A King Is Available

Last week's apparently panicky shifting of French allegiances left the world wondering who, exactly, was loyal to whom. Final answers to that question would have to wait. But sensational rumors said that many French officers who, for the moment, seemed enemies were really devoted to the same long-standing cause: the restoration of the French monarchy. Those in France naturally still found it expedient to placate Adolf Hitler. Those in French Africa found it profitable to side with the U.S. invasion forces. There was even a special advantage in this dualism: the monarchist movement was hedged against any outcome of the war.

There were two men who knew more about this than anyone else. One was the French Pretender himself. Slender, sharp-nosed, soft-chinned Henri de Bourbon-Orleans, Comte de Paris, 34, was last week, as French law requires of pretenders, in exile. This descendant of the effulgent Bourbon kings through Louis Philippe d'Orleans was biding his time in a sprawling white villa in the quiet little Spanish Moroccan port of Larache, only 600 miles from the headquarters of U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower.

The Comte de Paris, despite a somewhat squirrelish appearance, is personally a likable pretender. He is no sly neurotic, but a sobersided young man who studied politics at the Universities of Louvain and Brussels and likes to fly airplanes. His attractive young consort, the former Princess Isabelle d'Orleans-Bragance, 31, daughter of the late Brazilian Pretender Dom Pedro, would well become a throne. The would-be royal couple, incidentally, have six small children who are pictorially much more effective than their father.

The second expert on the recent progress of French monarchism is the Pretender's cousin and advance agent, Charles, Due de Nemours. Throughout the war, on passports including those of the Vatican and the Knights of Malta, sporting young "Chappy" Nemours has shuttled between London (the late Duke of Kent was his boyhood playmate), Vichy (where Marshal Petain sees him instantly and at length) and Berlin. Chappy has also made his headquarters in Madrid, where he used to visit former U.S. Ambassador Alexander Wilbourne Weddell, relative of Chappy's blonde U.S. wife, the former Peggy Watson of Richmond.

Last week the advisers, financial backers and widespread partisans of the Comte de Paris were undoubtedly in good fettle. They had many reasons to be:

> Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, cautious but lifelong royalist sympathizer, remained in Vichy as monarchism's chief hedge against Axis victory.

>Possibly a majority of French professional officers, of whatever present connection, are royalists by birth or tradition. (The laws of the Third Republic, by forbidding other public offices to sons of noble families, crowded them into the French Army and Navy.) France's leaders are now almost all professional officers.

> The collapse of the Third Republic disgusted great numbers of Frenchmen with parliamentary government. The miseries suffered under Vichy did the same thing for Fascist totalitarianism. French willingness to give limited monarchy another opportunity, therefore, may have greatly increased.

> In June 1941, the Petain Government, unnoticed by the world press, revived the system of the lettre de cachet, the reverse of the habeas corpus procedure, by which the Bourbon kings disposed of their enemies without trial. Since the revival, it was believed that some 100,000 to 200,000 liberal or radical-minded Frenchmen had been whisked to concentration camps, Axis labor projects or assorted deaths. In view of this, it seemed possible that the French monarchist vote might even be strong enough to win a French plebiscite--if the opposition was divided.

Not for years had French monarchism seemed less an intellectual exercise and more a political program. The world had reason to watch the young descendant of eight Bourbon kings, the young man who would be only too glad to ascend a French throne as Henry V.

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