Bathilde d'Orléans

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.

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.Fact|date=May 2008 Her mother died in 1759 when Bathilde was just eight years old. Her father, pressured by a jealous mistress, sent her to a convent.Fact|date=May 2008

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, Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon-Condé, 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.Fact|date=May 2008 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.Fact|date=May 2008 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.Fact|date=May 2008

Revolution

During the French Revolution, just like her brother Philippe Égalité, Bathilde discovered democracy in her soul.Fact|date=May 2008 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.

Exile

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.Fact|date=May 2008 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.Fact|date=May 2008 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, Louis Antoine, Duc d'Enghien, 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.

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".

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.

Ancestors

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1= 1. Bathilde d'Orléans
2= 2. Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans
3= 3. Louise Henriette de Bourbon-Conti
4= 4. Louis d'Orléans, Duke of Orléans
5= 5. Auguste Marie Johanna of Baden-Baden
6= 6. Louis Armand II de Bourbon, Prince of Conti
7= 7. Louise-Élisabeth de Bourbon-Condé
8= 8. Philippe II, Duke of Orléans
9= 9. Françoise-Marie de Bourbon
10= 10. Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden
11= 11. Sibylle Auguste of Saxe-Lauenburg
12= 12. François Louis, Prince of Conti
13= 13. Marie-Thérèse de Bourbon-Condé
14= 14. Louis III, Prince of Condé
15= 15. Louise-Françoise de Bourbon
16= 16. Philippe I, Duke of Orléans
17= 17. Elizabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine
18= 18. Louis XIV of France
19= 19. Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Marchioness of Montespan
20= 20. Ferdinand Maximilian of Baden-Baden
21= 21. Princess Louise Christine of Savoy-Carignan
22= 22. Julius Francis, Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg
23= 23. Hedwig of Palatinate-Sulzbach
24= 24. Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti
25= 25. Anne Marie Martinozzi
26= 26. Henry III Jules de Bourbon, Prince of Condé
27= 27. Anne-Henriette of Palatinate-Simmern
28= 28. Henry III Jules de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (= 26)
29= 29. Anne-Henriette of Palatinate-Simmern (= 27)
30= 30. Louis XIV of France (= 18)
31= 31. Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Marchioness of Montespan (= 19)

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.

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