#la fronde

[thorin-is-a-cuddler]

Mme de Longueville winning La Rochefoucauld for the party of Frondeurs:

[histoireettralala]

The real Mazarin ?

It was Mazarin’s misfortune, and the single factor most shaping the events and outcome of 1652, that he confronted the figure of Condé as his opponent, who embodied simultaneously the unchallenged right of a prince of the blood to participate in government, and the military genius responsible for the great successes of France after 1643. Had the young Condé been a mediocre military commander like his father, the political dynamic would have looked very different. The military paladins of the regency would have been Turenne and Henri, comte d’Harcourt, from a cadet line of the House of Guise. Both were capable military commanders, but political minnows in comparison with Condé. Mazarin could have bought the adherence of both with territories and titles, and in all probability neither would have made a serious attempt to assert themselves against the queen mother and her minister. Instead Mazarin faced someone for whom no political or territorial bribe would be sufficient, except the concession of powers that would effectively deny overall political control to Mazarin.

Yet it was also Condé’s misfortune —and that of France— that he encountered the real Mazarin, rather than the self-sacrificing servant of monarchy and state celebrated in hagiographic accounts of his ministry from the nineteenth century onwards. The Mazarin who had discreetly demonstrated his diplomatic and administrative abilities to Richelieu in the 1630s, and insinuated himself into the team of Richelieu’s ministerial fidèles, did not intend to spend his career as a lowkey political figure operating behind the scenes. His accumulation of rich benefices before 1640, and his ability to persuade Richelieu —who was normally intensely hierarchical in such matters— to nominate him for a cardinalship, might indicate a different agenda. Another hint may have been his cultivation of Anne of Austria at a time when most of Richelieu’s ministers regarded the queen as politically toxic. Whatever Mazarin’s real ambitions before 1643, he had prudently confined his role to that of faithful subordinate of Richelieu and then part of Louis XIII’s ministerial team during the king’s last months. But with the death of Louis XIII, the assumption of control by the queen regent, and Mazarin’s achievement of the status of unchallenged minister-favourite, the restraint which had previously characterized his personality and actions was thrown off.

To understand Mazarin and his motivation, it is necessary to abandon a superficially plausible notion that he saw himself as an outsider, a foreigner relying on cleverness and charm to climb the ladder of power and status in France. On this reading he was inhibited by his second-rank Italian background, in awe of, and not properly understanding, French grandees such as Condé, Longueville, or Vendôme. And indeed to Condé, Mazarin always remained the upstart ‘gredin de Sicile’, or the ‘illustrissimo signor facchino’, constantly seeking a political role far above his social status. Mazarin seemed in some respects to confirm this view of himself as upstart and outsider: he combined the ingratiating qualities of a favourite —using his foreignness to cement the complicit relationship with that other ‘foreigner’ at court, Anne of Austria— with an understanding of diplomacy and Realpolitik honed from his early career in Rome. Moreover, apart from the queen mother’s favour, Mazarin’s primary qualification for the role of first minister was his distinctly un-aristocratic administrative energy and capacity. The recognition customarily given to Jean-Baptiste Colbert as Louis XIV’s omniscient administrator, with his extraordinarily detailed grasp of every aspect of his government portfolio and a capacity to maintain a mountainous correspondence, may be seen as a tribute to the even more impressive working habits of his previous employer. To find someone who could equal Mazarin’s mastery of detail, his ability to range over domestic and foreign policy —whether supply of the galleys at Toulon or factional politics in Brittany— all with the same detailed knowledge and the ability to resume a subject months or years after he last discussed it, we would need to turn to Napoléon Bonaparte. Certainly Mazarin’s grasp of affairs and work-rate surpassed cardinal Richelieu, no laggard in his capacity for administrative graft. But Richelieu acknowledged his lack of knowledge in key areas, and delegated with far greater willingness than his successor. Indeed, a besetting weakness of Mazarin’s entire ministry, and a cause of much tension with his subordinate ministers, was his obsessive reluctance to delegate even practical executive authority to others.

Yet while this prodigious ability, which is certainly greater than that of any of his likely rivals in the years after 1643, is clearly relevant in explaining Mazarin’s success as a minister, it nonetheless misses the key point. Mazarin did not see himself as a backroom facilitator of effective government, aware that his foreign background and modest social status required discretion and reticence. On the contrary, he regarded himself as the primary architect of the greatness of the French monarchy. In passage after self-promotional passage in his correspondence, Mazarin celebrated the first six years of the Regency as the most glorious years in the history of the monarchy—a succession of military victories and diplomatic triumphs that had realized the great project to ensure France’s prestige and hegemony in Europe. It might come as a surprise to those who envisage

Mazarin as a créature and disciple of cardinal Richelieu that in Mazarin’s opinion the six years from 1643 far surpassed any comparable period in Richelieu’s ministry. And it was on what he regarded as his incomparable personal achievement that Mazarin’s deep sense of public and private entitlement rested: the monarchy and the kingdom owed him much, in terms of both gratitude and recognition, and a continued monopoly of power and influence.

If the great French families initially looked down on Mazarin, he certainly did not regard himself as their inferior; his apparently ingratiating and obliging language masked a ruthless sense of self-importance and his primacy within the state. He believed himself to be indispensable, and his language to the queen mother, to his supporters, and even to his enemies reflects that conviction. Both past achievements and promises of benefits and advantages to come created obligations, especially on the part of the crown, and from those ministers and other appointees who owed their positions and prestige to Mazarin’s success. Perhaps this conviction that his deeds could speak louder than words partly explains Mazarin’s reluctance to enter the ideological battle after 1648. It certainly underpins the poorly improvised attempts to justify the arrest of the princes in January 1650: in Mazarin’s eyes such high-handed actions were an element of his understanding of ragione di stato, necessary to preserve a superior direction of the affairs of state. This of course played to a massive literature of criticism in the mazarinades, for whom Mazarin’s policies were inspired by the tyrannical maxims of his fellow Italian, Machiavelli.

There is little doubt that well before 1650 the figures of Condé and Mazarin were set on a political collision course which would have required exceptional restraint on one or both sides to avoid. The fundamental difference, however, was that Condé could probably live with the political survival of Mazarin, whose role had been cut back to that of essentially executive first minister, accountable to a royal family dominated by Condé. In contrast, by late 1649 Mazarin’s assumptions about his own position were wholly incompatible with the political power and influence of Condé. Mazarin might be forced into political cohabitation with the prince, but it would delegitimize and disempower his ministerial position and all those associated with him.

David Parrott- 1652- The Cardinal, the Prince, and the Crisis of the Fronde.

[histoireettralala]

Condé vs Mazarin: power and legitimacy.

By April 1649 Mazarin had survived the biggest challenge so far to his ministerial rule. A political revolt had briefly united popular unrest with the discontents of the bourgeoisie, the most senior judicial officers, and a large group of the court aristocracy. A combination of military threats and wide-ranging concessions had apparently calmed the situation; most significantly perhaps for Mazarin’s future calculations, it had demonstrated that his opponents would find it extremely difficult to militarize their opposition in any effective way. But relief was premature. For Mazarin’s new problem was that the military support he had drawn upon in early 1649 had cost him his previous near-monopoly over power and influence. Condé’s blockade of Paris had set him, as the defender of absolute royal authority —and thereby Mazarin’s ministry— directly against his own relatives and much of the great nobility. Hitherto idolized as the young military hero, he was now execrated by all those who had regarded the uprisings since August 1648 as a justified attempt to overthrow ministerial tyranny. Setting aside his personal ambitions, it was essential to his reputation that he should demonstrate as publicly and as vigorously as possible that he was no lackey of the first minister, and that his actions had been on behalf of the crown, not Mazarin.

Who then was Louis II de Bourbon-Condé, who was to become Mazarin’s nemesis for a decade from 1649? The duc d’Enghien, as he was titled until his father’s death in 1646, was no stranger to the realities of ministerial power. His father, Henri II, had rebuilt the material and political fortunes of the cadet branch of the Bourbon family on the basis of a close alliance with cardinal Richelieu after 1626. Henri de Condé provided Richelieu and his regime with the legitimizing support of a prince of the blood, and Condé in return benefited from a spectacular flow of political and territorial rewards. The benefits of the alliance were so great that he was ultimately cajoled into marrying his son, Louis II, to Richelieu’s niece, Claire-Clémence de Maillé-Brézé. The marriage, celebrated at the Palais Cardinal on 9 February 1641, was a spectacular mésalliance for the duc d’Enghien, wished upon him by his father’s ambitions. Enghien, who until 1638 had stood only three lives from the throne, shared with his father an authoritarian ideology of an absolute monarchy mediated only by the king’s ‘natural advisors’, the princes of the blood. But the association with Richelieu and his family brought him into a close, stakeholder’s connection with the ministerial regime. Through this channel would flow the financial opportunities, patronage, and influence that had been enjoyed by his father over and above what would have been his as a prince of the royal blood.

Enghien would have been an important figure in the politics of the 1640s, just as his father had been in the previous decade. But the decision in 1643 to grant him the overall command of the army operating on the north-eastern frontier was not just a reflection of his status and political connections, but a remarkable act of confidence in a young man of twenty-three with no previous experience of overall military command. Enghien was surrounded by experienced lieutenants —most notably Jean, comte de Gassion— yet much would still depend on his untested ability to demonstrate qualities of leadership and decision-making. The French army faced a Spanish invasion, poised to take the town of Rocroi, and previous encounters in the field with the veterans of the Spanish army of Flanders had not ended well for the French. Enghien and his lieutenants took the decision to engage the Spanish army in an all-or-nothing bid to try to save Rocroi. Around 7.30 am on 19 May 1643 Enghien led a cavalry charge from the right flank of the French army which shattered the Spanish horse opposing him and left the infantry centre of the Spanish army exposed to his well-executed flanking attack. The magnitude of the victory over the best troops in the Spanish monarchy was unprecedented. The young duc d’Enghien became a legend overnight, a status that he never lost in the eyes of contemporaries.

Enghien’s successive military achievements through the 1640s in different campaign theatres were not just about heroic, charismatic leadership and calculated risk-taking. There was real tactical skill, partly learnt and partly intuitive, in his military deployments, his assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of his own and enemy positions, and, above all, his ability to exploit surprise, shock, and speed to devastating advantage. Like his great contemporary, Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, he recognized the fundamental importance of keeping his troops fed and equipped, and was free with his own resources to maintain supplies. Unlike Turenne, who had the well-regarded reputation of being thrifty with the lives of his own troops, Condé was unconcerned by heavy casualties in pursuit of his strategic objectives. Yet soldiers serving under his command recognized his remarkable talent for victory. On the eve of the battle of Bléneau in April 1652, one of Condé’s lieutenants wrote of the effect of the prince’s arrival, pulling the army together through the belief, above all among the common soldiers, that he was invincible.

The charisma of a young, brilliant general extended beyond the armies: in the 1640s contemporaries noted that he was regarded with both awe and considerable fear. Madame de Motteville wrote that, even after Mazarin had arrested him, ‘the reputation of M. le Prince imposed itself on everyone, and generated a curious veneration for his person, such that sightseers would go to visit the chamber where he had been imprisoned at Vincennes’. Numerous accounts confirmed that even powerful and well-established individuals found it difficult to stand up to Condé in any face-to-face confrontation, and his anger had an unpredictable character that few wished to test. The legend gained further weight from the fictional, centre-stage representation of Condé in Madeleine de Scudéry’s best-selling novel Le Grand Cyrus, published between 1649 and 1653.

The very particular danger Condé posed to Mazarin, or to any government which sought to control him, was the intractable nature of his own ambitions. His father had been manageable because he was rebuilding the Condé inheritance after its devastation in the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, and was rehabilitating his own political reputation after rebellion and imprisonment. By the 1640s the Condé had become the wealthiest aristocratic family in France, and more territorial grants, positions, and financial rewards, though demanded, were no guarantee of further tractability. Moreover, a family strategy that aimed to consolidate the pre-eminence of the Condé-Bourbon over any other aristocratic family in France would lead Condé to target further desirable assets, especially lands and governorships, whose possession would challenge the hegemony of the crown in areas of the kingdom.

Yet at base the prince was more interested in power and influence at the centre of the state than in local power and quasi-monarchical status built up across the provinces. This desire for influence did not mean that he wished to take over government, to oust Mazarin or supplant the role of ministers in general. Indeed, the detailed, procedural business of government, the workings of the executive, would have been considered by Condé to be beneath his status, and appropriate to (interchangeable or dispensable) professionals of modest birth like Mazarin. What Condé wanted for himself was a decisive influence in the formulation of royal policy, the ability to oversee and, where necessary, shape decision-making without negotiation or compromise with other parties. During the regency he considered that this was his right by virtue of his blood, and by his acquired status as the military paladin of the young monarch. He would expect to maintain this privileged role of high-status advisor and intimate councillor after the king came of age, with the assumption that his voice would naturally outweigh others in royal decision-making. Despite the charges variously made against him by Mazarin and the court, all on the basis of notably scant evidence, Condé was far too deeply committed to the principle of divinely ordained absolute monarchy to wish to replace the king. Such an act of usurpation would radically challenge his own ideology, which linked his own status to a God-given hierarchy headed by the sovereign. Indeed, his hostility to both the Parisian frondeurs and to Mazarin was precisely because they sought to trespass upon what were the fundamental prerogatives of the monarchy.

In seeking to unravel Condé’s personality and his motivation, it is no less necessary to retrieve him from the condescension of posterity. Equipped with hindsight which sees the defeat of the Fronde as a triumph for ministerial government and its modernizing, state-building initiatives, Condé’s fate becomes a facile metaphor for the fate of the traditional ‘sword nobility’ as a whole. His reckless and inappropriate ambitions for political autonomy, personal glory, and immoderate reward were vanquished by the agent of state power, cardinal Mazarin. Defeated, forced into exile and into the service of Spain at the end of 1652, Condé was required to make a humiliating submission to Louis XIV in 1659 as the price of his ‘pardon’. After this he was reduced to an obedient vassal of the monarch. This supposedly parallels the traditional nobility as a whole, whose last irresponsible and doomed act of self-assertion was the Fronde. After this final defeat they were reduced to well-ordered servitude in the court and army of the Sun King, whose powerful, centralized state represented the triumph of bourgeois administrators, the heirs of Mazarin’s victory over the frondeurs. On this interpretation, Condé’s chief crime, if he is relieved of the charge of attempted usurpation, is setting up an ideal of autonomous political action and individual liberty in defiance of the ‘modern’ requirement for disciplined, collective obedience to the crown imposed by its faithful ministers. Indeed, even by the standards of the collective ideal of aristocratic liberty, it is suggested that Condé went too far in pursuit of uncompromising self-assertion, and helped to undermine the very values that he sought to uphold.

The real problem posed by Condé for Mazarin and his regime was not Condé’s uncontrolled individualism, his ‘folle liberté’, but the perception of contemporaries that he held more legitimate right to participate in the decision-making of a regency by virtue of his blood than did a ministerial appointee of the queen mother. Indeed, it is a remarkable triumph of a well-entrenched historiography that Condé’s actions are perceived as illegitimate attempts to challenge what is treated as the legitimate royal government personified in its first minister. By conflating Mazarin with the authority of the crown, the crucial dynamic of the conflict building up from 1643 and climaxing in the Fronde is misunderstood. Mazarin’s attempts to resist Condé’s claims to involvement in the political decisions of the regency did not deny the essential legitimacy of those claims. His approach most frequently relied on alarming both the queen mother and the king’s uncle, Gaston d’Orléans, that Condé would squeeze them out of the decision-making which was no less their right by family. Mazarin hardly needed to be reminded, and the mazarinades would have done the job for him, that his own position enjoyed no such legitimacy.

David Parrott- 1652- The Cardinal, the Prince, and the Crisis of the Fronde.

[histoireettralala]

Everybody wants a royal patronage: power, greed and resentment

Mazarin lost much of what he had accumulated during the Fronde- his wealth had been one of the grievances of the great nobles- but he hastily recreated his fortune in the decade after the Fronde, not entirely by legal means. Neither he nor his heirs- his nephews by marriage who bore some of the greatest names in France- nor his créatures wanted a royal investigation into his fortune and how it had been obtained. Colbert, for instance, had played a major role in its acquisition as intendant of his household. Colbert's attack on Mazarin's finance minister, Fouquet, shortly after the Cardinal's death, was not only to eliminate a rival and put his own clientele in charge of the financial administration, but also to hide an embarrassing past from the king by providing a scapegoat.

If the fortunes of Richelieu and Mazarin- 22,400,000 and 38,000,000 or 39,000,000 livres, respectively- are compared with those of the dukes and peers of France at the same time, it becomes clear that they were, in fact, much wealthier than most of the great nobles at court. Great noble fortunes ranged in general from 1 to 10 million livres, with most falling on the lower end of the range, from 1 to 3 million livres. Richelieu's fortune was more than twice as large as that of the average great noble, and Mazarin's fortune- a truly enormous one- was more than three times as great, and these fortunes had been put together within a few years. Some of their families and important créatures had amassed fortunes nearly as large.

Not surprisingly, the great nobles resented what appeared to be a reduction in their share of royal patronage because the flow had been rechanneled toward the greedy, outstretched hands of the chief ministers and their dependents, whom they considered arrivistes. Richelieu's control over patronage caused a noble conspiracy in 1626-27, and contributed to the revolts of Guise and Montmorency in 1631-32. The Cardinal's patronage policies were so unpopular with the great nobles that after his death the regency government reversed them: Louis XIII on his deathbed pardoned all the governors dismissed by Richelieu except one, and a number of the politically proscribed under Richelieu regained their positions during the first years of Mazarin's ministry. However, Mazarin was forced to reverse the regency policy of reconciliation in the late 1640s, and thereafter he used royal patronage to reward his supporters, deprive his enemies at court, and create an extensive administrative clientele in the provinces, much as Richelieu had done. In addition, the need for political loyalty during the Habsbourg War and the Fronde prompted both cardinals to raise high hopes for promotion in the minds of some clients, for instance, Séguiran and Régusse, and not everyone could be satisfied.

The standard accusations against royal favourites- excessive greed in accepting royal pensions and gifts; appropriating royal tax monies; profiteering and engaging in illegal financial transactions; nepotism and favoritism- were all made against Richelieu and Mazarin. In the mazarinades, polemical political tracts published in great numbers in 1649 and 1650, the Cardinals were accused of financial abuses, avarice, and personal corruption. The size of Mazarin's fortune and his concern for family advancement were attacked, and he was called a parvenu and an upstart. The ministers' close personal association was emphasized. Richelieu was called a harpy and a tyrant. Both ministers were accused of excessive ambition and lust for power. Mazarin was denounced as a foreigner, an Italian-born disciple of Machiavelli, and Concini's successor. Both ministers were accused of misgovernment- ignoring the fundamental laws of France and disregarding public welfare. The mazarinades testify dramatically to the unpopularity of Richelieu and Mazarin and to their identification with a long history of rapacious royal favorites.

However, there was an important difference between court favorites and royal ministers: Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert were able statesmen who had received royal patronage as a reward for their political and administrative services to the crown, and they in turn rewarded their own clients for their service to the state. The royal ministers did not dispense royal patronage to a few great noble favorites, but to reliable members of their own administrative clienteles who helped them to govern as bons serviteurs du Roi.

Sharon Kettering - Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth Century France.

[histoireettralala]

Ministerial rule: habituation is not acceptance.

Richelieu's exercise of power as first minister from 1624 was not seen as a providential gift of strong leadership in difficult times. France was a monarchy, and one political issue about which there was overwhelming consensus in early modern France was that kings alone ruled. Their right to rule was ordained by God, who had established kings and princes as His direct representatives on earth. They might delegate some of their executive authority to subordinate agents, but this was strictly constrained by the need for the king actively and visibly to take all political decisions- for he alone was accountable to God for these. If French kings were to be advised, and there was plenty of precedent and tradition for taking advice, then there were constitutionally desirable forms in which this advice should be given: meetings of the Estates General, the most recent one having been held in 1614 to advise the queen mother and the young Louis XIII; assemblies of notables; the constitutional opinions and judgements of the Parlement of Paris, and to some extent the lesser Parlements. Above all, regular counsel should be sought through the members of the royal family and princes of the blood, all of whom were considered natural advisors in royal decision-making. More formally, of couse, an adult king attended meetings of his Conseil d'en Haut, and listened to the advice of his senior ministers before making his decisions.

In this political world dominated by consensus about the king's indivisible sovereignty, the existence of a first minister posed a considerable problem. In what would be understood as normal political circumstances there was no dominant minister, least of all one whose power and patronage might overshadow the ruler's. There would be a group of government ministers of relatively equivalent standing in terms of political experience, clients, and royal favour, even if their particular offices- chancellor, keeper of the seals, superintendent of finances, secretary for foreign affairs- implied varying status in governmental and court hierarchies. These figures would vie for the king's favour in pursuit of particular policies or actions. Though individually they might have great authority to make policy and distribute favour within their own administrative fiefs, there was little possibility that any one of them could consistently shape overall crown policy. During the reign of Henri IV (1589-1610), which in the 1630s and 1640s was increasingly seen as the model for virtuous royal government, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, might enjoy considerable royal favour and confidence, and directly control the king's finances, but he was never first minister. He was flanked by high-status figures such as Pomponne de Bellièvre and Nicolas de Neufville de Villeroy, who enjoyed the king's confidence, controlled their own parts of the government, and were as likely to influence the king by their policy proposals as Sully was. The apparent re-establishment of such a system under Louis XIV's personal rule in 1661 signalled a return to this style of traditional royal government that was certainly not lost on contemporaries.

Government by a dominant first minister, in contrast, had to be carefully finessed; it was likely to be seen as rule by a "minister-favourite", with all the pejorative implications of undue influence and personal and financial advancement. The strength of first-ministerial rule was determined by the ability to replace or marginalize other figures of authority in the government, by appointing clients or allies to other, now subordinate, ministerial positions, and by constructing mechanisms to ensure a monopoly of access and advice to the ruler. Both Louis XIII and Richelieu had early and first-hand experience of such rule by minister-favourite in the rapid rise and fall of Concino Concini during the later regency government of queen Marie de Médicis. Concini appointed his client Richelieu as secretary for foreign affairs, and was murdered in 1617 by a coterie around the young Louis XIII, who in turn seized power from the regent. The young Louis XIII was thus presented as an enemy of over-powerful ministerial rule, and créatures like Richelieu who had risen as one of Concini's ministerial team were summarily dismised […]

Louis XIII grew frustrated with what seemed the appeasement of Spain by his ministers in the early 1620s. He was prepared to abandon previous antipathies and to consider appointing a minister with a known record of anti-Spanish pronouncements, who had positioned himself within a hawkish faction in debates about French foreign policy. Sponsored by the queen mother, in whose party he had established himself by default, cardinal Richelieu made his return to the royal council in 1624.

Richelieu's intention to remove those ministers who might be able to challenge his influence with the king was clear from the outset: the disgrace of Charles de La Vieuville, superintendent of finances, followed in short order […] Meanwhile he sought to consolidate his standing with Louis XIII. The young king considered Richelieu under probation, and tolerated the extension of his power and dominance of the council only because of his frustration with the failures of previous ministers […]

Yet for Richelieu defeating the Huguenots in France was essentially a distraction from the process of justifying his position to the king as the architect of an aggressive anti-Habsburg foreign policy. Unlike Mazarin, who was to prove dangerously complacent about "selling" his policies to the French political class, Richelieu spent time and money acquiring writers who would defend the necessity of France's struggle against Habsburg "encirclement" and "universal monarchy", and who vaunted Richelieu's ability in the conduct of affairs. Yet despite this attempt to shape political opinion, criticism of Richelieu's direct assumption of power, of his use of his créatures to manage the king, and his exclusion of alternative sources of counsel was widely shared and well articulated. Already the argument was gathering weight that Richelieu's position represented an illegitimate, abusive seizure of power from the king. Opposition coalesced around the king's brother, Gaston d'Orléans, and his ill-treatment by the cardinal, who feared that Gaston and then his possible heirs were likely to succeed to the throne in the absence of children from Louis XIII's marriage. The disgrace and exile of Marie de Médicis after her failure to dislodge Richelieu in the November 1630 "Day of Dupes" worsened this perception, in which it seemed that Richelieu was intent on eliminating and replacing the royal family as "natural" advisors to the king.

[..]

France was operating on the sidelines of the continuing Thirty Years' War, in which the Habsburg powers of Spain and the Emperor were fully occupied by the struggle against the Dutch and those German protestant princes grouped under the imposing military leadership of Sweden. Richelieu could thus offer a relatively low-cost, apparently low-risk enhancement of the king's prestige and influence. Despite the failed rebellion in 1632 led by the duc de Montmorency, these years were notably less preoccupied with the problem of ministerial "tyranny". As was to be the case for cardinal Mazarin in the mid-1640s, foreign policy success could mute at least some domestic political pressure. The king's satisfaction with Richelieu's achievements on his behalf sent a message to those who opposed both the principle and the practice of first-ministerial rule. Richelieu himself was convinced that the execution of the duc de Montmorency, who, until his alliance with Gaston d'Orléans in 1632, had been a committed servant of the monarchy, had sent a clear message about the king's commitment to his first minister.

It is impossible to predict how long this situation might have continued, with France able to stand on the margins of the Thirty Years' War, accruing piecemeal but incremental territorial and political gains, and keeping both her military and financial commitments relatively contained. But habituation to rule by a first minister who was perceived to exercise an ever tighter control over the king's policies, and a monopoly over appointments and favour, was not the same as lasting acceptance of such a system. There remained a fundamental tension between the sovereign's right to delegate executive powers to whoever he chose, and the legitimacy of a minister who was usurping legislative and prerogative authority that could only belong to the king.

David Parrott- 1652- The Cardinal, the Prince, and the Crisis of the Fronde

[histoireettralala]

La Journée des Barricades ( the 1648 edition)

August 26, 1648, Paris.

The King, Louis XIV, isn't yet ten years old of age - his mother, Queen Anne, is Regent. She is helped and advised by Cardinal Mazarin.

The tensions between the Regent and the Parliaments come to a breaking point, and on Mazarin's advice, Anne of Austria has René Potier de Blancmesnil and Pierre Broussel arrested - those two members of the Parliament being loud and influential opponents to the Queen's decisions - they are notably opposed to the levying of more taxes (the Thirty Years war puts a strain on the finances) , which endears them to the Parisians.

[Pierre Broussel]

But as soon as the people of Paris hears about it, crowds gather. A third member of the Parliament, Louis Charton, escapes arrest.

The crowds are forcibly dispersed, blood is shed, and the inhabitants of Paris take up arms in order to get their vengeance. In every street chains are pulled to forbid access. There are 200 to 600 barricades in the city, decorated with flags, and fortified; and people are yelling " Long live the King! No Mazarin!" The Parliament comes to the Palais-Royal to ask for the prisoners'  liberation, first président Mathieu Molé being their spokesperson; he explains it is the only way to calm the angry crowds down and to squash a rebellion; unfortunately Anne of Austria sourly retorts that "The members of the Parliament were the true authors of the sedition by their disobedience to the crown's orders." Molé tries again, with no better result.

The members of the Parliament go back to their palace, and get to the third Barricade (at the Croix du Trahoir) where they are stopped. One armourer of the rue St Honoré, Raguenet, seizes Mathieu Molé by the arm, holds a pistol to his face and demands "Turn around, traitor, if you don't want to be slaughtered, you and yours; bring us Broussel back, or Mazarin and the Chancellor as hostages!" Molé keeps his calm, moves the pistol aside, and with a great dignity gathers the parliamentaries back to him, going back to the Palais Royal in the midst of a furious crowd.

[President Mathieu Molé, seized by the rebels, during the wars of the Fronde, by François-André Vincent, 1779]

For the third time he displays to the Regent how irritated the people are, what resistance they just faced, but the Queen isn't convinced yet. The Parliament then decides to gather in the galerie of the Palais Royal. Gaston de France, Duke of Orleans (the King's uncle), and Mazarin, assist to the conference. The Parliament states that the arrested members of the Parliament will be freed. And finally the Regent relents and accepts. The decision is immediately told to the people- but the Parisians declare (they do not trust the Court's sincerity) that they will stay under arms until they see Broussel free.

When Broussel appears the next morning, artillery salvos can be heard among the shouts of joy, and the magistrate is given a triumphal welcome and carried up to his home.

The city will be quiet again on August 29.

But the Fronde has only started.

[stromain]

Il  y a 120 ans, le 9 décembre 1897, paraissait le premier numéro de "La Fronde", quotidien fondé par #MargueriteDurand, dirigé, administré, rédigé et composé par des femmes. Jusqu'au 31 décembre, exposition à la Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand.

[oranegueneau]