But thanks to Mazarin, who completed his work, France gathered in the harvest sown by Richelieu. At the outset no one believed that the new cardinal would have any success. Every one expected from Anne of Austria Mazarin, 1643-1661. a change in the government which appeared to be justified by the persecutions of Richelieu and the disdainful unscrupulousness of Louis XIII. On the 16th of May the queen took the little four-year-old Louis XIV. to the parlement of Paris which, proud of playing a part in politics, hastened, contrary to Louis XIII.’s last will, to acknowledge the command of the little king, and to give his mother “free, absolute and entire authority.” The great nobles were already looking upon themselves as established in power, when they learnt with amazement that the regent had appointed as her chief adviser, not Gaston of Orleans, but Mazarin. The political revenge which in their eyes was owing to them as a body, the queen claimed for herself alone, and she made it a romantic one. This Spaniard of waning charms, who had been neglected by her husband and insulted by Richelieu, now gave her indolent and full-blown person, together with absolute power, into the hands of the Sicilian. Whilst others were triumphing openly, Mazarin, in the shadow and silence of the interregnum, had kept watch upon the heart of the queen; and when the old party of Marie de’ Medici and Anne of Austria wished to come back into power, to impose a general peace, and to substitute for the Protestant alliances an understanding with Spain, the arrest of François de Vendôme, duke of Beaufort, and the exile of other important nobles proved to the great families that their hour had gone by (September 1643).
Mazarin justified Richelieu’s confidence and the favour of Anne of Austria. It was upon his foreign policy that he relied to maintain his authority within the kingdom. Thanks to him, the duke of Enghien (Louis de Bourbon, afterwards prince of Treaties of Westphalia. Condé), appointed commander-in-chief at the age of twenty-two, caused the downfall of the renowned Spanish infantry at Rocroi; and he discovered Turenne, whose prudence tempered Condé’s overbold ideas. It was he too who by renewing the traditional alliances and resuming against Bavaria, Ferdinand III.’s most powerful ally, the plan of common action with Sweden which Richelieu had sketched out, pursued it year after year: in 1644 at Freiburg im Breisgau, despite the death of Guébriant at Rottweil; in 1645 at Nördlingen, despite the defeat of Marienthal; and in 1646 in Bavaria, despite the rebellion of the Weimar cavalry; to see it finally triumph at Zusmarshausen in May 1648. With Turenne dominating the Eiser and the Inn, Condé victorious at Lens, and the Swedes before the gates of Prague, the emperor, left without a single ally, finally authorized his plenipotentiaries to sign on the 24th of October 1648 the peace about which negotiations had been going on for seven years. Mazarin had stood his ground notwithstanding the treachery of the duke of Bavaria, the defection of the United Provinces, the resistance of the Germans, and the general confusion which was already pervading the internal affairs of the kingdom.
The dream of the Habsburgs was shattered. They had wished to set up a centralized empire, Catholic and German; but the treaties of Westphalia kept Germany in its passive and fragmentary condition; while the Catholic and Protestant princes obtained formal recognition of their territorial independence and their religious equality. Thus disappeared the two principles which justified the Empire’s existence; the universal sovereignty to which it laid claim was limited simply to a German monarchy much crippled in its powers; and the enfranchisement of the Lutherans and Calvinists from papal jurisdiction cut the last tie which bound the Empire to Rome. The victors’ material benefits were no less substantial: the congress of Münster ratified the final cession of the Three Bishoprics and the conquest of Alsace, and Breisach and Philippsburg completed these acquisitions. The Spaniards had no longer any hope of adding Luxemburg to their Franche-Comté; while the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, taken in the rear by Sweden (now mistress of the Baltic and the North Sea), cut off for good from the United Provinces and the Swiss cantons, and enfeebled by the recognized right of intervention in German affairs on the part of Sweden and France, was now nothing but a meaningless name.
Mazarin had not been so fortunate in Italy, where in 1642 the Spanish remained masters. Venice, the duchy of Milan and the duke of Modena were on his side; the pope and the grand-duke of Tuscany were trembling, but the romantic expedition of the duke of Guise to Naples, and the outbreak of the Fronde, saved Spain, who had refused to take part in the treaties of Westphalia and whose ruin Mazarin wished to compass.
It was, however, easier for Mazarin to remodel the map of Europe than to govern France. There he found himself face to face with all the difficulties that Richelieu had neglected to solve, and that were now once more giving trouble. State of the kingdom. The Lit de Justice of the 18th of May 1643 had proved authority to remain still so personal an affair that the person of the king, insignificant though that was, continued to be regarded as its absolute depositary. Thus regular obedience to an abstract principle was under Mazarin as incomprehensible to the idle and selfish nobility as it had been under Richelieu. The parlement still kept up the same extra-judicial pretensions; but beyond its judicial functions it acted merely as a kind of town-crier to the monarchy, charged with making known the king’s edicts. Yet through its right of remonstrance it was the only body that could legally and publicly intervene in politics; a large and independent body, moreover, which had its own demands to make upon the monarchy and its ministers. Richelieu, by setting his special agents above the legal but complicated machinery of financial administration, had so corrupted it as to necessitate radical reform; all the more so because financial charges had been increased to a point far beyond what the nation could bear. With four armies to keep up, the insurrection in Portugal to maintain, and pensions to serve the needs of the allies, the burden had become a crushing one.
Richelieu had been able to surmount these difficulties because he governed in the name of a king of full age, and against isolated adversaries; while Mazarin had the latter against him in a coalition which had lasted ten years, with Richelieu and Mazarin. the further disadvantages of his foreign origin and a royal minority at a time when every one was sick of government by ministers. He was the very opposite of Richelieu, as wheedling in his ways as the other had been haughty and scornful, as devoid of vanity and rancour as Richelieu had been full of jealous care for his authority; he was gentle where the other had been passionate and irritable, with an intelligence as great and more supple, and a far more grasping nature.
It was the fiscal question that arrayed against Mazarin a coalition of all petty interests and frustrated ambitions; this was always the Achilles’ heel of the French monarchy, which in 1648 was at the last extremity for money. Financial difficulties. All imposts were forestalled, and every expedient for obtaining either direct or indirect taxes had been exhausted by the methods of the financiers. As the country districts could yield nothing more, it became necessary to demand money from the Parisians and from the citizens of the various towns, and to search out and furbish up old disused edicts—edicts as to measures and scales of prices—at the very moment when the luxury and corruption of the parvenus was insulting the poverty and suffering of the people, and exasperating all those officials who took their functions seriously.
A storm burst forth in the parlement against Mazarin as the patron of these expedients, the occasion for this being the edict of redemption by which the government renewed for nine years the “Paulette” which had now expired, Rebellion of the parlement. by withholding four years’ salary from all officers of the Great Council, of the Chambres des comptes, and of the Cour des aides. The parlement, although expressly exempted, associated itself with their protest by the decree of union of May 13, 1648, and deliberations in a body upon the reform of the state. Despite the queen’s express prohibition, the insurrectionary assembly of the Chambre Saint Louis criticized the whole financial system, founded as it was upon usury, claimed the right of voting taxes, respect for individual liberty, and the suppression of the intendants, who were a menace to the new bureaucratic feudalism. The queen, haughty and exasperated though she was, yielded for the time being, because the invasion of the Spaniards in the north, the arrest of Charles I. of England, and the insurrection of Masaniello at Naples made the moment a critical one for monarchies; but immediately after the victory at Lens she attempted a coup d’état, arresting the leaders, and among them Broussel, a popular member of the parlement (August 26, 1648). Paris at once rose in revolt—a Paris of swarming and unpoliced streets, that had been making French history ever since the reign of Henry IV., and that had not forgotten the barricades of the League. Once more a pretence of yielding had to be made, until Condé’s arrival enabled the court to take refuge at Saint-Germain (January 15, 1649).
Civil war now began against the rebellious coalition of great The Fronde (1648-1652). nobles, lawyers of the parlement, populace, and mercenaries just set free from the Thirty Years’ War. It lasted four years, for motives often as futile as the Grande Mademoiselle’s ambition to wed little Louis XIV., Cardinal de Retz’s red hat, or Madame de Longueville’s stool at the queen’s side; it was, as its name of Fronde indicates, a hateful farce, played by grown-up children, in several acts.