Prince Philippe,éans– Duke of Orléans (; 6 February 1869 – 28 March 1926) was the Orléanist pretender to the throne of France from 1894 to 1926 as Philippe VIII.
Early life
Philippe was born at York House, Twickenham, near London, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the son of Philippe, Count of Paris, by his wife (and first cousin), Princess Isabelle of Orléans. He was baptised with the names Louis-Philippe-Robert, and was called Philippe. His family lived in the United Kingdom from the abdication and banishment of his great-grandfather Louis Philippe, King of the French, in 1848, and returned to France in 1871 following the fall of the Second French Empire. However, they again took refuge in England in 1886, when the French Republic exiled them following the wedding in Paris of Philippe's sister Amélie of Orléans to Crown Prince Carlos of Portugal.
Returning therefore to France in 1871 with his parents, Philippe was educated at home at the Château d'Eu and at the Collège Stanislas de Paris. His tutor from the end of 1882 to 1887 was Théodore Froment, previously a professor of Latin literature at Bordeaux. In 1880 Philippe's father granted him the title Duc d'Orléans. On 16 June 1881, he received the sacrament of confirmation at Eu. Growing up to be tall and blond, he later grew a beard. He was a better athlete than scholar and learned to love mountain-climbing from Captain Morhain, a former soldier from Saint-Cyr who had become his father's accountant.
Military career
Philippe began his military education at the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. In June 1886 he was on the point of becoming an officer in the French army when his family was once again exiled by France's republican government. At first he was placed under the tutelage of a Colonel de Parseval, under whose supervision he would later attend a military academy in Lausanne. In Great Britain and Ireland he entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, on the nomination of Queen Victoria in February 1887, completing his training there and developing an abiding interest in geography, topography, and the natural sciences.
He was attached for service to the King's Royal Rifle Corps, which was then serving in British Raj, but never held an actual commission in the British Army, in order to respect a French law forbidding Frenchmen from holding commissions in foreign armies without the permission of the French head of state. Nevertheless, he was ranked as a sub-lieutenant and served in India from January 1888 to March 1889, where he was a staff-officer to Lord Roberts, then Commander-in-Chief in India.
In October 1889, Philippe went to Switzerland to complete a course in military theory. While there he fathered a son, Philippe Debien, by Nina, an actress working in the casino at Lausanne. On his 21st birthday in February 1890 he left Switzerland by train with his friend Honoré d'Albert, 10th duc de Luynes, and entered Paris in violation of the law of exile of 1886. There, he offered to perform his military service, as required by law. Instead he was arrested and confined in the Conciergerie. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment at Clairvaux, but was released after a few months and expelled back to Switzerland.
Drawn to explore the "unknown", Philippe asked Prince George, Duke of Cambridge, to send him to a military post in the Himalayas. While in the East, he undertook a hunting and exploratory expedition in Nepal with his cousin Prince Henri of Orléans, went mountain-climbing in Tibet, and visited Afghanistan, Ceylon, and the Persian Gulf, before being posted back to Britain.
Prior to his imprisonment in France, Philippe had been unofficially engaged to his first cousin Princess Marguerite of Orléans, but the engagement was cancelled when Philippe's involvement with the Australian opera singer Nellie Melba was revealed. Melba was still married to Charles Nesbitt Armstrong, although they had lived apart for some years. Armstrong filed for divorce from Melba on the grounds of adultery, naming Philippe as co-respondent; the case was eventually dropped.
In September 1890, Philippe accompanied his father on a two-month trip to the United States and Canada. They visited the battlefields of the American Civil War, in which his father had fought, as well as Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; Manhattan, New York, New York County, New York; and Quebec, Canada.