“Good morning,” rumbled Prince Marie Charles-Henri Hugues Xavier Benoît Michel Edouard Joseph Balthazar de Lobkowicz from outside the bedroom door. Dawn didn’t breach the heavy curtains that the Bourbon claimant to the French throne had drawn for me the night before, muttering grumpily, “When you come again, you’ll have someone to do this for you.”
The Château Nouveau-Bostz is a 19th-century pile in central France overlooking the heartland of the Bourbonnais, a small slice of land that once stretched to Navarre, now in Spain, and belonged to the Bourbons, who ruled France on and off from the 16th century until the monarchy finally ended in the 19th century.
Briefly intended to be opened to the public, the château has the feel of a living museum. Prints allude to the Bourbon restoration in 1815, after the vanquishing of Napoléon at Waterloo. A large Bourbon flag hangs in the hall, and oil paintings show faces both familiar and forgotten. Charles, Nouveau-Bostz’s owner, is the great-great-great-great-grandson of Charles X of France and, in the minority sport of claimants to the French throne, he is a frontrunner.
In summer, he likes to fill the 16-bedroom château with friends, but in April, it was just the last of the Bourbons and his housekeeper Lucy, who’s been in his service for 20 years. Charles, 60, spends most of his time in an apartment in Paris staffed by a cook and three servants. When I visited the château, it hadn’t yet been “opened”, so Charles had warned me we would go “Scottish style”. Thankfully, he was wearing dark jeans and a sweater beneath a tweed jacket to ward off the cold, and not a kilt.
Thick-soled On trainers completed the outfit, giving him a particular spring as he guided me down Bostz’s creaking corridors. Though he insisted on a white shirt for dinner, the trainers, jeans and jacket were his uniform for our two days together, giving him the look of a tech entrepreneur gone rakish country gentleman. He repeated in plummy English that “simple, simple, simple” were his tastes.
Charles has fashioned his claim to the legacy of one of history’s most powerful families with care, and Bostz and his two other châteaux, Château Du Vieux Bostz and Fourchaud, both in the Bourbonnais, are central to this. But he didn’t grow up here. The son of financier Edouard de Lobkowicz and Princess Marie Françoise of Bourbon-Parma, Charles had a charmed upbringing in Paris. He was educated in the French capital, then briefly in England, and even more briefly in Germany, then Switzerland and the US, at Duke University in North Carolina.
He did a brief stint in the French army before following his father into investment banking. After Wall Street, he worked as an art consultant, selling Anselm Kiefers and Damien Hirsts in London as well as owning a smaller gallery in Beirut, before becoming a luxury goods ambassador for Chopard and then Moët & Chandon.
Charles’s most recent attempt to capitalise on the world of fruitful connections into which he was born is the PR company he set up last year, which does everything from handling press releases to brokering property deals for companies and individuals. He was quick, too, to franchise the family name as a wine brand to a local winemaker, and now hopes to refurbish the oldest of his châteaux, Vieux Boszt, as a vineyard.
“I’m not sure that the word is career,” he says reflectively. “You know, it’s difficult when the whole world says ‘Your Highness’ and old ladies start shaking when you appear. And then you actually have to run a life in a modern world.”
Born the third son, it is only through the tragic loss of his brothers, one murdered and the other to a brain tumour, that by the end of the 1980s Charles was the heir to his family’s legacy (his mother, now 96, and sister are both still alive). The sole proprietorship that “for some odd reason all ended up on me” has become a restoration project in the Bourbon heartlands.
But the prince has competitors. The Spanish Bourbons, a cadet branch of the family that went off to rule Spain from the 18th until the 20th century, have Prince Louis Alphonse, Duke D’Anjou. His followers call themselves “Legitimists”, believing that the crown belongs to the eldest male heir, while conveniently ignoring that their ancestor, Philip V, surrendered his claim in the 1714 Treaty of Utrecht.
In the other corner is the Bonapartist Jean-Christophe Napoléon, Napoléon Bonaparte’s great-great-great-great-grand-nephew, who is also a Bourbon on his mother’s side and therefore a cousin of Charles and Louis. A banker, formerly of Blackstone, he redoubled his ties to the French throne by marrying a Bourbon-Parma.
Finally, the Orleanist and Unionist claimant, descended from the brother of Louis XIV, is Jean d’Orléans, the would-be Jean IV of France and the current Comte (count) de Paris. “But,” Charles said, “if there were a king [of France], it would not be Jean.” However, any enmity with the Orléans, rooted in Louis Philippe d’Orléans’ fatal betrayal of his cousin Louis XVI, was quickly dismissed by Charles: “I’m close to him.”
Although there are other direct successors, the organisation Charles set up in 2013, Presénce Bourbon, makes him the most active Bourbon monarchist in France. He played down the claimant aspect when we met, however, describing his organisation as a cultural project, of which all the Bourbon family heads are members, that exists to refurbish and reinstate his family in the region through managing historical sites and restoring important monuments. He shrugged off tensions with the other claimants.
“With Napoléon, with Bourbon-Sicile [another branch of the family], even with the Orléans who beheaded Louis XVI, we keep very close ties,” he said. “They have the bees, we have the fleur-de-lys!”
Lucy convened breakfast beneath a vast oil painting of the battle of Lepanto. The table was carefully laid with white napkins and cutlery bearing the Bourbon ensign. Charles, already seated, was polishing off a helping of toast. Periodically he glanced out of the window towards a 12th-century ruin, the old Château Du Vieux Bostz, the Bourbons’ ancestral home until the French Revolution, when it was stormed and subsequently abandoned. Charles plans to restore it, for which he’s received a sum of at least €300,000 from French television personality Stéphane Bern’s conservation programme on behalf of the French government.
Snapping back to the present, Charles was the anxious host. “We have cheese (my cheese), honey (my honey) and bananas (which are not my bananas),” he offered, gesturing around the table. He has moonlighted as a gîte owner before, opening a couple of Bostz’s rooms to guests, but found it too much work. It’s one of several hats that he’s worn under his nominal crown.
The night before, the prince had insisted on dining at a new restaurant attached to a hotel in one of his villages. He had placed the chef there himself, hoping to pave the way for more boutique hotels in the area. Charles, convinced that the Bourbonnais has the history, food and culture to become a tourist destination, told me it lacks only the infrastructure and a touch of inspiration. To him, it’s simple. “The locals have not travelled, so when they open a hotel, they have no idea what a hotel should look like.”
The chef had been eager to impress, with a procession of pâté aux pommes de terre, squash velouté, lamb fillet and buttery mash, cheese, tarte au chocolat, passionfruit soufflé and fresh madeleines that might have overwhelmed anyone less than a prince. Charles greeted each dish with a childish delight that was quickly followed by a self-conscious flash of insouciance.
“I hate that they serve everything on these flying saucers,” he complained, indicating the modern porcelain orb on which the velouté arrived. “I like simple cooking,” he said, setting aside his cutlery and picking up a delicate aperitif with his fingers, then washing it down with a splash of champagne.
There was a whiff of noblesse oblige when the maître d’, owner, waiting staff and chefs presented themselves. It was the same routine one sees with British royalty: a handshake, eye contact, an offering of one’s name and occupation, and some brief nicety. The baffled younger staff followed the reverence of their elders and politely indulged the prince with uncertain half-smiles.
The chef sat down with us after dinner and quickly established an easy rapport. But when he joked that he’d always been “un Bonapartist”, Charles’s stony expression made him flush, laugh nervously and explain, “I’m joking.” Catching himself, Charles brushed it off. “You know Jean-Christophe Napoléon Bonaparte is a friend. He’s the nicest guy.”
Lack of recognition doesn’t deter him. He’s been doing this for a long time, and self-assurance is vital. Older locals, the chef included, seemed to understand that Charles had some influence, even if on my visit his only feedback for the restaurant was to change the lighting and remove the large acetate sign bearing its name. “The chef is good,” he said as we drove away, “but he needs his own place. He’s not comfortable there and it shows.”
Charles believes in the importance of a “good memory”, a retained consciousness of the past. “There’s something that we call ‘la mémoire historique’. People don’t know they remember it, but it’s part of their essence,” he said. He believes in an essential, sublimated relationship between the French people, the aristocracy, the land and, to an extent, God.
“The aristocratic families [created] the nation, created agriculture, created the arts,” he said. “Everything comes from there, the name of the village . . . So it’s very much within the French identity.”
Charles’s surname, Lobkowicz, is from his father’s Czech family, but on his mother’s side he is descended from Hugh Capet, the first king of France. The Bourbons, a powerful family, were passed the dynastic succession of France through the marriage of Beatrice of Burgundy in 1272, although the first Bourbon king was Henri IV in 1589. The dynasty ruled France until the revolution of 1789, which terminated the male line.
“The first revolts were in my area,” Charles says of the revolution, which he describes as “horrendous”, citing the “execution of women and children”. Fortunately for them, Charles’s ancestors had already decamped to Italy by this point and adopted the title of Bourbon-Parma.
Meanwhile, the First French Empire under Napoléon Bonaparte rose and fell and was succeeded in 1815 by the restoration of the brothers of the decapitated Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and then Charles X. They were succeeded in turn by the Orleanist pretender Louis Philippe I, whose father, Louis Philippe, had betrayed and voted for the death of Louis XVI. Louis Philippe titled himself “King of the French” until he was deposed in another revolution in 1848. Then followed a shortlived republic and the Second French Empire under Napoléon’s nephew.
The 19th century was characterised by what the French-British political analyst Catherine Fieschi described to me as, “100 years where it’s as though the king’s body sort of refuses to die”. An academic who has served the French government and a fellow at the EU-funded Robert Schuman Centre, a research institute that focuses on European integration, Fieschi’s areas of expertise include populism and nostalgia. She believes the French have real difficulty in relinquishing their monarchy.
France was ruled by the Third Republic from 1870 until the German invasion in 1940. The subsequent wartime Vichy regime had close ties with monarchist movements, which would go on to create political parties in the postwar Fourth Republic. This divided political right became the foundation for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. When we spoke on Zoom, Fieschi explained that, from its founding, the National Front was “bound by this notion of nostalgia. It was a very strong part of Le Pen’s party . . . that the republic was an illegitimate . . . cerebral construction, an ethereal ideal that wasn’t connected to the earth. It wasn’t connected to Frenchness. It wasn’t connected to anything real. The republic was a sort of empty, degenerate signifier. The monarchy was something that had been cast aside in a blasphemous way.”
General Charles de Gaulle shared many of these ideas. Having resigned his wartime presidency, he returned to politics in a coup d’état in 1958. De Gaulle furthered the old notion of France under a sole ruler and, in October 1958, established a constitution that rewards one individual with a lot of power. This “tells us something about what he thought the French looked for in their leadership”, Fieschi said. The government institutions of the current Fifth Republic still reflect and endorse France’s monarchic past. Indeed, at the genesis of the Fifth Republic in 1961, de Gaulle reassured the then Comte de Paris that, “France is gradually returning to its old and traditional monarchy”.
The National Front, founded in 1972, and now known as the National Rally, was established on Le Pen’s fantasy for the monarchist right, the belief that even de Gaulle’s presidential republic was predicated on a lack of faith in the legitimacy of the post-revolutionary republic.
Tristan de Bourbon-Parme, a political journalist working in London who is also Charles’s cousin, sees the French presidency as a symptom of monarchy baked into the Fifth Republic. “They want to be king . . . [Nicolas] Sarkozy and [Emmanuel] Macron want to be king,” he told me. “Louis XIV is important to understanding France today.”
While it is easy to dismiss the idea of royalty in France, a country that centuries ago overthrew its monarch in dramatic fashion, the French, de Bourbon-Parme said, are “completely hysterical” about the pomp and circumstance of the British royals. “The UK has parked [its] nostalgia in a particular place, clearly in Brexit, nostalgia for empire,” Fieschi said. “The French project their fantasies on their actual government, and it’s not good.”
Charles, who sees himself as indisputably a man of the people, shares current National Rally leader Marine Le Pen’s disaffection with government institutions, rejecting the republic as “une monarchie républicaine” ruled by an elite of businesspeople who lack conviction and legitimacy. In his view, “it’s always been the people and the nobles against the bourgeoisie — they don’t so much have that earthly notion”.
When we spoke, Julian Swann, a specialist in the French monarchy at Birkbeck College, University of London, dismissed this idea as a kind of aristocratic paternalism that can be seen throughout history. He pointed out that the aristocracy in France, rather than being gentle custodians of the landscape guided by an “earthly notion”, historically blocked the reformist impulses of the Third Estate (the common people, non-nobility, whose interests were often represented by the wealthy).
In Charles there seems to be a persistence of the kind of outlook that cost his ancestors the throne, a rigid belief in a divine right, from God to king, to the land. And yet, Charles’s work and future schemes recognise a more complicated modern world. One where the Third Estate, the industrialists, cannot be ignored, and where solvency and currency will be the true judges of his legacy.
Charles still confuses his left and right, adding uncertainty to the 15-minute drive through the 500 hectares his family has owned since the early 10th century. I drove, as Charles doesn’t. The vineyard of Denis Barbara, which currently produces Charles’s wine, was the first stop. The Château Du Vieux Bostz and its soon-to-be vineyard was the second, and then the Château Fourchaud.
Despite not growing up on his inherited lands, and describing himself as a creature of Paris’s Latin Quarter, the prince stressed again how much he values “simple, simple, simple” in his life. He’s happiest in the countryside, smoking cigarettes and talking to farmers about breeds of cattle, he said. His role dealing Hirsts, and the ambassadorships for luxury brands, may contradict such simplicity, yet he protested, “It’s not me, it’s the companies I work for!”
Something of a mover and shaker himself, he said, “My phone is always open. If you have a problem, I can fix it. People seem to like to call me.” His clientele is eclectic to say the least. He told me he is brokering an interview with Donald Trump for a French journalist friend (“I promised his team could pre-approve the questions”), closing a deal on a luxury hotel development in Paris (“I did yoga with the buyer’s wife”) and securing an ambassadorship for a Chinese electric car manufacturer (“We will put a car in the Place de la Concorde, it will be easy!”). Charles occasionally silenced the seemingly innumerable phone calls he received as we drove through the countryside. He never answers calls from unknown numbers. “People call it lobbying, but it’s not lobbying,” he said.
Passing field after field, the prince peered at them from the car, sometimes with a benign smile, sometimes with a look of revulsion. “I don’t like all these horrid white cows,” he remarked. “I’ve got a farmer introducing some lovely brown ones instead.” He pointed through the windscreen occasionally. He had helped that farmer to acquire some land, he said, indicating a fallow field. But he’ll get rid of that one. Or, “Keep going past this farmer, I don’t want to speak to him.” A total of six farmers work his ancestral land, providing the cheese, honey and soon enough the wine, and maintaining a new solar farm.
The Covid-19 pandemic renewed the prince’s interest in the area. He spent lockdown at Bostz with friends and cousins, the most significant length of time he had ever spent living in the château. Sometimes they would drive between the vineyards, which were often kept open during lockdown.
Charles has been involved in wine production since 2008, and he recently completed studies at the wine school in Beaune. “I’m employing some of my old teachers,” he said. He has big plans for the Vieux Bostz site, whether planting vines that he intends to harvest using horses “because I prefer the look”, re-roofing the old château or opening stables in its outhouses. It’s a vision that verges on fantasy.
Denis Barbara, the proprietor of the vines to which Charles currently gives his name, resembles a young Gérard Depardieu and has a rock-star strut. Charles’s business partner was silent as he followed the prince between rows of quiet machinery, then down to the basement where barrels of last year’s harvest were stored. Stopping at one, Charles pulled out a large rubber bung and inhaled. “C’est très bon, non?” He looked up for Denis’s assent. Charles carefully annunciated his French, resulting in the same clipped tone as his English. It is a world away from the tumbling French of Denis’s affirmative reply.
The Bourbon-crested bottles sell out three years in advance, and Denis, who lives in a converted barn next door and makes the wine, is mentioned only in the fine print on the bottle’s label. Yet Denis and his wife, like Lucy, seemed to know what Charles expected. They were deferential, immediately offering coffee and a plate of biscuits. Denis had put on a smart jacket and shoes for the visit, though Charles was eager to keep things “simple, simple, simple”. He slapped Denis on the back and made small talk about the producers in trouble in Bordeaux, but Denis seemed more eager to talk about expanding the business. As we pulled away, Charles seemed a little relieved. Denis, fizzing with ideas awaiting Charles’s approval and investment, might be waiting a while.
Charles believes Château Du Vieux Bostz will flourish not only on the popularity of the wine but on its royal reputation. “They’re coming back into fashion, the French royal family,” he said, as though that were inevitable. But Charles’s enterprises are not explicitly monarchist. The same cannot be said for his cousin, Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, self-styled Louis XX of France. He is the eldest great-grandchild of Alfonso XIII, Spain’s last king before the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed, and great-grandson of General Francisco Franco, not to mention great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and the Bourbons’ noisiest champion for a restored French monarchy.
Whether hosting events to mark the anniversary of the 1793 French royalist counter-revolution in the Vendée, or speaking out on social media against the reliance on “foreign technocrats” and commemorating specific atrocities of the revolution, Louis is more willing than Charles to make his platform political, flirting with populism to further his agenda. His 47,000 followers on X seem equally enthused. “Time is running out, my King, we need you on the throne to bring balance to our country,” one follower tweeted Louis.
De Bourbon-Parme, the London-based journalist, is doubtful of Louis’ efforts. “I don’t think he even speaks French,” he said of his Spanish cousin, “but they take the name, and they use it.” Louis, Charles and Jean-Christophe Napoléon Bonaparte share the frustrating trait of being born to a throne that doesn’t exist. De Bourbon-Parme, however, is a realist. His branch of the family distanced itself from the Bourbon name in the 1970s, conscious perhaps of the psychological burden that such names can represent. He’s protective of his young family, wary that history is not always past and not always kind.
Charles takes a different view. He is of the past, believing his name is tied to a kind of destiny for France, he told me. “England is actually a big illusion without the royal family. You don’t have your empire any more, you have your monarchy. That gives weight to a country.”
He tries to draw the family together through Présence Bourbon, which holds openings and anniversaries to boost the Bourbon reputation. He is a Knight of the Order of Malta, along with many of the other Bourbon family members. Pictures of Bonapartes and Bourbons adorn the top of a grand piano in Château Nouveau-Bostz, but he grumbled about his relatives’ distance from his work. “They only come to cut the ribbons,” he said.
Legacy is a game played not in decades, but centuries. For Charles, fortifying his corner of France to secure it, make it fast, profitable even, is something like a guarantee. Yet he is a life-long bachelor with no desire to marry. Charles told me he does have a successor in mind, but that it would make it too easy to name them too soon.
At present, France is divided by an election that nobody wanted and, once again, the country has an unpopular sole ruler negotiating an unstable power base. Without a clear electoral victory during this summer’s voting, the mood, as Charles saw it when I called him up after the result, is “confused”.
The problem, according to Swann, is that Macron’s unpopularity stems from the pressure to be a unifier, the same pressure French monarchs succumbed to in the past. Macron had cast himself as a de Gaulle-style strongman, what de Gaulle called a necessary “federator, like Charlemagne”. But, Swann said, “We know that Macron has a finite political life.”
“People think the National Rally have lost,” Charles said cheerily, “but they haven’t. They’re growing and growing and growing.” He believes that the monarchy could be a tangible part of this future, a means to remind politicians that there is a power above them, to bring accountability as well as stability. In his view, the image of the UK prime minister standing in the corner of the House of Lords during the King’s Speech represented the stability and permanence that monarchy brings and he believes France needs. He pointed to Spain, where the Bourbons were reinstated after the death of Franco in 1975 as a restoration success. “Anything can happen,” he said.
The final stop on my tour of Charles’s realm was the tumbled wreck of the fortress Fourchaud. Charles didn’t have a key, but a row of electric scooters indicated that a group of tourists were already there. “Well, somehow they got in,” he said, peering up at the thick-walled keep.
Circling the castle to find a wall to climb over, Charles came across a local guide touring a family visiting from the Isle of Man. It was clear that they lacked the reverence of the service staff at dinner the previous evening, nevertheless Charles persevered. A handshake, eye contact, a brief exchange, move on. But as he tried to move on from the father, a school teacher in Ramsey, he held Charles’s gaze and asked cheerfully, “Is there a name for someone that collects castles?” Charles winced, but there was no retinue to whisk away the offender. “A nutter,” he managed, with lightly concealed displeasure. Recourse to glib self-deprecation was easier than an explanation.
“You speak English better than us!” exclaimed the grandmother in a Mancunian accent. The comment elicited another darkened brow. It had not been part of Charles’s plan to run into these tourists. We made our way back to the car. “The Isle of Man is nothing special,” he sneered as he did up his seatbelt, “they’re very strange, no?”
It was now late afternoon and I dropped Charles at the steps of Nouveau-Bostz, where Lucy called him a driver. Charles would enjoy the freedom to make calls and answer emails on his way to Moulins station, from where he would ride first class to Paris, arriving just in time for an engagement that evening. He had to be there by 5pm, but he’d call ahead to push it back a touch. He had another dinner the following evening, he said, but he’d return to Nouveau Bostz the week after to record an episode of the French weekly current affairs TV show 13h15 le Dimanche. He hoped the lighting would be fixed in the restaurant. There was always more to do, it seemed. After all, if he didn’t do it, who would?
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