Henri Philippe Pierre Marie d'Orléans (14 June 1933 – 21 January 2019) was the Orléanist pretender to the defunct French throne as Henry VII. He used the style of Count of Paris.
He was head of the House of Orléans as senior in male-line descent from King Louis Philippe I, who reigned from 1830 to 1848. Henri was a retired military officer as well as an author and painter.
He was the first son of Henri, Count of Paris (1908–1999), and his wife Princess Isabelle of Orléans-Braganza, and was born in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Belgium, a law in 1886 having permanently exiled from France the heads of its formerly reigning dynasties and their eldest sons.
Despite the ban, while living in Belgium Henri occasionally accompanied his mother on brief visits to France and, later, to his mother's relatives in Brazil. In August 1940 as World War II escalated, the family relocated to property they owned in Larache in the French protectorate of Morocco. While his father sought to play a role in the French resistance, Henri, in 1940 a child of 7, remained at Larache with his mother, siblings, grandmother and father's sisters' families during the Nazi occupation of France, sharing a small desert home that lacked electricity. Advised by Henri Giraud's Moroccan command that the Orléans had become unwelcome in the protectorate following the assassination of Vichy regime collaborater François Darlan by the monarchist Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, the family relocated to Pamplona in Spain until 1947, when they took up residence at the Quinta do Anjinho, an estate near Sintra, on the Portuguese Riviera. During that year, President Vincent Auriol allowed Henri and his brother François to visit France, and in 1948 he was allowed to enroll in a lycée in Bordeaux.
The law of exile was abrogated in 1950, allowing Henri to repatriate with his parents. Later that year, his parents purchased an estate near Paris, the Manoir du Cœur-Volant in Louveciennes, which became Henri's first home in France. He was one of the over 100 European royal personages who took part in a cruise organized by King Paul of Greece and Queen Frederica in 1954, which became known as the "Cruise of the Kings".
Henri studied at the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), obtaining his bac in 1957, and on 30 June of that year, his father conferred upon him, as the heir apparent of his house, the title of "Count of Clermont", by which he was generally known during his father's lifetime.
From October 1959 to April 1962, Henri worked at the Secretariat-General for National Defence and Security as a member of the French Foreign Legion. Transferred from there to a garrison in Germany, he took up a new assignment as military instructor at Bonifacio in Corsica, where his wife and children joined him early in 1963.
Returning to civilian life in 1967, Henri and his family briefly occupied the Blanche Neige pavilion on the grounds of his father's Cœur-Volant estate before renting an apartment of their own in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. In the early 1970s Clermont managed public relations for the Geneva office of a Swiss investment firm while dwelling in Corly.
Henri wrote several books, including:
Adresse au futur chef d'État (1994)
Désolé, Altesse, c’est mon jour de sortie (1994)
La France survivra-t-elle à l'an 2000 (1997)
La France à bout de bras (2002)
Henri was also a painter and launched his own brand of perfume. His political career included unsuccessfully contesting the 2004 European elections for the Alliance Royale, a monarchist party.
Henri met Duchess Marie Therese of Württemberg (born 1934), like himself a descendant of King Louis-Philippe, at a ball given by the Thurn and Taxis family in Munich. They were married on 5 July 1957 at the Royal Chapel of Dreux, on which occasion President Charles de Gaulle publicly offered congratulations, calling the wedding a great national event and observing that the dynasty and couple's future were bound to the hopes of France. Five children were born from this union:
Princess Marie d'Orléans (born 3 January 1959 in Boulogne-sur-Seine) married civilly in Dreux, on 22 July 1989, and religiously in Friedrichshafen, on 29 July 1989, to Prince Gundakar of Liechtenstein (born on 1 April 1949 in Vienna), and has issue:
Princess Léopoldine of Liechtenstein (born 27 June 1990, Vienna)
Princess Marie Immaculata of Liechtenstein (born 15 December 1991, Vienna)