Count of Guise and Duke of Guise were titles in the French nobility.
Originally a seigneurie, Guise was erected into a countship for René, younger son of Louis II of Anjou, in 1417.
While disputed by the House of Luxembourg (1425–1444), it was ultimately retained by the House of Anjou and its descendants, passing in 1520 into the cadet House of Guise, headed by Claude of Lorraine. In 1528, it was elevated to a duchy for him.
This creation became extinct in 1688, and the lands passed to Anne, Pfalzgravine of Simmern, a great-granddaughter of Charles of Lorraine, Duke of Mayenne (whose mother happened to have first married the 5th Duke of Guise) - although she was not the heiress in primogeniture, that being the Duke of Mantova and Montferrat. The dukedom was recreated for her and her husband Henri Jules de Bourbon-Condé in 1704.
On the extinction of the Bourbon-Condé family, her descendants, in 1830, the heirs were the House of Orléans, descendants of Anne's granddaughter's Louise Élisabeth de Bourbon's daughter Louise Henriette de Bourbon, the Duchess of Orleans, and the title of Duke of Guise was used as a courtesy title for members of this family in the nineteenth century, firstly for three sons of Prince Henri, Duke of Aumale, and then for Jean, son of Robert d'Orléans, Duke of Chartres. Jean, Duke of Guise became Orléanist claimant to the throne of France as Jean III in 1926.
Famous quotes containing the words counts and/or guise:
“The man who knows it can’t be done counts the risk, not the reward.”
—Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915)
“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.... Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)