Marie-Caroline of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duchess of Berry (1798–1870), was a princess, patron of the arts and bibliophile, and one of the leading figures of the Bourbon Restoration. The wife of Charles-Ferdinand d'Artois, Duke of Berry, son of the future Charles X, she was also the mother of Henri d'Artois, Count of Chambord, the last representative of the senior Bourbon line.
Born in Palermo in 1798, Marie-Caroline belonged to the House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies. In 1816 she married the Duke of Berry and settled at the French court. After her husband's assassination in 1820, the posthumous birth of their son Henri, Duke of Bordeaux, gave her considerable dynastic importance.
The Duchess of Berry also played an active part in the artistic life of her day. A great lover of painting, theatre, music and books, she supported many artists and shared in the nascent Romantic taste. She herself practised drawing and lithography: a view of the Château de Rosny executed in her own hand in 1823 is preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
A passionate bibliophile, she assembled an important library and had many of her books bound with her arms or her cipher. Copies from her collection, often remarkable for their provenance and their bindings, remain sought after by collectors today; her bibliophily has been the subject of dedicated studies.
After the Revolution of 1830 and the exile of Charles X, she attempted in 1832 to raise a Legitimist uprising in western France on behalf of her son. The venture failed: arrested in Nantes, she was imprisoned in the citadel of Blaye.
She subsequently spent much of her life outside France and died in 1870 at Schloss Brunnsee, in Styria. A political princess as much as a woman of taste, the Duchess of Berry remains an essential figure of the Restoration, of the history of Legitimism and of nineteenth-century French bibliophily.
