History The uncle of King Juan Carlos: heir to the throne for 10 days and died in strange circumstances
Families The tragic existence of the Duke of Cádiz, on the 30th anniversary of his fatal skiing accident
A year after the death of the Duke of Cádiz, his eldest son, who had his throat cut by a cable while skiing in Colorado in January 1989,
Emmanuela Dampierre
, wife of the infante Don Jaime and
grandmother of Luis Alfonso
de Borbón, received this editor at her home in Rome .
She lived in a
beautiful but decadent
palazzo surrounded by family memories, and in the interview she obsessively repeated "my son was murdered,
Freemasonry killed him."
She was a beautiful old woman, but with a harsh expression and
an irascible character,
surely the product of accumulated bitterness in the face of the
chain of tragedies
she had experienced.
After two failed marriages,
she saw her two children die,
Alfonso and
Gonzalo de Borbón
, and her eldest grandson, Fran, only 12 years old, in an accident.
"My greatest misfortune is having survived the death of my two children and my grandson," she said in her final stretch.
Strapped to a wheelchair, she died alone
and practically broke at the age of 98 in her palazzo in Rome on May 3, 2012. As she acknowledged in her explosive memoirs, published in 2003, "throughout my life I have felt like
a survivor.
My stubborn determination to defend my children from all the insults and pettiness of which they were victims became the
sad excuse for my existence.
Emmanuela Dampierre and her son Alfonso.GTRES
Emmanuela Dampierre y Rúspoli, born in Rome on November 8, 1913, was
the daughter of Viscount Dampierre,
a French aristocrat, and his first wife, the Italian princess Victoria de Rúspoli, whose
divorce caused her to experience great
economic hardship
as a teenager .
Her mother, dreaming of a royal destiny for her,
agreed with King Alfonso XIII of hers to marry her to her son, Jaime of her,
second of her sons, who became
deaf
and dumb as a child;
a loveless wedding
that took place in the church of San Ignacio de Loyola in Rome in 1935. The bride
was only 21 years old
and her dreams of royalty were dashed when Jaime was
forced to renounce his rights to the throne
of Spain in favor of his younger brother, Juan, father of Don Juan Carlos.
Her marriage to don Jaime, from which her two sons, Alfonso and Gonzalo, were born, was
quite unfortunate
because the infant joined
numerous infidelities
to his disability that pushed Emmanuela, who was not very loyal to him either, to
leave the marital home
with her parents in 1946.
two children.
Later, she began a relationship with a
wealthy Milan stockbroker,
Antonio Sozzani, whom she married civilly in 1949. But this marriage
also ended in divorce
in 1967, after which she joined a Neapolitan lawyer for a time. , Federico Estartita.
Unable to achieve sentimental stability,
he put his hopes in his children,
of whom he had not taken care of too much when they were little, because they were
sent to a Swiss boarding school
under the protection of his grandmother,
Queen Victoria Eugenia,
who was for them their second mother .
.
In 1972 the wedding of his eldest son Alfonso with Franco's favorite granddaughter,
Carmen Martínez-Bordiu,
made him conceive the chimera that Alfonso, Duke of Cádiz and royal highness after his marriage,
could reign in Spain,
displacing his cousin Juan Carlos , something for which Emmanuela did not hesitate to maneuver.
However,
Franco remained firm
in keeping Juan Carlos as his successor, the 1980s being especially dramatic for Emmanuela as it
saw the marriage
of Alfonso and Carmen break up, who left her husband to settle in Paris with the antique dealer Jean Marie Rossi. leaving her children Fran and Luis Alfonso with their father in Madrid.
Something that Emmanuela never forgave her daughter-in-law, whom
she publicly insulted
on numerous occasions.
Together with his grandson, Luis Alfonso de Borbón.GTRES
Later in 1984, a tragedy occurred when returning from skiing, the Duke of Cadiz, who was driving,
skipped a stop sign suffering a terrible accident
in which Fran, Emmanuela's eldest grandson, died.
The misfortunes did not end there, because five years later
Alfonso himself died
in a ski accident in Colorado and also in 2000 her youngest son, Gonzalo, of leukemia, leaving Emmanuela practically alone in the world.
Only his grandson Luis Alfonso,
Duke of Anjou remained, who assumed his father's historical legacy as
heir to the French Bourbons
.
They maintained a close relationship, despite the fact that her grandson
did not want to go live with her in Rome
when her father died, preferring to remain in Madrid
with her other grandmother, Carmen Franco.
It was Luis Alfonso, married to the Venezuelan millionaire Margarita Vargas, who was in charge of Emmanuela's funeral, that she was
buried in the family pantheon
of the Paris cemetery.
Later,
he also presided over her funeral .
in the church of Val de Grace, which was officiated by the bishop of Versailles, which Carmen Martínez-Bordiú unexpectedly attended, despite the animosity professed by her mother-in-law.
"I understand because
I hurt your son,
maybe if someone hurt my children I would do the same," she said.
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