Les collections du comte de Chambord à Chambord (1820-1883). Le testament d’un héritier malheureux

From 1821 to 1883, the Chambord estates belonged to Henri, Duke of Bordeaux, the Count of Chambord who was the grandson of King Charles X and pretender to the throne of France. At his death, his nephews, the princes of Bourbon-Parme family, inherited the estate and managed it until its sequestration in 1915.The handful of rooms in the château that were opened to the public from 1821 presented only a few objects and works of art, the furniture having been sold of during the Revolution. But from the years 1848-1850 onwards, the Duke of Bordeaux, then in exile, launched a programme of acquisition, undertaken by his administrative services. Far from his partisans, he wished to remain close to the French people and attempted to make of the château a place of dynastic memory for the Bourbon framily, in anticipation of the restoration of the monarchy. The systematic strudy of the estate’s archives, held by the Loir-et-Cher departmental archives, allows for a better understanding of how the rooms were to be organised and how works of art were purchansed according to these plans. From a longer term point of view, for a proper diachronic analysis, it is also necessary to take into account the presentation choices made after 1930 when the estate was acquired by the French State