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You can hurl insults at Chambord until you're blue in the face, the fact is he was a man who stood by his convictions. BTW, if you would *read* my post, I never called Williams an ultra-liberal, I said most serious historians, which is true. In fact, most of the intellectual elite of any subject are liberals.

Chambord was also not absolutist (just like Charles X was not), it seems you are buying into the liberal lie that any monarch who wishes to actually have a viable role in government is an absolutist. Which, by the way, is why the British monarchy is certainly not my ideal as a monarchist. No British sovereign has vetoed an act of Parliament since the reign of Queen Anne. Britain has become more and more liberal all the time because the monarch is powerless to act in all but the most extremely rare circumstances. This is what Chambord refused to do. He was not going to be king and just sit in on state meetings with nothing to say and no power to act.

My views of both Charles X and Chambord were framed by Roger Williams, one the the 20th centuries most distinguished American historians of 19th century France, who was not, as I have said, a leftist.

I grant you Chambord's courage of his principles, such as they were, but am convinced there was no way a man of such principles could succeed as a French monarch in the last quarter of the 19th century, let alone any other time after 1789. By your own statement in an earlier post, Chambord sought a traditional, conseravtive and Church-based monarchy in the old style. That is saying he sought an absolutist monarchy along the lines of Louis XIV. That's no liberal lie, it's just the fact.

History give Chambord an opportunity to restore the French monarchy, albeit on terms not precisely to his liking. Chambord chose not to restore the monarchy on those terms. The French chose not to respre the monarchy on Chambord's terms. No one compromised. Some historians, among whom I number myself, think the French might well have been better off had Chambord been more flexible and a constitutional monarchy been established. You obviously don't think so, rather you seem to think there should have been a return to the pre-revolutionary monarchy. Fine. It didn't happen either way. History is full of might have beens, and Chambord will be right there with the Young Pretender and the Emperor Norton.