Prince du sang
Under the House of Capet of France, the monarchy was feudal, and the younger sons and grandsons of kings did not have rights or precedence based on their royal descent.
Under Philip Augustus, the Duke of Burgundy, a peer of France, could be reckoned to be mightier than the Count of Dreux, a "baron of the second rank", even though the latter was a paternal cousin of the king, while the former was only a distant agnate.
Finally, in 1576, King Henry III of France issued an edict, to counter the growing power of the House of Guise, which made the princes of the blood supreme over the peerage, and amongst themselves, the closer in the line of succession would outrank the more distant, without regard to the actual title that they held.
In France, the rank of prince du sang was the highest held at court after the immediate family of the king during the ancien régime and the Bourbon Restoration.
During the last century of the reign of the House of Valois, when religious strife brought forth rivals for the throne, prince du sang became restricted in use to refer to dynasts who were distant members of the royal family (i.e., those who were not children or grandchildren in the male line of a French king and, as such, entitled to specific, higher rank of their own as enfants and petits-enfants de France).
In practice, only the agnatic descendants of Saint Louis IX, such as the Valois and the Bourbons, were acknowledged as princes du sang.
The Courtenays descended in legitimate male-line from King Louis VI, but had become impoverished, minor nobles over the centuries.
In 1715 Louis-Charles de Courtenay, his son Charles-Roger and his brother Roger were once again rebuffed in their attempt to seek recognition of their status.
[2] Those who held this rank were usually styled by their main ducal peerage, but sometimes other titles were used, indicating a more precise status than prince du sang.
As his descent from a prior monarch went back generations, in practice, it was not always clear who was entitled to the rank and thus succession to the throne should the main line fail, and it often took a specific act of the king to make the determination.
The rank was held for life: the birth of a new, more senior prince who qualified for the position did not deprive the current holder of his use of the style.
The title should theoretically have passed in 1752 to Prince Philip, Duke of Calabria, the first great-grandson of the Grand Dauphin that was neither a fils de France nor a petit-fils de France; however, Louis XV left the title to the House of Orléans rather than to the Spanish branch of the Bourbons, which had renounced its right to succeed to the French throne by the Treaty of Utrecht.
This meant that Louis Philippe, duke of Orleans in the late 18th century, was the First Prince of the Blood immediately before the French Revolution, entitling him to sit on various bodies, such as the 1787 Assembly of Notables, which he used as a platform to advocate liberal reforms.
Originally, the eldest son was given the title of Duc d'Enghien, but that changed in 1709 when the Condés lost the rank of premier prince.
The most famous holder of this honorific was: Others included: This address was used by the head of the most junior branch of the House of Bourbon, the comte de Soissons.
