The Duke of Saint-Simon is one of the most famous memoirists of all time, and the most meticulous and detailed account available to us for the court of Louis XIV of France. He’s not always the most reliable source, as he particularly enjoys boasting, about his powerful friends, about his own intellect, and so on. One of his most persistent boasts in his memoirs is that his lineage is impeccable, in ancientness and nobility, and that he therefore deserved to be treated with the utmost of deference (which he rarely got), and deserved a seat at the table of royal government. Yet how much do most people interested in the history of Versailles know about this lineage?  Who were these exalted ancestors of the Duke of Saint-Simon?  Most specialists of the history of the French court or of French literature of the 18^th century probably could not tell you.

On another level entirely, the name Saint-Simon means something else to historians of a different stripe, those who are interested in the social and political movements of the early nineteenth century. ‘Saint-Simonians’ were those who followed the ideologies of the Count of Saint-Simon, a political and economic theorist who called for a form of socialist utopia in which science and industry would drive society. The two men, the Duke and the Count, were in fact distant cousins, though their ideologies were worlds apart.

Both the Duke of Saint-Simon and the Count of Saint-Simon were members of the family of Rouvroy, which did indeed have ancient roots. The small towns of Rouvroy and Saint-Simon are both in the far north of France, in Picardy—the village of Saint-Simon in particular is in the easternmost part of the Province of Picardy, the Vermandois, one of the most ancient feudal counties of France.  The earliest known members of the family emerge from medieval documents as having close ties to the counts of Vermandois, as vassals, officers and agents, and this proximity is what probably led to the exaggeration by the Duke of Saint-Simon in his writings that they were not just servants of the Vermandois dynasty, but members, from a junior branch.  What makes this claim even more noteworthy is that the House of Vermandois itself was a junior branch of the Imperial dynasty of Charlemagne.  By claiming direct lineal kinship with the Carolingians, Saint-Simon was, not very subtly, asserting that his family had a better claim to the French throne than Louis XIV, whose ancestor, Hugh Capet, ‘usurped’ the throne from the legitimate Carolingian heirs in the late 10^th century. (see the chart at the bottom of this page)

Upon closer examination, the weak link in this dynastic story seems to be a certain Eudes de Vermandois ‘the foolish’, who, according to Père Anselme’s massive royal genealogy of the late 17^th century, only appears in some accounts, while his more well-documented sister, Adèle, is known to have transmitted the county by marriage back into the royal house of France. Anselme adds that those who mention Eudes explain that he had been disinherited in about 1077 because he was ‘of little understanding and without government’ (ie, he was probably mentally ill). Nevertheless, Eudes is said to have married an heiress called Avide, daughter of the Lord of Saint-Simon. He adopted her name and started a new dynasty. The last lord of Saint-Simon of this line died around 1330, leaving his lands to his sister, Marguerite, who in 1332 married Mathieu de Rouvroy, ‘le Borgne’ (‘one-eyed’). Mathieu had lost an eye in battle in service to the Capetian monarchs in battles along the northern frontier of Picardy and Flanders, and was appointed governor of Lille. His ancestors had filled important leadership roles like this, but the most prominent were on the far side of the Kingdom, Renaut and Alphonse both serving as governors of the Kingdom of Navarre in the late 13^th and early 14^th centuries. Mathieu’s son, Jean, would also lose an eye in battle, and similarly sported the nickname ‘the one-eyed’, before he was killed at Agincourt in 1415. Those looking for physical remains of the Rouvroy de Saint-Simon family won’t find very much in Picardy. Fragments of ancient castles can be found at Saint-Simon, Rouvroy, Clastres and other family estates, but most of the land today is wide rolling countryside. For imposing châteaux, we’ll need to travel south, to later centres of power, to the northwest and southwest of Paris (Sandricourt, La Ferté-Vidame), and even further to the lands northeast of Bordeaux (Ruffec and Giscours)—though even with these, they are either ruins or much later rebuilds.

But before the family expanded south, they expanded further north. Before he died, Jean de Rouvroy married a Flemish heiress, Jeanne d’Haverskerque, Lady of Rasse (or Râches, in Flanders), and their two sons founded the two main lines of the House of Rouvroy-Saint-Simon. The elder, lords of Saint-Simon and other properties in Vermandois and Picardy, rose through service to the late medieval dukes of Burgundy (who governed Picardy) and kings of France, were named viscount of Clastres, but never fully joined the ranks of the grandees of France until the eighteenth century, aided by the pre-eminence of the junior branch, the lords of Rasse. We will return to the senior branch below. The junior branch of Saint-Simon-Rasse held several lordships near Orchies and Douai, and were appointed to important military posts along the sensitive frontiers of Flanders, until one of these rose to the high rank of maréchal de camp in 1591. His son, Louis, was also a commander in the wars of religion in the 1580s-90s, and, like many nobles, bankrupted his family in supplying his own men with food and supplies. His three sons, however, managed to rebuild, and even surpass the family fortunes, with the middle son in particular, Claude, becoming a royal favourite.  This was the father of the famous memoirist.

Claude de Rouvroy, Comte de Rasse, was born in 1607, and was appointed to be a page in the household of the Dauphin Louis. Once the Dauphin became king, as Louis XIII, Claude remained one of his close companions, a Gentleman of his Chamber, named Premier Equerry of the King in 1627, then only a year later, Master of the Wolf Hunt of France (Grand Louvetier), one of the Great Offices of the Crown.  Like most Bourbons, Louis XIII passionately loved hunting, so it is significant that his closest friends were named to positions like Master of the Hunt, Master Falconer, etc; this ensured that they were always near him in his day-to-day activities. Claude was also one of the young men of the court best known as a dancer, an important and often politically charged evening pastime, and indeed, he remained a protector of musicians for the rest of his life. Gossips who always wondered why the King had thus far not produced any children with the Queen (and why he had no mistresses) naturally jumped to the conclusion that the King was having an affair with the attractive Claude de Rouvroy.  And maybe he was.

In 1630, Claude was named governor of the fortress of Blaye, a very lucrative post as one of the keys to controlling the defense of Bordeaux and Aquitaine, and governor of the of royal châteaux of Versailles and Saint-Germain-en-Laye.  By 1635 he had accumulated enough money through his various court offices and government appointments to purchase a grand estate at La Ferté-Vidame, in the former province of Perche (southwest of Paris, bordering on Normandy) which came with an interesting title of ‘vidame’ de Chartres.  The cathedral town of Chartres was about 50 km to the east, and the vidames were secular lords who aided the bishop in the administration of his lands. The lords of La Ferté were vidames of Chartres from the early 12^th century; their castle was older, built in the 10^th century, and, as rebuilt in the 14^th by the Vendôme family, would become the Rouvroy family’s primary country seat for the next century and half.

The royal favourite, Claude de Rouvroy, also convinced his distant cousins to cede the original family lands to him—the seigneuries of Saint-Simon, Clastres and others in Vermandois—and these were erected into a duchy-peerage by the King in 1635. But the new Duke of Saint-Simon was almost immediately disgraced—for what sounds like a pretty flimsy reason of defending his uncle who had failed to defend a key fortress in the north, though 1636 was a fairly stressful year for the King, as Spanish armies came within a hair’s breadth of invading the Isle de France and Paris itself. I wonder if it didn’t have more to do with the fact that Cardinal Richelieu, the real power in France, was finding it difficult to control the King’s favourites and worked for their removal (one of Louis XIII’s only real ‘mistresses’, Louise de La Fayette, was also sent away later that year), in part so he could place his own creature within the King’s intimate circles: note the swift rise of the young and debonnaire Marquis de Cinq-Mars, a client of the Cardinal’s, was only a year later.

The 1^st Duke of Saint-Simon retired to Blaye and did not return to favour at court until the King was on his deathbed in 1643 (and notably following the disgrace and horrific execution of Cinq-Mars in late 1642). The Duke’s son claims in his memoirs that the King, overjoyed with the reconciliation, promised to name his erstwhile favourite Master of the Horse (Grand Écuyer), one of the top court offices in France, and that he died before he could make it official. Saint-Simon firmly believed the office was then ‘stolen’ by Henry de Lorraine, Count of Harcourt, a favourite of the new Queen Regent, and it was then passed on to his son and grandsons in the reign of Louis XIV (they did in fact control this prestigious office until the Revolution).  This ‘theft’ (for which there is no real evidence beyond the word of Saint-Simon) is the source of many, many pages of outrage and bile in the Memoirs of Saint-Simon towards the House of Lorraine. In fact he did lose the position of Master of the Wolf-Hunt and that of Premier Equerry of the King, in the new regime of the Regent Anne, but one does wonder why exactly the former consort of Louis XIII disliked Saint-Simon so much.

The 1^st Duke of Saint-Simon outlived his royal patron by fifty years (that’s right, fifty) but is almost never mentioned in the histories of the Regency of Queen Anne or the court of young Louis XIV. His elder brother, Charles, Marquis de Saint-Simon, was more prominent: a lieutenant general and captain of the château of Chantilly in the 1630s-50s, the primary seat of the Prince of Condé, first prince of the blood, and one of the most powerful men in the Kingdom. The Marquis also made the first marriage in the family from amongst the high aristocracy, Louise de Crussol, daughter of the Duke of Uzès, and Dame d’honneur of Queen Anne. Charles introduced his wife’s daughter from a previous marriage, Diane-Henriette de Budos de Portes, to his brother Claude, and they were married in 1644. But neither Charles nor Claude had a son to carry on the name or the title, so Claude remarried, at age 65, to try to beget an heir. The bride was the 32 year old Charlotte de l’Aubespine, Dame de Ruffec, daughter and co-heiress of the Marquis de Châteauneuf and Eleonore de Volvire, Marquise de Ruffec.  Ruffec was a large estate in Angoulême (now the Department of Charente) north of Bordeaux. A son, Louis (known as the Vidame de Chartres as heir) was born in 1675, but as he complains in his memoirs, just as his father was introducing him to the world of the court and helping to start his military career, he died in 1693.

The 2^nd Duke of Saint-Simon, the memoirist, therefore had to make his own way. His aunts and uncles were dead, and his elder half-sister too, Gabrielle-Louise, who had married very well, to the Duke of Brissac, but died with no children. So Saint-Simon had no well-placed in-laws or cousins.  He was not entirely without support, however: the King was in fact his godfather, which entailed a certain level of protection, and certainly had a hand in his marriage, in 1695, to a daughter of another duke, and one very much in favour, Guy-Aldonce de Durfort, Duke of Lorges, Marshal of France. The new Duchess of Saint-Simon, Marie-Gabrielle, was said by many to be the more successful courtier of the couple, and it surely humiliated the Duke when, in 1706, the King talked about appointing him ambassador to Rome—finally a prestigious posting!—but his advisors counseled him sharply to do nothing without first seeking the advice of his wife.

The Rome posting never materialised, and the King never did give the Duke of Saint-Simon the kind of appointment he felt he deserved in his administration. Nor was his military career any more successful, and after being passed over for a promotion in 1702, he quit the army, and made a big show about it, thus losing any chances he may have had of ever returning to the King’s favour.  His wife, meanwhile, continued to thrive, and in 1710 was appointed Dame d’honneur (chief lady-in-waiting) to one of the royal princesses, the King’s favourite grand-daughter (via his illegitimate daughter), the Duchess of Berry. The Duke placed his hopes in this next generation, the grandchildren of the King, and became a member of the circle of the Duke of Burgundy, heir to the throne from 1711. The two young men shared a vision of a new France that would be built after the old king would (finally!) die, a kingdom based on traditional values of Christian piety, and especially respect for the old aristocratic families, like Saint-Simon’s of course, who had been cruelly abased and so ignored by the Sun King in his vanity and false notions of absolutism in government.  At least this is how Saint-Simon viewed it, but these ideas are supported by the writings of the Duke of Burgundy’s former tutor, the Archbishop Fénélon, whose thoughts on this subject had earned him exile from the court.  All they had to do was wait: Louis XIV was now 73 years old.

These plans for a bright future were dashed however, when the Duke of Burgundy died, in the Spring of 1712. The old king Louis XIV finally died himself in 1715, and Saint-Simon saw some hope in the new regime of his friend and close contemporary in age, though quite different in temperament, the Duke of Orléans, who now became regent for the child-king, Louis XV. Saint-Simon’s vision of a decentralised government where the grand old aristocrats were once again given premier place in running the state was tested by the Regent (in various councils, known as ‘polysynody’), but failed miserably since all the aristocrats did was bicker over issues of precedence and their own special interests. Unable really to find his place on the various governing councils of the Regent, the Duke looked elsewhere for a place to express his superior rank, and was gratified with the post of Extraordinary Ambassador to Spain in 1721, with the specific task of requesting the hand of the Infanta Mariana Victoria for Louis XV. His mission was successful in that a marriage contract was signed (though later rejected), but also personally, in obtaining the great favour from the King of Spain (the former Duke of Anjou, another of Louis XIV’s grandsons) of having his first son awarded the Order of the Golden Fleece, the highest honour in Spain, and his second son the title of Grandee of Spain, a rank which was recognised at the French court as equal to a dukedom, with all its privileges. That same year, he negotiated a prestigious marriage for his only daughter, Charlotte, with a prince, Charles-Louis-Antoine de Hénin-Liétart, Prince of Chimay, who was one of the leading grandees of the Spanish Netherlands, a lieutenant-general in both French and Spanish armies, had a Cardinal-Archbishop for a brother, and, even more thrilling for Saint-Simon, was considered to be a sovereign prince, albeit in the tiny principality of Revin and Fumay (in the Ardennes). This family even claimed descent from the Carolingians, via the ancient House of Alsace, so Saint-Simon must have been the happiest father-of-the-bride who ever lived.

But the ambassadorial trip to Spain (and undoubtedly his daughter’s significant dowry needed to attract the Prince of Chimay) ruined the Duke of Saint-Simon’s finances, and his future in politics was dashed when the Regent Orléans fell from power and then died, in 1723, and his replacement at the head of government was an old enemy of Saint-Simon, Cardinal Dubois. Saint-Simon retreated to his château at La Ferté-Vidame, and spent the next decades writing his famous memoirs. The grand château still retained its medieval appearance, with eight great towers. The Duke did maintain a residence in Paris, but he moved from place to place—the building at 17 rue du Cherche-Midi in the 6^th arrondissement (not far from the Luxembourg Gardens) bears a plaque indicating that this was where he wrote the memoirs—but he was not often seen at court.

The 2^nd Duke of Saint-Simon knew he needed to try to maintain to the family’s position at court and in the government while he languished in the provinces. In 1727 he oversaw the marriage of his elder son, Jacques-Louis, to a daughter of the Duke of Gramont, and in 1728, he formally resigned his peerage to him, thus allowing him to sit as a peer in the Parlement of Paris and appear at court in the rank of a duke. To differentiate father and son, the latter was known as the ‘Duke of Ruffec’, taking his title from his grandmother’s marquisate near Bordeaux.  When Jacques-Louis died in 1746, the old Duke once again resigned his peerage, now for the second son, Armand-Jean, who was now legally the 4^th Duke of Saint-Simon, but he too predeceased his father, in 1754. And when the by now fairly ancient memoirist-duke died himself in 1755, there only remained his daughter, the Princess of Chimay (who had no children), and one daughter by the eldest son, Marie-Christine, who had married the Comte de Valentinois, younger brother of the Prince of Monaco.

The Countess of Valentinois had a very good court career—she inherited her uncle’s title ‘Grandee of Spain’, which meant she was treated as a duchess (or even better, since her Grimaldi husband was ranked as a ‘foreign prince’), and was given the important court office of Dame de Compagnie of ‘Mesdames’ (the unmarried daughters of Louis XV), in 1762, then Dame d’atours of the Comtesse de Provence (the sister-in-law of the future Louis XVI), in 1770, and finally the same princess’s Dame d’honneur, in 1772. Like many court aristocrats of the later 18^th century, however, she ran into financial troubles. Although she had inherited the magnificent château and estates at La Ferté-Vidame, and the estates in the south of France at Ruffec, she sold these off: Ruffec to the Comte de Broglie in 1762; and La Ferté to the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde in 1764 (who significantly remodelled it). Just as she was reaching her apogee, as first lady of the second lady of France, she died in 1774, childless, and with her, the junior branch of the House of Rouvroy.

But the memory of the memoirist persisted. The 2^nd Duke of Saint-Simon had understood the importance of solidifying the position of all of his dynasty, not just the immediate family, and reached out as a patron to his very distant cousins from the senior line of the family. As early as 1712, he looked after Claude-Charles de Rouvroy-Falvy, who lost his father that year, and helped him acquire a lucrative benefice, the Abbey of Jumièges in Normandy, in 1716. The young Abbot accompanied the Duke on his embassy to Spain in 1721-22, and was first promoted to higher clergy as Bishop of Noyon in 1731, then Metz, in 1733.  Neither Noyon nor Metz were amongst the wealthiest sees or the most prominent politically in the French church, but to the status-conscious and history-loving Saint-Simon, they were perfect: Noyon, though one of the smallest dioceses in France, was also one of the oldest, and its bishop was one of the six ecclesiastical peers who crowned the monarch; Metz was formerly an Imperial bishopric and thus entitled to be addressed as ‘prince’ and ‘highness’, or so Claude-Charles thought.  His assumption of princely airs and graces (and claims to regalian rights, ie, as if he was a sovereign, some judiciary, some financial), caused the local Parlement of Metz, in 1737, to issue a formal statement prohibiting him from using the title ‘Prince of Metz’.  He was a true heir to Saint-Simon. And in fact, the Duke left him his papers in his will, including the famous memoir manuscript, though he never actually took possession due to legal complications, before he himself died five years later in 1760.

The Bishop of Metz in turn had promoted the career of another cousin, from an even more remote branch, Charles-François de Rouvroy-Sandricourt. He was first appointed to be the Bishop’s Grand Vicar (chief administrator), then given his own diocese as Bishop of Agde (on the Mediterranean coast) in 1759. He survived into the world of the French Revolution, but continued the family tradition of clinging to traditional values, refusing to swear the oath supporting the new ‘state church’ of 1790, and succumbing to the guillotine in 1794.

Another cousin, Claude-Anne, from the line of Rouvroy-Montbléru, raised the military profile of the family in the later 18^th century, and even managed to revive, in a round-about way, the title of Duke of Saint-Simon. Both Claude-Anne and his brother Claude (a popular family name) served in the French army aiding the Americans in their quest for independence (both of them notably at Yorktown). The younger was named one of the founding members of the Order of Cincinnatus, the hereditary order founded to commemorate the heroes of the American Revolution, and his descendants continued to bear this honour until they died out in the early 20^th century. Claude-Anne, a field marshal from 1780, served as a deputy of the Second Estate (the nobility) from Angoulême (where he held properties, notably the château of Giscours) to the Estates General of 1789. Soon after the outbreak of revolution, the Marquis de Saint-Simon (or Marquis de Montbléru) emigrated, to Spain, where he was named a lieutenant-general in the Spanish army and gathered together a group of fellow émigrés to form the Légion catholique et royale des Pyrénées (aka Légion de Saint-Simon) in 1793. In 1796, he was named by Carlos IV second in command of the Army of Navarre, Captain-General of the Province of Old Castile, and colonel of the Regiment de Bourbon, which he led in combat in Majorca, Catalonia, and Portugal. He was rewarded by his services first with the title of Grandee of Spain, first class, 1803, then Duke of Saint-Simon and Capitàn General of Spain (the equivalent of a Marshal of France), by the restored King Ferdinand VII, in 1814. He remained in Spain as colonel of the Walloon Guard, but stayed out of politics. His properties like Giscours has been confiscated and sold, so he remained in Spain, in Pamplona or Madrid, where he died in 1819.

The Duque de Saint-Simon left behind only a daughter, ‘Mademoiselle de Saint-Simon’ who is known today for a dramatic painting by Charles Lafont depicting the moment she begged the Emperor Napoléon to spare her father’s life after he had been captured in 1808.

The Duke’s heir was his nephew, Henri-Jean-Victor, who had led a very different life in the military, serving from age 18 in the armies of the French republic, including campaigns in Spain against the very same royalist forces being led by his uncle.  From 1809, he commanded one of the guards regiments of Joseph Bonaparte (Napoléon’s brother) as King of Spain. Like so many aristocrats, the Vicomte de Saint-Simon rallied to Louis XVIII at the Restoration, in 1814, and remained loyal during the Hundred Days, accompanying the King to Ghent, where he was named a maréchal de camp. When his uncle died, Henri-Jean-Victor succeeded as second Spanish Duke of Saint-Simon, and confirmed as a peer of France by Louis XVIII in 1819 (though with the rank of marquis, not duke). Crucially for our story here, he petitioned the King to formally release from state possession the already famous, but unpublished, memoirs of his distant cousin. The first complete version of the Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon appeared under his patronage in 1829-30 in 27 volumes.

The Marquis de Saint-Simon (he didn’t start to use the ducal title until the 1840s) entered royal service; he was an ambassador first in Lisbon, then in Copenhagen, before being named Governor-General of the French colonial possessions in India, based in Pondichéry, in 1834. Recalled in 1841, he played a role in the Senate in support of the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and was promoted to lieutenant general in the army, though he was ineffectual in preventing the revolution of 1848 that swept this regime from power. As a good political chameleon, he supported the proclamation of the Second Empire in 1851, and was named Senator of France. Late in life, he ceded his rights to the manuscript of Saint-Simon’s memoirs to the publisher Hachette, who produced what is now considered one of the premier editions of the memoirs, edited by Adolphe Chéruel, in 1856-58. As he was dying in 1865, the ‘6^th Duke of Saint-Simon’ tried to have one of his sons from his second marriage—born long before the marriage—recognised as a legal heir (and thus potentially 3^rd Duque de Saint-Simon, Grandee of Spain), but was rebuffed by all legal authorities in France and Spain.

Had he been still alive, the last member of the family to have left a significant mark on history, Henri de Saint-Simon (he ceased to use a title during the Revolution), might have applauded this attempt to transfer noble status onto the son of double adultery. The Comte de Saint-Simon was actually a double-dose Saint-Simon, with his father heading up the junior branch of Sandricourt, and his mother from the more senior line of Falvy. The line of Sandricourt, an estate northwest of Paris, a marquisate from 1652, had been a distinct branch from the early 16^th century. They became in fact more prominent than their cousins at the court of the last Valois kings, but lost prominence under the Bourbons. But they were always there, and in the late 18^th century, the numerous brothers and sisters of Count Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon de Sandricourt all served in the army or the navy and at court—one of the most prominent was his sister, Marie-Louise, Dame de Montléart, who succeeded her Saint-Simon cousin as Dame d’honneur of the King’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse de Provence, in 1786. Claude-Henri (who went by Henri) served in America under General Rochambeau, and like his cousin, was awarded the Order of Cincinnatus. He was the King’s Lieutenant in the city and region of Metz, but quit military service to devote himself to industry and plans to build canals and factories.

He embraced the Revolution fully, made a lot of money working for the regime, then lost it all, and turned instead to writing, though not much came of it until 1817, when he published l’Industrie, an important forerunner in the history of socialist thought. More successful though brief, was a periodical he founded, l’Organisateur, to criticise the government and make plans for a better system, but it was shut down in 1820, after only a few issues. He published more books advocating the primary of industry for building a more equitable future, then began to write about philosophy and how a new religion could be forged out of the best parts of Christianity in the  service of the state, society and its poorest members. His final work, Nouveau christianisme: Dialogues entre un conservateur et un novateur, was left unfinished when he died in 1825.

Henri de Saint-Simon left no descendants, but his brother, a naval officer, did, and there remains a Rouvroy de Saint-Simon family inscribed in the official lists of the modern French nobility.  In fact, one of the caretakers of such lists was Fernand, Comte de Saint-Simon, one of the authorities on the history of the French nobility in the 1970s.  There are no grand buildings left associated with the Saint-Simon family (the grand château that exists today at Sandricourt was built in the 19^th century by a different family—and had interesting inhabitants in the 20^th century, including the American millionaire Robert Walton Goelet, whose first cousin Mary had joined the British aristocracy as Duchess of Roxburghe, and Hermann Goering during the occupation of France in the Second World War).

The still monumental ruins of the château of La Ferté-Vidame, a symbol of the lost world of ancien régime France. Looted and sacked during the Revolution, it became the property of the Orléans family after the Restoration, then confiscated by Napoleon III and sold and re-sold many times, until the French state acquired it and used it as the home of a religious charity aimed at rehabilitating imprisoned women.  In 1991 the state ceded it to the department of Eure-et-Loir who has restored the grounds and opened them to the public.

(images from Wikimedia Commons)

The family history of the dukes of Villeroy is one of the best examples of a the successful rise of a non-noble family into the very highest ranks of the French aristocracy, even to the point of being considered members of the intimate royal circle at Versailles. Indeed, one of these, the 2^nd Duke, might be considered one of the few men Louis XIV would have called ‘friend’, a person who certainly would have made an intriguing contribution to the recent television show Versailles. The same might be said for his sister, Catherine, one of the great intriguers of the French court, whose brazen attempt to bring down the power of Madame de Maintenon led instead to her downfall and banishment from court.

The story of the Neufville de Villeroy family is also a neatly self-contained saga of the Ancien Régime, from their rising up in the era of ‘new men’ promoted in the exuberance of a reforming monarchy in the early 16^th century, to obtaining the highest positions of duke and peer, marshal of France and provincial governor in the 17^th century, then coming to a complete and swift end via the guillotine during the French Revolution. It is also one of the best examples of a family whose origins were most often obscured by the large-scale genealogical volumes produced in the eighteenth century. Rising from the status of a propertied government minister into the court nobility was acceptable for the image the monarchy and its supporters wanted to portray; rising from fish merchants was not.

Because of this desire to obscure a family’s origins in ‘trade’, there are therefore a lot of conflicting accounts about the origins of the Neufville family. Their surname means simply ‘new town’, but there’s no real indication what this refers to. It seems that they were successful merchants dealing in fish from one of the great port cities in Normandy, Rouen, who in the 15^th century transferred their business to the great central market in Paris known as Les Halles. Near this great commercial centre, they built one of the many residences that later bore the name Villeroy, named for a lordship they acquired by marriage in the 16^th century (see below). This Hôtel de Villeroy (rue des Bourdonnais) was conveniently located between Les Halles and the government centres a few streets to the west clustered around the Louvre. Richard Neufville combined his thriving mercantile business with administrative positions, first looking after the Paris residence of the Duke of Burgundy as his maître d’hôtel, then as a tax official for the district of Paris.

His son, Nicolas, seems to have added a ‘de’ around 1500 when he acquired some small seigneuries in the environs of Paris, and shortly thereafter the prestigious post of royal secretary. Most importantly, he had married well, to Geneviève le Gendre, whose father and brother (also from Rouen) both held offices of treasurer of France (high ranking finance officials), and Nicolas soon joined them in this position. He served Louis XII and Francis I as a finance secretary and a privy councillor, as did his son, Nicolas II. The latter in particular became an intimate financial officer for Francis I, financial secretary for his private affairs, and treasurer of his order of knighthood. He also continued the family’s rise in prominence within the city of Paris as administrator of the Hôtel-Dieu, the most prominent charity hospital. And he too married well, first to a great-niece of the Chancellor of France (Briçonnet), and then two more times within Parisian parlementaire circles. In the late 1530s, he secured for his son, Nicolas III, his mother’s claims to the Le Gendre properties, Villeroy and Alincourt, on opposite sides of Paris. Alincourt, in the small province known as the Vexin, was situated perfectly on the route between Paris and Rouen to allow convenient contacts with their former business network in Normandy. It possessed a medieval castle which was modified in the 16^th century and still exists today, in private hands.

The lordship of Villeroy was to the south-east of Paris, in the region of great forests so cherished by royalty and the nobility for its hunting (the grandest of all these, Fontainebleau, is in the same general direction). Built on the banks of the River Essonne, near its confluence with the Seine, Villeroy was part of the lordship of Mennecy which had long been a fief of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, but was sold off to financiers in the 15^th century and eventually acquired by one these, Le Gendre. In the 1560s, Nicolas III de Neufville rebuilt the château and enlarged its gardens. The house was rebuilt in a neo-classical style in the 18^th century, and the family supported the opening of a nearby porcelain manufactury. This was closed by the 1780s, and in the 1790s, after the extinction of the family, the château was pulled down. Only the park remains today.

Nicolas III Le Gendre de Neufville, Seigneur de Villeroy and Alincourt, had a career much like his father, a royal finance secretary and a Parisian city official, who also married within the circle of Parisian high finance. He rose higher in the ranks, however, serving as a Secretary of State for King Henry II and his Lieutenant in the Ile de France, and ending his career in the top position in the hierarchy of the city of Paris, the Provost of the Merchants (essentially the mayor), 1566 to 1570.

Nicolas IV was therefore launched very well into his career, and would become one of the leading government figures of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. In addition to serving as one of the chief ministers of Charles IX, Henry III, Henry IV and Marie de Medici—in a long career spanning from the 1560s to his death in 1617—he and his wife, Madeleine de l’Aubespine, also hosted a leading Parisian salon at their home the Hôtel de Villeroy. She was a leading light in the Parisian intellectual scene, a hostess and patron of major poets like Ronsard, and known herself as a poet and a translator.

Père Anselme’s genealogical history of the family praises Nicolas IV as ‘a strong supporter of men of letters, with the reputation as one of the wisest and skilful men at court’. He succeeded his father-in-law as a Secretary of State in 1567, and soon became the close personal secretary of King Charles IX, then one of the most influential ministers, particularly in foreign affairs, of King Henry III. Initially a supporter of the Catholic League, Villeroy transferred his allegiance to Henry IV after his conversion to Catholicism in 1594, and was confirmed by the new king as a Minister of State. Towards the end of his career, his lordship of Villeroy was raised to the status of marquisate. He had been influential in the fall of the chief minister, Sully, in 1611, but was himself pushed aside in 1614.

By this point, however, the Neufvilles’ place was secure as a court family, and Nicolas V’s only son, Charles, Marquis de Villeroy, was already acting as a grandee nobleman, with the kinds of provincial and court offices that went along with such status. Charles had made a name for himself in the early years of the 17^th century as ambassador to Rome (two of his sons were born there and were honoured with significant godfathers, who gave them their names: Ferdinand for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Camille for Cardinal Borghese, the future Pope Paul V). On his return to France, Charles was named Governor of Lyon, and the neighbouring provinces of Lyonnais, Forez and Beaujolais, 1612, a powerful position in France’s second city that his family would turn into a nearly hereditary possession, retaining the governorship of these provinces until the Revolution. Charles also retained his father’s position on the Council of State, and obtained a court office, Grand Marshal of the Lodgings of the Royal Household, the officer in charge of distributing rooms when the court moved from one residence to another, or traveled in the countryside or on campaign. He was therefore key in determining access to the king, a crucial element of court life and royal patronage in this period. The Marquis de Villeroy displayed the perfect blending of administrative and court worlds that consumed the energies of so many families on the rise. This is seen in his marriages as well, and those of his children: he first married the daughter of the previous governor of Lyon, Marguerite de Mandelot, then the daughter of one of the most influential Parisian parlementaire families, Jacqueline de Harlay. The daughters of his first marriage both married within this same mixed old/new noble/ministerial world: a Brulart and a Souvré, and obtained posts as ladies-in-waiting to the Queen. From the second marriage, Villeroy’s elder sons were launched on military careers, while the younger sons entered the Church and the Order of Malta (an exclusively noble order—they had now definitely arrived)—the youngest was even named ‘Lyon-François’ to demonstrate the family’s new prominent position in the southeast of France.

Of the clergymen, Camille became the most prominent, first being sent to the southeast as an abbot and lieutenant-general of the Lyonnais, then elevated to the position of Archbishop of Lyon in 1654. His long reign in Lyon was one of the most intriguing fusions of secular and spiritual power in early modern France, as both archbishop and lieutenant-general (virtual governor, since his brother was usually elsewhere). He rebuilt the archiepiscopal palace and also a country château at Ombreval (renamed Neufville for the family), on the river Saône north of the city of Lyon. Here he acted like a virtual sovereign and lived in great splendour.

He was a reformer in his archdiocese, built numerous schools and churches, rebuilt the Hôtel de Ville in Lyon, and gathered a huge collection of books (estimated at over 5,000) which he donated to the Jesuits of Lyon upon his death in 1698. His devotion to the city of Lyon was clear: although always supportive of Louis XIV in his struggles against religious dissent, he opposed the King’s actions against Protestants, since many of these were essential to Lyon’s most important industry, silk weaving. Ombreval was erected into a marquisate for him, and this and the château were passed on to Archbishop Camille’s nephew, the Marshal de Villeroy, and then into the family of Boufflers by marriage in the 1730s.

This Marshal de Villeroy was the second of two pre-eminent Marshals of France in the reign of Louis XIV, the first and second dukes of Villeroy. Most noteworthy about these men, father and son, was their position of extreme intimacy with the monarch himself, the first as governor of the young Sun King, and the second as intimate friend, then as governor of the royal successor, Louis XV.

The first of these, Nicolas V, first known as the Marquis d’Alincourt as his father’s heir, was given the survivance of the governorship of Lyon and the Lyonnais in 1615, when he was only 17. A survivance is an important indication of a family’s importance within the monarchical structure of ancien régime France, as it was a basically a guarantee that the office would pass from father to son, and that if it wasn’t, the family would receive significant financial compensation. Young Nicolas also secured a bright future through marriage in 1617 to Madeleine de Créquy, daughter of a leading general, the future Marshal-Duke de Lesdiguières, under whom he served in numerous campaigns in northern Italy in the 1620s-30s. Rising in the ranks of the French army himself, Alincourt played important role in the wars of Louis XIII in the Piedmont, Franche-Comté and Catalonia—often using nearby Lyon as his base of operations—then made a real name for himself in the siege of Turin, 1640, and the successful capture of the nearly impregnable fortress of La Mothe in Lorraine, 1645. The next Spring he was chosen to act as the governor of the new king, Louis XIV, who was now 7, the year princes traditionally were moved from the care of women into that of men. He was also raised to the rank of Marshal of France, the highest military grade in the Kingdom.

The Marshal was more than merely a loyal commander, but had been a childhood companion (enfant d’honneur) of Louis XIII, and the King’s widow now ensured that the two families would remain close. The proximity between the Hôtel de Villeroy and the Palais Royal where the young king was being raised meant that a lot of time was spent in both places, and the two Bourbon princes played and were schooled together with the Neufville sons and daughters. To further honour this long-term connection, the marquisate of Villeroy was elevated into a duchy in 1651, though given the fragile politics of the era, the new duke had to wait until 1663, once the King was fully in his majority, for the title and peerage to be confirmed by the Parlement of Paris, who were not so keen to promote this relatively arriviste family, formerly very much one of their own, to the premier ranks of the nobility. The King had to force them, and force them he did.

Now that Louis XIV was an adult, the first Duke of Villeroy’s position as princely governor was transformed into a government post, as Chief of the Royal Council of Finances, in 1661, though this was mostly symbolic—the actual financial control was held firmly by Louis XIV’s chief minister, Colbert. Here was a source of conflict, however, in that Villeroy continued his families links with the other main ministerial clan, the Le Telliers, rivals of the Colberts: his half-sister’s grand-daughter Anne de Souvré married the leading Le Tellier, the war minister Louvois, and his own grandson, Nicolas VI, would later marry the child of this union, Marguerite Le Tellier. Such was the way that Louis XIV encouraged his chief courtiers and ministers to remain in constant competition with each other rather than united and against the Crown. It is the chief strength of his reign.

The chief weakness, however, was in Louis XIV’s complete loyalty to his favourites, regardless of the cost to the state or to his reputation as king. One of these favourites was his governor’s son, his childhood friend, François de Neufville, 2^nd Duke of Villeroy. We can see it also in the King’s relationship with the Duke’s sister, Catherine, who was married in 1660 to the King’s other great childhood friend, Louis de Lorraine, Comte d’Armagnac. Such was the King’s affection for Armagnac that despite Catherine’s repeated scandalous transgressions at court in the later 1660s which cost her the post of Dame du Palais of the Queen and even her expulsion from court (after she informed the Queen about the King’s affair with Madame de Montespan), she never lost the King’s favour completely, and their sons were highly favoured by him throughout the reign.

This was hardly comparative with the on-going favour given to her brother, the 2^nd Duke, who was repeatedly rewarded with military commands even following great disasters. He had been ceded his father’s regiment from Lyon, his position as governor there, and even the ducal title and peerage from 1675. He was rapidly promoted brigadier general in 1672, field marshal in 1674, lieutenant-general in 1777, and finally Marshal of France like his father in 1693.

A year later the new Marshal de Villeroy was in charge of the siege of Namur, but allowed the armies of William of Orange escape, refusing to listen to the voices of his advisors. Yet he remained in command of the Army of the Low Countries until peace was declared in 1697. When the War of the Spanish Succession broke out in 1701, Villeroy was sent to command the Army of Italy, but was soon defeated by the Austrian General Prince Eugene, at Chiari, then shortly after at Cremona in 1702, and was held prisoner in Austria for several months. Nevertheless, he was welcomed back to Versailles with open arms—to the great ire and disgust of contemporary memoirists like Saint-Simon—and sent out again in 1703 to command the Army of Flanders. The greatest defeat of his career came at Ramillies, May 1706, at the hands of the Duke of Marlborough. This time Villeroy’s favour was not enough to save him, and he resigned his command as well as his household post as Captain of the King’s Guard.

Nevertheless, disfavour did not last long, and Villeroy was restored to Louis XIV’s inner circle in 1712, and was named to his father’s old post as Chief of the Council of Finances in 1714. More importantly, he was named future governor of the Dauphin Louis, aged only 4, soon to succeed as Louis XV. The Regency established in 1715 by the new King’s uncle, the Duke of Orléans, would be fractured by two major factions: that of the liberals and reformers led by Orléans and his chief minister Dubois, and the conservatives led (rather weakly) by Villeroy, and the late King’s widow, Madame de Maintenon and illegitimate (and favourite) son, the Duc du Maine. Villeroy was given a seat on the Regency Council, as head of the Council of Commerce, but his real power emerged in 1717 when the boy king was formally transferred into his care (upon reaching the age of 7). The Marshal lived with the King in the Tuileries, rather than in his large Paris residence the Hôtel des Lesdiguières.

This residence, close to the Bastille, was part of a large inheritance that fell to the Villeroy family thanks to the first Duke’s marriage to Madeleine de Créqui de Lesdiguières, followed shortly by the inheritance that came from his own wife’s family, heirs of the duchies of Retz and Beaupréau (both located in western France, near the mouth of the Loire). The 2^nd Marshal’s grandson would be known as the Duke of Retz from 1716 (as his father was already 3^rd Duke of Villeroy, from 1696). Since the King’s governor resided at the Tuileries, the Hôtel de Lesdiguières was provided for the visit of Peter the Great to France in 1717, and Villeroy and the King visited the Russian Tsar there to attempt to build stronger connections between their two nations.

The Governor of Louis XV was known to contemporaries either as a bulwark of solid, pious louisquatorzian values, or as a vain, rigid relic of the past who was teaching the boy king to be pompous and frivolous. Finally, the Regent Orléans had enough and managed to exile Villeroy from court, ordering him to tend to his governorship in Lyon in August 1722. When the King attained his majority a few months later in February 1723, this order was not reversed, which demonstrates pretty clearly that the old love between the monarchy and the Neufville de Villeroy family was finally at an end. Although he did return to Paris in 1724 after the death of Orléans, the Marshal resided in the Hôtel de Lesdiguières and ceased to play an important role in the Kingdom.

The 3^rd Duke of Villeroy, Nicolas VI, may have seemed set to restore the family position. Already a lieutenant-general by 1702 (promoted despite his father’s defeat), and commanding a part of his father’s army crushed at Ramillies, he was nevertheless given his disgraced father’s post of Captain of the Guard in 1708, and assured the succession to the governorship of Lyonnais, Forez and Beaujolais. In October 1722, even after the father had been sent to Lyon, the son was given a place of honour at the coronation of Louis XV, as commander of troops camped outside the city of Reims and ceremonial captain of the Scottish Guard. But the timing was off for this generation—the 3^rd Duke was part of that missing generation, those born in the 1660s, who lost their chance of being intimates of the sovereign when that potential sovereign (the Grand Dauphin) died in 1711. His wife, Marguerite le Tellier, also died in 1711 during the same smallpox epidemic, severing the ties of the Neufville and Le Tellier families. Now firmly established as high aristocrats, the children of the 3^rd Duke and Duchess married into exclusively ducal circles: two of the oldest families in France, Montmorency and Harcourt, and a fairly recent military dynasty like their own, Boufflers, with a double marriage to a brother and sister in 1720 and 1721.

The 3^rd Duke didn’t live much longer to build on this new dynastic power base, however, and died only four years after his ancient father (aged 86), in 1734. His younger brother, François-Paul, had also been set up to continue to build the family’s power in the south-east, as Archbishop of Lyon in 1714. He had been considered as successor to his great-uncle Archbishop Camille as early as 1698, but at only 19, even Louis XIV’s extreme favour towards this family was not enough to overcome clerical opinion that an archbishopric was not appropriate. He did finally take over in Lyon, as well as the country château at Ombreval, but he too died in middle age, in 1731.

The 4^th Duke, Louis-François, who had been known as the Duc de Retz as heir, had no children, and his brother had been created Duc d’Alincourt in 1729 by royal brevet as a sign that he was the assumed heir (and he was also created lieutenant in Lyon). But Alincourt died in 1732, so the 4^th Duke raised the only surviving nephew as his own son.

The 4th Duc de Villeroy, like his ancestors, rose through the military ranks, attaining the rank of Field Marshal in 1738 in the run-up to the War of Austrian Succession. But his interests were more in developing his family properties, notably with the proclaim manufactury at Villeroy mentioned above, but also rebuilding the château there and its gardens, and building a new Hôtel de Villeroy in Paris. The Hôtel de Lesdiguières was mostly sold off in the 1730s, and the old Hôtel de Villeroy, entirely rebuilt by the first Marshal in the 1640s, had been sold in 1671 (the building remains and for a while served as the Bureau de Poste). So a new Hôtel de Villeroy was built in the newly fashionable neighbourhood on the left bank of the Seine, near the Invalides—originally built for the Swiss banker, Antoine Hogguer, it was redesigned in the 1730s by the fashionable architect Jean-Baptiste Leroux.

But like many of the grand court families in the latter half of the 18^th century, the Neufvilles ran into financial difficulties. The new Villeroy residence in Paris was sold in 1768 (it became a government building during the Revolution, and has been the seat of the Ministry of Agriculture since the 1880s), the porcelain factory was shut down in 1777, and the duchy of Retz was sold in 1778. The 4^th Duke had died in 1766, and even though his nephew the 5^th Duke, Gabriel-Louis, succeeded to the now informally hereditary posts of Captain of the King’s Guard and Governor of Lyonnais, Forez and Beaujolais, and rose through the military hierarchy as lieutenant-general by 1781, he was never a major presence, in court, government, or military. Having sold the Hôtel de Villeroy, he acquired the smaller Hôtel de Beauharnais for his residence in Paris, but spent much of his time at the Hôtel de Villeroy in Lyon. Like most dukes by the 18^th century, he married within the now exclusive circle of ducal families, Jeanne-Louise-Constance, daughter of the Duke of Aumont, but they had no children. No longer part of the inner royal circle, his family’s long service to the Crown nevertheless tarred him during the Revolution, and he was executed during the Terror in April 1794. There were no nephews or cadet branches, so when the Duke’s widow died in 1816, the Neufville de Villeroy name was completely extinguished.

(images from Wikimedia Commons)