Princess Louise of Belgium
Princess Louise Marie Amélie of Belgium (18 February 1858 – 1 March 1924) was the eldest child and daughter of King Leopold II and Queen Marie Henriette of Belgium. She was a member of the House of Wettin in the branch of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. By her marriage with her first cousin once removed Prince Philipp of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, she retained her birth titles of Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duchess in Saxony.
For the current princess, see Princess Louise of Belgium (b. 2004).Louise of Belgium
18 February 1858
Royal Palace, Brussels, Belgium
1 March 1924 (aged 66)
Hotel Nassauer Hof, Wiesbaden, Germany
Louise was born during the reign of her grandfather Leopold I of Belgium, and she was named after her grandmother Queen Louise. She married in Brussels on 4 February 1875 with her first cousin once removed Prince Philipp. Louise and Philipp settled in Vienna, where they had two children: Leopold Clement, born in 1878, and Dorothea, born in 1881.
Louise's marriage quickly fell apart. Endowed with a strong and whole personality, she refused to submit to a husband who did not suit her, who had been imposed for reasons of state. She reacted by leading a lavish and worldly life as a beauty in the court of Vienna. Louise was quickly preceded by a reputation for scandal to which she gave credit by engaging in several successive affairs before falling in love with Geza Mattachich, an aristocratic Croatian officer. Europe was scandalized when her husband had Louise declared insane and convinced the Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria to intern her in a psychiatric hospital, while Mattachich was accused of forgery and imprisoned. Released four years later, Mattachich succeeded in helping the princess escape. Both then traveled across Europe. After succeeding in proving her mental balance, Louise divorced amicably in 1906.
Louise began the life of a stateless person. Together with her sister Stéphanie, she filed several lawsuits, which were ultimately unsuccessful, against the Belgian State to recover the inheritance of their father, who had died in 1909. However, in 1914 she managed to receive a part of King Leopold II's fortune. World War I and the German defeat further impoverished Louise, who decided to publish her memoirs under the title Autour des trônes que j'ai vu tomber (Around the thrones that I saw fall) which also constitute a testimony of the life of the European courts. Prince Philippe, her ex-husband, died in 1921. In 1924, at the age of 66, Louise died in poverty, a year after her lover Mattachich. Her only surviving offspring was her daughter Dorothea, whom she no longer saw. The major memory she leaves in Belgium is the Avenue Louise in Brussels, named after her.
Historiography[edit]
Autobiography[edit]
In her memoirs published in 1921 under the title Autour des trônes que j'ai vu tomber, Louise immediately affirms her Belgian patriotism (always hoping for a return to her native country) then recounts her eventful existence and draws up interesting portraits, obviously subjective, of members of her family and of the European sovereigns she has met during her lifetime. This work offers first-hand testimony to the royal courts, some of which have disappeared by the time the author describes them. She also settles the score there. She describes Emperor Franz Joseph I as "a narrow man, full of false and preconceived ideas [...]. Under the decor of rank and ceremonies, under the vocabulary of receptions, audiences and speeches, there was a being devoid of sensitivity [...]. He looked like an automaton official, dressed as a soldier".[93] But she praises the beauty of Empress Elisabeth, whom she sees as a "martyr".[94]
Louise claims that her brother-in-law, King Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, attracted by occultism, told her during a stay at the court in Sofia in 1898: "You see all that is here, men and things. Well! everything, including my Kingdom, I place with me at your feet".[95] She draws up a severe indictment against German Emperor Wilhelm II: "the emperor of illusion [...] who lulled his people with illusions and lies, and led them to ruin, civil war, dishonor".[96] As for Queen Victoria, she remembers that she liked to gather her parents around her and admits that she sometimes displeased the British sovereign.[97]
Biography[edit]
Olivier Defrance wrote the first biography dedicated to Louise of Belgium, published in 2001. During her lifetime, Louise had already become, writes the author, "a character in a novel, the legend going beyond reality, and that will last a long time...The memoirs that Louise will write [...] will consolidate the myth".[98] Thanks to an investigation in numerous unpublished archives kept at the National Archives of Austria, the Pannonhalma Archabbey in Hungary, Brussels, Baden-Baden, Coburg, the Musée Condé or even Regensburg, the Belgian historian paints the full and nuanced portrait of this controversial figure of the Belgian dynasty. The biography sheds new light on Louise, psychologically unstable, but not devoid of intelligence.[99]
The biography dedicated to Louise also includes an interesting analysis of the neuropsychiatrist Jean-Paul Beine who tries to answer the question: "Was Princess Louise of Belgium mad?". According to him, the psychiatrists who examined Louise played a leading role in the princess's internment. However, apart from the final expertise which made it possible to free the patient, the incomplete nature of their opinions probably constitutes an obstacle to a formal conclusion. Beine sees "an abusive maneuver [by which] the princess is led to give her written consent to this stay in a nursing home, which turns out from the first day to be interned in a mental institution".[100] The last expertise of 1904–1905 concluded that there was no need for internment and guardianship. The reason given in favor of the internment finds its sources in the grievances of her family about her affair with Geza Mattachich and in an obscure case of unpaid drafts against a background of forgery. To conclude, Beine declares: "The lavishness of the princess did not, from the documents provided today, have its origin in a mental disorder such as to justify her internment".[101]
Aftermath[edit]
Louise has no living descendants today. Her son Prince Leopold Clement of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, born in 1878, died unmarried and in the aforementioned tragic circumstances in 1916. As for her daughter Princess Dorothea of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, born in 1881, married on 2 August 1898 (during the internment of her mother) with Ernst Gunther, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, brother of the German Empress Augusta Victoria. This marriage, which Louise disapproved of, has remained without posterity, but on 11 November 1920 they adopted Prince Johann Georg and his sister Princess Marie Luise, children of a distant cousin, Prince Albrecht of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, prematurely widowed.[102] Dorothea had also given up all relationship with her mother,[103] and after her husband's death in 1921 and in economical distress, she left the Neues Schloß in Primkenau for a modest residence in the same city,[104] where she died in 1967.[105]
Titles and heraldry[edit]
Titles[edit]
At her birth, as the daughter of King Leopold II, Louise was titled Princess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and Duchess in Saxony, with the predicate of Royal Highness, according to the titles of her house, and bears the unofficial title of Princess of Belgium, which will be officially regularized by Royal Decree dated 14 March 1891.[106]