There’s no finer royal biography than Stephen Constant’s Foxy Ferdinand, 1861-1948, Tsar of Bulgaria (1979), a judicious, penetrating analysis of the man known as “the Bismarck of the Balkans,” among other epithets. Son of Prince August of Saxe-Coburg and Princess Clémentine of Orléans, daughter of King Louis Philippe I, Ferdinand was considered a very unlikely candidate for any throne, least of all one as volatile as Bulgaria’s. On the surface, he was effete, preening, and superstitious, painfully conscious of his outsized nose, and completely under the sway of his formidable mother, who wanted to see her son in a position worthy of his Bourbon-Orléans ancestry. What no one at the time could have imagined is that he proved himself a master diplomat – “Foxy Ferdinand” – playing all sides against each other to ensure Bulgarian independence from the substantial pressures of Russian and Austro-Hungarian power plays. For his sister-in-law Princess Louise of Belgium, he was “one of the most curious beings it is possible to imagine. To describe him adequately needs the pen of a Barbey d’Aurevilly or a Balzac.” (Autour des trônes que j’ai vu tomber, 1921)
Bulgarian politics were frequent subjects of debate in international newspapers of the era, and the real plots that rattled Ferdinand’s throne turn up regularly in Ruritanian novels, including Laura Daintrey’s The King of Alberia. A Romance of the Balkans (1895) and Justus M. Forman’s The Garden of Lies (1904; filmed by Universal in 1915). Ferdinand adored being a monarch, first as reigning prince under nominal Ottoman suzerainty and then as Tsar in 1908, transforming his court into a hyper-refined simulacrum of French and Austrian etiquette (the food and wine were Lucullan). He married twice, first to the ultra-Catholic Princess Marie Louise of Bourbon-Parma, the mother of his four children, and then after her death in 1899, to Princess Eleonore Reuss of Köstritz, but Ferdinand’s homosexuality was an open secret (especially among the palace guards), and both marriages were deeply unhappy.
Ferdinand adored jewels – it’s said he kept large precious stones in his pockets to gaze at when he needed to contemplate something beautiful – and many commented on his immaculately manicured hands. But he was also a serious ornithologist, entomologist, and botanist, whose contributions were recognized in an obituary in Nature magazine (02.10.1948). The biggest miscalculation was siding with the Central Powers in World War I, and Ferdinand was forced into exile in 1918, living largely in Coburg until his death, five years after his son and successor, Boris III, had been murdered in still mysterious circumstances (he and his wife Queen Giovanna, daughter of King Vittorio Emanuele III and Queen Elena of Italy, did much to save Bulgaria’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation). Ferdinand is seen in this footage, most likely shot in the early years of World War I, on a train with one of his beloved dogs.

Jay Weissberg