with Austria and Prussia early in 1792, Philippe attempted unsuccessfully to receive a military commission. The war went badly for the French, whose armies were poorly disciplined and led. Soon, Paris and the revolution seemed threatened by enemies advancing from the east and others subverting it from within. Philippe was living idle in Paris, August 10, 1792, when radicals seized the Tuilleries Palace, imprisoned the royal family, and went on to declare France a republic. In September, Parisian mobs massacred thousands of prisoners in the city’s jails. From a balcony of the Palais Royal, Philippe saw the mob parading the mutilated corpse of his former mistress, the princesse de Lamballe, through the streets.

Though sobered by the carnage, Philippe thought he had no choice but to go with the revolutionary tide. A curious lassitude afflicted his spirit. He renounced his title of nobility and accepted the name Philippe Égalité from the Paris Commune, the municipal government dominated by radicals. His son Louis-Philippe urged him to emigrate to the United States. With characteristic nonchalance, Philippe granted that politics in Paris had become unbearable but added that in the end there was always the opera. Elected to the National Convention, the third successive revolutionary legislature, which convened in September, 1792, Philippe fatalistically supported the radical democratic policies of the Montagnards against their Girondin opponents, who condemned his princely origins.

In December, during the trial of Louis XVI by the Convention, the Girondins attempted to confuse the issue of the deposed king’s fate by accusing the Montagnards of conspiring to put Philippe on the throne. Though he could have absented himself, in January, in a state of extreme emotional distress, Philippe voted for the execution of his cousin Louis.

Shortly afterward, Philippe himself fell under suspicion when his son Louis-Philippe, duc de Chartres, defected to the Austrians with the French commander Charles-François du Périer Dumouriez on April 5, 1793. Accused of being an accomplice of Dumouriez, Philippe was arrested on April 6 and confined for months in a dark prison cell in the south of France. Brought back to Paris for a travesty of a trial, he was sent to the guillotine November 6. Throughout this ordeal, he behaved with exemplary courage.

Significance

Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, was a significant player in revolutionary France not so much because of what he did but because of the support he lent to others. He was an indolent man, devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, who shirked onerous responsibilities and retreated from serious challenges, but with his great wealth and rank, he could make things happen. Superficially enlightened and moved by complex feelings of envy and resentment toward the royal family, Philippe gave crucial support to writers and politicians advocating reform of the autocratic but bankrupt Bourbon monarchy and contributed to its fall.

Bibliography

Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. The author gives a standard account of the political and social background to the most tragic part of Philippe’s life.

Erickson, Carolly. To the Scaffold: The Life of Marie Antoinette. New York: William Morrow, 1991. In this narrative, which is sympathetic to the queen, Philippe appears frequently as the royal family’s nemesis.

Hardman, John. Louis XVI. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. The author describes at length how the king resented and feared his cousin and took steps to thwart his ambitions.

Hibbert, Christopher. The Days of the French Revolution. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989. Originally published in 1980 under the title The French Revolution, Hibbert’s book provides detailed descriptions of events from 1789 until the rise of Napoleon. The book includes information on Philippe. Well written and understandable to readers with little or no knowledge of the period.

Howarth, T. E. B. Citizen-King: The Life of Louis-Philippe, King of the French. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1761. Philippe figures significantly in the first nine chapters of this biography of the prince’s son, who ruled France from 1830 to 1848.

Louis-Philippe. Memoires, 1773-1793. Translated and introduced by John Hardman. Foreword by Henri, comte de Paris. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. The future king of the French refers with affection and respect to his father, Philippe, and throws light on the main events of his life.

Schama, Simon. Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1989. Schama’s history of the period includes information on Philippe. Schama argues the revolution did not create a “patriotic culture of citizenship” but was preceded by a more vital, inventive culture.

Scudder, Evarts S. Prince of the Blood. London: Collins, 1937. The first full-length study of the prince in English.

Warnick, R. “Radical and Chic: A Duke Who Courted Revolt and Doom.” Smithsonian 20, no. 4 (July, 1989): 66. A profile of Philippe.