Comte de Chambord

Henri Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonne, Comte de Chambord (September 29, 1820 - August 24, 1883) was the grandson of King Charles X of France, the posthumous son of Charles's younger son Charles, Duc de Berry, who had been assassinated several months before Henri's birth. Until his grandfather's abdication, he was known as the Duc de Bordeaux.

In 1830, Charles abdicated in favour of his grandson, whose supporters proclaimed him Henry V. However parliament instead decreed that the throne should go to a distant relative, the Duc d'Orléans, who became Louis-Philippe, King of the French.

The Comte de Chambord, as he was generally known, remained the Legitimist claimant to the throne under the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the Second Republic and the Empire of Napoleon III. In the early 1870s, as the Empire collapsed following its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, Chambord was offered the throne by the French National Assembly. However he set one demand, that France abandon its tricolour and return to the Bourbon fleur-de-lis, which the National Assembly could not grant.

A temporary Third Republic was established, to wait for the childless Chambord's death and his replacement by the Comte de Paris, the Orleanist pretender whom Chambord had accepted as his heir. By Chambord's death in 1883, however, public opinion had swung behind the Republic, as the form of government that 'divides us least', in the words of former President Thiers.