Article Sketch: The time when the Bourbons were going to be restored in France...but the Tricolour got in the way

Twice, once after the Prussian-induced fall of Napoleon III's Second Empire in September 1870 and three years later in 1873, there was a clear majority for the restoration of the Legitimist?Bourbon monarchy in the shape of Henri, Comte de Chambord.?

The grandson of Charles X (who reigned from 1824-30), the last deposed Bourbon monarch, Henri unfortunately suffered from the typical block-headedness of his family.

“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing”?as Talleyrand famously said.

The throne could easily have been Henri's but he refused to keep the national flag of the Tricolour, insisting on the restoration of the traditional Bourbon?fleur-de-lys.

The foolish pretender rejected a compromise of keeping the royal flag as his personal standard?with the Tricolour as the flag of the French nation.?

Pope Pius IX commented: "And all that, all that for a napkin!"

But Henri himself declared:?"Henry V cannot abandon the white flag of Henry?IV".

However, although years before the count had apparently designed a flag that combined both the Tricolour and that of his House, when the time came he dug his heels and rejected a compromise of the fleur-de-lys as his personal standard, and the tricolour as the national flag.

The 5 July 1871 declaration, known as the "declaration of the white flag" (déclaration du drapeau blanc), by Henri, Count of Chambord (Henri V):

Instead of a monarchy,?after the departure of Napoleon III another (the Third) Republic was declared, but was expected to be purely a temporary measure until a king was installed to placate the mainly royalist majority of the French countryside. But the obtuseness of the favoured Bourbon contender put paid to this.

French politician (and later Prime Minister) Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) sarcastically described Henri as "the French Washington" without whom the Third French Republic couldn't have existed.

A vote to restore the Bourbon monarchy was defeated in June 1874 in the National Assembly by 272 to 79.

Alas for the supporters of the Bourbons, cadet House of Orleans and Bonapartists, the moment for all three had passed. For the time being?

In the words of wily former French President Adolphe Thiers (described by Karl Marx as a?"monstrous gnome"), a Republic?"divides us least".

The current senior Napoleonic claimant to the throne of France, Jean-Christophe, Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoléon combines ancestry from both the House of Bonaparte and the Bourbons through his mother Princess Béatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.

Other would-be kings of France are Jean d'Orleans (Orleanists) and Louis de Bourbon (Legitimists).

The Orleanists (descendants of King Louis XIV's eccentric brother Monsieur Philippe I, Duke of Orléans*), in the shape of Louis-Philippe I, King of the French were the last monarchs of France. Louis-Philippe, 'The Citizen King' of the Bourbon cadet branch, took over when the reactionary Charles was booted out in 1830; he was in turn ejected in 1948 in favour of Louis Napoleon.

Here the 'bourgeois' ruler meets Queen Victoria in the ITV series Victoria:

*Monsieur Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, well-played by my friendly acquaintance Murray Lachlan Young in Vatel

And by Stanley Tucci