And welcome to Revolutions. Episode 3.34B, Felipe Igalate. As I mentioned back in Episode 3.25, the Duke to Orlean, the renegade prince of the blood who was now styling himself, Felipe Igalate, deserves more attention than I have been able to give him. Since he is about to get his head chopped off, I figured that now would be the perfect time to try to correct this oversight.
So without further ado, let's hop in the wayback machine and head back into the days of Anción Regime, because the story of the coming of the French Revolution is absolutely not complete without explaining the part played by the Duke of the Orlean. Young Louis Felipe Joseph Dorlion was born in 1747 into the house of Orlean, the senior cadet branch of the royal house of Orlean. His grandfather was Felipe Dorlion, a younger brother of King Louis XIV, and it was to him that both the family name and their cadet branch status trace back to. The Orlean branch, being so close to the immediate royal family but just outside of it, earned their senior male patriarchs the distinction of being the first prince of the blood.
An official court position reserved for the most senior royal prince not in the king's immediate family. What this meant in practice was that if all the inner circle borvents were to die out, the throne would pass the house of Orlean, and that is going to be important. When Louis Felipe was 22, he married one of his cousins, Louisa Marie, who happened to be the daughter of an insanely wealthy Duke, who himself happened to be the son of one of King Louis XIV's legitimized illegitimate children, if you can follow along with that. So Louisa Marie's dowry, combined with the already huge estates of the house of Orlean, meant that when Louisa Leop inherited the title Duke Dorlion from his father, he became one of the richest men in France.
This is also going to be important. Now from very early on, Louisa Leop cultivated an antagonistic edge in his dealings with the king's immediate royal family. He first ran afoul with them in the early 1770s when Lord Chancellor Mupu made his play at shutting down the parlour, which we talked about way back in episode 3.3. While Louisa Leop not yet duked Orlean, he set himself up as a champion and patron of the parlour.
For this, he earned popular acclaim and the enmity of the king's ministry, and a lecher de cachet was issued exiling him from Paris. Not the last time that would happen. He kept up his tweaking of the borvents after Louis XVI ascended to the throne, and it took no time at all for Louisa Leop and Marie Antoinette to come to utterly despise each other. When his father died in 1785, Louisa Leop became the Duke Dorlion, and first prince of the blood, which wrangled the king's inner circle to no end.
He also inherited the Palais-Royale, a huge palace just a few blocks from the Tuileries in Paris. One of the subtle little quirks of on-screen regime law was that royal residences, like the Palais-Royale, were not subject to official censorship laws. So when Orlean inherited the property, he threw its doors open to the public and basically created a safe space to print and distribute material that might otherwise run afoul of the censors. The arcades of the Palais were soon brimming with shops and cafes and books, pamphlets and newspapers that advocated all kinds of crazy stuff were distributed at will.
So just as the pre-revolution was heating up, the Palais-Royale served as the great clearing house for any and all dangerously seditious notions, like hey, maybe we should call the estates general again. This political and literary patron made Orlean very popular with the people, and very unpopular with the inner royal family, most especially Queen Marie Antoinette, who saw in everything Orlean did further proof that he was going to try to overthrow the borvents and set himself up as king. Now her his part, Orlean hated the queen right back, believing her to be a frivolous spendthrift whose loyalty to France was suspect at best. So the really critical thing to understand here is that in the late 1780s, when the political and economic reform movement was running into enlightenment philosophy, which was running into complaints about the king and the church, they were all coming together in the Palais-Royale, which was owned and operated by the Duke of Orlean.
So though the queen's paranoia about her husband's cousin went too far, I mean she blamed him for everything, it's really not hard to see why she thought him and his money were behind all the misfortunes that were about to befall her family. When the monarchy went bankrupt and controller General Cologne had to call the assembly of Notables in 1787, the Duke of Orlean was of course invited because he had to be invited, he was the first prince of the blood. And he of course became the most prominent critic of Cologne's reform package. Then during the disastrous royal session of November 1787 that we talked about in episode 3.7, that was when the king was supposed to make nice and instead went off script and demanded fealty to his will, it was the Duke of Orlean who got up and stammered that what the king was doing was illegal.
On this affront, got Orlean exiled from Paris again, helping to spark another round of pointed complaints against the whole electric decay cache system that was now being used to silence the great patron of French liberty. When the estates general was finally called in the spring of 1789, the Duke of Orlean was of course elected to the second estate, and he was clearly ready to stand out as one of the liberal noble champions of the third estate. After Louis failed to intimidate the third estate during another disastrous royal session, the Duke of Orlean was the one who led the delegation of 47 nobles into the now self-proclaimed national assembly which effectively ended any possibility that the estate might be kept separate. This forced Louis to call on everyone else to come together.
We talked about all this back in episode 3.10. Now, as if all this standing up to the king wasn't bad enough, do you remember where it was that Camille de Moulog gave his famous speech that roused Paris to arms and led directly to the fall of the Masciel in July 1789? That's right, he delivered it from atop a café table in the Palais Royale. This left no doubt in the minds of the king's immediate family with the Duke of Orlean with orchestrating the revolution to oust them from power and get himself crowned king.
But though this all looks really suspicious, Orlean is actually not much of an archpumpetier. What's going on here is that the French Revolution was a time of rampant paranoia when everyone, royalists and moderates and revolutionaries, whoever, were all convinced that everyone else was a part of some vast sinister plot to destroy them. So while the royal family was now convinced that Orlean was a revolutionary mastermind, really he was just a rich liberal noble who enjoyed tweaking his cousins. If he was really aiming to overthrow them, he certainly never did much to finally close the deal.
And indeed, once things started getting a little nuts in 1789, Orlean backed off and attempted to get right with the king queen. He even accepted an order to leave the country and go on a diplomatic mission up to England when the king asked him to. And then, if there was ever a moment for Orlean to try to capitalize on all this alleged sinister plotting, it was right after the flight to Veremne, when the king and queen were utterly discredited and suspended from power. But the Duke of Orlean made no attempt to seize the crown.
He of course had followers pushing him in that direction. But instead of doing that, we find evidence that he actually tried to help his cousins through the crisis. But of course by that point they were so ticked off at him that they rejected all his overtures. After the flight to Veremne, Orlean decided that the time had finally come to make a good show of his permanent commitment to the revolution, and he started publicly calling himself Citizen Philippe Igalate.
And it was under that name that he was elected to the National Convention in September 1792. But once in the convention, Philippe Igalate discovered that the times had really changed around him. He saw with Robespierre in the mountain, but even as he tried to keep up with the times, he discovered that he was now little more than an embarrassment and a liability for the mountain. This was the age of the republic, and despite his superficial name change, everyone knew he was a prince of the blood.
The charge that he had made revolution to get himself crowned king was no longer an accusation than to run it him by right wing conservatives, but rather now by left wing or radicals. When there wore on the mountain, the gyrondin's twice made direct attacks on Philippe and accused the mountain of being his accomplices, which forced the mountain into the uncomfortable position of defending Philippe Igalate, and saying, well, this is all a bunch of crazy talk, he's not really like that. But even they had doubts about his real motives. When the time came to sit in judgment on the king and Philippe Igalate voted death without appeal, it was impossible even for his alleged allies to not believe that he wasn't still trying to pave the way for his own coronation.
Whether he really wanted to be king or not is a mystery of his inner mind that we'll likely never know the answer to. But if Philippe Igalate did want to be king, he pretty much blew any shot he had at it quite a long time ago. In the spring of 1793, he was finally brought down by events outside his control. As we talk about back in episode 3.27, when General DeMurrier defected, Philippe Igalate's first born son and heir went with him.
When this defection led to a general crackdown on aristocrats, though in France, there was nothing Philippe Igalate could say or do to avoid getting swept up by the authorities. His son had just been an accomplice to one of the great treasonous betrayals of the whole revolution. And all his assets were seized. Once this is all said and done, I have some ambition to cobble together a book on the children that the revolution devoured.
The first chapter will be about the Duke D'Orleon, who did so much in the late 1780s to harbor political dissidents and create a hotbed of activism that fed directly into the revolution and who then gave so much patronage and money to the cause in the early going. I mean, he gave it protection when no one else would. He was so involved in the early days that, as I said, the king and queen truly thought that the entire revolution was a massive plot by the Duke D'Orleon to oust them from power. But that turned out to not really be the case.
And it is a little bit ironic that those same accusations were the accusations that would bring him down, but they would ultimately come from the left, not the right. Philippe Igalate languished in prison until November, but once the reign of Tarragon he was moved quickly to the front of the line, with being a prince of the blood in all. On November 6, 1793, Philippe Igalate, formerly Duke D'Orleon, was tried, convicted, and guillotine all on the same day. But there is an interesting little postscript to all this.
After Napoleon went down, and the brothers of Louis XVI came back into town to restore the monarchy, they wound up running an arch-conservative kingdom that, in the words of Tallyrand, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. So after about 15 years of enduring the Bourbons attempting to turn French citizens back into French subjects, the French got sick of it all, and overthrew the restored Bourbons in July 1830. The man they turned to to lead a new constitutional monarchy was the Duke D'Orleon's son, Louis Philippe. So, just as Marie Antoinette feared, the House of Orleon did eventually succeed in overthrowing and replacing the House of Orleon, it just took a little longer than she thought.
Okay, so next week there will not be an episode because I only managed to crank out three supplemental before I left. But when we return in two weeks, I will be just getting back from the first ever American Revolution tour, and to celebrate I wrote up a little thing on the young French ambassador dispatched by the National Convention in early 1793 to drum up support for revolutionary France in the new United States of America. With all of Europe now arrayed against them, it was critical that France secured support from their Republican brothers in the New World, which is why it was so unfortunate that the young ambassador of the Convention sent was a needlessly provocative and endlessly infuriating citizen, Jean-Ann.