Whether Genabum is to be identified with Orleans or with Gien is matter of dispute; but Aurelianum appears as a flourishing town in the 5th century. St Aignan (as already mentioned) was bishop when, in 451, it was vainly besieged by Attila. Clovis got possession of the city in 498, and in 511 held there the first council assembled in

France. Though the dignity which it then obtained, of being the capital of a separate kingdom, was lost by its union with that of Paris in 613, Orleans remained during all the mediaeval period one of the first cities of the French monarchy; several of the kings dwelt within its walls, or were consecrated in its cathedral; it had a royal mint, was the seat of councils, and obtained for its schools the name of university (1305), and for its soldiery an equal standing with those of Paris. It became the apanage of one of the first princes of the blood under Philip of Valois, who made it a duchy for his second son, and under Charles VI., who bestowed the duchy on his brother Louis. After the assassination of this last prince by Jean sans Peur, duke of Burgundy (1407), the people of Orleans sided resolutely with the Armagnacs, and in this way brought upon themselves the attacks of the Burgundians and the English. Joan of Arc, having entered the beleaguered city on 29th April 1429, effected the raising of the siege by 7th May by means of an attack on the Fort des Tournelles, in the course of which she was wounded. After the Amboise conspiracy (1560) the States-General were convoked at Orleans, where Francis II. died. In 1562 it became the headquarters of Condé, the Protestant commander-in-chief, and the duke of Guise was assassinated on his way to besiege it. Huguenot and Leaguer were alternately in possession till Henry IV. came in person to take it in 1594. The duchy of Orleans, united to the crown by Louis XII., was again detached in favour of Gaston, brother of Louis XIII., and afterwards for Philip, brother of Louis XIV. and founder of the present house of Orleans. Since 1789 the title “duke of Orleans” has been purely honorary. During the Revolution the city suffered from the sanguinary excesses of Barere and Collot d’Herbois. It was occupied by the Prussians in 1815 and in 1870. As the centre of the preparations made by the Government of the National Defence for raising the siege of Paris, it bore the brunt of numerous battles fought in its vicinity, and of the hostile occupation to which they led.

ORLEANS, Charles, Duke of (1391-1465), commonly called Charles d’Orléans, was the eldest son of Louis, duke of Orleans (brother of Charles VI. of France), and of Valentina Visconti, daughter of Galeaso of Milan. He was born on 26th May 1391. Although many minor details are preserved of his youth, nothing except his reception in 1403, from his uncle the king, of a pension of 12,000 livres d’or is worth noticing, until his marriage three years later (29th June 1406) with Isabella, his cousin, widow of Richard II. of England. The bride was two years older than her husband, and is thought to have married him unwillingly, but she brought him a great dowry,—it is said, 500,000 francs. She died three years later, leaving Charles a widower and father of a daughter at the age of eighteen. He was already duke of Orleans, for Louis had been assassinated by the Burgundians two years before (1407). He soon saw himself the most important person in France, except the dukes of Burgundy and Brittany, the king being a cipher. This position his natural temperament by no means qualified him to fill. His mother was eager for vengeance for her husband, and for years Charles did his best to carry out her wishes by filling France with intestine war. Of this, however, he was only nominally one of the leaders, the real guidance of his party resting with the great count of Armagnac, whose daughter, Bonne, he married, or at least formally espoused, in 1410. Five years of confused nego tiations, plots, and fightings passed before the English invasion and the battle of Agincourt, where Charles was joint commander-in-chief. According to one account he was dangerously wounded and narrowly escaped with his life. He was certainly taken prisoner and carried to England, which country was his residence thenceforward for a full quarter of a century. Windsor, Pontefract, Ampthill, Wingfield (Suffolk), and the Tower are named among other places as the scenes of his captivity, which, however, was anything but a rigorous one. He was maintained in the state due not merely to one of the greatest nobles of France but to one who ranked high in the order of succession to the crown. He hunted and hawked and enjoyed society amply, though the very dignities which secured him these privileges made his ransom high, and his release difficult to arrange Above all, he had leisure to devote himself to literary work. But for this he would hardly be remembered as anything better than a more than usually amiable and less than usually able example of the higher feudal nobility, whose political position rather than their personal faults made government difficult or impossible in the later Middle Ages.

The work which secures a measure of immortality to Charles d’Orléans consists wholly of short poems in the peculiar artificial metres which had become fashionable in France about half a century or more before his birth, and which continued to be fashionable till nearly a century after his death. Besides these a certain number of English poems have been attributed to him. It is certain that he studied the language of his captors, but it is more than doubtful whether the extant English poems which bear his name are genuine, and in any case they are of no value. The ingenuity of a single English critic has striven to attribute to him a curious book in prose, called Le Débat des Hérauts de France et d’Angleterre, but Μ. Paul Meyer, in his edition of the book in question, has completely disposed of this theory. For all practical purposes, therefore, Charles’s work consists of some hundreds of short poems, a few in various metres, but the majority either ballades or rondels. The chronology of these poems is not always clear, still less the identity of the persons to whom they are addressed, and it is certain that some, perhaps the greater part of them, belong to the later years of the poet’s life. But many are expressly stated in the manuscripts to have been “composed in prison,” others are obviously so composed, and, on the whole, there is in them a remarkable unity of literary flavour. Charles d’Orléans is not distinguished by any extraordinary strength of passion or originality of character; but he is only the more valuable as the last and not the least accomplished representative of the poetry of the middle of the Middle Ages, in which the form was almost everything, and the personality of the poet, save in rare instances, nothing. Yet Charles d’Orléans is not entirely without differentia. If he were he would hardly hold the place which at present he justly occupies. He is a capital example of the cultivated and refined—it may almost be called the lettered—chivalry of the last chivalrous age, expert to the utmost degree in carrying out the traditional details of a graceful convention in love and literature. But he is more than this; in a certain easy grace and truth of expression, as well as in a peculiar mixture of melancholy, which is not incompatible with the enjoyment of the pleasures, even the trifling pleasures, of life, with listlessness that is fully able to occupy itself about those trifles, he stands quite alone. He has the urbanity of the 18th century without its vicious and prosaic frivolity, the poetry of the Middle Ages without their tendency to tediousness. His best-known rondels—those on Spring, on the Harbingers of Summer, and others—rank second to nothing of their kind.

Poetry, however, could hardly be an entire consolation, and it is not surprising to find that Charles, during all the long years of his captivity, was perpetually scheming for liberty. But the English Government had too many reasons for keeping him, and it was not till his hereditary foe Philip the Good of Burgundy interested himself in him that the Government of Henry VI,, which had by that time lost most of its hold on France, released him in return for an immediate payment of 80,000 saluts dor, and an engagement on his part to pay 140,000 crowns at a future time. The agreement was concluded on 2d July 1440. He was actually released on 3d November following, and almost immediately cemented his friendship with Duke Philip by marrying his niece, Mary of Cleves, who brought him a considerable dowry to assist the payment of his ransom. He had, however, some difficulty in making up the balance, as well as the large sum required for his brother, Jean d’Angoulême, who also was an English prisoner. The last twenty-five years of his life (for, curiously enough, it divides itself into three almost exactly equal periods, each of that length) were spent partly in negotiating, with a little fighting intermixed, for the purpose of gaining the Italian county of Asti, on which he had claims through his mother, partly in travelling about, but chiefly at his principal seat of Blois. Here he kept a miniature court which, from the literary point of view at least, was not devoid of brilliancy. At this most of the best-known French men-of-letters at the time—Villon, Olivier de la Marche, Chastelain, Meschinot, and others —were residents or visitors or correspondents. His son, afterwards Louis XII., was not born till 1462, three years before Charles’s own death. He had become, notwithstanding his high position, something of a nullity in politics, and tradition ascribes his death to vexation at the harshness with which Louis XI. rejected his attempt to mediate on behalf of the duke of Brittany. At any rate he died, on 4th January 1465, at Amboise. Many of his later poems are small occasional pieces addressed to his courtiers and companions, and in not a few cases answers to them by those to whom they were addressed exist. The best edition of Charles d’Orléans’s poems, with a brief but sufficient account of his life, is that of C. d’Héricault in the Nouvelle Collection J annet , Paris, 1874. (g. sa.)

ORLEANS, Dukes of. The title duke of Orleans was borne by three distinct dynasties of French princes of the blood. The first duke of Orleans was Louis (1371-1407), second son of King Charles V., who was born in 1371, and received the title from his brother Charles VI. in 1392. Both he and his son and heir played very important parts in the history of the Hundred Years’ War with England (see France) in opposition to the duke of Burgundy. He had been appointed regent of France during the madness of his brother, Charles VI., and had, by his immorality and his intimacy with the queen, raised a great scandal throughout the kingdom. The duke of Burgundy made himself the mouthpiece of the general discontent, and on 23d November 1407 had the regent murdered in the streets of Paris in revenge for his own father’s death. Louis’s son Charles is the subject of the preceding article. With his son’s accession to the throne as Louis XII. the dukedom of Orleans merged in the crown. It was revived in 1626, when Louis XIII. created his brother, Jean Baptiste Gaston (1608-1660), the third son of Henry IV., duke of Orleans and Chartres and count of Blois. Gaston of Orleans’s fruitless intrigues fill the history of France from the time of Richelieu and Mary de’ Medici to that of Mazarin and Anne of Austria. Four times he was banished from France, and more than four times did he sacrifice his associates, who had plotted the overthrow of Richelieu. To him Montmorency, Cinq-Mars, and De Thou owed their deaths, and he was only protected from sharing their fate by the fact of his royal birth. On the death of Louis XIII. he was appointed lieutenant-general of the kingdom for the minority of Louis XIV. But Mazarin never meant him to exercise any real power, and when he became convinced that his power was subordinate to the cardinal’s he entered the ranks of the Fronde (see Mazarin), in which he played a conspicuous part, but always as the tool or the mouthpiece of others. Far more manly and determined was his daughter, best known as La Grande Mademoiselle, who with her own hands directed the guns of the Bastille upon Turenne’s soldiers on the day of the battle of St Antoine. He was afterwards exiled to his castle of Blois, where he died without male issue in 1660. The title was at once revived by Louis XIV., who created his brother Philippe (1640- 1701) duke of Orleans and of Chartres, and married him to Henrietta, the sister of Charles II. of England. The court was soon entertained by the details of the quarrels between the duke and duchess, and by the former’s jealousy even of his brother the king, and, when Henrietta, after successfully detaching Charles from the Triple Alliance and negotiating the treaty of Dover, died suddenly in 1670, the duke was universally accused of poisoning her. In the following year he married Princess Charlotte Elizabeth of Bavaria. In the campaign of 1677 he so distinguished himself that Louis XIV. became afraid of his popularity and refused to allow him to go again to the frontier. He was obliged to waste his time at Paris like other noblemen, in attendance on the court, until his death in 1701. He left one son and three daughters: the daughters married Charles II. of Spain, Victor Amadeus II. of Savoy, and Prince Charles of Lorraine; the son was Philippe (1674-1723), the regent, who has been spoken of in France, vol. ix. p. 584. Before succeeding to the dukedom of Orleans in 1701 he had given no indication of political ambition or capacity, yet Louis XIV. distrusted him, and thought to mar his chance of allying himself with any royal or noble family, and to unite his interest with that of his own natural children, by marrying him to his illegitimate daughter by Madame de Montespan, Mademoiselle de Blois. This distrust was increased as the king’s legitimate descendants died off, and in his will he left his natural son, the duke of Maine, guardian of the person of his great-grandson and heir, and greatly circumscribed the authority of Orleans as regent. On the death of the grand monarque in 1715 Philippe, guided by the advice of the duke of Saint Simon, induced the parliament of Paris to upset the will and make him regent of the realm with the fullest authority. By the same nobleman’s advice he procured the degradation of the natural children of the late king from the precedence above the peers of France which had been conferred on them. Saint Simon hoped he would go yet further, and that he would entrust the nobility with their old political authority; but the regent had no mind to restore the privileges which Richelieu had had so much difficulty in combating, and which the policy of Louis XIV. had only, after long years, been able to destroy. He determined to hand down to Louis XV. the absolute power of his great-grandfather. Another main object he sought was to keep France at peace, which alone could restore her to her former prosperity. With this intention he joined the Quadruple Alliance. He remained in close union with Stanhope, the prime minister of England, and the emperoη, whilst Dubois worked out his intentions. This alliance enabled the kingdoms of England and France to overthrow Alberoni and prevent his disturbing the peace of Europe. In compliance with the wishes of Lord Stair, the able English ambassador, Orleans expelled the Pretender from France, and was helped to overthrow the conspiracy of Cellamare—the French part of Alberoni’s scheme by which the bastards of Louis XIV. were to overthrow the regent. Under this peaceful policy France rapidly began to recover prosperity, and Philippe hoped to restore the condition of her finances by listening to the advice of a Scotch adventurer, and buying out the farmers-general of the taxes, who were the real causes of the financial distress (see Law, John, vol. xiv. p. 367). It should also be noted that the regent showed both courage and determination in putting a stop to the insane speculations of the Rue Quincampoix. He cannot be called a great statesman; he indeed formed great plans, but left all details of government to Dubois. Yet his real political ability must not be overlooked, as is often done, because the period of the regency is only regarded, as a rule, as a period of wild debauchery, in which the regent ruled a court of bacchanals. Philippe never allowed his pleasures to interfere with his politics. His fidelity to the youthful monarch is no less remarkable in a man of his seemingly abandoned character, hence it is no wonder that when Louis XV. attained his majority he maintained the duke of Orleans and with him Dubois in power. But a career of debauchery had weakened his physical powers, and, in the very year in which his ward had thus shown his gratitude to him (1723), he died. His character is best painted in an apologue of his mother’s. “The fairies were all invited to my bedside, and, each giving my son on.e talent, he had them all. Unhappily an old fairy had been forgotten, who, on arriving after the others, exclaimed, ‘ He will have all the talents, excepting that of making good use of them.’”

The son of the regent, Louis (1703-1752), who succeeded him as duke of Orleans, played no part in politics, though his name frequently occurs in the social history of the time, and fills a great place in contemporary memoirs. Louis’s son, Louis Philippe (1725-1785), was equally averse to politics, though he served as a soldier at the battle of Dettingen; his great delight was the theatre, and his place is rather in the history of the Paris greenrooms than in the history of France. But to Louis Philippe Joseph (1747-1793), son of the preceding, a more adventurous life was allotted, and his part in the history of the French Revolution is one of the most difficult problems to solve of that exciting period. He was born at St Cloud in 1747, and bore the title of duke of Montpensier until his grandfather’s death in 1752. He then became duke of Chartres, and in 1769 married Louise Marie Adelaide de Bourbon Penthièvre, only daughter and heiress of the duke of Penthièvre, grand admiral of France, and the richest heiress of the time. Her wealth made it certain that he would be the richest man in France, and he determined to play a part equal to that of his great-grandfather, the regent, whom he resembled in character and debauchery. As duke of Chartres he opposed the plans of Maupeou in 1771, and was promptly exiled to his country estate of Villers-Cotterets (Aisne). When Louis XVI. came to the throne in 1774 Chartres still found himself looked on coldly at court; Marie Antoinette hated him, and envied him for his wealth, wit, and freedom from etiquette, and he was not slow to return her hatred with scorn. In 1778 he served in the squadron of D’Orvilliers, and was present in the naval battle of Ushant. He hoped to see further service, but the queen was opposed to this, and he was removed from the navy, and given the honorary post of colonel general of hussars. He then abandoned himself to pleasure; he often visited London, and became an intimate friend of the prince of Wales (afterwards George IV.); he brought to Paris the “anglomania,” as it was called, and made jockeys as fashionable as they were in England. He also made himself very popular in Paris by his large gifts to the poor in time of famine, and by throwing open the gardens of the Palais Royal to the people. Before the meeting of the notables in 1787 he had succeeded his father as duke of Orleans, and showed his liberal ideas, which were largely learnt in England, so boldly that he was believed to be aiming at becoming constitutional king of France. In November he again showed his liberalism in the lit de justice, which Brienne had made the king hold, and was again exiled to Villers-Cotterets. The approaching convocation of the States-General made his friends very active on his behalf; he circulated in every bailliage the pamphlets which Sieyès had drawn up at his request, and was elected in three—by the noblesse of Paris, Villers-Cotterets, and Crépy-en-Valois. In the estate of the nobility he headed the liberal minority under the guidance of Adrien Duport, and led the minority of forty-seven noblemen who seceded from their own estate (June 1789) and joined the Tiers État. The part he played during the summer of 1789 is one of the most debated points in the history of the Revolution. The court accused him of being at the bottom of every popular movement, and saw the “gold of Orleans” as the cause of the Re-veilion riot and the taking of the Bastille, as the republicans later saw the “gold of Pitt” in every germ of opposition to themselves. There can be no doubt that he hated the queen, and bitterly resented his long court disgrace, and also that he sincerely wished for a thorough reform of the government and the establishment of some such constitution as that of England; and no doubt such friends as Adrien Duport and Choderlos de Laclos, for their own reasons, wished to see him king of France. The best testimony for the behaviour of Orleans during this summer is the testimony of an English lady, Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who shared his heart with Comtesse de Buffon, and from which it is absolutely certain that at the time of the riot of 12th July he was on a fishing excursion, and was rudely treated by the king on the next day when going to offer him his services. He indeed became so disgusted with the false position of a pretender to the crown, into which he was being forced, that he wished to go to America, but, as Comtesse de Buffon would not go with him, he decided to remain in Paris. He was again accused, unjustly, of having caused the march of the women to Versailles on 5th October. La Fayette, jealous of his popularity, persuaded the king to send the duke to England on a mission, and thus get him out of France, and he accordingly remained in England from October 1789 to July 1790. On 7th July he took his seat in the Assembly, and on 2d October both he and Mirabeau were declared by the Assembly entirely free of any complicity in the events of October. He now tried to keep himself as much out of the political world as possible, butin vain, for the court would suspect him, and his friends would talk about his being king. The best proof of his not being ambitious of such a doubtful piece of preferment is that he made no attempt to get himself made king, regent, or lieutenant-general of the kingdom at the time of the flight to Varennes in June 1791. He, on the contrary, again tried to make his peace with the court in January 1792, but he was so insulted that he was not encouraged to sacrifice himself for the sake of the king and queen, who persisted in remembering all old enmities in their time of trouble. In the summer of 1792 he was present for a short time with the army of the north, with his two sons, the duke of Chartres and the duke of Montpensier, but had returned to Paris before 10th August. After that day he underwent great personal risk in saving fugitives; in particular, he saved the life of the count of Champcenetz, the governor of the Tuileries, who was his personal enemy, at the request of Mrs Elliott. It was impossible for him to recede, and, after accepting the title of Citoyen Égalité, conferred on him by the commune of Paris, he was elected twentieth and last deputy for Paris to the Convention. In that body he sat as quietly as he had done in the National Assembly, but on the occasion of the king’s trial he had to speak, and then only to give his vote for the death of Louis. His compliance did not save him from suspicion, which was especially aroused by the friendship of his eldest son, the duke of Chartres, with Dumouriez, and when the news of the desertion of Chartres with Dumouriez became known at Paris all the Bourbons left in France, including Égalité, were ordered to be arrested on 5th April. In prison he remained till the month of October, when the Reign of Terror began. He was naturally the very sort of victim wanted, and he was decreed “of accusation” on 3d October. He was tried on 6th November and was guillotined on the same day, with a smile upon his lips and without any appearance of fear. No man ever was more blamed than Orleans during the Revolution, but the faults of ambition and intrigue were his friends’, not his · it was his friends who wished him to be on the throne. Personally he possessed the charming manners of a polished grand seigneur: debauched and cynical but never rude or cruel, full of gentle consideration for all about him but selfish in his pursuit of pleasure, he has had to bear a heavy load of blame, but it is ridiculous to describe the idle and courteous voluptuary as being a dark and designing scoundrel, capable of murder if it would serve his ambition. The execution of Philippe Égalité made the friend of Dumouriez, who was living in exile, duke of Orleans. Louis Philippe (1773-1850) was known as duke of Orleans throughout his long emigration and under the Restoration, and as duke of Orleans he was called upon to become king of the French in 1830. His eldest son, Ferdinand Louis Philippe Charles Henri (1810-1842), at once took the title of duke of Orleans. He was a brave soldier, and served in Algeria from 1834 to 1836. In 1837 he married Princess Helena of Mecklenburg, and became the father of the count of Paris, who is therefore de jure duke of Orleans. In 1839 he again went to Algeria, but the fatigues of the campaign were too much for him. He died at Neuilly in 1842. With him died the last duke of Orleans, for his son will not take the title; but the whole party which supports him is rightly known as the Orleanist party.

The chief authorities on the three most important dukes of Orleans are for Gaston of Orleans, Avenel’s Lettres de Richelieu, <tc. ; Chéruel, Correspondance de Mazarin ; Id., Histoire de France pendant la minorité de Louis XIV. ; Id., Histoire de France pendant le ministère de Mazarin ; for the regent Orleans, the portions of Michelet’s and Martin’s Histories of France; and for Philippe Égalité, Baschet ’ s Histoire de Philippe Egalité, and the Journal of Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliott (1859). (H. Μ. S.)