The headship of the Royal House of France is disputed; to many, Madame la Comtesse de Paris was simply the de jure Duchesse d'Orléans. The Orléans line is the least senior of all the surviving lines of the House of Bourbon, though many consider all those lines senior to it to have forfeited all claims to the throne of France. The debate has been going on since the death of France's last legitimate monarch, Henri V, in 1883. Henri, called the Comte de Chambord during his long years of exile, willed the grand collars and other insignia of state belonging to the "Ordres du Roi" not to the Orléans claimant, but to the Duke of Madrid, the next senior Bourbon in terms of male primogeniture. "Legitimistes" today still consider the claim to France's throne to properly rest in the Spanish branch with Don Luis Alfonso de Borbon y Martinez Bordiu, whom they consider to be HRH Louis Alphonse of France, Duc d'Anjou, or "Louis XX" of France and Navarre.
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Tim de Carmain-Périllos
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