Legitimism in the context of René Rémond

Orléanist (French: Orléaniste) was a 19th-century French political label originally used by those who supported a constitutional monarchy expressed by the House of Orléans. Due to the radical political changes that occurred during that century in France, four different phases of Orléanism can be identified:

• The "pure" Orléanism: constituted by those who supported the constitutional reign of Louis Philippe I (1830–1848) after the 1830 July Revolution, and who showed liberal and moderate ideas.
• The "fusionist" (or "unionist") Orléanism: the movement formed by pure Orléanists and by those Legitimists who after the childless death of Henri, Count of Chambord in 1883 endorsed Philippe, Count of Paris, grandson of Louis Philippe, as his successor. The fusion drove the Orleanist movement to more conservative stances, emphasising French nationality (rejecting claims to France of the Spanish Bourbons on account of their "foreignness") and Catholicism.
• The "progressive" Orléanism: the majority of "fusionists" who, after the decline of monarchist sentiment in the 1890s, joined into moderate republicans, who showed progressive and secular-minded goals, or into Catholic rally, like the Liberal Action.
• Contemporary Orléanism. The party Action Française embraced and still does advocate for its own variant of Orléanism which rejects the economic liberal policies of "pure" Orléanism and supports Integralism.

Orleanism was opposed by the two other monarchist trends: the more conservative Legitimism that was loyal to the eldest branch of the House of Bourbon after 1830, and the Bonapartism that supported Napoleon's legacy and heirs.

The Carlist Wars (Spanish: guerras carlistas, Basque: karlistadak) were a series of civil wars that took place in Spain during the 19th century. The contenders fought over claims to the throne, although some political differences also existed. Several times during the period from 1833 to 1876 the Carlists—followers of Don Carlos (1788–1855), an infante, and of his descendants—rallied to the cry of "God, Country, and King" and fought for the cause of Spanish tradition (Legitimism and Catholicism) against liberalism, and later the republicanism, of the Spanish governments of the day. The Carlist Wars had a strong regional component (Basque region, Catalonia, etc.), given that the new order called into question region-specific law arrangements and customs kept for centuries.

When King Ferdinand VII of Spain died in 1833, his widow, Queen Maria Cristina, became regent on behalf of their two-year-old daughter Queen Isabella II. The country splintered into two factions known as the Cristinos (or Isabelinos) and the Carlists. The Cristinos supported Queen Maria Cristina and her government, and were the party of the Liberals. The Carlists advocated for Infante Carlos of Spain, Count of Molina, a pretender to the throne and brother of the deceased Ferdinand VII. Carlos denied the validity of the Pragmatic Sanction of 1830 that abolished the semi Salic Law (he was born before 1830). The Carlists wanted a return to autocratic monarchy.

Arthur de Gobineau, Count de Gobineau (French: [ɡɔbino]; Joseph Arthur de Gobineau; 14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French writer and diplomat who is best known for helping introduce scientific race theory and "racial demography", and for developing the theory of the Aryan master race and Nordicism. He was an elitist who, in the immediate aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, wrote An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. In it he argued that aristocrats were superior to commoners and that aristocrats possessed more Aryan genetic traits because of less interbreeding with inferior races.

Gobineau was born to an aristocratic family of counts under the Ancien Régime. He was ideologically a Legitimist who supported royalist rule by the House of Bourbon and opposed the French Revolution, democracy, and rule by the House of Orléans which came to power after the 1830 July Revolution. He began his diplomatic career in the late 1840s, and beginning in 1861, variously served as minister to Persia, Brazil, Greece, and Sweden. As a writer, Gobineau authored novels and short stories, as well as non-fiction travel writings, polemical essays and other philological and anthropological works, including his Essai. His Essai is widely discredited as pseudoscience by modern scholarship. Gobineau himself never had any qualifications in anthropology.

Prince Jean Carl Pierre Marie d'Orléans, Count of Paris (born 19 May 1965) is the current head of the House of Orléans. Jean is the senior male descendant by primogeniture in the male-line of Louis Philippe I, King of the French, and thus according to the Orléanists the legitimate claimant to the defunct throne of France as Jean IV. Of France's three monarchist movements, Orléanism, Legitimism, and Bonapartism, most royalists are Orléanists. Jean is the second son of Henri, Count of Paris (1933–2019) and his former wife Duchess Marie-Thérèse of Württemberg (born 1934). With the death of his father, he has been using the style of Count of Paris since 2019.