Eugenio, Count of Villafranca

Eugenio of Savoy (Eugenio Ilarione; 21 October 1753 – 30 June 1785) was a prince of the House of Savoy and founder of the Villafranca branch of the royal family of Italy that survived until 1888. He was the brother of Queen Marie Antoinette's tragic confidante, the Princesse de Lamballe.

Biography

Born in Turin, he was the next to youngest of the nine children of Louis Victor of Savoy, Prince of Carignano and his German wife, Christine of Hesse-Rheinfels-Rotenburg. Although their family seat was the principality of Carignano 20 kilometers south of Turin, of which they were nominally suzerains, as princes of the blood royal in the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Savoy-Carignanos were in attendance at the royal court of the Savoys in Turin, while also maintaining a residence in Paris and frequenting the French court.

In addition to being a cousin in the first degree of Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia and of Louis Joseph of Bourbon, Prince de Condé, Eugènio's sister Maria Teresa (1749-1792) had married Louis Alexandre de Bourbon, Prince de Lamballe, the heir of a legitimised branch of the French royal family when he was 13, and had become the close friend and Surintendante of the French queen, Marie Antoinette of Austria, by 1775. As his elder brother, Victor Amadeus, was heir to the Carignano princedom, the traditional occupations for a younger son of a princely house, an episcopal or military sinecure, beckoned him to the French court. and was known there as "Prince Eugène, comte de Villefranche".

While stationed in Saint-Malo, on 29 December 1779 the 26 year-old prince secretly married 14 year-old Elisabeth Anne Magon de Boisgarin, the daughter of François Nicolas Magon, Seigneur de Boigarin, and his wife Louise de Caruel. After the wedding, held probably in the Boisgarin parish of Spézet in the Finistère, the bride assumed the title, Countess de Pommeryt. The marriage evoked a scandal, a lawsuit (conducted over many years by the renowned attorney, Lacretelle the Elder) and, eventually, an annulment ("for not having observed all the formalities prescribed by the civil and military laws of the kingdom") registered by the Parlement of Paris at the behest of Eugène's parents, boxstyle_1=background-color: #fcc; boxstyle_2=background-color: #fb9; boxstyle_3=background-color: #ffc; boxstyle_4=background-color: #bfc; boxstyle_5=background-color: #9fe; 1= 1. Prince Eugenio, Count of Villafranca 2= 2. Louis Victor, Prince of Carignano 3= 3. Princess Christine of Hesse-Rotenburg 4= 4. Victor Amadeus I, Prince of Carignano 5= 5. Maria Vittoria, Marquise of Susa 6= 6. Ernest II Leopold, Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenburg 7= 7. Countess Eleonore of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rochefort 8= 8. Emmanuel Philibert, Prince of Carignano 9= 9. Princess Maria Caterina of Modena 10= 10. Victor Amadeus II of Sardinia 11= 11. Jeanne Baptiste d'Albert de Luynes 12= 12. William I, Landgrave of Hesse-Rotenburg 13= 13. Countess Maria Anna of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rochefort 14= 14. Maximilian Karl Albert, Prince of Löwenstein-Wertheim-Rochefort 15= 15. Countess Polyxena Maria Khuen von Lichtenberg und Belasi

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