Royalist fusion (France, 1850–1851)

When the February Revolution of 1848 brought down the July Monarchy, the two royalist parties joined in the Party of Order and dominated parliament, but they remained divided over who should be king: the Legitimists supported Charles X's grandson the Count of Chambord, the Orléanists the family of Louis Philippe. The idea of merging the two houses may have been Thiers's, and conservative Orléanists such as Guizot and Molé took it up: the Orléans princes would recognise Henri V as king, and he would make them his heirs.

The death of Louis Philippe in exile in England in August 1850 seemed to open the way. Chambord had a mass said for him and wrote to his widow, Queen Marie-Amélie. If the twelve-year-old Count of Paris succeeded the childless Chambord, then twenty-nine, the two lines could be joined. But Chambord's camp would not accept the tricolour or a liberal constitution and held to divine-right monarchy, and some of Louis Philippe's sons looked unfavourably on the reconciliation. Orléanists such as Thiers preferred to run Louis Philippe's son, the Prince of Joinville, in the presidential election of 1852. The fusion was never achieved; the two royalist camps stayed in the Party of Order but could not agree on common action and failed to prevent the proclamation of the Second Empire.

In chapter VI of The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx mocked the attempt at length: "The diplomats of the party of Order believed they could settle the struggle by an amalgamation of the two dynasties, by a so-called fusion of the royalist parties and their royal houses. The real fusion of the Restoration and the July Monarchy was the parliamentary republic, in which Orleanist and Legitimist colors were obliterated and the various species of bourgeois disappeared into the bourgeois as such, the bourgeois genus." He described the Legitimist chiefs Berryer, Benoist d'Azy and Saint-Priest making the pilgrimage to Claremont to win over the Orléans family, and Guizot and Duchâtel lending a hand, until Joinville's candidacy was officially announced in September; thus the royalist attempt at fusion not only failed but broke up their parliamentary fusion, the common republican form, and decomposed the party of Order into its original constituents.

The idea revived later. When the royalists won a majority in the National Assembly in 1871, the two camps agreed to make Chambord king, but his refusal of the tricolour wrecked the restoration of 1873. When Chambord died in 1883 most Legitimists recognised the Count of Paris as his heir, giving rise to the so-called "fusionist" Orléanists.