Anne Genevieve De Bourbon Longueville, duchess de, a French politician, born Aug. 29, 1619, died April 15, 1679. Her father, Henri II., prince of Conde, was prisoner in the chateau of Vincennes at the time of her birth. The great Conde and the prince of Conti were her brothers. Her mother, a member of the Montmorency family, imparted to her strong sentiments of piety, but her education was neglected. When she yielded to the request of her friends and attended a court ball, her beauty created a sensation which tempted her to become a regular habituee of the royal circle. The prince de Joinville, to whom she had been betrothed, having died, she was in 1642 prevailed upon to bestow her hand upon the duke de Longueville, a widower who was double her age, and whose former mistress, Mme. de Montbazon, caused great annoyance to the duchess by accusing her of a love intrigue with Coligni, for which at that time there does not seem to have been any foundation. The duke was sent to Munster in 1645. During his absence from Paris, the duchess occasionally saw the prince of Marsillac, afterward duke de La Rochefoucauld; and it being reported that she was not indifferent to his attentions, the duke de Longueville caused his wife to join him in Westphalia, where she remained till 1647, following with interest the negotiations of the treaty of peace of Munster, and imbibing a fondness for politics, which on her return to Paris she displayed most actively in the part which she took in the Fronde. La Rochefoucauld was one of its chief leaders, and she threw herself with impetuosity into the movement.

Among others who joined it were her brother Conti and the duke de Bouillon; but as it was intimated that they were both wavering in their revolutionary zeal, Mme. de Longueville was detained in the hotel de ville as hostage for her brother, and Mme. de Bouillon for her husband. While there, in the night of Jan. 26, 1649, the duchess gave birth to a son, of whom La Rochefoucauld was supposed to be the father. In order to punish the duchess, her brothers and husband were arrested by order of Anne of Austria, the regent, in 1650. Mme. de Longueville left Paris on the night of the arrest for Normandy, where she hoped to inspire a rising; but failing, and barely escaping with her life on her flight from Dieppe, she gained Rotterdam and repaired to the citadel of Stenay on the Meuse, of which she took the command, and succeeded in inducing Turenne, whom she met there, to join the Fronde and accept the assistance of the king of Spain in levying troops against France. After the conclusion of this alliance, she published a letter to the king, accusing Mazarin, and throwing upon him the responsibility for her course.

Her husband and brother were set free in the beginning of 1651, when she went to Paris; but declining to follow her husband, who was firm in his loyalty to the king, into Normandy, she set out on a new revolutionary expedition to Bordeaux, in company with La Rochefoucauld, the duke de Nemours, and her brothers Conde and Conti. Dissensions broke out between her and her younger brother. The citizens of Bordeaux opened negotiations with the duke de Vendome, who was blockading it. A general amnesty was proclaimed in 1653,, after which the duchess returned to private life. Afflicted by the loss of her mother (1650), and by the desertion of her lover, and baffled in her schemes against the court, she resolved to renounce the world. But after having spent some time in various convents, she was again attracted by the pleasures of society, and accepted an invitation of her husband to rejoin him in Normandy. The duke died in 1663, and the duchess now devoted herself almost entirely to a religious life.

She was called the "mother of the church," and her influence in Rome was said to have secured for the Jansenists the so-called peace of Clement IX. (1668). The latter part of her life was darkened by the death of her son the duke de Longueville in battle (1672), and spent in the Carmelite convent of Paris in the most stringent observance of religious duties and in the practice of charity. Her death was even affirmed to have been either voluntary, or at all events hastened by the influence of an ab-stemious and penitential life upon her health. Cousin, in his interesting work on Madame de Longueville (Paris, 1853, often reprinted), calls her "the soul of the Fronde."