Early Modern — France

Abstract

From the late sixteenth century, more prevalently in the seventeenth, and with certainty in the eighteenth, an informal title of address evolved in its usage at the French court: the prince étranger, or »foreign prince«. At first merely a general description of the dual status of a person who was a foreigner and of princely rank, the phrase evolved into a recognised title delineating specific rank and status for a group of senior courtiers who resided in France and had acquired specific privileges, accorded personally by French sovereigns, but never formally given official standing in French law. It was not, in contrast to the title duc-et-pair or other letters patent granting titles of nobility, registered in the Parlement of Paris or other courts of law. But that was the point – the name prince étranger deliberately carried with it the notion of extra-territoriality, of a status existing outside the jurisdiction of French sovereignty. These princes, or so they maintained, lived under the protection of the French king, and worked with him as allies and clients, but were free to leave his service at any time. They based their claims to this status on their position as junior members of sovereign princely families in the Holy Roman Empire or in Italy, or as sovereigns themselves of independent territories, however small, or as potential heirs to foreign kingdoms, real or imagined. Few historians have dedicated attention specifically to the princes étrangers, and their views are sometimes conflicting. The now standard definition by Robert Oresko, points out the inherent contradiction of courtiers of French monarchs who presented themselves as independent members of foreign sovereign houses and at the same time as subjects of the Crown, due to extensive properties held within French jurisdiction 1 . In contrast, Guy Antonetti de-stressed the foreign quality of the foreign princes, and instead posed a thesis whereby the adoption of such a title was based mostly on the factor of blood relations of the princes étrangers with the royal house of France 2 . With the emergence of trans-nationalism