Prince Philippe, Duke of Orléans (; 6 February 1869 – 28 March 1926) was the Orléanist claimant to the throne of France from 1894 to 1926 as Philippe VIII. Early life Philippe was born at York House, Twickenham, near London, Middlesex, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the son of Philippe, Count of Paris, by his wife (and first cousin), Princess Isabelle of Orléans. He was baptised with the names Louis-Philippe-Robert, and was called Philippe. His family lived in the United Kingdom from the abdication and banishment of his great-grandfather Louis Philippe, King of the French, in 1848, and returned to France in 1871 following the fall of the Second French Empire. However, they again took refuge in England in 1886, when the French Republic exiled them following the wedding in Paris of Philippe's sister Amélie of Orléans to Crown Prince Carlos of Portugal. Returning therefore to France in 1871 with his parents, Philippe was educated at home at the Château d'Eu and at the Collège Stanislas de Paris. His tutor from the end of 1882 to 1887 was Théodore Froment, previously a professor of Latin literature at Bordeaux. In 1880 Philippe's father granted him the title Duc d'Orléans. On 16 June 1881, he received the sacrament of confirmation at Eu. Growing up to be tall and blond, he later grew a beard. He was a better athlete than scholar and learned to love mountain-climbing from Captain Morhain, a former soldier from Saint-Cyr who had become his father's accountant. Military career Philippe began his military education at the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr. In June 1886 he was on the point of becoming an officer in the French army when his family was once again exiled by France's republican government. At first he was placed under the tutelage of a Colonel de Parseval, under whose supervision he would later attend a military academy in Lausanne. In Great Britain and Ireland he entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, on the nomination of Queen Victoria in February 1887, completing his training there and developing an abiding interest in geography, topography, and the natural sciences. He was attached for service to the King's Royal Rifle Corps, which was then serving in British Raj, but never held an actual commission in the British Army, in order to respect a French law forbidding Frenchmen from holding commissions in foreign armies without the permission