14 Facts About Legitimists

Legitimists are royalists who adhere to the rights of dynastic succession to the French crown of the descendants of the eldest branch of the Bourbon dynasty, which was overthrown in the 1830 July Revolution.

Legitimists believe that the traditional rules of succession, based on the Salic law, determine the rightful King of France.

Until the deaths of Charles X and his son in 1836 and 1844, respectively, many Legitimists continued to recognize each of them in turn as the rightful king, ahead of Chambord.

Legitimists joined with Orleanists to form the Party of Order which dominated parliament from the elections of May 1849 until Bonaparte's coup on 2 December 1851.

The most committed Orleanists supported the candidacy of Louis Philippe's third son, Francois d'Orleans, Prince of Joinville, for the presidency while the Legitimists largely supported allowing Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to run for a second term.

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Nevertheless, the Legitimists remained a significant party within elite opinion, attracting support of the larger part of the Ancien Regime aristocracy.

Those Legitimists who had rallied to the Republic in 1893, after Chambord's death ten years before still called themselves Droite constitutionnelle or republicaine .

However, Legitimists joined Maurras in celebrating the fall of the Third Republic after the 1940 Battle of France as a divine surprise and many of them entered Philippe Petain's Vichy administration, seeing a golden opportunity to impose a reactionary program in occupied France.

Remnant of Legitimists, known as the blancs d'Espagne, by repudiating Philip V's renunciation of the French throne as ultra vires and contrary to the fundamental French monarchical law, upheld the rights of the eldest branch of the Bourbons, represented as of 1883 by the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne.

Spanish-born Louis-Alphonse de Bourbon is the Bourbon whom the French Legitimists consider to be the de jure king of France under the name Louis XX.

Legitimists is a French citizen through his paternal grandmother and is generally recognised as the senior legitimate representative of the House of Capet.

Legitimists consider the valid rationale for restoration and the order of succession to the French throne derives from fundamental laws of the Ancien Regime, which were formed in the early centuries of the Capetian monarchy.

Philippe d'Orleans, Count of Paris and grandson of Louis Philippe I, accepted the prior claim to the throne of Chambord, who remained childless; Chambord in turn acknowledged that Philippe would claim the right to succeed him as heir, and after his death many Legitimists accepted the descendants of Philippe as the rightful pretenders and became known as Unionists.

Those Legitimists who did not accept the Orleanist line as the successors of Chambord argued that the renunciation of the French throne by Philip V of Spain, second grandson of Louis XIV, was invalid and that in 1883 the throne passed by right to Philip V's heirs in the male-line.