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France – Prince Ferdinand – Duke of Orleans: 9 August 1830 – 13 July 1842
1843 Bronze Medal 25 (4.93 grams)
S.A.R. Fn – Pie Lis Ce He DUC D’ORLEANS, Ferdinand facing left.
CHAPELLE DU CHATEAU DE DREUX – 1843, Chapel estate facade.
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 The Royal Chapel of Dreux (Chapelle royale de Dreux) situated in Dreux, France, is the traditional burial place of members of the House of Orléans. It is an important early building in the French adoption of Gothic Revival architecture, despite being topped by a dome. Starting in 1828, Alexandre Brogniart, the director of the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, produced fired enamel paintings on large panes of plate glass, for King Louis-Philippe, an important early French commission in Gothic taste, preceded mainly by some Gothic features in a few jardins paysagers.
 In the 1770s, Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, Duke of Penthièvre was one of the greatest land owners in France prior to the French Revolution. In 1775, the lands of the county of Dreux had been given to the Penthièvre by his cousin King Louis XVI. In 1783, the Duke sold his domain of Rambouillet to Louis XVI. On November 25 of that year, in a long religious procession, Penthièvre transferred the nine caskets containing the remains of his parents, Louis Alexandre, Count of Toulouse and Marie Victoire de Noailles, his wife, Princess Maria Teresa Felicitas of Modena, and six of their seven children, from the small medieval village church next to the castle in Rambouillet, to the chapel of the Collégiale Saint-Étienne de Dreux.
Penthièvre died in March 1793 and his body was laid to rest in the crypt beside his parents. On November 21 of that same year, in the midst of the French Revolution, a mob desecrated the crypt and threw the ten bodies in a mass grave in the Chanoines cemetery of the Collégiale Saint Étienne. In 1816, the Duke of Penthièvre’s daughter, the Duchess of Orléans, had a new chapel built on the site of the mass grave of the Chanoines cemetery, as the final resting place for her family. In 1830, Louis Philippe I, King of the French, son of the Duchess of Orléans, embellished and enlarged the chapel which was renamed the Royal Chapel of Dreux, now the necropolis of the Orléans royal family.
 Prince Ferdinand Philippe of Orléans (3 September 1810 – 13 July 1842) was the eldest son of Louis Philippe d’Orléans, Duke of Orléans (the future King Louis Philippe I) and Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily. Born in exile in his mother’s native Sicily, he was heir to the House of Orléans from birth. Following his father’s succession as King of the French in 1830, he became the Prince Royal and subsequently Duke of Orléans (French: Duc d’Orléans), the title by which he is best known. He died in 1842, never to succeed his father or see the collapse of the July Monarchy and subsequent exile of his family to England.
In 1830, during the July Revolution, the young Duke of Chartres was on garrison duty at Joigny. He made his regiment wear the cockade of France and quickly led them to aid the uprising in Paris. He was temporarily stopped at Montrouge, and entered Paris on 3 August at the head of his regiment. When his father was offered the French throne by the Chamber of Deputies, Prince Ferdinand Philippe received the title of Duke of Orléans, Prince of Orléans, and also became Prince Royal, the heir apparent to the throne. Upon entering the Conseil (at his father’s bidding), Ferdinand Philippe, who had something of a temper, criticised the time lost by ministers’ prevarications and was frequently embroiled in skirmishes with the doctrinaires, to whom he wished to impart the sentiments of revolutionary youth. When Casimir Periero was nominated president of the Conseil in March 1831, he accepted the post only on condition that Ferdinand Philippe be excluded from the Conseil.
In November 1831, the young Duke of Orléans and Maréchal d’Empire Nicolas Soult, Duc de Dalmatie, were sent to repress the Canut revolts. He acquitted himself of this difficult task without violence and managed to rapidly appease opponents of the July Monarchy, even gaining a certain popularity. During the cholera outbreak in 1831, he did not hesitate to take real risks in visiting the most sickly patients at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, accompanied by Casimir Perier (who caught the disease and died). In the eyes of the people and the press he was seen as a generous prince, sincerely preoccupied with the plight of the poor, and he became a sort of icon for the dynastic opposition of politician Odilon Barrot, who saw in him the only prince capable of reconciling modern France’s democratic aspirations with the heritage of its monarchical past. On 2 March 1832 he was granted an annual income of 1 million francs under his father’s new Civil List.
In 1842, the Duke was scheduled to leave for Saint-Omer to review part of the army of which he had been made the commander that was engaged at the Marne. He planned to travel from the Tuileries Palace to Neuilly-sur-Seine on 13 July 1842 to say goodbye to his family, and, for the sake of expediency, opted for an open carriage. When the horses of his carriage ran out of control at Sablonville in the Hauts-de-Seine département; he lost his balance and fractured his skull, and, despite the best attentions of his doctors, the 31-year-old Duke died some hours later, surrounded by family members who had rushed to the scene. Alfred de Musset evoked the accident in his poem Le Treize Juillet (in the collection Poésies nouvelles).
Ferdinand Philippe’s funeral service was held in Notre Dame which was covered not in black fabric (of which there wasn’t enough) but, at the suggestion of the architect Visconti, black paper. He was interred in an elaborate tomb in the Chapelle Royale, in Dreux, Eure-et-Loir.
Deprived of the popular support his eldest son had had, Louis Philippe and his régime fell six years later. He, his family, and Ferdinand Philippe’s widow Princess Hélène went into exile in Great Britain. There, Hélène died nearly 16 years after her husband, on 18 May 1858 in Richmond, Surrey. Because Hélène was a Protestant, she could not be buried in the Catholic Chapelle Royale at Dreux. Instead, a room with a separate entrance was built attached to the chapel and a window was opened between her tomb and her husband’s. The sculpture of the Protestant princess rests atop her tomb, depicting her reaching through the opening to the tomb of her beloved Catholic prince.
  France, officially the French Republic (French: République française), is a sovereign state comprising territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European part of France, called Metropolitan France, extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. France spans 640,679 square kilometres (247,368 sq mi) and has a total population of 67 million. It is a unitary semi-presidential republic with the capital in Paris, the country’s largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. The Constitution of France establishes the state as secular and democratic, with its sovereignty derived from the people.
During the Iron Age, what is now Metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The Gauls were conquered in 51 BC by the Roman Empire, which held Gaul until 486. The Gallo-Romans faced raids and migration from the Germanic Franks, who dominated the region for hundreds of years, eventually creating the medieval Kingdom of France. France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years’ War (1337 to 1453) strengthening French state-building and paving the way for a future centralized absolute monarchy. During the Renaissance, France experienced a vast cultural development and established the beginning of a global colonial empire. The 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots).
France became Europe’s dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV. French philosophers played a key role in the Age of Enlightenment during the 18th century. In 1778, France became the first and the main ally of the new United States in the American Revolutionary War. In the late 18th century, the absolute monarchy was overthrown in the French Revolution. Among its legacies was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the earliest documents on human rights, which expresses the nation’s ideals to this day. France became one of modern history’s earliest republics until Napoleon took power and launched the First French Empire in 1804. Fighting against a complex set of coalitions during the Napoleonic Wars, he dominated European affairs for over a decade and had a long-lasting impact on Western culture. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a tumultuous succession of governments: the monarchy was restored, it was replaced in 1830 by a constitutional monarchy, then briefly by a Second Republic, and then by a Second Empire, until a more lasting French Third Republic was established in 1870. By the 1905 law, France adopted a strict form of secularism, called laïcité, which has become an important federative principle in the modern French society.
France reached its territorial height during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it ultimately possessed the second-largest colonial empire in the world. In World War I, France was one of the main winners as part of the Triple Entente alliance fighting against the Central Powers. France was also one of the Allied Powers in World War II, but came under occupation by the Axis Powers in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War. The Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Following World War II, most of the empire became decolonized.
Throughout its long history, France has been a leading global center of culture, making significant contributions to art, science, and philosophy. It hosts Europe’s third-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites (after Italy and Spain) and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, the most of any country in the world. France remains a great power with significant cultural, economic, military, and political influence. It is a developed country with the world’s sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and eight-largest by purchasing power parity. According to Credit Suisse, France is the fourth wealthiest nation in the world in terms of aggregate household wealth. It also possesses the world’s second-largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ), covering 11,035,000 square kilometres (4,261,000 sq mi).
French citizens enjoy a high standard of living, and the country performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, civil liberties, and human development. France is a founding member of the United Nations, where it serves as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. It is a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and La Francophonie. France is a founding and leading member state of the European Union (EU).
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