in London, and also noted that "De Gaulle was not my friend...De Gaulle and I shared some common ideals and I agreed with him on the essentials of his approach to politics...I believe he was sincere when he wished that France may return to a monarchy. But once he was in power for a few years, he changed his ideas." In 1988, Henri produced a scandal among his monarchist supporters when he supported the re-election of François Mitterrand, a socialist. Political beliefs In his college years, Henri spent many nights listening to the French monarchist writer Charles Maurras. But during his adult life, Henri considered himself a centrist and never allied with any political party. On Action Française, Henri stated that it had many talented leaders, but he ultimately regarded it as "a Rightist party with extreme Right sympathies." In Henri's view, "no one should be in a position to claim a monopoly on the monarchist idea." Henri befriended politicians on both the left and right, and declined to run for Parliament, despite de Gaulle's suggestion that he should do so. His political strategy was to court the political Left and ignore the Right, knowing that the Right possessed no choice but to back him. Some rightist critics of Henri regarded him as "the Crown Prince of the Republic" or "a dyed-in-the-wool socialist, if not a Jacobin." The Countess of Paris described her husband as "an authoritarian and an absolutist." Henri was a critic of primogeniture and favored elective monarchy over hereditary. He believed that France should possess a council of state, which would be entrusted with the duty of finding the most worthy successor within the royal family. Marriage and family life On 8 April 1931, he married Princess Isabelle of Orléans-Braganza. The wedding was celebrated in Palermo Cathedral in Sicily, the same church where their common ancestors, Louis Philippe of France and his Queen Maria Amalia, married in 1809. Guests at the wedding included official representatives of the Brazilian, Italian, Greek, Belgian, Danish, and Spanish royal families. The Count and Countess of Paris had eleven children. They separated in 1986, but never divorced. In 1984, Henri declared that his son, Henri of Orléans, had lost his rights of inheritance because he had divorced his first wife and married a second time, outside of the Roman Catholic Church. Henri gave his son the lesser-valued title comte de Mortain in