Louis III, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine (German: Großherzog Ludwig III von Hessen und bei Rhein; 9 June 1806, Darmstadt – 13 June 1877, Seeheim) was Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine from 1848 until his death in 1877.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (January 2022) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,118 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Ludwig III. (Hessen-Darmstadt)]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|de|Ludwig III. (Hessen-Darmstadt)}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Quick Facts Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, Reign ...

Louis III
Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine
Reign	5 March 1848 – 13 June 1877
Predecessor	Louis II
Successor	Louis IV
Born	(1806-06-09)9 June 1806 Darmstadt, Hesse
Died	13 June 1877(1877-06-13) (aged 71) Seeheim, Hesse
Burial	Rosenhohe, Darmstadt
Spouse	Princess Mathilde Caroline of Bavaria Anna Magdalena, Freifrau von Hochstädten (morganatic)
House	Hesse-Darmstadt
Father	Louis II, Grand Duke of Hesse
Mother	Wilhelmine of Baden

Close

He was the son of Grand Duke Louis II of Hesse and his consort, Princess Wilhelmine of Baden. He succeeded as Grand Duke in 1848 upon the abdication of his father during the March Revolution in the German states.

During the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, Louis sent word more than once to Queen Victoria, mother-in-law of his nephew and successor Louis, appealing to her to reason on his behalf with the King of Prussia, "in the same sense I had already written before, but it would be utterly useless."^[1]

He was succeeded by his nephew, Louis IV, on 13 June 1877, as his brother Charles (Louis' father) had already died three months previously, in March.

In Munich, on 26 December 1833, he married Princess Mathilde Caroline of Bavaria, eldest daughter of Ludwig I of Bavaria. The marriage produced no children. Princess Mathilde Caroline died in 1862, and in 1868 the Grand Duke remarried, morganatically, to Magdalene Appel who was created Baroness of Hochstädten.