During the coronation of Louis XV in October 1722, Elisabeth Therese, her mother, and her sisters Anne Charlotte and Marie Louise went to the French royal court. Elisabeth Therese's grandmother, Princess Palatine, found her three granddaughters very charming as well as attractive, though Anne Charlotte was deemed the most beautiful.
In the spring of 1725, the young French king, Louis XV, was fifteen and unmarried. He was engaged to Mariana Victoria of Spain, but the young princess was sent back to Spain because she was too young to conceive. As a result, Élisabeth Charlotte began negotiations to marry Elisabeth Therese to the king.[1] However, this was met with opposition from the king's prime minister, the Duke of Bourbon, who arranged for the king to marry an obscure Polish princess later that year. The Duke of Bourbon stated that marriages between kings of France and princesses of Lorraine always resulted in strife, and that the House of Lorraine was too closely related to the House of Habsburg, which would cause discontent and conflict within the French nobility.[2]
Her father died in 1729 amid negotiations regarding a marriage between the then seventeen-year-old Elisabeth Therese and her recently widowed cousin Louis, Duke of Orléans. He refused outright, much to the annoyance of her mother.[3] The match having come to nothing, her mother named her daughter the coadjutrice of Remiremont Abbey on 19 October 1734.[4] The Remiremont Abbey was closely associated with the House of Lorraine.
She married the King of Sardinia by proxy on 5 March 1737 at Château de Lunéville, with the Prince of Carignan, who was the prince's brother-in-law, acting as the king. The day after the proxy marriage, she left for Lyon, where she arrived on 14 March. Her brother, the Duke of Lorraine, raised a dowry for her, and the marriage contract was signed in Vienna by the Duke and Duchess of Lorraine and Emperor Charles VI.[5]
The couple married in person on 1 April 1737. Charles Emmanuel III was her half-first cousin, his mother being Anne Marie d'Orléans, her mother Élisabeth Charlotte's half-sister. The marriage would produce three children, but only one would live to adulthood. She and her husband arrived in Turin on 21 April.[6]
^Calmet Augustin: Histoire de Lorraine...depuis l'entrée de Jules César dans les Gaules jusqu'à la cession de la Lorraine, arrivée en 1737, A. Leseure, 1757, p 309, 70
^Foucault: Histoire de Léopold I, duc de Lorraine et de Bar, père de l'Empereur, Paris, 1791, p 340
Augustin, Calmet (1757). Histoire de Lorraine...depuis l'entrée de Jules César dans les Gaules jusqu'à la cession de la Lorraine, arrivée en 1737 (in French). A. Leseure. pp. 70–309.
Foucault (1791). Histoire de Léopold I, duc de Lorraine et de Bar, père de l'Empereur (in French). Paris. p. 340.
