Born on 21 September 1819 in the
Élysée Palace, in Paris, she was the first surviving child of
Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry and his young wife
Carolina of Naples and Sicily. At the time of her birth, her great-uncle
Louis XVIII, was the reigning king of France, but he was childless and already in declining health. Louise's
grandfather was the heir to the French crown. He had only two sons. The eldest,
Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême had no children of his own from his marriage to
Madame Royale. Therefore, the continuity of the dynasty rested solely on the youngest son, Charles-Ferdinand, Duke of Berry, Louise's father. Known from her birth as Mademoiselle d'Artois, Louise did not have the chance to get to know her father. She was only five months old when the Duke of Berry was assassinated while leaving the old opera of Paris by
Louis Pierre Louvel, a
Bonapartist whose goal was the "extinction of the house of Bourbon". Louise was then the only child of the main branch of the royal dynasty of Bourbon descendants of
Louis XV. The lack of male heirs raised the prospect of the throne passing to the Duke of Orléans and his heirs, which horrified the more conservative
ultras. Parliament debated the abolition of the
Salic law, which excluded females from the succession and was long held inviolable. However, the widowed Duchess of Berry was found to be pregnant and on 29 September 1820 gave birth to a son, Louise's only sibling, the miracle boy
Henri d'Artois (1820-1883). He received then the title of Duke of Bordeaux. Louise was brought up under the care of her mother the Duchess of Berry at the Elysée Palace and at
Château de Rosny-sur-Seine, her mother's main residence. Louise's education was entrusted to Marie-Joséphine Louise de Montaut-Navailles (1773-1857), Marquise de Gontaut Saint-Blacard, a former
Lady-in-waiting of the Duchess of Berry. The Marquise was appointed as the governess of the little girl and her brother. Until the end of her life, Louise would remain very close to her brother, later describing their relationship as one soul in two bodies. Louise would remember her great-uncle King Louis XVIII as an invalid who could not move from his chair. He suffered from
gangrene and died in 1824, five days before Louise's fifth birthday. During the reign of
Charles X, as a granddaughter of the French king, Louise had the title
petite-fille de France
(granddaughter of France). Her grandfather's reign (1824-1830) ended abruptly as his unpopular policies launched the
July Revolution. On 2 August 1830, Charles X and his son the
Dauphin abdicated their rights to the throne. Although Charles had intended that his grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux, would take the throne as Henry V, the politicians who composed the provisional government instead placed on the throne a distant cousin,
Louis Philippe of the cadet
House of Orléans -a descendant of Louis XIV's only brother-, who agreed to rule as a constitutional monarch. This period became known as the
July Monarchy. Supporters of the exiled senior line of the Bourbon dynasty became known as
Legitimists. On 16 August 1830, the royal family went into exile in England. ==Formative years==