WHEN the news that the dagger of Ravaillac had ended the life of Henry IV was brought to the Duke of Sully, the latter cried out in distress, " France is about to fall into foreign hands!" He was not wrong. The new King, Louis XIII (1610- 43), whose nominal reign began the instant his father died, was only a helpless minor. The government passed to his mother Queen Marie de' Medici, an Italian lady, "heavy and lethargic," of very mediocre ability and quite willing to let herself be controlled by unworthy favorites. Sully quitted office in disgrace, and for seven years the true ruler of France was an Italian, Concini, "who had been made a marshal without ever having been under fire." Needless to say his domination, foreign birth, and arrogance made him utterly unpopular among the high-spirited French noblemen, and in 1617 he was assassinated in a bold and successful plot; being shot down at the very gates of the Louvre, by high-born conspirators who alleged that he was "resisting the orders" the young King had given them for his arrest. Louis XIII was now old enough to assert himself, although not to rule intelligently. He replaced the favorite of his mother with his own favorite, the clever, supple, and unprincipled De Luynes, who was practically Prime Minister until he died in 1621.
Under such a government, one faction of selfish nobles contending against another, and the interests of the nation being recklessly sacrificed, it is needless to say there was lamentable decadence from the brave policies of Henry IV. That redoubtable monarch had seen a foe in every Hapsburg, and had counted Austria the dearest rival of France; but Marie de' Medici and her custodians deliberately played up to the Hapsburgs, and caused the young King to marry the Princess Anne of Austria. A government that could not sustain the interests of France abroad was not likely to be strong at home. The great nobles began to follow their lawless whims in the good old feudal manner. The Protestants and Catholics resumed quarreling over political issues. In 1614 the weak administration tried to calm public sentiment by convening the already antiquated and discredited States General, that inefficient parliamentary body wherein the Nobility, Clergy, and "Third Estate" met in three separate bodies to petition the King, ventilate their grievances, contend, and then to disband. The meeting of 1614 was even more contentious than usual. Practically no effective measures for bettering the realm were suggested to the Government, and the worthlessness of the States General as a helper to the King was so advertised, that the body was never reconvened until the eve of the great Revolution in 1789.
Then, just as the feeble government seemed cracking, as France seemed about to lapse, if not into feudal anarchy, at least into a long period of weakness and misrule, a firm hand took the helm of state. Louis XIII was a man of very ordinary abilities, but he was a far more fortunate monarch than many a more capable king; he had found a truly great Prime Minister and he had the firmness and common sense to keep him in office. We thus come to one of the genuine builders of the splendor of France – Richelieu.
Armand Jean du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, was born near Chinon in 1585. Like that of many another famous man, his family was "poor but noble." His first education was for the army, but young Richelieu soon found that for him at least the quill pen was a far better weapon than the sword. He entered the Church, and family influence was sufficient to get him the bishopric of Luson, "the most wretched and disagreeable bishopric in France," as he afterwards testily stated. The young prelate was doubtless a sincere Catholic, but no one claimed that he ever looked on the Church as anything but a means to worldly advancement. He seems to have spent as little time in the ruling of his clergy as possible, and devoted his main energies to pushing his fortunes at court where his immense practical and social talents soon carried him far.
In 1614, Richelieu was a member of the States General, and became disgusted at the selfishness and political inefficiency of its members. In 1616 for a short time he was a minister of state, but so long as Concini or De Luynes lorded it, there was no real scope for his talents in the government. Richelieu steadily grew, however, as a power at the court. In 1622, he received the red hat of a cardinal, and in 1624, Louis XIII had the intelligence to realize that in this Churchman was a "First Minister" who could order his land for him. For the next eighteen years it may be fairly said that Louis XIII reigned, but that Richelieu governed. The monarch only shone by the light reflected from his mighty vicegerent.
Richelieu had a very genuine devotion to the weal of France, but he saw that weal coming from her glory in war, not from her quiet economic prosperity. He was determined to eliminate all opposition to the royal power at home, and to advance the boundaries of the kingdom by fair means or foul. He did not shrink from harsh and utterly unscientific methods of taxation. He had only scorn for the relics of "popular liberties" surviving from mediæval times. The experience of the States General of 1614 had convinced him that the best government was an intelligent autocracy. He was drastic and unscrupulous in his methods, but it may at least be said he never descended to wanton cruelty, and some of the opponents he crushed assuredly deserved their fate. Early in his career it had been written of him, "His is an intellect to which God has set no limits," and his deeds went far to justify the saying. Richelieu's performances may be summed up in three sentences: He robbed the Protestants of political importance. He reduced the nobility to genuine dependence on the Crown. He created a formidable army and launched it in victorious war against Austria. In simpler words, he consolidated the royal power at home and he made it terrible abroad.
Richelieu's quarrel with the Protestants was political and not religious. He did not attempt to tamper with their consciences or their right to hold religious gatherings; but ever since the Edict of Nantes it had become plain enough that the privilege therein granted them of garrisoning sundry fortified towns and of holding meetings for political purposes, were so many opportunities for unruly noblemen wherewith to undermine the royal authority and to breed civil wars. Twice Richelieu, in the King's name, drew the sword against the Protestant nobles. The second time the war was on a really large and bloody scale. La Rochelle, the Huguenot stronghold by the sea, made a desperate defense (1627-28) and resisted Richelieu's blockade until the children died of famine in the streets. The Protestants hoped for succor from their fellow religionists of England, but the incapable Charles I could not find admirals valiant enough to force their vessels through Richelieu's dikes across the harbor. When the English ships retired, La Rochelle surrendered, having held out until the survivors were "so wasted they resembled in looks the dead." Thus ended the Huguenots as a political party. They had failed, but they had gone down with honor. Richelieu (wiser than Louis XIV afterwards) left them their religious privileges, and for fifty years thereafter French Protestant lived with Catholic in a peace and harmony seldom seen elsewhere in any part of Europe save in Holland, because (in the Cardinal's own sagacious words) "we must trust to Providence, and bring no force to bear against [the Reformed doctrines] except the force of a good life and a good example."
This was Richelieu's first hard task: but the curbing of the high nobility was even more essential and much more difficult. The haughty malcontents were able to carry on intrigues against the hated minister in all the closets of the palace. At any moment Louis XIII might succumb to some backstairs influence, yield to the Cardinal's enemies, and fling him out of office. But it was absolutely required that the aristocratic dissidents should be taught their place if France was to be great France, and the Prime Minister did not flinch from the ordeal.
"The four corners of the King's cabinet," he declared, "are harder for me to conquer than all the battles fought in Europe." The Cardinal had not merely to fight against subtile intrigues and ordinary conspiracies, but against wholesale lawlessness on the part of the majority of the entire nobility. The practice of dueling among the French aristocracy had risen to a national evil. A competent writer affirmed that more gentlemen had perished in these private combats than in the entire "Wars of Religion." Duels took place on the most trifling possible provocation: because two "men of honor" would not step aside on the street, because one chanced to look at another coldly or arrogantly, because he would not look at all, because the two had touched one another in passing, etc. Each adversary had his witnesses; the "witnesses," who in no wise shared the original provocation, did not content themselves merely with seeing fair play, they fought personally, possibly without in the least knowing what the dispute was supposedly about. The quarrel of a nobleman thus sometimes involved all his near friends. The combats were frequently waged in deadly earnest, and not one, but five or six persons might perish in the swordplay. There were royal ordinances against all this, but the French aristocracy were as accustomed to laugh at such enactments of the King as at very many other laws. These seventeenth-century duels were therefore becoming really more destructive to life than the old mediæveval tourneys and ordeals by battle!
Of course under all this blood-letting rested the ancient feudal notion that it was discreditable for a true nobleman to let his quarrels be determined by any means save his good right arm. Richelieu set himself stubbornly against this whole. sale dueling, probably quite as much because it implied defiance of royal authority as because it was morally outrageous. In 1626 the Cardinal applied the anti-dueling edicts with a severity which soon alarmed the malcontents. A certain gentleman, the Count of Boutéville, a scion of the great House of Montmorency, had been exiled to Brussels for having had part in twentytwo duels. After pardon had been refused him by the Government, he had the boldness to beard the lion, by deliberately coming back to Paris and fighting a combat at high noon in the Place Royale (1627). The hand of the Cardinal was instantly upon him. Boutéville and his second, the Count de Chapelle, were promptly arrested, tried, and condemned to die. The protest from the high nobility against this "cruelty" was tremendous. Every kind of influence, social and political, open and backstairs, was invoked to induce Louis XIII to pardon the offenders. But the King, though probably not without sympathy for the "high sense of honor" of the victims, dared not discredit his great minister by an act of pardon. The offenders died, and as Richelieu observed, "Nothing serves better to keep the laws in full vigor than the punishment of persons whose great rank is equal to their crime." Dueling was not indeed completely swept away by acts like these. It long continued to curse the French nobility, but its worst features disappeared, and in any case a vigorous lesson had been taught the lawless.
About this same time Richelieu struck another and far more effective blow at the bold spirits who might feel tempted to defy the King. There were still many venerable castles over France, strong enough to defy anything but a regular siege with heavy artillery. Their mere existence was a suggestion to their noble owners of schemes for insurrection. The Cardinal ordered the wholesale dismantlement or downright destruction of these castles. To the French middle classes and peasantry, long the victims of feudal insolence or even of wholesale oppression, this was the most popular edict imaginable. Thousands of willing hands aided the royal officers to throw down battlements or to demolish entire donjons. As a consequence, a great number of once magnificent castles sank into ivy-clad ruins: the remainder would be made over into elegant, but undefendable open châteaux. Antiquarians of a later day might regret this destruction of the stately relics of feudalism, but the peace of the land was infinitely the gainer. Hereafter if there were to be soldiers or strongholds, they were to be ever increasingly at the sole service of the King.
So long as Richelieu was dealing only with the seigneurs of petty or average rank, his position was secure enough. It was different when his policies collided with the King's own kinsfolk. In truth, the Cardinal was so masterful a ruler that no dignitary could be very comfortable in his presence, and even the King himself dreaded and somewhat disliked him, at the very time when he told himself that his redoubtable "servant" was indispensable. In 1626 several very formidable personages combined against Richelieu. Gaston of Orléans, the brother of the King himself, and heir to the throne, was nominally the center of the conspiracy, but he was a decidedly stupid man and the brains of the undertaking were really with Marshal d'Ornano, whom Richelieu had earlier favored and promoted. Nearly all the other French princes seem to have known something of the plot. Their object seems to have been to depose the Cardinal by force, since the King refused to dismiss him, and to substitute some more pliable and obsequious minister. These high-born gentlemen speedily learned, however, the dangers of plotting against one who admirably combined the fox and the lion. Richelieu got wind of their schemes: let them drift along, then suddenly began arresting the leaders right and left. Ornano was clapped into the fortress of Vincennes and in a few months died in custody. The Count of Chalais, another leading spirit, had to die on the scaffold. The cowardly royal princes were let off easily, mostly with a term of exile, and Gaston of Orléans, after a fit of helpless rage, went through the forms of reconciliation with the King and his Minister. The Cardinal had wisely refrained from touching the blood royal, and for a time his credit was higher than ever. The King granted him a bodyguard of a hundred men, as if he too were a royal personage, while the great offices of "Constable" and "Admiral of France" (posts that had hitherto given two great nobles a considerable control respectively over the army and the navy) were suppressed, thus bringing the armed forces more completely under the monarch's authority.
So Richelieu met and flung back the first personal danger which confronted him. But he had now won for himself the standing enmity of the two queens. The Queen-Mother, Marie de' Medici "had turned against her 'ungrateful' minister with a hatred intensified, it is said, by unrequited passion." Anne of Austria, Louis's consort, had been on very bad terms with her mother-in-law; her dislike of Richelieu, however, had presently led to a reconciliation with the older princess. In September, 1630, Louis lay very ill at Lyons, and the Queens, working upon him, won his tentative promise to dismiss the Cardinal. The King declared, however, nothing could be done until peace should be made with Spain. When tidings of the truce of Regensburg reached the court, Marie hastened to recall the promise. If she had been more tactful and less violent, probably she would have had her way. On November 10, 1630, when the court had returned to the Luxembourg Palace in Paris and the King had recovered, the Queen-Mother created a scene before her son, denouncing Richelieu and his favorite niece, Madame de Combalet, "in language that would have disgraced a fishwife," and driving the Cardinal, who did not venture to defend himself, from the room. It was one of those moments when, as is possible in monarch-ridden countries, a violent domestic quarrel can make or mar the fortunes of empires. Richelieu, and, it is not unfair to say, the immediate hopes of France were lost if Louis wavered. The King, however, though loath to quarrel, and listening to his mother in silence, was still more loath to dismiss a minister whose chief fault obviously consisted in being more devoted to the Sovereign's interests than to those of the Queen Dowager. After Marie had left him, Louis did nothing, and certain of Richelieu's friends confirmed him in his resolution not to jeopardize the weal of France by succumbing to female tantrums.
Meantime the Queen Dowager had swept out of her son's cabinet conveying the impression of triumph. The courtiers crowded around her with time-serving congratulations. The rumor spread that the Cardinal was packing his valuables for flight. This was hardly true, but Richelieu was in genuine fear lest the King had deserted him, as indeed had almost all others; but while he desponded, and while all the toadying Parisian world waited for the name of the new "First Minister," there came the messenger of the King announcing that his master had no intention of displacing his great vicegerent. "Continue to serve me," said Louis, "as you have done; and I will sustain you against all who have sworn to destroy you." This "Day of Dupes" (November 11, 1630) was therefore to become famous in French annals. Many pompous magnates who had shown their joy at the Queen-Mother's alleged triumph were promptly stripped of their dignities. Marie de' Medici vainly attempted a reconciliation with the Cardinal, but her humiliation was too great – in 1631 she fled to Brussels and never again entered France, dying in gilded exile.
If the Queen-Mother could not displace Richelieu, no lesser worthy surely could turn the trick, although there were other conspiracies. In 1632, indeed, Henry, Duke of Montmorency, undertook an open revolt in Languedoc – a blunder which promptly cost him his head. In 1642 a young favorite of the King, Cinq-Mars, a vain and futile courtier, dabbled also in treason, and perished in turn upon the scaffold. On the whole, however, from 1630 onward Richelieu was the uncontested master of France. He could devote himself to greater things than nipping closet intrigues and boudoir conspiracies.
Richelieu was by no means a skillful civil administrator. Taxation meant to him simply the means of raising huge armies, without respect to the miseries of the taxpayer. The taille (the main tax on the peasantry) was doubled to meet the cost of the wars with Spain. The distress of the rural population was often extreme. In 1634, in the South Country, and in 1639 in Normandy, there were serious insurrections of the peasants, and the name of the Cardinal became execrated by all the lower classes even as by the great nobles.
But the Cardinal surpassed as a master diplomat and organizer of wars and coalitions. Probably no statesman, in the days when diplomacy was said to consist of "lying for one's country," ever handled the sinister weapons of intrigue, private correspondence, and underhanded bargain more adroitly than he. Besides his accredited ambassadors and open agents, he made incomparable use of confidential representatives and downright spies. A certain Father Joseph, a supple and sanctimonious ecclesiastic, was his special private deputy at various important conferences, and probably had a large part in the making of much significant history.
The aim of Richelieu's foreign policy was very simple: to humble the House of Hapsburg and to make France recognized as the first power in Europe. The Hapsburgs were a divided dynasty: one branch was reigning in Austria, another in Spain, but the family alliance was fairly well maintained. Spain was still theoretically a great monarchy, with vast dominions and a redoubtable army, but already there were plenty of signs of that dry-rot within her fabric which was to bring her low without any one crushing disaster. In 1618 the Emperor of Austria (or more officially the "Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire") had become engaged in a life-and-death war, at first largely over religious issues, with the German Protestant States. By the time Richelieu grasped power, however, in 1624, it was evident enough that the question was partly this – Could Austria, with the aid of Spain, subjugate and consolidate under her centralizing sway all the lesser princes of Germany, especially those of the North? The Protestants were being steadily defeated, thanks to Spanish gold and Spanish pikemen. For several years it seemed likely they would go under. In that case a huge Hapsburg dominion would hem in France from the East, with a territory running clear down from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Against such a disaster to France, Richelieu struggled with all his might.
For years, however, this very belligerent and secular-minded Cardinal could hardly draw the sword along the Rhine. He was too busy at home crushing rebellious Huguenots and malcontent noblemen. But the same warrior-prelate who pressed the siege of La Rochelle against the French heretics was busy pulling wires and sending money in behalf of the German heretics who were the foes of his hated Austria. The inconsistency of this policy troubled Richelieu not a whit, even if his enemies denounced him as "The Pope of the Huguenots, and the Patriarch of atheists." Finally, in 1631, Richelieu made a direct treaty with Gustavus Adolphus, the Lutheran King of Sweden, paying that great captain a heavy subsidy if he would invade Germany and humble Austria. Gustavus, of course (as Central European history duly records), fulfilled his entire share of the bargain. He broke the power of the Hapsburgs over the North German Protestants by his famous victory at Breitenfeld (1631), and although he fell himself in battle in 1632, there was no longer any serious danger of the extermination of German Protestantism. Richelieu, however, was interested, not in the safety of Teutonic heresy, but in the prestige of French monarchy. His hands were now becoming untied at home. He could therefore devote his main energies to organizing France for foreign war. Hitherto, despite the vast resources and martial population sustaining them, French campaigns had been conducted most unscientifically. The standing army had been very small. There were plenty of country gentlemen to make a dashing militiacavalry, provided the term of service was short and the discipline lax. A good many of the infantry regiments had been made up of mercenaries – German, Swiss, Scotch, Irish, etc., who found the King a steady paymaster. The generals had often been royal courtiers and favorites, but by no means always men of military ability or even of decent training. All in all, the French armies up to 1630 could not be compared in organized effectiveness with the best of those of Spain.
Richelieu deserves the honor of being the first real builder of the modern French war-machine, later so terrible to every adversary. He made grievous mistakes. He too often mistook mere numbers of men for disciplined armies. He sometimes selected very incompetent generals; but he profited by his own blunders; repaired defeat and disaster with dauntless energy; and before his death he began to reap his reward.
The history of the foreign wars of Richelieu is largely a history of the later phases of the miserable Thirty Years' War in Germany (1618-48); a war which began as a struggle over religion, and which, after 1632, continued almost exclusively over the sordid question whether Austria on one side or France allied with Sweden on the other should reap the greatest material advantage at the expense of the helpless, devastated lesser states of Germany. In 1635, France actively intervened in the war, beginning active hostilities against Spain and Austria. Richelieu had gathered very large armies, but they were still only partially trained, and in 1636 the Spaniards were thrusting down from the Belgian provinces and were even threatening Paris, only halting at Corbine-on-the-Somme. By courageous efforts Richelieu turned this stroke aside, and soon the tide flowed steadily in his favor. In 1638 the German leader Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, fighting, however, in the French pay and interest, took the greater part of Alsace (excluding Strassburg), and on his death in 1639 this coveted territory was turned directly over to France. By this time Richelieu's armies were everywhere on the offensive, and before the great Cardinal died in 1642, they were striking at the Hapsburgs and their allies across the Pyrenees, in Italy, in Flanders, and across the Rhine. The older Spanish Monarchy was being pushed at every point upon the defensive.
A year after Richelieu departed, the forces which he had organized under the generals he had commissioned won a smashing and decisive pitched battle at Rocroi in Champagne (1643), when the stout squares of Spanish pikemen crumbled and collapsed under the charges of the French cavalry, and 7000 Spaniards fell and 6000 were taken prisoners. "The victory of Rocroi marked the end of the military preponderance of Spain, and the beginning of the military preponderance of France." It was won by the superior intelligence of the French leaders and soldiers as stimulated and organized by Richelieu, though the Cardinal never heard with mortal ears the tale of his greatest triumph.
However, Richelieu died a happy and fortunate man, even if he did not live till the day of Rocroi. Everywhere the power of his royal master had been consolidated; and victories were being already reported from every frontier. In 1621, Louis XIII had possessed an army of 12,000 men. In 1638, it had risen to 150,000. In 1642, it was still greater. Above all, Richelieu had fostered the training of two young generals – the masters of war, who were to enable France almost to dominate the world – generals known to history as Condé and Turenne. The House of Hapsburg was already very hard-pressed in Germany. In six years it would have to sign the humiliating Peace of Westphalia; and already French standards were floating over the Alsatian fortresses beside the Rhine.
Richelieu died late in 1642. His life had been one of incessant intrigues and wars. Probably if a more peaceful existence had been granted him, he would have proved a lavish patron of art and letters. As it was he dabbled in literature himself, left some interesting and significant memoirs, gave legitimate patronage to the poet Corneille, and in 1635 found time amid his martial cares to found the famous French "Academy," which was to have so important an influence upon the life of the nation.
It was fortunate, of course, for the Cardinal, that his royal "master" was not a man of sufficient sensitiveness and energy to feel his dignity hurt by the princely state affected by this overpowering "First Minister." Richelieu built for himself the great "Palais Cardinal" at Paris, later the well-known "Palais Royal." He was never modest in appropriating his share of the royal revenues. In 1617 as a "poor bishop" his income had been 25,000 livres. In his later years it was 3,000,000. His table cost him 1000 crowns per day, and he delighted in sumptuous fêtes. His nephews and nieces ranked almost as "Children of the Blood," and great nobles were compelled to lacquey this omnipotent ruler of the King.
Richelieu is described to us as having looked his stately part, despite a sickly frame and a drawn face. Before his stern, august presence all France quailed, including Louis himself. Cunning, unscrupulous, and sinuous in all his ways, and adamantine to every foe, the Cardinal was nevertheless capable of acts of high courage and even of generosity. His interpretation of the "public weal" was pitifully narrow, and excluded a thousand acts which governments now count needful to make the governed happy; but at least he was never swerved from what he considered his duty to France and her King, by reason of threats, danger, or desire to win popularity and applause. More than any other great Frenchman he can be likened to another famous Prime Minister of a later day – Otto von Bismarck. Their moralities and ambitions were very much the same; but with this extenuation for Richelieu – he lived in the fetid atmosphere of the courts of the seventeenth century. Bismarck lived in the later nineteenth – an ample time for the standards of the world to change. Louis XIII died seven months after his great minister (May 14, 1643). He had been, to say the least, a very inconspicuous king, but he deserves a place in history for one crowning virtue – in the face of infinite opposition he had kept Richelieu for eighteen years in power.
Those eighteen years were to prove decisive in the history of France. Under the successors of Louis XIII and of Richelieu, France was in a position to advance from strength to strength.
That the next decade, following the death of Richelieu, was not one in which the full power of France was brought to bear upon Europe, is largely due to the fact that the great Cardinal's nominal master left only a boy of five years to be his heir. Once more the kingdom had to undergo the sorrows and weakening of a regency. Anne of Austria, mother of Louis XIV (whose official reign was to extend for the extraordinary term of seventy-three years, from 1643 to 1715), was no woman to play the part of Blanche of Castile, the regent for an earlier Louis. She was perhaps a shade more capable than her mother-in-law, the unlamented Marie de' Medici, but in any case she was absolutely under the influence of the new First Minister, Cardinal Mazarin, around whose policies and destinies the next eighteen years were largely to revolve.
Mazarin was a smooth, shrewd, supple, and extraordinarily calculating Italian ecclesiastic, who had come to France in 1634 and had become an invaluable lieutenant to Richelieu. That magnate had promoted him, secured him the Cardinal's hat, and doubtless would have been pleased could he have known he was to be his successor. Mazarin was certainly a lesser man than Richelieu, less original, daring, or willing to use courageous methods; but he was nevertheless a statesman of genuine ability who faced great difficulties and skillfully overcame them, albeit not always by heroic methods. The fact that he was an Italian naturally made the native aristocracy hate him; the other fact, that the King was a minor and that the grasp of the Regent and her Minister on the government was none too strong, of course made these same lords also feel that the time had come to throw off some of the humiliating restraints cast upon them by Richelieu. When that master of men at length vanished, for the last time France was racked by an aristocratic reaction.
The days were long departed when the great feudal vassals had dreamed of dismembering the kingdom. What the noble counts, marquises, dukes, and "Princes of the Blood" now really wanted was to be allowed to have their full share of the royal offices, patronage, and treasury receipts. The idle, frivolous life of a seventeenth-century court put a premium on boudoir plottings and parlor conspiracies, merely as a means of escaping ennui. No higher motives than these stated led certain lace-collared monseigneurs and mesdames into hatching schemes against "the Italian"; but it must be said there were other more legitimate causes of discontent with the Government. Richelieu had been an abominable financial manager. Mazarin was little better. The superintendent of the treasury was an Italian, Emeri, who shared his patron's unpopularity. Taxes were being collected with merciless rigor. Public offices were being sold to eke out the exchequer. Money was being borrowed at twentyfive per cent, yet the Thirty Years' War was still dragging to its expensive as well as its painful close, and Mazarin was charged, not unjustly, with feathering his own private nest at the cost of the State.
Such conditions enabled the high-born conspirators to obtain considerable popular sympathy, especially in the city of Paris, when they talked much of drawing the sword to rescue the young King from "his evil ministers." In addition to that, the high judicial court of France, the Parlement of Paris, was quite willing to assert its power. The members of this court were all of them noblemen, holding office as a matter of hereditary right, and they had long claimed the privilege of a practical veto upon the royal decrees by refusing to "register" them – that is, enroll them as legally binding. They had also under their eye the example of the much more powerful legislative "Parliament" of England, which was just then gaining the mastery over Charles I in the Puritan Revolution.
These three elements, therefore – discontented nobles, dissatisfied taxpayers, and a self-assertive judiciary – came together in a series of insurrections which made young Louis XIV sit very uneasily upon his throne. In 1648 began the wars known as the "Fronde" (1648-53), the detailed history whereof is not important, although it forms the basis for numerous racy and romantic court memoirs. For some time the two great royal generals, Condé and Turenne, were the mainsprings of the action. Both had their grievances against Mazarin, both were for a while in revolt against the Government, although not always simultaneously, and both (though more particularly Condé) struck hands with the Spanish enemy against their own King. The battles in these wars were sometimes bloody, but seldom were very decisive. The Parlement, and presently the Parisian city-folk, came to realize that the lofty aristocrats, who professed such zeal for the woes of the lower classes and for the respect due the laws, were themselves fighting mainly for pensions, patronage, and high commands. When the tempest was at its height, Mazarin had sagaciously withdrawn from court, but the moment the royal armies gained the advantage he was back (1653) and more powerful than ever. In that year Paris surrendered to Turenne, who was now again firmly on the King's side. The Parlement and the citizens made their peace with the young King, and Condé fled into exile among the Spaniards. The old aristocracy, which had been a thorn in the side of every king since the crowning of Hugh Capet, had fought its last battle.
Peace did not come instantly with the collapse of the Fronde commotions. Spain had not shared in the pact of 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia, with the German Powers, had awarded the bulk of Alsace to France. The proud Castilians had been very loath to confess that their dream of world domination was forever ended, and that north of the Pyrenees had risen a power mightier than they. When Condé fled his native land, he was welcomed at Brussels by its courtly governors, and they gladly gave the famous general the command of their armies. But Condé probably misliked the part of a rebel. In any case his new Spanish troops were not equal to his old French regiments. He won few successes over his one-time comrade and now opponent Turenne. In 1657, since the war dragged, Mazarin put his pride as a Catholic into his pocket, and made alliance with Cromwell, the redoubtable Puritan "Protector" of England. The latter sent over to the Continent a division of his stoutest, psalm-singing "Ironsides." In 1658, Frenchmen and English fought shoulder to shoulder against the Spaniard in the once famous Battle of the Dunes, on the sands near Dunkirk. The Spaniards were routed. Their power was near its end; and the proud Philip IV submitted to the terms dictated by the two nations which Philip II, his ancestor, had hoped to conquer. Dunkirk was ceded to England. France received parts of Artois, Roussillon (in the Pyrenees), and also various districts in Lorraine, whose unlucky Duke had sided with Spain. It was also agreed that Louis XIV should marry the Infanta Maria Theresa. The Princess was to bring a dowry of 300,000 gold crowns, in consideration of which she was to waive all claims to her father's throne. This Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) definitely settled the question whether Spain or France was the first power in Europe. The only issue remaining was whether France would push her ambitions further. Mazarin's foreign administration thus wound up in a blaze of glory. The young King was seemingly his obedient pupil, content to imitate his father and let a capable minister steer the ship of state for him. The last powers of resistance had been squeezed out of the great nobles. Henceforth they were to be merely gilded, obsequious ornaments of a splendid court, or at most the faithful commanders of the royal armies.
In Richelieu's time (or possibly earlier) there had, however, developed a new type of royal administrator in districts roughly corresponding to the various provinces. These new administrators, intendants, were men of humble origin who owed everything to the King, and expected everything from him; and although they did not formally replace the old royal governors, who were still great nobles, they speedily stripped them of most of their functions. The intendants by 1660 were becoming indispensable agents of monarchy, and were enabling the royal ministers to centralize the government at Paris, so that never since the fall of the Roman Empire was any pretentious monarch to have a more complete grasp upon the persons and property of his subjects than did Louis XIV.
In 1661, Mazarin died. He had completed the work of Richelieu, and he left his master the most splendid and powerful monarch in the world. If he had let the public debt accumulate, and otherwise proved himself a worse civil administrator than he was diplomat and court intriguer, he had at least looked well to his private fortune. He bequeathed an estate valued at 100,000,000 livres, had married his numerous nieces to great Italian or French noblemen or princes, had made his nephew a duke, and his brother (once a poor Italian monk) a cardinal. To crown his success, he had found in the young King a docile ward and admirer, and he had tried diligently to implant in him all those devious methods of statecraft which the age accounted the highest worldly wisdom. Louis XIV was twenty-two years old when this minister and mentor left him. Hitherto the young King had seemed content to lead a life of courtly pleasure. It was expected he would immediately name a new First Minister and resume his royal vanities, but when after Mazarin's death the lower ministers came to him asking to whom they should report for orders they received an astonishing answer. "To me!" replied the young King.
Louis XIV had determined not merely to reign, but also to govern.