Included in that royal category (in descending order) were: This hierarchy in France evolved slowly at the king's court, barely taking into account any more exalted status a foreign prince might enjoy in his own dynasty's realm.
Deposed rulers and their consorts (e.g. King James II of England, Queen Christina of Sweden, Duchess Suzanne-Henriette of Mantua, etc.)
Some ruled small border realms (e.g., the principalities of Dombes, Orange, Neuchâtel, Sedan), while others inherited or were granted large properties in France (e.g., Guise, Rohan, La Tour d'Auvergne).
Their high birth not only attracted the king's attention, but sometimes drew the allegiance of frustrated noble courtiers, soldiers-of-fortune and henchmen, ambitious bourgeoisie, malcontents and even provinces in search of a protector (e.g., the Neapolitan Republic) -- often against or in rivalry with the French Crown itself.
[2] 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.
During the reign of Louis XIV, the families which held the status of prince étranger were: Most renowned among the foreign princes was the militantly Roman Catholic House of Guise which,[2] as the Valois kings approached extinction and the Huguenots aggrandized in defense of Protestantism, cast ambitious eyes upon the throne itself, hoping to occupy it but determined to dominate it.
He was obliged to hastily wed a princesse étrangère, Catherine of Cleves, to avoid bodily harm from Margaret's offended brothers (three of whom eventually succeeded to the crown as, respectively, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III).
[4] After the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre the Guises, triumphant in a kingdom purged of Protestant rivals, proved overbearing toward the king, driving Henry III to have the duke assassinated in his presence.
The genealogist par excellence of the French nobility, Père Anselme, initially deprecated such neologistic practice with insertion of a "dit" ("styled" or "so-called") in his biographical entries, but after the reign of Louis XIV he records the usage among princes étrangers without qualification.
Although Saint-Simon and other peers were loath to concede these prerogatives to the princes étrangers, they were even more jealous of two other privileges, the so-called pour ("for") and the tabouret ("stool").
Whereas the queen had her throne, the filles de France and petite-filles their armchairs, and princesses du sang were entitled to cushioned seats with hard backs, duchesses whose husbands were peers sat, gowned and bejewelled, in a semicircle around the queen and lesser royalties on low, unsteady stools without any back support — and reckoned themselves fortunate among the women of France.
Most notable among these was Prince Eugene of Savoy, whose cold reception at the court of his mother's family drove him into the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, where he became the martial scourge of France for a generation.
[2][6] Likewise denied princely precedence was Frédéric Maurice, comte d'Auvergne (1642–1707), the nephew and protégé of Marshal Turenne, who founded a Netherlands branch of the La Tour family through his 1662 marriage to Henrietta of Hohenzollern-Hechingen (1642–1698), Margravine of Bergen-op-Zoom.
Although his elder brother ruled Bouillon, his younger brother became Grand Almoner and a cardinal, and Auvergne himself held as sinecures the governorship of Limousin and colonel generalship of the French Light Cavalry, when neither his birth rank nor his wife's Brabantine domain persuaded Louis XIV to allow him precedence before knights of the Order of the Saint Esprit, let alone to share in Bouillon's rank above ducal peers, Auvergne refused to attend the Order's presentations at court.