‘Gossip Girl’: How Much Was Blair Waldorf’s Dowry After Marrying Louis?
In Season 5 of Gossip Girl, Blair Waldorf marries Prince Louis of Monaco. But she cannot get a divorce when she wants because of the massive dowry her family would owe. The exact number she would owe is never revealed — something Gossip Girl fans wonder about to this day.
What happened between Blair and Louis on ‘Gossip Girl’
Blair and Louis originally met in Season 4 of Gossip Girl while Blair visited Paris. After Blair returns to New York City, Louis joins her, and they begin dating. When Louis proposes, Blair accepts. However, their relationship is consistently complicated by Blair’s lingering feelings for Chuck Bass.
Blair finds out she is pregnant with Louis’ child. But for a time, she did not know if her baby’s father was Chuck or Louis. At one point in the fifth season, Blair was ready to leave Louis for Chuck. After she is in a car accident with Chuck and loses the baby, she decides to marry Louis.
At their wedding, a video of her professing her love for Chuck is leaked. Louis and Blair go through with the wedding. But Louis tells Blair that they are married in the public eye only. From that moment on, their relationship is only a business deal. When Blair tries to get a divorce, she discovers that the dowry her family would owe would ruin them.
Hints about how much the dowry cost
The remainder of Gossip Girl hints at how much the dowry would cost the Waldorf family. The biggest clue is that Blair’s mother, Eleanor, said she would have to sell her company, Waldorf Designs. It is also common knowledge that while the Waldorf family can still afford their Upper East Side lifestyle, they are not as wealthy as families like the Bass family.
In the end, Chuck secretly pays the dowry. The show indicates that paying the dowry hurt his liquidity, but he still had multi-millions to billions in assets. While Chuck was not broke after paying the dowry, he could not financially help Nate in a future episode because of the money he spent paying the dowry.
“I read recently that Grace Kelly’s family paid a $2 million dollar dowry to Monaco in 1955. Accounting for inflation, that’s about $18 million now, and considering how wealthy the Waldorfs are, $2 mil wouldn’t make them broke but I bet $18 mil would. But chuck they always talk about as a billionaire so he’d be okay. That’s my theory,” a Reddit user speculated.
In Gossip Girl, the characters’ finances did not always make sense. Based on the costs of royal dowries in real life, one can assume Blair’s dowry cost between $15 million and $50 million.
Some fans don’t like that Chuck paid Blair’s dowry on ‘Gossip Girl’
In Gossip Girl, Blair strongly opposed Chuck paying her dowry, as she did not want him to own her. The show ran from 2007–12. Looking back, many fans do not agree with the plot line.
“I never understood this. They made Blair into a pawn that can be bought and sold by Chuck as he pleases. Did the writers never stop for a moment to think about how it makes Blair (who was a strong and independent woman) look? Every time she became a weak girl without any agency of her own with Chuck,” wrote a Reddit user.
