Maria Karolina von Neapel-Sizilien

Marie-Caroline Ferdinande Louise of Bourbon-Two Sicilies was born on November 5, 1798, at the Royal Palace of Caserta and died on April 16, 1870, at Brunnsee Castle in Styria. She became best known as the Duchess of Berry. She was the wife of Charles-Ferdinand d’Artois, Duke of Berry and second son of the future French King Charles X, and the mother of Henri d’Artois, later Count of Chambord and the Legitimist claimant to the throne as “Henri V.” In 1832, she unsuccessfully attempted to seize power in France and establish a regency in her son’s name. Her campaign sparked the last major Vendéan and Chouan uprisings in western France. Marie-Caroline came from a younger branch of the House of Bourbon. Her father was Francis I, Duke of Calabria and later King of the Two Sicilies; her mother was Archduchess Marie-Clémentine of Austria, a daughter of Emperor Leopold II. Through her mother, Marie-Caroline was connected to the Habsburg imperial family. Her paternal grandmother, Queen Maria Carolina, was a sister of the French Queen Marie Antoinette and a determined opponent of the French Revolution. Her childhood was shaped by the political upheavals of the Napoleonic era. Shortly after her birth, the Neapolitan royal family fled to Palermo to escape the French troops. After a temporary return to Naples, they were forced to retreat to Sicily again in 1806, when French forces conquered the kingdom. Marie-Caroline lost her mother as early as 1801. She received a comparatively liberal education, grew up with Italian folk songs, and took an interest in painting. Her extended family included connections to the Bourbon, Habsburg, and Orléans dynasties, while political tensions between the European royal houses and Napoleonic France continued to shape the era. After Napoleon’s downfall, the Bourbons returned to several European thrones. In France, Louis XVIII became king, while Marie-Caroline’s grandfather Ferdinand regained his rule in Naples. Because Louis XVIII was childless and his brother, the future Charles X, also had no grandchildren, his younger son Charles-Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, was expected to secure the dynasty’s future. The choice fell on the eighteen-year-old Marie-Caroline. Following a proxy marriage in Naples in April 1816, she traveled to France. On June 17, 1816, she married her husband, who was twenty years her senior, in a civil ceremony at the Tuileries Palace and a religious ceremony at Notre-Dame in Paris. Although the marriage had been arranged for political reasons and the duke had previously had several relationships, the couple apparently developed a close bond. They lived at the Élysée Palace and had four children. Two died shortly after birth. Their daughter Louise Marie Thérèse later became Duchess of Parma. Their son Henri d’Artois was born on September 29, 1820, and later received the title Count of Chambord. He was regarded as a “miracle child” because his father had been murdered only a few months before his birth. On February 13, 1820, Charles-Ferdinand d’Artois was fatally stabbed by Louis Pierre Louvel outside the Paris Opera as he accompanied his wife to her carriage. After the assassination, Marie-Caroline moved to the Tuileries court. Unlike her more austere sister-in-law, the Duchess of Angoulême, she was lively, sociable, fashion-conscious, and receptive to new ideas. She lent energy to court life during the 1820s and helped popularize sea bathing in France, particularly in Boulogne-sur-Mer and Dieppe. She traveled frequently, went out to sea in her boat, Le Furet, and supported numerous cultural and economic projects. She also appeared publicly in Bordeaux to strengthen the city’s loyalty to the Bourbon crown. Marie-Caroline was an important patron of the arts. She supported painters, musicians, writers, theaters, and craft businesses. Composers such as Gioachino Rossini and François-Adrien Boieldieu benefited from her patronage. At her Château de Rosny, she assembled an extensive library containing more than 8,000 volumes. She was also interested in photography, theater, botany, and garden design. She had the park at Rosny transformed in the style of an English landscape garden, with exotic plants, animals, an artificial waterfall, and a large heated greenhouse. Because of her exceptional generosity toward the needy, former servants, and victims of disasters, she was known as “the good duchess.” The July Revolution of 1830 ended the rule of the senior Bourbon line. Marie-Caroline followed Charles X into exile in England and lived for a time in Bath and at Holyrood Palace in Scotland. She wanted to act as regent for her underage son and assert his claim to the French throne. Together with committed Legitimists, she developed a political program that combined the restoration of the senior Bourbon line with elected municipal and provincial bodies and two national chambers. In the summer of 1831, she traveled to Italy and prepared an uprising in Marseille and the Vendée from there. She received private support from several rulers, especially the Duke of Modena. On December 14, 1831, she secretly married Count Hector Lucchesi-Palli in Rome; he supported her political plans. In April 1832, she landed near Marseille with several followers, but instead of the expected two thousand men, she managed to mobilize only about sixty. Her attempt to win control of the city failed, and the rising in the Vendée was also weak. After six months on the run, she was betrayed and arrested in Nantes in November 1832. She had hidden with her companions behind a fireplace, but was forced to emerge when the gendarmes lit a fire there. She was then held under strict guard in the citadel of Blaye. On May 10, 1833, she gave birth there to a daughter, Anne Marie Rosalie. On that occasion, she revealed her secret marriage to Lucchesi-Palli and declared him the child’s father, but the paternity was publicly questioned and used against her politically. The writer Chateaubriand defended her and carried messages from her imprisonment to Charles X. Marie-Caroline was released on June 8, 1833, and expelled to Italy. This ended her prospects of becoming regent; the upbringing of her son Henri was entrusted to his aunt Marie-Thérèse. Little Rosalie died in Livorno in August of the same year. Marie-Caroline thereafter lived mainly in Austria, first in Graz and later at Brunnsee Castle, which she acquired in 1837. With Lucchesi-Palli she had further children; altogether, six of her ten children came from her two marriages. The final decade of her life was marked by bereavement and financial difficulties. In 1864, her daughter Louise of Parma and her second husband died within a few months of one another, leaving Marie-Caroline burdened with heavy debts. She lived between Brunnsee and Venice, eventually becoming almost blind and seriously weakened physically, while remaining closely attached to her grandchildren. She died at Brunnsee Castle in 1870 and was buried in a family chapel in the cemetery at Mureck.