Talk:French nobility

Merger of Noble of the Robe/Sword and French Nobility is worth consideration

Merging all of these articles is worth consideration. However, Noble of the Robe and Noble of the Sword are commonly used terms and would still need small pages briefly explaining the terms and referring them to the major article. As the French Nobility article currently stands it needs a lot of work before it could stand alone. Wikipediatoperfection 06:38, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

(Opposite) There are fr:Noblesse de robe and de:Noblesse de robe. So the merging will confuse the interlanguage links. You should use template:main.Penpen0216 00:25, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Role in the Enlghtenment

French nobles played a huge role in the Enlightenment. I am adding a section on this. Wikipediatoperfection 06:40, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Question and Suggestion:

Noblesse d'épée (nobility of the sword) or noblesse de race or noblesse ancienne - The traditional or old nobility.

I think that perhaps this should be linked to a page better explaining what this means. I am just taking a big assumption here on this... but 'The traditional or old nobility' -- I take that to mean 'hereditary' nobility? Those who are sons or grandsons or otherwise related to the King? Is that correct? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.194.149.240 (talk) 23:30, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

---

Today

Shouldn't this article say something about French nobility today? Are the decendents of nobles allowed to use titles? I know that in Germany, non-primogenitural titles became last names. Did something similiar happen in France? Emperor001 (talk) 15:10, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

The article does address those issues in the section "Nobility since the Revolution". - NYArtsnWords (talk) 03:20, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Titles

Is there a comprehensive list of French titles on Wikipedia, as there are for the British nobility? (e.g. List of earldoms) Drutt (talk) 00:01, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I imagine that would be harder to establish. —Tamfang (talk) 18:39, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

What is Nobility? Shouldn't the Leed plainly state this?

I read the leed and could not determine what the article is about. All I know is that it is about French Nobility, but I have no idea what a Noble is. It would seem to me that it would be desirable for an article, especially articles of at least moderate length- like this one, to provide an unfamiliar audience with an understanding of what the subject actually is, if not more, in the leed. Does anyone have any comments on this, and could anyone edit the leed such that those unfamiliar with its topic would know what the article's subject is after reading the first couple of paragraphs (the leed)? Basically, the leed discuses seemingly random issues with some relationship to nobility, but never gets around to actually stating what a noble is or providing any identifying charecteristics that would give the reader some conception of what "french nobility" even is.--Δζ (talk) 00:09, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

The first two words in the article are "The nobility". If you click on the blue word you'll find an article on nobility in general. This device, known colloquially as a link, allows us to avoid repeating material in many related articles. —Tamfang (talk) 01:44, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Missing information

I went looking for the definition of "sieur." A web search showed that information on this early modern title had perhaps once been part of the article, but now it is not. There are various biographical articles on Sieur this and Sieur that, but lacking a definition of the term, its origin, its decline, etc., they are relatively useless as a way of figuring out the positions of such persons with the class of nobles. Why such a term should have been deleted is beyond me, but it has been, and I can find no indication of why. Interesting too that there is very little information on how the various dukedoms evolved, legally speaking, from independent principalities, in effect, to memberships in the noblesse d'epee. So again, historical dimensions that are important are simply missing. Disappointing.Theonemacduff (talk) 19:09, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the input. First off, I imagine a "sieur" article, or "sieur" treated (via a redirect) in another article, would be in order. As for dukedom and the historical evolution of the ranks and titles, it should be said that the article still has a long way yet to go (including references for everything). Hopefully interested editors can find the time to make the required changes this summer. - NYArtsnWords (talk) 07:23, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

The title was there, in English translation (sieur is, in English, "sire": for example, see the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on Montmorency, where its founder, Bouchard I, is so titled) and correctly defined until today. Six historical "sireries" are mentioned here. Sieur was a distinct noble title that pre-dated Seigneur which never was, properly, a title of nobility. For a partial list of the many families whose heads were titled sieur, many of which retained it until the French Revolution, go to Roglo's Genealogical Database, type in "Sieur" under "by title", and click "OK" at the end of that line. FactStraight (talk) 09:17, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

Going forward, I think it's probably important to maintain the French word "sieur" in the article and not translate it as "sire", given that both words exist in French with complicated and divergent linguistic histories; both "sieur" and "sire" derive from the medieval form of "seigneur" (possessor of a 'seigneurie', i.e. lord of a manor, although not necessarily of a fief), but they seem not to be interchangeable (cf the French wiki article on Seigneurie: "Ces « seigneurs » sont parfois appelés sieurs, à ne pas confondre avec « sire »... ). To make matters worse, usage of these terms seems to have changed in the modern era. What may need to happen is that "sire/sireries" also be added (but separate from "sieur"). I suspect the use of the word "sireries" may be a regional variation of "seigneurie" (compare this to the regional variations of terms used in the judicial system in the medieval and early modern period: vigueries, baylies, vicomtés, châtellenies), but that will take some digging. Do you know if the possessors of "sireries" were addressed as "sire de.."? On a side note, I notice that the French wiki equivalent of this article has a great deal of additional material that could be added here, although they seem to muddy up the title vs rank distinction. I wonder if, in addition to "titles" and "ranks", we should add "other honorifics" under which "seigneur" and "sieur" are better placed? Finally, can someone suggest a comprehensive English language reference that we can use to verify and footnote the most important sections of this article? Thanks! - NYArtsnWords (talk) 15:52, 5 May 2013 (UTC)

I concur that sieur and sire seem to be used in different periods of French history. But I also think they've become conflated in historical French usage, whereas I don't see evidence that either is interchangeable with seigneur as a title. François Velde (a U.S. economics professor and numismatist whose first language is French and whose summaries on French royalty and nobility are, by the way, the most careful, concise & well-bibliographed in English, but can't be cited on Wikipedia because they reside on his personal website) quite clearly distinguishes between seigneur and sire, describing the latter as a term rooted in France's medieval rather than modern nobility amd defining it as a distinct kind of seigneurie: "A castellan (châtelain) was the commander in charge of a castle. A few castellanies survived with the title of 'sire'." Although Daniel de Rauglaudre's Genealogical Database lists thousands of lordships under seigneur and, separately, hundreds under sieur, it lists no instance of "sire", suggesting that it converts all such references into sieur. Looking at Père Anselme's 1728 Histoire de la Maison Royale de France, tome IV, both sire and seigneur are frequent, but at first glance I don't see sieur -- again suggesting that sieur is a more modern form of sire -- both of which translate into English as "sire" (do "show" and "shew" have different translations in modern French?). The six sireries Velde cites are in areas of France where other lordships are often called seigneuries, making sirerie unlikely to be merely a regional variation. Moreover, Anselme includes numerous references using both terms, e.g., "Louis II du nom, sire de la Tremoille, vicomte de Thouars, prince de Talmond, comte de Guynes & de Mauleon, seigneur des Isles de Rhe & de Marans, amiral de Guyenne & de Bretagne, chevalier de l'ordre du roy..." What I suspect is that sieur fell into desuetude just as, late in the ancien regime, parvenus eager to be taken for noblesse d'epee widely assumed use of seigneur, gradually leaving sieur as a quaint title only used for a seigneurie that was never raised to a higher title by letters patent and so never ceased being called a sirerie. This article now re-defines seigneur and sieur/sire to be synonymous titles in the article, but I can't see on what grounds. FactStraight (talk) 05:21, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Remove no pertinent images

I removed portraits of people (why them and not others) that are not relevant (even if they are nobles) to understand the topic’s context : The French Nobility its origins and its history. See : Images Pertinence and encyclopedic nature. --Belyny (talk) 06:02, 2 December 2021 (UTC)