DUC DE GUISE

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 50, 27 August 1940, Page 11

DUC DE GUISE

THE FRENCH PRETENDER

(Received August 27, 1.30 p.m.) TANGIERS, August 26. The Due de Guise, Pretender to the French Throne, is dead, at the age of 66.

The Due de Guise issued the following manifesto in November, 1937: "The situation at home and abroad is grave. The nation will be forced to turn to a dictatorship of the Right or Left. There is only one solution—restoration o£ the Monarchy. lam determined to reconquer the Throne." The discovery two or three months later of the plot

of the "Cagoulards" to overthrow the French Republic and to restore the Monarchy, brought the Duke into the limelight again. Known to his followers as Jean 111, he was tall, severelooking, arid resembling in features his ancestor Henri IV of Navarre. He was a descendant of one branch of the Bourbons, and in direct line of succession to King Louis-Philippe. French laws prevent the Pretender to the throne from residing in France, and for many years the Due de Guise lived in Belgium, at Stockel-les-Bruxelles. With him in exile were his son and his daughter-in-law, the Comte and Comtesse de Paris, and their three children, Princess Isabelle-Victoire, Prince Henri, Dauphin of France, and the three-year-old Princess Helene Astrid Leopoldine. Etiquette and tradi-j tion ruled the Royal household at the Manor of Anjou, and the lips of each newly-born Royal child were unfailingly rubbed with a garlic clove dipped in Jurancon wine. • It was around the Comte de Paris, however, that Royalist activities were centred in recent years.

The Due de Guise inherited more than £4,000,000. Like all of his line he had a shrewd business instinct. Before he was exiled he was regarded as one of the best farmers in France. Subsequently he turned his barren estate at Larache, in Spanish Morocco, into the most important Atlantic port of the colony. At Larache he kept his unique collection of lead soldiers of the revolution and the Empire and of old French flags. The Chateau d'Amboise, one of the residences of the former Kings of France, on the Loire, was the property of the Duke. Though unable to visit it himself, he used it as an asylum for old family servants.

The Due de Guise became head of the Bourbon-Orleans family in 1926 on the death of the Due d'Orleans. The Orleanist branch of the French Bourbons has provided the head of the Maison de France, as the former French Royal house is still called, since 1883. In that year the Comte de Paris, the last representative of the senior French line, descended from Louis XV, died at Stowe. The Orleanists trace their descent, from Philip, Duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIV.' The ducal titles of Guise and Chartres are both taken from the domains granted as appanages to the Orleanist family by Louis XIV, and his successor.