Famous French Royals

## Napoleon I

**Napoléon Bonaparte** was a French statesman and military leader of Italian descent who rose to prominence during the French Revolution and led several successful campaigns during the French Revolutionary Wars. He was *Emperor of the French* as Napoleon I from 1804 until 1814 and again briefly in 1815 during the Hundred Days. Napoleon dominated European and global affairs for more than a decade while leading France against a series of coalitions in the Napoleonic Wars. He won most of these wars and the vast majority of his battles, building a large empire that ruled over much of continental Europe before its final collapse in 1815. He is considered one of the greatest commanders in history, and his wars and campaigns are studied at military schools worldwide. Napoleon's political and cultural legacy has endured as one of the most celebrated and controversial leaders in human history.

Born into a Corsican family, Bonaparte joined the army during the French Revolution. He proved to be a first-rate military talent. Especially the campaigns in Italy and Egypt made him popular. This enabled him, by the coup of the 18th Brumaire VIII (9 November 1799), first as one of three consuls, to take power in France. From 1799 to 1804 as First Consul of the French Republic and then until 1814 and again in 1815 as Emperor of the French, he stood before a dictatorial regime with plebiscitary elements.

Through various reforms - such as those of the judiciary through the Code civil or the administration - Napoleon has shaped the state structures of France to the present day and initiated the creation of a modern civil law in occupied European countries. On the foreign policy side, supported by the army, he temporarily gained control of large parts of continental Europe. He was from 1805 King of Italy and from 1806 to 1813 protector of the Confederation of the Rhine and used in a few other states family members and confidants as monarchs. Through the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, which he initiated, the constitution of Central Europe became a central question in the 19th century. Initially, he himself had propagated nationalist ideas outside of France, but the success of this very idea made it difficult to maintain the Napoleonic order in Europe, especially in Spain, in Germany and, finally, in Russia.

The catastrophic outcome of the campaign against Russia from 1812 onwards led to the shattering of his rule over much of Europe, the wars of liberation and, ultimately, the overthrow of Napoleon. After a short period of exile to Elba, he returned to power in 1815 for a hundred days. At the Battle of Waterloo he was finally defeated and banished to the end of his life on the island of St. Helena.

* Joséphine de Beauharnais was 32 years old, widowed and well established in French society when she met the timid 26-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte for the first time. It took only six months for the two to get together and get married.
* Napoleon is said to have been 5'2 "tall at the time of his death (the average size of a Frenchman at the time), but the measure of the measurement was in French units smaller than today's units. It is likely that he was 5'6 "or 5'7" tall, which would actually make him above average height.

## Catherine de‘ Medici

**Catherine de’ Medici**, daughter of Lorenzo II de' Medici and Madeleine de La Tour d'Auvergne, was an Italian noblewoman who was *Queen of France* from 1547 until 1559, by marriage to King Henry II. As the mother of kings Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III, she had extensive, if at times varying, influence in the political life of France. From 1560 to 1563, she ruled France as regent for her son Charles IX, King of France.

In 1533, at the age of fourteen, Catherine married Henry, second son of King Francis I and Queen Claude of France. Throughout his reign, Henry excluded Catherine from participating in state affairs and instead showered favors on his chief mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who wielded much influence over him. Henry's death thrust Catherine into the political arena as mother of the frail fifteen-year-old King Francis II. When he died in 1560, she became regent on behalf of her ten-year-old son King Charles IX and was granted sweeping powers. After Charles died in 1574, Catherine played a key role in the reign of her third son, Henry III. He dispensed with her advice only in the last months of her life (he would outlive her by seven months).

Catherine's three sons reigned in an age of almost constant civil and religious war in France. The problems facing the monarchy were complex and daunting but Catherine was able to keep the monarchy and the state institutions functioning even at a minimum level. At first, Catherine compromised and made concessions to the rebelling Calvinist Protestants, or Huguenots, as they became known. She failed, however, to grasp the theological issues that drove their movement. Later she resorted, in frustration and anger, to hard-line policies against them.[1] In return, she came to be blamed for the excessive persecutions carried out under her sons' rule, in particular for the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572, in which thousands of Huguenots were killed in Paris and throughout France.

* Fifteen days after her birth, Catherine's mother died and six days after her mother died her father died also. By the time she was month old she was an
* Catherine saw little of her husband in their first year of marriage, but the ladies of the court treated her well, impressed with her intelligence and keenness to please.
* Throughout the reign of her husband, Henry Catherine from participating in state affairs and instead showered favours on his chief mistress, Diane de Poitiers, who wielded much influence over him
* Her policies, therefore, may be seen as desperate measures to keep the Valois monarchy on the throne at all costs, and her patronage of the arts as an attempt to glorify a monarchy whose prestige was in steep decline.
* According to Mark Strage, one of her biographers, Catherine was the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe.

## Louis XVI

**Louis XVI of France** born **Louis-Auguste**, was the last *King of France* before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution.
Louis Auguste (first *Duke of Berry*) was Dauphin after the death of his father in 1765 and finally king of France and Navarre after the death of his grandfather in 1774.

Louis XVI. received a difficult legacy from his grandfather Louis XV. France was on the brink of financial ruin and within the framework of the absolutist monarchy, the king could not cope with the crisis.

The first part of his reign was marked by attempts to reform the French government in accordance with Enlightenment ideas. These included efforts to abolish serfdom, remove the taille (land tax) and the corvée (labour tax), and increase tolerance toward non-Catholics as well as abolish the death penalty for deserters. Louis implemented deregulation of the grainmarket, advocated by his economic liberalminister Turgot, but it resulted in an increase in bread prices.

From 1776, Louis XVI actively supported the North American colonists, who were seeking their independence from Great Britain, which was realised in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The ensuing debt and financial crisis contributed to the unpopularity of the Ancien Régime. This led to the convening of the Estates-General of 1789. Discontent among the members of France's middle and lower classes resulted in strengthened opposition to the French aristocracy and to the absolute monarchy, of which Louis and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, were viewed as representatives.

In the course of the French Revolution, he was overthrown and forced in 1791 to agree to the conversion of the absolute into a constitutional monarchy, as its head, now king of the French, he acted. He was deposed in 1792, sentenced to death by the revolutionaries in 1793, and executed by the guillotine.

Today's view of Louis XVI. is differentiated; Historians see in him an honest man of good intentions, but who failed because of the difficulty of reforming the monarchy to the necessary extent and curtailing the privileges of the upper classes of nobility and clergy in order to avert the threat of national bankruptcy. As a representative of the Ancien Régime, he was held accountable by the increasingly radical forces.

* Louis XVI was the only King of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy.
* Both of his sons died in childhood, before the Bourbon Restoration; his only child to reach adulthood, Marie Therese, was given over to the Austrians in exchange for French prisoners of war, eventually dying childless in 1851.

## Marie Antoinette

**Marie Antoinette** born Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna (2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was the last *Queen of France* before the French Revolution. She was born an Archduchess of Austria and was the penultimate child and youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa and Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. She became Dauphine of France in May 1770 at age 14 upon her marriage to Louis-Auguste, heir apparent to the French throne. On 10 May 1774, her husband ascended the throne as Louis XVI and she assumed the title Queen of France and Navarre, which she held until September 1791, when she became Queen of the French as the French Revolution proceeded, a title that she held until 21 September 1792.