I'm reading Stephen Kotkin's Stalin biography and when describing Imperial Russia and the royal family he mentions that Alexander III originally wanted the tsesarevich, the future Nicholas II, to marry Princess Hélène d'Orléans, the daughter of Prince Philippe d'Orléans, Comte de Paris, the pretender to the French throne. The purpose of this match would supposedly have been to strengthen the bonds between Russia and the French Republic.
I find this slightly odd. Wouldn't the government of France have been provoked by a marriage between the heir to a foreign power and the daughter of a man who claimed that he was the legitimate ruler of France and, consequently, that the Republic was not legitimate?
I would be most grateful if anyone could shed some light on this, and perhaps also on the role of the French pretenders more generally in European diplomacy at the time.
On your first question : it is a provocation, but you have to understand that the Third Republic was weak for most of the 1870s and a part of the 1880s and that legitimists (people who wanted a Bourbon king), orelanists (people who wanted an Orlean king) and bonapartists were still active and credible political parties : the government of France at the time wasn't completely Republican, and the true Republicans were considered the far-left (the main republicans were called "Opportunists", because they pushed for republican reforms only when they felt they could and weren't that much against monarchy). Adolphe Thiers and Mac-Mahon, the first two presidents of the Third Republic were against the Republic and Mac Mahon himself wanted to reestablish a monarch. It took people such as Gambetta, Grévy and Ferry to lead the Republican ideals and impose them. Following Mac Mahon's resignation, the powers of the president were strongly toned down in order to make a point against a powerful executive power, which made the Third Republic an extremely parliamentary system (of which De Gaulle was an extremely strong critic, which led him to establish the semi-presidential system of the Fifth that we still use today).
So basically, it was probably a provocation, but the government was still not legitimate enough to publicly counter that with conviction. I wouldn't be surprised if french pretenders screwed things up in Europe trying to get back to the throne; monarchs were scared shitless by the Revolutionary ideals.
Source: Can't go wrong with Winock's Third Repubic.