Foreign Prince - Rivalry With Peers

Rivalry With Peers

Although during formal receptions at court (the so-called Honneurs de la Cour) their sovereign origins were acknowledged in deferential prose, foreign princes were only members by hereditary right of the nation's main judicial and deliberative body, the Parlement of Paris, if they also held a peerage. In which case, legal precedence derived from its date of registration in that body. Their notorious disputes with ducal peers of the realm, remembered thanks to the memoirs of the duc de Saint-Simon, were due to the princes' lack of rank per se in the Parlement, where peers (the highest tier of French nobility, mostly dukes) held precedence immediately after the princes du sang. Whereas at the King's table and in society generally, the prestige of the princes étrangers exceeded that of the ordinary peer, the dukes denied this pre-eminence, both in the Montmorency-Luxembourg lawsuit and in the Parlement of Paris, regardless of the king's commands.

They also clashed with the upstarts at court favored by Henry III, who raised to peerage, fortune, and singular honor a number of fashionable young men of the minor nobility. These so-called mignons were disdained and resisted by France's princes initially. Later, endowed with hereditary wealth and honors, their families were absorbed into the peerage, and their daughters' dowries were sought by the princely class (e.g., the dukedom of Joyeuse eventually fell by marriage into the princely hands of, respectively, the ducs de Montpensier and the ducs de Guise.

More frequently, they vied for place and prestige with each other, with the princes légitimés, and sometimes even with the princes du sang of the House of Bourbon.