Charles-Ferdinand, Duc de Berry, nephew of Louis XVI, was attacked on the steps of the Paris Opera while helping his wife into a carriage and later died from the knife wounds he sustained. The assassin, Louis-Pierre Louvel, was a staunch Bonapartist determined to extinguish the Bourbon line. Berry was expected to be the last of the line but his wife was discovered to be pregnant and gave birth to a male heir, Henri, later comte de Chambord.

See Munro Price, The Perilous Crown: France Between Revolutions, 1814-1848 (London: Macmillan, 2007) pp. 106-7.