Archduchess Maria Clementina and Francis, Hereditary Prince of Naples, were married on 26 June 1797.
As was rather customary for the Habsburgs, they were first cousins — the daughter and son of Emperor Leopold II and his favourite sister, Maria Karolina, Queen of Naples, respectively. Their union formed part of a larger dynastic strategy between the Imperial and Neapolitan royal families, which saw two of Leopold’s sons and a daughter marry two Neapolitan princesses and a prince. For Maria Clementina, Queen Maria Karolina was both aunt and mother-in-law.
Curiously, Maria Clementina and Francis had already been married by proxy in 1790, when the bride was only 13. However, due to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, it was unsafe for her to travel to Italy, and the actual wedding was delayed for seven years. In the meantime, both of her parents died within a few months in 1792, and her brother Francis II ascended to the imperial throne.
Maria Clementina was described as educated, kind-natured, and popular. Her mother-in-law’s private correspondence suggests that the young couple had little in common apart from an unusually fervent interest in conjugal intimacy, which raised eyebrows at the Neapolitan court.
She suffered from a lung condition and died in 1801 at the age of just 24. Through her only surviving daughter, Carolina — later Duchess of Berry — she became the grandmother of Henri, Count of Chambord, the last male heir of the senior Bourbon line and pretender to the throne of France.
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