YOUNG PRETENDERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 May 1938, Page 10

YOUNG PRETENDERS

FIVE EUROPEAN CLAIMANTS. PREPARATIONS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. There are five young men in Europe today, all still in their twenties, who are claimants to thrones; one could reasonably extend the number to seven, writes Ferdinand Tuohy in the “Daily Mail.” Two, particularly, have come right into the news during recent days. First, the Comte de Paris. His father the Due de Guise, has issued a manifesto in which he said; “I am determined to reconquer the throne of my fathers." Although officially the Pretender, the Due de Guise has previously indicated that in the event of any possibility of a restoration of the monarchy, he would stand aside in favour of his son. Then there is Juan, Prince of the Austrias, who has recently been talked of as a potential King of Spain. Let us deal with France and her two Pretenders first. Yes, there are two —rivals —the Comte de Paris and the 23-year-old Prince Napoleon Bonaparte. The Comte de Paris has been freely drawing on the family’s £4.000,000 fortune to push the Royalist cause in unstable French times, and with a special view to checking Bonapartist encroachment.

Personally, “the Dauphin” is an attractive candidate. The would-be Henry VI., at 29, is a live-wire. He edits his own paper, and pilots his own aeroplane. He manages his father’s estate at Larrache, Spanish Morocco, and at Palermo, where he was married to his cousin, Princess Isabelle of France, who has borne him four children. The young Comte is an enthusiastic “sportif;” is fluent in English, Italian, Spanish, German; has graduated in law and in political sciences.

Now Prince Napoleon. He is the dark horse of this story. Until he came of age no one gave him a thought; his Orleanist rival might have been the solitary French Pretender.

Since then the latest aiglon has only been more and more discussed in Paris along with a steadily expanding Bonapartist propaganda on stage and screen, in literary and journalistic quarters. Young Napoleon can draw on a huge fortune which he shares with his mother, the former Princess Clementine of Belgium. This forceful woman is pushing her son’s cause by every discreet means, now that her fledgling has become the eagle.

She has bided her time ever since the day when she, in exile, caused French earth to be strewn on the floor of her bedroom as she awaited her firstborn, certain it would be a boy, and determined that the birth should take place on the soil of France. (It was a girl, Princess Clotilde, and so more French earth had to be carried across to Belgium two years later, this time with the wished-for sequel).

THE BONAPARTISTS’ AIM. The great coup the Bonapartists are aiming at is the return of the body of the Duke of Reichstadt from the Capucine vault in Vienna to the Invalides, there to lie in glory beside I’Empereur. What thrills, what memories, that would evoke. The great Napoleon’s great-grand-nephew (through Jerome King of Westphalia, and not through the failure of Sedan, Napoleon 111., as the Pretender of today, is keen on pointing out) lives in the Avenue Louise, Brussels, with his mother from whom he has inherited a measure of vigorous Coburg blood. Slender and over six feet, bronzed and regular-featured, with firm mouth and resolute chin, and thick, brushed-back, dark brown hair, young Napoleon not long since haughtily intimated to a Bourbon delegation that in no circumstances would he form a political liaison with the rival House.

Before we proceed to Juan, 24-year-old Prince of the Asturias, it is worth noting how very different are these modern claimants from their predecessors of generations past. They have taken degrees, they fly, they work. But where they particularly differ is in their attitude to a restoration. Not only do they wish to go back on their merits but they have small liking for coups d’etat. At one moment, four of the five Young Pretenders were located together in Brussels, three attending the same university,, Louvain. But for Juan, the Spanish candidate, it was to be the briefest halt. He had just come from three years in the British Navy, and policy decreed that he should speedily marry. A BoubonHabsburg cousin would meet the case; there followed bridal bells in Rome, and then a honeymoon round the world. The Prince and Princess of the Asturias favoured France for residence, the. young husband's altered personal state not interrupting his specialised studies. With what hope? —one may be forgiven for asking. Yet it behoves to be wary in these matters. In the springtime of 1848 LouisNapoleon was as good as a nonentity. By Christmas he was PrincePresident.

The other two contemporaries at Louvain were the Archduke Otto and Prince Napoleon. No claimant has ever been so sedulously prepared for a restoration as

the handsome 25-year-old Hapsburg. And well might it be so,, considering ail that may yet depend on this vacant throne. For years Otto has saturated himself in the past history of the Dual Monarchy, in political science appertaining to Central Europe today and in solutions for tomorrow. Otto has seen his estates returned to him, the banishment law removed. He has been deluged with the freedom of Austrian communes. He says: “I will never return to Austria except as Sovereign by the expressed majority will.” The fifth of our Young Pretenders is Dom Duarte. Duke of Braganza, the Legitimist claimant to the Portuguese throne since the death of King Manoel five years ago. Aged 20 and athletic, he lives mostly in Austria, where he was born. Young Louis-Ferdinand, of Prussia, scond son of the ex-Crown Prince, is not a Pretender—in fact, he is an airpilot under the Nazi colours, having qualified mechanically in a works at Detroit. Yet if there be a Hohenzollern candidate anywhere, it is he, since he is his grandfather’s heir consequent on the morganatic marriage of his elder brother. The remotest chance of all is that of Prince Vladimir- heir to “the Tsar of All the Russians,” the Grand Duke Cyril. Nevertheless, the father has carefully trained the son, who also is a great sportif. Dinard-way.