Prince Pedro Gastão of Orléans-Braganza


Prince Pedro Gastão of Orléans-Braganza was one of two claimants to the Brazilian throne and head of the Petrópolis branch of the Brazilian Imperial House.

Biography

Prince Pedro Gastão was the son of Pedro de Alcântara, Prince of Grão-Pará and his wife Countess Elisabeth Dobrzensky of Dobrzenicz. He was born in Eu, France. His father was expected to eventually inherit the imperial throne of Brazil, as his mother was the elder child and heir presumptive of Emperor Pedro II. The monarchy was, however, overthrown in 1889 and the former imperial family went to France in exile. Until Dom Pedro de Alcântara's renunciation at the time of his marriage to a woman who was not of royal birth, he was to succeed his mother as imperial pretender, leading the Brazilian restoration movement from abroad.
Pedro Gastão spent his youth in Europe, largely at his family's Parisian home in the Boulogne sur Seine suburb: "I have very good memories of my grandparents...In exile in France I was always brought up thinking of Brazil not France or Portugal."
A few years before his death Pedro Gastão's father Prince Pedro de Alcântara told a Brazilian newspaper:
Following the death of his father, and supported by Infante Alfonso, Duke of Calabria and Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona he declared himself head of the Imperial Family of Brazil. His position was supported by Francisco Morato, law professor at the University of São Paulo, who concluded the resignation of Pedro Gastão's father was not a valid legal or monarchical act. Professor Paulo Napoleão Nogueira da Silva in the 1990s published a report saying that the resignation of his father was invalid under all possible aspects of Brazilian Law.
He represented a rival claim to that of his cousin's son, Prince Luiz of Orléans-Braganza, to be the heir of the deposed Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, despite the renunciation signed by his father in 1908 when he married, without dynastic approval, a Bohemian noblewoman.
Pedro Gastão died aged 94 on 27 December 2007.

Marriage and children

He married Princess Maria de la Esperanza of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, a daughter of Prince Carlos of the Two Sicilies and Princess Louise of Orléans, on 18 December 1944 in Seville, Spain, and had six children: