Henri Louis, Prince of Guéméné


Henri Louis de Rohan, Prince of Guéméné, was a French courtier and the penultimate Grand Chamberlain of France.

Biography

Henri Louis was born in Paris, a member of the House of Rohan, which claimed ancestry relating to the Dukes of Brittany. He was the only son of the family's main branch chief, Jules Hercule Mériadec de Rohan, Prince of Guéméné, whereas his mother Marie Louise Henriette Jeanne de La Tour d'Auvergne had an illegitimate child with her lover, Charles Edward Stuart.
On 15 January 1761, he married his second cousin, Victoire Armande Josèphe de Rohan, daughter of Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise and Princess Anna Teresa of Savoy. The couple had five children, four of whom survived into adult age. The family owned the Hôtel de Rohan-Guémené on the Place des Vosges.
In 1775 Henri Louis was appointed Grand Chamberlain of France by Louis XVI, inasmuch as his uncle Godefroy Charles Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, duke of Bouillon gave up that charge. The Princess of Guéméné also inherited a charge; she was appointed Governess of Royal Children.
From the 1780s on Henri Louis and his family was involved in personal and political scandals. In 1782, Henri Louis's mistress, Countess Thérèse Lucy de Dillon, the first wife of Arthur Dillon and a friend of his wife, succumbed to tuberculosis at 30 years; in the same year the Prince declared bankruptcy, with a debt of 33 million livres. He and Victoire abdicated their charges at the court and left Versailles. Their properties were sold, including the Hôtel de Rohan-Guéméné and their Mansion at Montreuil.
At the death of his father in law, he was the legal heir to the title Prince of Soubise.
During the French Revolution, Henri Louis and his father, wife and children fled to Habsburg Monarchy, where he in Prague died in 1809, at the age 63 years. However, his mother was guillotined in 1793.

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