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( Louis-Philippe of France)
De Jure Philippe VII (Orléanist pretender) Louis-Philippe was born in Paris to Louis Philippe Joseph, Duc de Chartres (later Duc d'Orléans and also known as "Philippe Égalité") and Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre. As a member of the reigning House of Bourbon, he was a Prince du Sang. He was the first of three sons and a daughter of the Orléans family, a family that was to have erratic fortunes for the next court years. The relationship between the Bourbon-Orléans junior line, to which he belonged, and the Bourbon elder line, to which the king belonged, was linked through Louis XIII. The elder line had a deep distrust of the intentions of the family which would succeed to the French throne should the senior Bourbons die out. Exiled from the royal court, the Orléans confined themselves to studies of the literature and sciences emerging from the Enlightenment. Louis-Philippe was tutored by the Comtesse de Genlis, beginning in 1782. Madame de Genlis instilled in him a fondness for liberal thought; it is probably during this period that Louis-Philippe picked up his slightly Voltairean brand of Catholicism. When Louis-Philippe's grandfather died in 1785, his father succeeded him as Duke of Orléans, and Louis-Philippe succeeded his father as Duke of Chartres. In 1788, with the Revolution looming, the young Louis-Philippe showed his liberal sympathies when he helped break down the door of a prison cell in Mont Saint-Michel, during a visit there with Madame de Genlis. From October 1788 to October 1789 the Palais-Royal, the Paris home of the Orléans family, was a meeting-place for the revolutionaries. During the early stages of the Revolution, Louis-Philippe strongly supported the reformation of French society as a whole. However, his father Philippe's actions during the vote on the execution of King Louis XVI changed the fortunes of the young Duke of Chartres and his family. As Philippe continued his support for the liberal factions of the Revolution, the royal family and the royal court became increasingly hostile towards the Orléans family. Dubbed "Philippe Égalité", he became an exemplar of liberal reform to the common people of Paris. Hundreds of medallions with Philippe's figure framed by the title Père du Peuple (Father of the People) were minted and seen in the streets. But Philippe's actual position was weak, which became apparent as he was involved in several scandals in Paris. In October 1789, he went to England on the pretext of negotiating with the British government to set up an independent kingdom in the Austrian Netherlands. He returned in July 1790. Honoré Mirabeau later said of him "if we need some sort of a puppet it might as well be that bastard as anyone else."
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