Count Henri Paris Duke of France Signed Royal Document French Royalty Henry VII for Sale

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Count Henri Paris Duke of France Signed Royal Document French Royalty Henry VII For Sale

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Count Henri Paris Duke of France Signed Royal Document French Royalty Henry VII:
$349.96

LOT-O186.For your consideration is an exceedingly rare and historically important original c.1958 royal presentation Christmas card with photograph of Henri, Count of Paris, Duke of France, pretender to the throne as Henry VII, hand-signed and inscribed by Duke Henri. Royal autograph is manuscript hand-signed in fountain pen ink. Museum quality. One of a kind. Royal document measures approximately 5.25" x 7.25". Royalty presentation photograph is original. Condition is excellent. Embossed royal coat of arms with cipher and crown. Guaranteed authentic.

Henri, Count of Paris, Duke of France (Prince Henri Philippe Pierre Marie d'Orléans; 14 June 1933 – 21 January 2019), was the Orléanist pretender to the defunct French throne as Henry VII.

He was head of the House of Orléans as senior in male-line descent from Louis-Philippe I d'Orléans, who reigned as King of the French from 1830 to 1848. Henri was a retired military officer as well as an author and painter.

He was the first son of Henri, Count of Paris (1908–1999), and his wife Princess Isabelle of Orléans-Braganza, and was born in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Belgium, a law in 1886 having permanently exiled from France the heads of its formerly reigning dynasties and their eldest sons.

Despite the ban, while living in Belgium Henri occasionally accompanied his mother on brief visits to France and, later, to his mother's relatives in Brazil. In August 1940 as World War II escalated, the family relocated to property they owned in Larache in the French protectorate of Morocco. While his father sought to play a role in the French resistance, Henri, in 1940 a child of 7, remained at Larache with his mother, siblings, grandmother and father's sisters' families during the Nazi occupation of France, sharing a small desert home that lacked electricity. Advised by Henri Giraud's Moroccan command that the Orléans had become unwelcome in the protectorate following the assassination of Vichy regime collaborater François Darlan by the monarchist Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, the family relocated to Pamplona in Spain until 1947, when they took up residence at the Quinta do Anjinho, an estate near Sintra, on the Portuguese Riviera. During that year, President Vincent Auriol allowed Henri and his brother François to visit France, and in 1948 he was allowed to enroll in a lycée in Bordeaux.

The law of exile was abrogated in 1950, allowing Henri to repatriate with his parents. Later that year, his parents purchased an estate near Paris, the Manoir du Cœur-Volant in Louveciennes, which became Henri's first home in France.

Henri studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), obtaining his bac in 1957, and on 30 June of that year, his father conferred upon him, as the heir apparent of his house, the title of "Count of Clermont", by which he was generally known during his father's lifetime.

From October 1959 to April 1962, Henri worked at the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security as a member of the French Foreign Legion. Transferred from there to a garrison in Germany, he took up a new assignment as military instructor at Bonifacio in Corsica, where his wife and children joined him early in 1963.

Returning to civilian life in 1967, Henri and his family briefly occupied the Blanche Neige pavilion on the grounds of his father's Cœur-Volant estate before renting an apartment of their own in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. In the early 1970s Clermont managed public relations for the Geneva office of a Swiss investment firm while dwelling in Corly.