Born on 21 September 1819 in the Élysée Palace, in Paris, she was the first surviving child of Charles Ferdinand, Duke of Berry and his young wife Carolina of Naples and Sicily.

She was only five months old when the Duke of Berry was assassinated while leaving the old opera of Paris by Louis Pierre Louvel, a Bonapartist whose goal was the "extinction of the house of Bourbon".

However, the widowed Duchess of Berry was found to be pregnant and on 29 September 1820 gave birth to a son, Louise's only sibling, the miracle boy Henri d'Artois (1820-1883).

Although Charles had intended that his grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux, would take the throne as Henry V, the politicians who composed the provisional government instead placed on the throne a distant cousin, Louis Philippe of the cadet House of Orléans -a descendant of Louis XIV's only brother-, who agreed to rule as a constitutional monarch.

For a time the Duchess of Berry and her children lived in Bath, but they later moved in order to be closer to Charles X who had settled in Scotland, at the Palace of Holyrood.

The Duchess of Berry settled with her two children at 11 (now 12) Regent Terrace but did not find conditions in Edinburgh agreeable, nor did she accept her son's exclusion from the throne by the Orléanist "King of the French".

The Duchess of Berry was arrested in Nantes, then imprisoned in the Chateau of Blaye where she gave birth to a child born out of a secret morganatic marriage.

Twelve-year-old Louise and her brother were then entrusted to their aunt, the Duchess of Angoulême "Madame the Dauphine", the only surviving child of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

Remarried and living in Brunnsee castle, in Eichfeld (200 km from Vienna), the Duchess of Berry never recovered the custody of her children.

After the death of their uncle the Duke of Angoulême in 1844, the siblings moved with their aunt to Schloss Frohsdorf, a baroque castle just outside Vienna.

In 1832, King Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, half-brother of the Duchess of Berry, had proposed to marry his younger brother, the Count of Lecce who was 16 years old, to Louise who was then 13.

Besides the young age of the princess, the prince of the Two Sicilies was her uncle and only a younger brother in a large family with little prospects, and in spite of his youth, the Count of Lecce already had a deserved reputation as a womanizer.

After a brief sojourn on the island of Malta, he traveled to Naples and then Livorno where he was joined by Louise Marie Thérèse who had just given birth to their first son.

Like the other rulers of the Central Italian states, she and her son were ousted during the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, and they retired to Austrian protection in Venice.

Various schemes following the war, either for her and her son's restoration in Parma, or territorial swaps which might leave them ruling over Tuscany, Modena, or the Romagna, came to nothing, as the whole of central Italy was annexed by Piedmont in March 1860.

Queen Sophie of the Netherlands met Louise Marie in 1862 and described her in a letter to a friend: The other day I made the acquaintance of the Duchesse de Parme, Count Chambord's sister.

She was buried in her grandfather Charles X's crypt at the Franciscan monastery Kostanjevica in Görz, Austria[3] (now Nova Gorica, Slovenia).

Other members of the French Royal Family buried there include her brother Henri, Count of Chambord, her aunt Marie Thérèse of France, and her uncle Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême.