BOURBON, HOUSE OF

Spanish Borbn, Italian Borbone, one of the most important ruling houses of Europe. Its members were descended from Louis I, duc de Bourbon from 1327 to 1342, the grandson of the French king Louis IX (ruled 122670). It provided reigning kings of France from 1589 to 1792 and from 1814 to 1830, after which another Bourbon reigned as king of the French until 1848; kings or queens of Spain from 1700 to 1808, from 1814 to 1868, from 1874 to 1931, and since 1975; dukes of Parma from 1731 to 1735, from 1748 to 1802, and from 1847 to 1859; kings of Naples and of Sicily from 1734 to 1808 and of the Two Sicilies from 1816 to 1860; kings of Etruria from 1801 to 1807; and ducal sovereigns of Lucca from 1815 to 1847. The present article attempts a rapid survey of the dynasty as a whole, relying mainly on genealogical tables to display necessary details. In these tables the names and titles of sovereigns are mostly anglicized, but those of other persons are mostly given in the original form, except where princesses, having married into another country, are better known under that country's name for them. The tables also omit perforce the Bourbon bastards, whose multitude lends some colour to the popular notion that the Bourbon nose (larger and more prominent than the normal aquiline) betokens a Bourbon temperament or enormous appetite for sexual intercourse. Additional reading An introduction is provided by Sanche De Gramont, Epitaph for Kings (1968). Those interested in genealogy may consult Henri Vrignault, Gnalogie de la maison de Bourbon, 2nd ed. rev. (1957), with 12 tables, and, on the bastard branches of the House of Bourbon, Lgitims de France de la maison de Bourbon de 1594 1820 (1965). Vrignault's work of 1957 may be brought up-to-date through the successive volumes of the periodical Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels (irregular), whose first article Bourbon appeared in 1953 (vol. 2 of the series, 3 of the collection). On the physiological aspect, the reader may first consult Andr De Maricourt and Maurice De Bertrandfosse, Les Bourbons, 1518-1830: hrdits, pathologie, amours et grandeur, 4th ed. (1936). The story of the French Bourbon sovereigns is too vast to be addressed collectively in any single work other than a history of France. Biographies of the French kings are collected in Desmond Seward, The Bourbon Kings of France (1976). A general survey of Bourbon society is Richard M. Golden (ed.), Church, State, and Society Under the Bourbon Kings of France (1982). A comparison of the Bourbon dynasty with its predecessors can be found in Keith Cameron (ed.), From Valois to Bourbon: Dynasty, State, and Society in Early Modern France (1989). There have been several solid examinations of the Bourbon Restoration, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, Napoleon and the Restoration of the Bourbons, ed. by Joseph Hamburger (1977); Frederick B. Artz, France Under the Bourbon Restoration (1931, reissued 1963); and Guillaume De Bertier De Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration (1967; originally published in French, 1955). Bourbon France is compared with Stuart England in John Miller, Bourbon and Stuart: Kings and Kingship in France and England in the Seventeenth Century (1987). Helpful works in English on the Spanish Bourbons and on the Neapolitan include Charles Petrie, The Spanish Royal House (1958); Theo Aronson, Royal Vendetta: The Crown of Spain, 1829-1965 (1966), on the Carlist question; Harold Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, 1734-1825 (1956, reprinted 1974), and The Last Bourbons of Naples, 1825-1861 (1961); and John D. Bergamini, The Spanish Bourbons (1974). John Graham Royde-Smith The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica