End of Pretending

The lawmakers of an infirm Third Republic in 1886 were more than usually jittery about the future of popular rule in France. The tubby nephew of Emperor Napoleeon I was spending many an evening plastering Paris with posters denouncing the republican government and advocating a prompt return to empire. At his Rue de Varenne mansion the grandson of King Louis Philippe was holding miniature courts and receiving ambassadors from abroad, for all the world as though the Bourbons still reigned. To stem the monarchist tide, France's legislature passed a law ordering from France's soil forever all heads of those families which had ever held the throne of France.

Last week the Assembly of the Fourth Republic sent a bill repealing the law to the Council of the Republic (France's upper house). After a bored debate, with only the Communists dissenting, the Assembly had decided that monarchy was no longer a serious threat, and that the pretenders might just as well come home.

Underground Prince. On Paris streets, wispy old women still peddled literature advocating a return to Bourbon rule, but the royalist cause has been as good as dead for years. By tacit consent of the government itself, 36-year-old Prince Louis Napoleeon, the Bonapartist pretender, had been calmly ignoring the Law of Exile ever since World War II. A well-heeled young businessman, Prince Louis Napoleeon was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for his leadership in the French underground during the war. Since then he has spent a good part of every year living in a Paris apartment under the name of Comte de Montford.

The "legitimate" pretender, Henri d'Orleans, Comte de Paris, was less fortunate. Moustached Henri, who looks as all French counts should in fiction and many French garage mechanics do in fact, is the great-great-grandson of King Louis Philippe. As the Bourbon-Orleeans* pretender to the throne, Henri has spent most of his 41 years hovering in expectant exile just outside the boundaries of France. In 1931 he married Isabelle d'Orleeans-Bragance, the doe-eyed, lovely daughter of a pretender to the throne of Brazil. Fearing that the line might become extinct, Henri's father viewed this further inbreeding of the Orleans clan with some alarm; but in the next 16 years Henri and

Isabella confounded his pessimism by producing eleven healthy children.

A Place to Settle. Meanwhile, encouraged by vociferous royalists back home, the young count kept on with his pretending, established a newspaper and published a spate of books and essays on politics.

Since the war Henri and Isabelle have spent most of their time in Portugal, rearing their children and trying in vain to make a 150-acre farm pay profits. When he heard the news of the Law of Exile's repeal, Henri said: "I intend to settle down in la douce France for good. I want to go first to my family's old Chateau d'Amboise, where I hope to live with my wife and children." Henri's friends in Paris shook their heads in contemplation of the ancient royal chateau's lack of plumbing and other conveniences, but, as Henri explained: "It isn't easy to find a place to settle down with such a large family as mine."

-Charles X, who reigned from 1824 to 1830, was the last of the Bourbon descendants of Louis XIV to rule France. Forced into exile by the revolution of 1830, he relinquished his throne to his grandson, the Comte de Chambord. The proud count, however, refused to recognize the tricolor of constitutional monarchy, and refused to be king unless France adopted the lily-white ensign of the Bourbons. The throne passed to Louis Philippe, descendant of Louis XIII's second son, the Due d'Orleans.

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