page_title: Victoire de Rohan
section_title: Courtier
hierarchical_section_title: Victoire de Rohan / Biography / Courtier
caption_attribution_description: English: Marie Thérèse Charlotte of France and her governess
context_page_description: Victoire Armande Josèphe de Rohan, Princess of Guéméné was a French noblewoman and court official. She was the governess of the children of Louis XVI of France. She is known better as Madame de Guéméné, and was Lady of Clisson in her own right.
context_section_description: In 1775, Marie Louise de Lorraine, Comtesse de Marsan resigned the post of governess to the royal children in favour of Victoire, who was her niece. From 1778 to 1782, Victoire was in charge of the household of Louis XVI's oldest child, Marie Thérèse of France, known at court as Madame Royale. In this role, she was in charge of a staff of over one hundred courtiers and servants.
  During her tenure as royal governess, she was in accordance with her position not allowed to leave court except with a written permission from the monarch, a permission she asked only to attend the parties of the Archbishop of Narbonne at Hautefontaine. She became an influential personal friend of Marie Antoinette, and was alleged to have had a bad influence upon her, mainly by introducing her to wasteful and expensive habits such as arranging illegal games with high stakes, particularly Pharaoh, which she introduced in her salon at Versailles, and the new English fashion of horse races, interests which made the Queen acquire huge debts.
  She had a relationship with Augustin Gabriel de Franquetot de Coigny (1740–1817), the father of one of her charges, Aimée de Franquetot de Coigny,  Duchesse de Fleury (1769–1820), muse of the poet André Chénier. The Prince of Guéméné, meanwhile, had an affair with Victoire's close friend, Thérèse-Lucy de Dillon, Comtesse de Dillon. Because of this, Abbot de Vermond reportedly reproached Marie Antoinette for keeping company with women of ill repute like Dillon and Guéméné. In 1776, Emperor Joseph, during his stay in France, chastised his sister Marie Antoinette for attending the salon of the Princess, which he called a gambling den.
  She was described as intelligent and with an interest in spiritualism: "though endowed with considerable intellectual power, spent her time in pursuing the follies of spiritualism", and in possession of a large collection of famous jewels, which she seldom wore but regularly lent to others and were therefore frequently seen at formal occasions.
caption: Victoire de Rohan with Madame Royale.
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