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Amelie Therese Marie

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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MARIE AMELIE THERESE (1782-1866), queen of Louis Philippe, king of the French, was the daughter of Ferdinand IV., king of Naples, and the archduchess Maria Carolina, daughter of the empress Maria Theresa, and belonged to the house of Bourbon. She was born at Caserta, on the 26th of April 1782, and received a careful education which developed the naturally pious and honourable disposition that earned for her in the family circle the nickname of La Santa. Driven from Naples in 1798, the Neapolitan royal family fled to Palermo, and the years from 1800 to 1802 were spent by Marie Amelie with her mother at the Austrian court. In 1806 they were again in flight before the armies of Massena, and it was during the second residence of her father's court at Palermo that she met the exiled Louis Philippe, then duke of Orleans, whom she married in November 1809. Returning to France in 1814, the duke and duchess of Orleans had barely established themselves in the Palais Royal in Paris when the Hundred Days drove them into exile. Marie Amelie took refuge with her four children in England, where she spent two years at Orleans House, Twickenham. Again in France in 1817, her life at Neuilly until 1828 was the happiest period of her existence. Neither then nor at any other time did she take any active share in politics; but she was not without indirect influence on affairs, because her strong royalist and legitimist traditions prevented the court from including her in the suspicion with which her husband's liberal views were regarded. Her attention was absorbed by the care and education of her numerous family, even after the revolution of 1830 had made her queen of the French, a position accepted by her with forebodings of disaster justified by her early experience of revolutions. During her second exile, from 1848 to the end of her life, she lived at Claremont, where her charity and piety endeared her to the many English friends of the Orleans family. Marie Amelie died at Claremont, on the 24th of March 1866.

See A. Trognon, Vie de Marie Amelie (1872); A. L. Baron Imbert de St Amand, La Jeunesse de Marie Amelie (1891), Marie Amelie au Palais Royal (1892), Marie Amelie et la cour de Palerme (1891), Marie Amelie et la cour des Tuileries (1892), Marie Amelie et l'apogee de regne de Louis Philippe (1893), Marie Amelie et la societe francaise 1847 (1894), and Marie Amelie et la duchesse d'Orleans (1893).