Marie de Bourbon, Countess of Soissons
Countess of Soissons (1606-1692)
Marie de Bourbon (3 May 1606 – 3 June 1692) was the wife of Thomas Francis, Prince of Carignano, and thus a princess of Savoy by marriage. At the death of her brother in 1641, she became Countess of Soissons in her own right, passing the title down three generations of the House of Savoy.
Biography
Marie de Bourbon, born at the Hôtel de Soissons in Paris, was the second daughter and youngest child of Charles de Bourbon, Count of Soissons, and his wife Anne de Montafié, Countess of Clermont. At the court of Louis XIII, who was her second cousin, Marie enjoyed the rank of princesse du sang. She was a sister of Louise of Bourbon, Duchess of Longueville. Originally placed in the Abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, she took the habit on 10 April 1610 aged just four.
On 6 January 1625, Marie was married to Thomas Francis, ninth child of Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, and his wife Catherine Michaela of Austria. It was arranged that Thomas, as son of a reigning monarch, would hold the rank of first among the princes étrangers at the French court – taking precedence even before the formerly all-powerful House of Guise, whose kinship to the sovereign Duke of Lorraine was more remote. He was appointed Grand Master of France of the king's household, briefly replacing the traitorous Louis II de Condé. He engaged the services of the distinguished grammarian and courtier Claude Favre de Vaugelas as tutor for his children.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q635315. VIAF identifies the subject as 221487111. The Library of Congress control number is no2016152166. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1606, 1692, 1641 and 1610.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marie de Bourbon, Countess of Soissons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.