Family and friends of the late Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma gathered at the Hotel des Invalides (Paris) this morning to bid farewell to his earthly remains.
Besides his close family, other royals in attendance included: Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg and his brother Prince Jean, the Prince and Princess of Venice, as well as Prince Dushan of Yugoslavia. Several of the late prince's Danish descendants traveled to France to pay their respects to their father and grandfather.
Dear Subscribers and Readers,
It is with much pleasure that we announce that Issue CXVII, Volume 21.1 is printing. This is the first issue of our 22nd year of publication!
Inside Issue CXVII you will find the following articles:
1. The Return of Prince Nicholas of Romania, by Seth Leonard (with the cooperation of Nicholas and Alina-Maria de Roumanie)
2. An Imperial Bicentennial: The Tsar Liberator, by Coryne Hall
3. Grand duke Adolf Friedrich VI of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, by Marlene Eilers Koenig
4. WHO IS IN THE PHOTOGRAPH: The Family of there Infante don Carlos, by Arturo E. Beéche
5. Wittelsbach castles and palaces in Bavaria, by Susan Symons
6. Book Reviews
7. Royal News
Subscribers have been sent renewal forms, which have been arriving here at our office. Please do not delay so you can be on the mailing list for this next issue!
Subscription information:
Michel of Bourbon-Parma: Last of the Royal Swashbucklers
By Charles Stewart 8 July 2018
The death of Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma (1926-2018) on 7 July severs the last link binding several of Europe's royal families in history and kinship.
The late Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma.
©Eurohistory
He led a fascinating life, straddling Europe's major Catholic and Protestant royal dynasties. He belonged to the Danish branch of the House of Bourbon-Parma, but grew up mostly in Paris and retired there and to Palm Beach, Florida. His grandfather was Roberto I de Bourbon (1848-1907), the last ruling Duke of Parma who fathered 24 children in exile. His father was the Duke's 19th child, Prince René (1894-1962), who married Princess Margrethe of Denmark (1895-1992), whose mother Marie was an Orléans exile, and whose father was Christian IX's youngest son Prince Valdemar (1858-1939) – he whose lifelong liaison with his nephew, Prince George of Greece (1869-1957), was respected by their wives and families because of the pair's discreet but steadfast mutual devotion.
Michel's sister, Anne (1923-2016) was a classmate of Philip of Greece at The Elms, an American school in Paris, and later married Philip's playmate/cousin, King Michael of Romania. Michel attended The Elms later too, and his mother is the "Meg Bourbon" mentioned in Battenberg correspondence who was one of the relatives/neighbors concerned when Philip's mother Alice began to lose her sanity in the late 1920s.
The family of Prince René of Bourbon-Parma: René, Jacques, André,
Margrethe, Michel, and Anne.
©Eurohistory
Michel twice became a hero in the 1940s, secretly parachuting with US troops into Nazi-occupied France during WWII. In 1945 the communist Viet Minh in French Indochina interned him as a prisoner of war, after parachuting in. Captured, half-starved and marched from one prison camp to another, always trying to escape yet always re-captured, watching most of his compatriots die from the rigors of nearly a year in captivity, he was finally freed by Geneva Convention negotiations, about which he would write a book. He was awarded the French Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre, as well as the British Military Cross.
From the left: André, Jacques, Prince George of Denmark, Michael, Prince Flemming
of Denmark, and Princess Anne.
©Eurohistory
Later he took up the modern profession of idle royalty (replacing Crusades to the Holy Land, expeditions to colonies, and military commands in Europe): sports car racing.
Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma with his mother and Princess Isabelle of France.
©Eurohistory
He married, separated from and then reunited with two princesses: 1. Princess Yolande de Broglie-Revel (1928-2014), whom he finally divorced in 1999. They had five children. 2. HRH Princess Maria Pia of Savoy (born 1934), daughter of ex-King Umberto II of Italy, whom Michel finally married in 2003. Her second pair of twins, Prince Serge and Princess Helena, born before her 1967 divorce from their legal father, Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia (1924-2016), continue to bear the name and titles of their mother’s first husband.
Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma and his first wife, Princess Yolanda de Broglie-Revel.
©Eurohistory
Michel's eldest son by his first marriage, Prince Erik (born 1953) took up residence in Denmark, where in 19980 he married (later divorcing) his second cousin Countess Lydia af Holstein-Ledreborg (born 1955), daughter of Princess Marie-Gabrielle of Luxembourg, herself the daughter of Michel's uncle, Felix of Bourbon-Parma, Prince Consort of Luxembourg. By Erik's son, Prince Henri of Bourbon-Parma (born 1991), Michel lived to see the birth of his great-granddaughter in October 2017, Victoria de Bourbon de Parme, whose mother is Henri's fiancée (and 2nd cousin), Archduchess Marie-Gabrielle of Austria (born 1994, daughter of Archduke Carl Christian of Austria and Princess Marie-Astrid of Luxembourg).
HRH Princess Maria Pia of Savoy.
Michel's younger son by Yolande is Prince Charles-Emanuel (born 1961), a leader in the French Legitimist movement. Two of Michel's five daughters pre-deceased him, leaving non-dynastic children. Another is Amélie de Bourbon de Parme (born 1977 of Michel's affair with Laure LeBourgeois), who has two children by her 2009 marriage to Igor Bogdanoff (born 1949), one of the French twin TV stars famous for their scientific theories and bizarre lifestyles who were raised in a Gascon château by their Bohemian grandmother, Her Illustrious Highness Countess Bertha of Coloredo-Mansfeld (1890-1982, née Countess Kolowrat-Krakowsky). From her frustrated affair with the African American opera tenor, Roland Hayes (1887-1977), a daughter (Maya) was born. Bertha's husband, Count Hyeronimus, refused to recognize the child and the couple divorced quietly. Although Hayes offered to adopt the live child, Bertha declined that option.
The late Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma and Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.
©Eurohistory
Michel was the son-in-law of King Umberto II of Italy, brother-in-law of King Michael of Romania, and first cousin of Archduke Otto (Head of the Imperial House of Habsburg), Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg, Carlos-Hugo Duke of Parma, and Prince Axel of Denmark (husband of Anne, Viscountess Anson, née Bowes-Lyon, a first cousin of HM The Queen). Michel was also the last surviving of his parents' children. His eldest brother, Prince Jacques died in 1964 in an automobile accident; Queen Anne died of old age in 2016; and Prince André died in 2011.
The late Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma and Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.
©Eurohistory
Princess Maria Pia and the late Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma and
Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.
©Eurohistory
The late Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma and Princess Beatrice of Bourbon-Two Sicilies,
with Prince Michel of France, Count d'Evreux.
©Eurohistory
Prof. Roberto Gonzalez has posted an insightful and thoroughly well-written review of Eurohistory's latest contribution to the study of the Romanov Dynasty: Terry Boland and Arturo Beéche's DEATH OF A ROMANOV PRINCE.
Death of a Romanov Prince - Prince Oleg Konstantinovich’s Promising Life and Early Death “The coffin was lowered into the grave...... Soon there was a burial mound above. It was quickly covered with wreaths, flowers and crowned with a plain wooden cross. Prince Oleg’s promising life was finished.” Death of a Romanov Prince follows the brief life-journey of Prince Oleg Konstantinovich, one of the lesser-known members of the powerful and privileged Russian Imperial family. He was a talented young man of intellectual and artistic genius. Oleg was the gifted son of the talented Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, who wrote under the pseudonym of KR. The Grand Duke was a friend of Tchaikovsky, who set his numerous poems to music, and who established literary circles for his troops, translated Hamlet into Russian, and wrote The King of the Jews, an original play that he and his sons performed. The reader will follow Prince Oleg Konstantinovich, his family, and Imperial cousins, as his life takes him via the luxuries of the family’s four magnificent palaces of Pavlovsk, in Tsarskoye Selo, the Marble Palace in St Petersburg, the Konstantine Palace at Strelna; and the Ostashevo Estate near Moscow; as well as numerous holidays in the Crimea. The young prince enjoyed the most liberal program in literary, scientific, and artistic education. He was the first Romanov to be enrolled in a civilian school and graduated from the Imperial Lyceum in St Petersburg, where in 1913 he won the Pushkin Medal for his academic achievements. At the age of 21, Prince Oleg Konstantinovich was on the crest of a brilliant career and personal greatness when World War I began. Then tragedy struck ... Death of a Romanov Prince brings the reader into the battlefields of World War I’s Eastern Front. Bloody battles fought in northern Poland and Lithuania’s Masurian Lakes. It was while fighting there that Prince Oleg led his troops into heroic cavalry charges against the Germans.
The book can be purchased on AMAZON at:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0994583001
Review by Prof. Gonzalez...
I became more familiar with personal character and domestic world of Prince Oleg Konstantinovich of Russia, especially in relation to his large immediate and extended families.
The beginning chapters increased my comprehension of the extent of the Konstantinovichi branch of Romanov wealth and lifestyle.
My appreciation and liking of the Konstantinovichi branch grew as it became apparent that they were not indiscrete contributors to the short-sighted, dynasty-destroying sniping of Nicholas II and Alexandra and the concomitant competition from within the mainline Alexandrovichi, the Vladimirovichi and some members of the Mikhailovichi and Nikhailovichi branches of the Romanov Imperial Family.
Numerous photographs throughout the book enhanced my learning.
Boland's explanation of those early weeks of the Russian Empire's entry into the Great War, especially the insufficient training of calvary regiments on flat fields which singularly failed to prepare horse and rider to navigate the terrain they actually encountered in battle on the Eastern Front, was the first time that civilian me understood this flawed planning.
The differences between German and Russian standards of battle field medical facilities and transports was clarified for me more than ever before in this work.
I was highly conscious of my stunned, then startled reaction by the nature of Prince Oleg's war wound.
Surely, I've read and own "Gilded Prism," "Memories of the Marble Palace," and the diary entries of Oleg's father K.R., but I had not grasped until reading this book the hideousness of Oleg's fatal injury.
Which is just as well, because I am inclined to immerse myself in reading again relevant parts of those other works. Just as I "follow-up" by reading for myself some of the references cited in every book I read.
But I was left wondering if better battle field medical facilities located nearer to the Eastern Front could have saved Prince Oleg's life.
As a retired Latino counseling psychologist (culturally imbued with the Sorrowful Mother at the Foot of The Cross, which I find similar to the devotion to the Mother of God Orthodox iconography), the worst human suffering I ever saw in my clinical practice were bereaved parents.
Bereaved parents' anguish is most often physically manifested in excruciatingly painful, violent abdominal diaphragm spasms that leads the sufferer to feel like they are being ripped in half.
So, both personally and professionally, I came away with much more compassion for Prince Oleg's father K.R. and, more than ever, for the Prince's mother "Mavra."
Given my own educational background and decades of field-based live-supervision of graduate level individual and family therapists, I found "Death of a Romanov Prince" to be a humanizing case study of one of the lesser known Romanovs.
