Louis Engelbert, VI. duc d'Arenberg

Herzog von Meppen und Fürst von Recklinghausen. 1775 erblindet. 1803 zurückgetreten.

https://genealogics.org/getperson.php?personID=I00009915&tree=LEO

BIOGRAPHY Louis Pierre Engelbert Marie Joseph Augustin was born in Brussels on 3 August 1750, the second of eight children of Charles Marie Raymond, prince et 5.duc d'Arenberg, and Louise Marguerite von der Marck, comtesse de La Marck et de Schleiden.

On 19 January 1773 in Paris, Louis Pierre married Louise Antoinette de Brancas-Villars, comtesse de Lauraguais, daughter of Louis Léon Félicité de Brancas, duc de Lauraguais, duc de Brancas, and Elisabeth Pauline de Gand-Vilain de Merode de Montmorency, princesse d'Isenghien. They had five children of whom two sons and a daughter would have progeny.

Louis Pierre was blinded in a hunting accident in 1775 when he was just 24. As a military career was now impossible he kept himself occupied with natural sciences, theatre, art and music. In 1782 he was inducted into the Order of the Golden Fleece by Emperor Joseph II. He was also grand-bailli and capitaine-général of Hainault.

Louis Pierre managed to keep his estates largely intact throughout the French Revolution, but in 1793-1794 the French armies under Napoleon occupied the lands of the empire on the left bank of the Rhine, and many of the reigning houses, including Arenberg, lost their immediate territories. Louis Pierre lost the estate of Arenberg, which had come originally from his ancestress Margarethe von der Marck, princesse d'Arenberg, in the Eifel mountains on the left bank of the Rhine.

The treaty of Lunéville (1801) recognised these territorial losses and promised to compensate the secular rulers. The Imperial Assembly created a special imperial deputation to distribute the compensation. By the provision of the Final Recess of the Imperial Deputation (_Reichsdeputationshauptschluss_) (February 1803) the secular rulers, who had the status of Imperial Estates, were compensated with the secularised ecclesiastical territories and those territories of the imperial free cities.

In 1803 Louis Pierre received the estates of Meppen and Recklinghausen, formerly belonging to the bishopric of Münster, in compensation for the loss of the former duchy of Arenberg. These estates were combined into a new duchy of Arenberg. From 1794 until 1803 Louis Pierre is recorded as living at Tachau, the estate in West Bohemia of Graf Josef Niklas Windisch-Graetz, the husband of his sister Leopoldine.

In 1803 Louis Pierre abdicated in favour of his son Prosper Louis. Louis Pierre was appointed a senator and a count by Napoleon. After 1815 he settled in Belgium. Louis Pierre died in Brussels on 7 March 1820. The new duchy of Arenberg had been abolished in 1810, but in 1815 it was reinstated by the Congress of Vienna, though without the sovereignty it had enjoyed previously.