page_title: Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans
section_title: Princess of Commercy
hierarchical_section_title: Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans / Life / Princess of Commercy
caption_attribution_description: Château de Stanislas à Commercy (Meuse, France)
context_page_description: Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans was a petite-fille de France, and duchess of Lorraine and Bar by marriage to Leopold, Duke of Lorraine. She was regent of Lorraine and Bar during the minority and absence of her son, and suo jure Princess of Commercy 1737–1744. Among her children was Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor, a co-founder of the royal House of Habsburg-Lorraine.
context_section_description: Unable to prevent her son from giving up the duchy of Lorraine to Stanisław Leszczyński when he married the Habsburg heiress, Maria Theresa of Austria, Élisabeth Charlotte moved into the Château d'Haroué in nearby Commercy, which was erected into a sovereign principality for her to reign over during her dowager years.
  In 1737, her daughter, Élisabeth Thérèse married Charles Emmanuel III of Sardinia. Elisabetta Teresa, as she was known in Italy, died in childbirth in 1741 after giving birth to Élisabeth Charlotte's grandson, Benedetto, Duke of Chablais.
  On 7 January 1744 her youngest son, Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine, made a "marriage of love" with Archduchess Maria Anna of Austria, who died in childbirth on 16 December 1744.
  Élisabeth Charlotte died of a stroke at the age of sixty-eight on 23 December 1744, one week after her daughter-in-law and grandchild. She was the last of her siblings to die and had outlived most of her children. Nine months after her death, her son Francis Stephen became Holy Roman Emperor.
  She was buried in the funerary chapel of the Dukes of Lorraine in the Saint-François-des-Cordeliers church in Nancy.
caption: The Château de Commercy where she died in 1744
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