Henri VI, Count of Paris, who might have been King if France were still a monarchy, died on Saturday in the family home in Dreux. He was 90 and had been suffering from prostate cancer.
His eldest son, also Henri, 66 -- one of nine surviving children, six of them daughters -- immediately claimed the titles of Count of Paris and Duke of France.
Henri VI bore his royal heritage with such political finesse that republican leaders on both the right and the left mourned his passing.
But the Count said five years ago that in the turmoil caused in France by Algerian independence in 1960, a President who ruled like a monarch, Charles de Gaulle, told him, ''Monseigneur, I believe deeply in the value of the monarchy, and I am certain as well that this regime is the one best suited to our poor country.''
De Gaulle ran for the presidency again in 1965, and the Count never found out whether French voters agreed on the subject of monarchy. In 1988, he scandalized some of his backers by supporting the re-election of another President with regal airs, Francois Mitterrand, a Socialist.
Continue reading the main storyBut from the time he became heir apparent to the throne in 1926 until 1950, the Count did not even have the right to live here. A law passed in 1886, after royalists thronged around the Orleans family residence in Paris during a wedding and made leaders of the shaky Third Republic nervous, banned claimants to the throne from French soil.
The Count violated that law at least once, flying in from Belgium in 1938 to warn that the Munich agreement would lead to no good and then flying out again to avoid arrest.
When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion under the pseudonym d'Orliac and fought in North Africa.
A solemn, trim man with a trademark mustache, Henri Robert Ferdinand Marie Louis-Philippe d'Orleans was born in France, the eldest son of the Duke de Guise, but spent his early childhood in Morocco.
The pretender to the throne at the time was not his father but his uncle, the Duke of Orleans. He had no sons, and named Henri his successor in 1926. Henri attended the University of Louvain in Belgium, and married Isabelle, granddaughter of the last Empress of Brazil. He and his wife separated after 52 years of marriage. They had 41 grandchildren, one of whom, Eudes, was being married when his grandfather died.
During World War II, Henri and his family lived in Morocco, then in Spain and Portugal. But after the war, the French allowed his heir to go to school in Bordeaux and, in 1950, abolished the law of exile.
Henri moved the family back to France and, proclaiming loyalty to democracy, established its seat at Dreux. He set up a foundation that restored the Orleans castle at Amboise, and opened it to the public.
Die-hard supporters of the senior Bourbon branch of the royal family sometimes contested Henri's right to succession, because one of his ancestors took the name Philippe Egalite after the French Revolution and voted in the National Assembly to send Louis XVI to the guillotine.
But his legitimacy was never seriously doubted by most of the few tens of thousands of French royalists.
There were periodic scandals. In 1984, he stripped his eldest son of his position as heir apparent for getting a divorce and marrying a divorced Chilean. The father relented in 1996.
The new Count of Paris lives on -- what else? -- royalties from a line of perfume called Royalissime and by making sketches and watercolors. He is also the author of a cookbook, published by Michel Lafon in 1994, whose title may explain why he collected recipes: ''Terribly Sorry, Highness, It's My Day Off.''
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