SEVEN
My first goal was the majesty of the King; the second was the greatness of the realm.
—Cardinal Richelieu
LOUIS XIII (1610–43) CAME TO THE THRONE as a child not quite nine years old. Here was a dangerous situation for France, whereby the ruler of a mighty country surrounded by watchful enemies, both inside and outside, was a regent—and a woman—governing in the name of an infant. Over the next 100 years, there would be three child-kings in a row on the throne of France, ruling through three regents. In the case of both Louis XIII and his son, Louis XIV, aged four when he came to the throne, the Regent would be the Queen Mother. In Milan was the self-exiled Prince de Condé, and in eastern France, the powerful Duc de Bouillon, who threatened a Huguenot uprising if the young King were to marry the Spanish infanta—a match arranged when he was just ten years old. But Henri had shown foresight; some six months before his death he had declared to Maréchal de Lesdiguières that he “well knew that the foundation of everything in France is the prince’s authority.”1 For that reason, he intended to establish the Dauphin “as absolute king and to give him all the true, essential marks of royalty, to the end that there might be no one in the realm who would not have to obey him.” Here, de facto, was enunciated the principle of absolutism by which, for better or worse, France would be governed until the Great Revolution 180 years later— and again, revived under Emperor Napoleon I.
On the eve of setting off for the wars, Henri had taken the wise precaution of designating his queen, Marie, to act as Regent in his absence, supported by a Regent’s Council fifteen strong. She had neither the authoritarian will nor the expertise in statecraft of her predecessor and kinswoman, Catherine. Marie, fat, blonde—though comely enough when Rubens glorified her—also suffered the disadvantage of being a foreigner, and was of limited intelligence. But sensibly she stuck with all Henri’s ministers. Only the ageing Sully resigned, his stewardship finally fulfilled. Acting judiciously to calm Protestant fears of another Saint Bartholomew’s Eve, one of her first acts was to confirm, on 22 May, the Edict of Nantes. However, Henri had not ruled long enough for the stability he achieved to survive the assassination. “Rule in the interest of the public good, or for the good of all Frenchmen,” claims one historian, “had proved too radical.”2
When Marie was declared Regent shortly after the announcement of the regicide, the citizens were shocked and frightened. But instead of running to arms, as they might have done before Henri’s death, they ran to pray and make votive offerings for the health and prosperity of his son. Thus Marie was able to lay a foundation sufficiently sound for the young Louis XIII to survive campaigns against the princes in 1619–20, and in 1627–28 against the Huguenots—as well as to resist the external pressures of the Thirty Years’ War which had scourged central Europe in the 1630s. The Queen Mother contented herself with purchasing and completing her sumptuous Luxembourg Palace, summoning Rubens from his native Antwerp in 1621 to decorate its galleries with twenty-four vast canvases that celebrated, with magnificent flattery, the main events of her marriage, and the benefits to her adopted country of the Regency.
In 1612, the engagement of the ten-year-old Dauphin to Anne of Austria, daughter of King Philip III of Spain, a thoroughly dynastic arrangement, was announced. At the same time, Louis’ sister, Élisabeth, was betrothed to Anne’s brother, the future Philip IV of Spain. That April saw one of the most extravagant celebrations ever mounted in Paris to dignify the double engagement and inaugurate the Palace. A mock carrousel, called the Château de Félicité, complete with turrets and battlements, was erected in its centre. The Queen and court, with an estimated 200,000 Parisians, watched a défilé of 150 musicians, “twenty-four trumpets, twelve horse-mounted drums, five giants with bows and arrows,” and a gigantic equestrian ballet, punctuated by the sound of cannon fired from the Bastille.
The noble Chevaliers de la Gloire, dressed in embroidered gold and silver, carrying bright red standards walked in front of ten companies of assaillants led by the late King’s bastard, the Duc de Vendôme, and “a troop of many-coloured chevaliers on armour-clad horses, bandsmen, rois captifs,two elephants, two reinocerots [sic], and a chariot pulled by deer.” Sibyls made their appearance, chanting eulogies specially written by the poet Malherbe. When the cavalcade ended, the “defenders” of the carrousel charged theassaillants in a mock battle. As night fell, accompanied by the firing of 4000 rockets from the towers of the nearby Bastille, the whole Château de Félicité was set alight, its defenders seen consumed by fire.
The following day there was a new, brilliant cavalcade. On the third day, Saturday, there was a salute of 200 cannon and a grand feu de joie outside the Hôtel de Ville where only so recently the unfortunate Ravaillac had been ritually torn apart.
TOGETHER WITH A LIBERAL HAND-OUT of graces-and-favours to the nobles, and an increase in their pensions, the great festival temporarily assured the popularity of Reine Marie—but only temporarily. Two years later the Estates-General met, to hand in a formidable list of grievances. War with both Habsburgs and Huguenots threatened, and with it financial bankruptcy; it seemed as if the age of conspiracy and rebellion might be about to return. Already suspect on account of her Italian background, Marie rashly handed great powers to her Florentine favourite, a woman widely held to be “a swarthy and greedy sorceress,” called Leonora Galigai. Leonora was married to an affected fop, Carlo Concini, whom the Queen made Marquis d’Ancre, and a marshal of France—though he never fought a battle. The Concinis exerted a curious influence over the Queen Regent, enriching and foolishly flaunting themselves in front of both the “Great Ones” and the young King. They soon became the scapegoat for all the real or imagined shortcomings of the regime. Louis reached his majority, aged thirteen, in October 1614, and—dressed in white, elegant and frail—appeared before the Estates-General where the young Bishop of Luçon (which appointment he had received from Henri IV, at the tender age of twenty-one), one Richelieu, first made his mark with his forceful eloquence. The boy-King thanked his mother profusely for “all the trouble” she had taken on his behalf, and said he wished her to continue to govern and to be obeyed.
Nonetheless, the young King was but a glum shadow of his father, lacking his panache—and fearful of women. As a lonely child, sulky, morose and shy, he grew up to be secretive, cold and capable of great cruelty. He was unsociable and a dreamer, who seemed consistently bored. When asked to pardon a condemned peer (and personal friend), he is said to have remarked icily: “A king should not have the same feelings as a private man.” Like his mother he made a poor choice of favourites. Left to be brought up by court servants, his choice was Charles d’Albert de Luynes, Grand Falconer at the court, whose name sounded grander than in fact he was. Luynes, who was all of twenty-three years older than Louis, was a fairly humble petit gentilhomme from near Aix-en-Provence, born—according to Richelieu’s acid comment— of a cannon and a chambermaid. He was good looking and expert at riding and hunting, which seems to have been what most interested the King.
In November 1615, aged fourteen, Louis married his Anne of Austria (though she was, in fact, a Spanish princess), then a beautiful young woman. Anne was to become, in Dumas’ Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844), a Queen Guinevere–like heroine of d’Artagnan and his chivalrous comrades-in-arms, protecting her honour from the machinations of Richelieu. During the marital festivities, Louis had made a show, unusual for him, of being joyeux et galant. He may well have been a bisexual. In total contrast to either his father or his son, Louis XIV, he was in all probability simply frigid. Deeply attached to Luynes, Louis is said not to have entered his wife’s bed until five years after their marriage, and then only when he was led to it by Luynes. There was to be no issue of the marriage for twenty-two years—following a chance encounter when Louis was sheltering from a storm in 1637. But for the advent of one of history’s greatest politicians, Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s reign might have been a calamity for France.
The Concinis, arrogant parvenus, came increasingly to annoy Louis by cheekily parading outside his windows in the Louvre, with an escort of between 200 and 300. With Louis on a tight string financially, Concini added to the humiliation by offering to help him out. It was an intolerable situation. Condé had already made a failed attempt at eliminating Concini, but he had escaped and Condé had ended in the Bastille. Then, in April 1617, Louis, almost certainly egged on by his favourite, ordered the elimination of Concini, his mother’s favourite. On the morning of the 24th, as the puffed-up Maréchal d’Ancre and his retinue of fifty entered the Louvre, a courtier supported by a few men sprang out and took the right arm of Concini, announcing: “The King has commanded me to seize your person.” Concini cried out for help, but was immediately shot down with a volley of pistol shots. His retinue did nothing, although Louis and Luynes were waiting anxiously inside, ready to flee if the plot failed.
The city rejoiced ferociously at the death, in the courtyard of the Louvre itself, of the hated Concini, who was suspected of complicity in the death of Henri IV and even blamed for the failure to place his statue on the Pont Neuf. Buried at Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Concini’s body was later dug up, torn apart, and cannibalised: “having torn out the heart, one mob roasted it on a charcoal brazier, and ate it with relish.” 3 At sixteen the unpleasant Louis had truly come of age; “Yes, now I am King!” he declared. Marie de’ Medici, realising that her innings was over, said resignedly, “I’ve reigned for years, and now I expect nothing more than a crown in Heaven!” She was exiled (briefly) to Blois. Her Italian best friend, Leonora Galigai, Concini’s widow, was seized while trying to conceal her jewellery in a mattress, and then burned on the Place de Grève as a witch. “What a lot of people to see a poor woman die!” she is said to have exclaimed.
WITH THE DOUBLE SPANISH MARRIAGE in 1615, the Spanish threat to France, which had so exercised Henri IV, was now approaching its end as Spanish power began its long descent following the death of Philip II. Once again the dangers were internal. With Louis and his favourite, the skein of religious reconciliation, so courageously woven by his father, began to unravel. Luynes was a Catholic zealot, although Louis, by upbringing and the influence of his Medici mother, hardly needed much encouragement. He soon found himself entangled in a campaign against the Protestants in the south-west of France, in his father’s old bailiwick and against Henri’s former supporters. Luynes, now appointed Constable of France (amid much derision), was put in charge of operations. Lacking both political and military experience, he had swiftly made himself almost as detested as Concini, exploiting his relationship with the King to amass wealth and titles. In 1621, he so mishandled the siege of Montauban that it had to be abandoned after three months. Among the heavy casualties was Luynes, dead of camp fever.
Louis shed no tears; they were not part of the King’s make-up. Writing to Richelieu, Cardinal Bérulle described the death of Luynes as a “coup de justice et de miséricorde.” Unmistakably, it was a stroke of pure good fortune for France, though it left a serious power vacuum in Paris. Into it, and out of his temporary disgrace, moved Richelieu— invited by Louis, disorientated by the loss of his favourite.
LOUIS BECAME RECONCILED to his mother and abetted the rise of her favourite Richelieu. He was made cardinal in 1622. Two years later Louis, repressing in his memory Richelieu’s involvement with the Concinis, called him to take over the government. Previously Louis had viewed him as a dangerous prelate, but for France, this was to prove a marriage almost made in heaven. For the monarchy, it was to transform an unattractive and accident-prone princeling into a great king. If Louis had greatness, it lay primarily in his entrusting of the country almost entirely to his brilliant prime minister, creating a virtual dictatorship of a premier ministre with the acceptance of the monarch. Richelieu declared that “my first goal was the majesty of the King; the second was the greatness of his realm.” Historians like Montesquieu, however, saw it differently: Richelieu had assigned the King the role of playing “second fiddle in the realm, and first in Europe.”
Armand Jean Du Plessis de Richelieu was born in Paris in 1585, five years before Henri IV began his siege of Paris, younger son of a provincial family of nobles from Poitou. Obliged by them to enter into Holy Orders, he was ever a convinced Christian and strict priest, and had greatly impressed the Sorbonne with his theological theses. At the Estates-General convocation of 1614 his arched nose and thin lips, his goatee and military moustache, his pale complexion and slender figure, already lent him a distinguished bearing. Beneath the cool, reasoned exterior which was to dominate the portraits of the epoch was a man of passion, occasionally capable of violent rages. France, Richelieu saw, was dangerously caught in a power play between Spain, Habsburg Austria and Protestant Germany, menaced not only by the Catholic-Protestant split, but also by the ambitions of “Great Lords” like Condé grown too rich and too powerful under the Regency. Richelieu found himself under great pressure, on the one hand, from the parti dévot, successors to the sixteenth-century Catholic League, which urged him to concentrate on suppressing the Huguenots and to favour Spain; and, on the other hand, from the nobles who wanted to assert their authority. Always the pragmatist rather than a reformer, Richelieu eschewed grand designs in favour of a method—a method of making things work, avoiding confrontation. “In politics,” he was fond of saying, “one is impelled far more by the necessity of things than by a preestablished will.”4
In simplest terms, Richelieu’s early programme operated on three prongs: to crush Huguenot power, to humble France’s “Great Lords” and to thwart Austrian designs. In the first of these, he was greatly aided by the folly of James I’s favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Villiers handed him an Anglo-French war into which the key Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay was unwillingly drawn. Having suffered terrible privations on a par with Paris in 1590, La Rochelle was starved out after a fourteen-month siege in 1627–28. In what subsequently, to French eyes, was a scuttle comparable to Dunkirk in 1940, Buckingham pulled out, abandoning his Huguenot allies to their fate—a disastrous episode which, in England, lowered the prestige of the monarchy and contributed to the causes of the Civil War. John Felton, the assassin, removed Buckingham36—but too late to avert the damage already done.
Acting with great moderation towards the defeated Protestants, Richelieu coaxed Louis into a humane settlement, depriving the Huguenots of their fortresses and armies, but guaranteeing them liberty of conscience. As a result of this “Peace of Grace,” the Huguenots caused no real trouble for the government over the next few decades.
TO HUMBLE THE NOBLES, Richelieu began by purging from the Council any ministers who opposed him, executing some. For many years without an heir, Louis was a natural object for conspiracy, particularly among his half-brothers, the Vendômes (the illegitimates of Henri IV) and his younger brother, Gaston of Orléans. Gaston (1608–60)— until 1638 the presumptive heir to the throne—an odd-looking man with thick black eyebrows, was an attractive but irresponsibly feckless libertine of no great intelligence. In 1626, he became seriously embroiled in a plot to assassinate Richelieu, led by the Marquis de Chalais. Tortured and having confessed, after a dismally botched execution Chalais was put to death. His friends swore to get Richelieu. The Cardinal doubled his personal bodyguard, while Gaston, because of his proximity to the King, remained untouchable. The episode embittered personal relations between Louis and Queen Anne, whom he accused of desiring his death so that she could marry Gaston, despite her protestations.
It was not a situation exactly favourable to producing an heir for the throne of France. But the throne was at last made secure when, seemingly almost in a fit of absent-mindedness during that storm of 1637, Louis caused Anne to conceive an heir, born on 5 September 1638, twenty-three years after their marriage. Two years later another similar miracle produced a second son; Gaston, Richelieu’s bitter enemy, lost all hope—at least temporarily—of succeeding to the throne.
IN HIS THIRD AIM of humbling the Habsburgs, now grown powerful through the aggrandisements of “Charles Quint,” Richelieu was largely successful. By encouraging the armies of others to accomplish the policies of France, he kept out of the grisly Thirty Years’ War that ravaged Germany and the countries east of the Rhine. It was a risky policy, however, bringing war with Spain again. At one point, in 1636, her armies invading from Holland once more reached Pontoise, almost at the gates of Paris. Though subsequently this was to be seen as virtually the last effort of waning Spanish power, in scenes similar to those of 1940 the roads to the south became crammed with fleeing coaches. For one grim moment there seemed to be nothing between Paris and the Spanish infantry. Richelieu even contemplated having to abandon the capital and flee southwards. But from Paris Louis and Richelieu dispatched a levée en masse of hastily conscripted soldiery. Merchants were forbidden to keep more than one apprentice; all the rest had to join up. Out of these complicated hostilities, France managed to survive intact.
BUILDING ASTUTELY, AND RUTHLESSLY, on the absolutist foundations laid by Henri and Sully, Louis XIII and Richelieu steadily tightened the monarchy’s grip. It was a tendency that would continue on through the reigns of the next three Louis, to the Revolution, and beyond to the Consulate and First Empire of Napoleon I; and would then, briefly, be reanimated under the last of the Bourbons, Charles X, and the ill-fated Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon. In the mother country of liberty, the instinct for authoritarianism also lies never far below the surface. Almost never before had the charge of lèse-majesté been made so frequently throughout the country, although the capital remained curiously tranquil throughout the time of Richelieu. In 1630, many provincial centres erupted in violence against his massive tax increases, under chieftains attaining brief moments of glory with such sobriquets as “Jean Va-nu-Pieds” and “Bras-Nus.” Typically, it was Louis’ rule of thumb that “The more considerate you are with such people, the more they take advantage.”
Now Richelieu too showed himself ruthlessly determined to stamp out what, to him, was a particularly heinous sin. Duelling had become all the rage among galants. In the one year of 1607 alone, 4000 members of the gentry are recorded to have perished in duels. Pour encourager les autres, in June 1627 a well-known noble, the Comte de Montmorency-Bouteville, was arrested for duelling, refused a pardon and beheaded. Henceforth it was to be said that the aristocracy “tourna au galant, faute de pouvoir tourner au tragique.”37 Led on by the skilful guile of Richelieu, the nobles ended weakened by division among themselves, while loyalty was encouraged among the six pays d’État (the outer ring of recent acquisitions that comprised Languedoc, Brittany, Burgundy, Provence, Normandy and the Dauphiné) through their entitlement to pay lower taxes.
MORE LIKE HIS VALOIS ANTECEDENTS than his father Henri IV, when not at the wars or involved in acts of repression in the provinces, Louis was addicted to la chasse. Richelieu, on the other hand, spent as much time in Paris as he could—because that was where lay the sources of power, the ultimate aphrodisiac. During the two Richelieu decades, the geographical centre of gravity of Paris moved westwards, away from the smells and congestion of the Marais. Exceedingly shrewd in matters of real estate for a man of God, Richelieu amassed a vast property that stretched from the back door of the Louvre to the city wall to the north. There, between 1633 and 1639, Richelieu built a princely palace of stone with eight elegant and classically regular courtyards, which he bequeathed to the King.
Known initially as the Palais-Cardinal, when the royal family moved in after Richelieu’s death it gained the name it has held ever since—the Palais-Royal. “An entire city, built with pomp, seems to have arisen miraculously from an old ditch,” extolled Corneille, his praise possibly conditioned by the fact that he found there both a patron and a stage for his plays. After Louis XIV died in 1715, the light-hearted and hard-living regent, Philippe d’Orléans, moved in and with his notorious soupers gave it the reputation which clung to it for many years. It was his grandson, who was to become “Philippe-Égalité,” the turncoat regicide, who— deeply in debt—built the arcades and shops which he rented out most profitably, and laid out the delightful gardens of what remains one of the most tranquil oases amid the hubbub of Paris.
During the Terror, it was from a cutlery shop at No. 177 Galerie de Valois that Charlotte Corday bought the knife with which she stabbed Marat in his bath in July 1793. Equally profitable gambling houses and brothels made the arcades of the Palais-Royal a famous pick-up place over both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It also became a centre for intellectuals like Diderot to meet for a game of chess and, in one corner, saw the birth of France’s oldest three-star restaurant, the Grand Véfour. Napoleon and Josephine dined here, Fragonard is said to have died here eating a sorbet; while in 1983 it was targeted for a plastique by a left-wing terrorist—possibly outraged by the food and its cost. Following the post-1815 Restoration, the Palais became a favoured duelling ground, with residents complaining at being woken by the groans of the vanquished opponents.
The shift of religious balance following the death of Henri had resulted in a powerful Catholic renaissance, in which Richelieu made his ascent to power. The clergy had regained respect, and influence; and so had the Jesuits, expanding everywhere in their role of educators. There was even rash talk about a new crusade, against the infidel Turks who were threatening Austro-Hungary in the east of Europe. There was a flurry of church building, encouraged by the King as displays of thanksgiving. Louis built Notre-Dame des Victoires to celebrate the fall of La Rochelle, although the outstanding monument to his reign is not a church and lies in the middle of the Seine—the Île Saint-Louis. Just upstream from the age-old Île de la Cité were two small muddy islets, used over the centuries for grazing cattle. Henri IV had it in mind to join them together, build a dyke round them to keep the Seine out, and then develop the resulting island. His assassination brought a halt to the project, but Louis carried it forward, laying out the buildings on a grid system (which would preserve them from the attentions of Préfet Haussmann subsequently). Within a space of thirty years, the two mudbanks had been transformed into a beautiful city in miniature, a seventeenth-century jewel encapsulating in its streets of pot-bellied houses both uniformity and individualism. Many of the houses were designed by Louis XIV’s famous architect Le Vau, who—understandably—kept one of the best for himself. From its inception, prostitutes from the Marais were banned from the Île. Compared with Henri’s clamorous Place des Vosges, the Île Saint-Louis’ straight streets were a model of sober rectitude and planned tranquillity. But the other great project envisaged by Henri IV, the grandiose scheme for the Place de France, was abandoned by Richelieu as simply too ambitious.
Richelieu’s greatest cultural legacy to France lay not in bricks and mortar, however, but in the creation of the Académie Française, designed to defend and enhance the purity of the French language. Founded in 1635, initially of a group of nine men of letters, with an average age of thirty-six, under the patronage of Richelieu it was then followed, in 1648, by the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. In 1671 came the all-powerful Académie Royale d’Architecture, designed similarly to establish and maintain standards in building.38
THE CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE had brought the arts to a new low. The League attacked Renaissance art as heretical, so few young artists of talent were attracted to Paris in those days. Henri IV was no connoisseur, and had no time to become one; Marie de’ Medici lacked the necessary taste. However, to quote Douglas Johnson in his excellent short survey, “In terms of culture, as in politics, it is possible to talk of a sense of discipline replacing the restless ambition of the sixteenth century.”5 This was certainly true of French architecture and, fortunately, Richelieu possessed both taste and the political power to indulge it. He bought paintings and sculpture from Italy, and brought the portrait painter Philippe de Champaigne from Brussels. In 1635, he commissioned Nicolas Poussin to paint more of the light-hearted bacchanals and landscapes which had made his early reputation; Poussin, of Norman peasant stock, found money and fame, but in 1642 he abandoned his rich but pretentious Paris patrons for the inspiration of Rome.
His fellow Norman, the great dramatist equally capable of writing both comedy and tragedy, Pierre Corneille (1606–84), was set to work by Richelieu as one of his cinq auteurs, writing plays under his careful direction, sometimes performed before the King. In January 1637, he produced the heroic tragedy by which his reputation stands, Le Cid, dealing with the conflict between passion and honour. It marked a major milestone in the history of French drama, in the same year that Descartes (1596–1650) published his world-shaking Discours de la Méthode—“Cogito ergo sum.” Corneille, too, was outstanding for his belief in freedom of will—in marked contrast to the theme of impotence conveyed in Greek classical tragedy, the tradition that was to be inherited by Racine.
Another Norman was the poet François de Malherbe (1555–1628). Renowned for his slowness in composition, he once spent three years writing stanzas on the death of a noble lady, so that when it was presented the bereaved husband had already remarried—and died! Thus Malherbe left few verses to posterity, but he possessed a rigorous purity of style and his diction eschewed all Latinisms and foreign usage, in preference for common speech. This set him aside from the more ornate style of his Renaissance predecessors, making him an important precursor of the Académie. Though Henri had not been a great patron, his reign laid the groundwork on which his widow, son, grandson—and Richelieu—were all to build a kind of “nationalisation” of the French arts. Henri’s own letters, passionate and forthright as they were, broke new ground as classics of their kind. So too did the Économies Royales of Sully—reading as a new, more genuine form of autobiography than the ghosted and stiff Mémoires of Richelieu.
Finally there was the great essayist Montaigne (1533–92), much admired down through posterity for the vigour and gaiety of his language. An incorrigible digresser, he brought fresh insight to bear on contemporary mores and philosophy, on public calamities, education, virtue and prevailing attitudes towards death. He had little difficulty in supporting the legitimacy of Henri of Navarre and his descendants. The succession had been secure since the surprise birth of the future Louis XIV to the semi-detached royal couple, Louis and Anne. There followed one last conspiracy on behalf of the absentee princeling, Gaston d’Orléans—that of a courtier with the unusual name of Cinq-Mars, arrested while planning to assassinate Richelieu during a visit to Lyons in the spring of 1642. Cinq-Mars was duly beheaded, but Richelieu—his body eaten away with ulcers—was already a dying man.
The end of the Louis XIII–Richelieu era arrived with extraordinary suddenness. On 4 December 1642, Richelieu died; on being administered the last rites, when asked by the curé of Saint Eustache whether he forgave his enemies, he replied that he had none—except for those of the King and of the state. Meanwhile Louis XIII was also failing. In his youth he had suffered from persistent fevers, and in adulthood from an excess of doctors—who had once bled him fifty times in a year, and prescribed him 200 different medications and as many enemas. In 1630, he had nearly died of an internal abscess, and in December 1641 he suffered a swelling which made it hard to swallow, or to sleep, and caused such discomfort that he could not stand the shaking of a coach. At the last meeting between the King and the Cardinal, in Tarascon, both were so debilitated that Louis ordered his bed to be placed next to his Prime Minister’s. It was a tearful leave-taking. Five months after Richelieu, Louis was also carried away, on 14 May 1643—apparently by tuberculosis, and amid no great mourning. Yet the Cardinal had created in the person of the King what could not unreasonably be claimed as le plus grand roi du monde.
By the death of Louis, the shape of France’s modern geography was confirmed in the familiar “hexagon” of today. Under the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, a large part of German-speaking Alsace would be added—and French possession of the key fortresses of Metz, Toul and Verdun recognised. Expanding also abroad, the city of Quebec was founded by Champlain, then, on a deserted island in the Saint Lawrence, Montreal as Ville-Marie, dedicated to the Virgin. Footholds were also gained in West Africa, Madagascar and Saint Lucia in the Caribbean.
Once again, France found herself ruled by a woman regent, the Queen Mother, Anne. Louis XIV (1643–1715) was not yet five years old, his coming of age perilously far away. Yet, as both an augury of what was to come and a “hands-off” warning to her foes, within a week of the child-King’s accession a renewed Spanish advance upon Paris from the Low Countries was defeated, at Rocroi in the Ardennes, by the twenty-two-year-old Duc d’Enghien, “with the profile of an eagle” (he was soon to be known as “le grand Condé,” son of the troublesome but ineffectual would-be cuckold of Henri IV). One of the great military victories of French history, Rocroi may also have marked the definitive end of Spain’s military pre-eminence.
A new era lay ahead, but none of it would have been possible had it not been for the solid foundations laid by Louis’ grandfather, Henri IV, whose short but glorious reign was the rock on which would be built the France of the “Sun King,” and “the Great Nation” of the next century.
ON HIS ACCESSION, four-year-old Louis went to live in the Louvre with his mother and his younger brother, Philippe d’Orléans, then moving into the Palais-Royal which had been vacated by Richelieu, a modern, comfortable abode. From the earliest days Louis loved playing there with his silver toy soldiers, complete with miniature gold cannon drawn by fleas. As he grew older, he would march through the Palais-Royal deafening bystanders with his drum, and later still take to target practice on unfortunate sparrows in the gardens with a specially made small arquebus—already in childhood showing perhaps something of the instincts of the bully. To replace Richelieu, Anne called in his far less austere, Italian-born secretary, Jules Mazarin, “Tall, of good appearance, a handsome man, with chestnut hair, lively and amused eyes, and a great sweetness in his face.”6 There were unsubstantiated rumours that he also became the Queen Mother’s lover. Aged forty, Mazarin was a highly cultivated man (though, according to Voltaire, he never learned to pronounce French properly);7 loving the opera and drama, he seemed gentle and unassuming, flexible where Richelieu had been ruthless. But he was to follow in much the same pattern; another churchman unhesitant at resorting to the sword. Mazarin’s reputation for avarice made him few friends, and he was heavy-handed with taxation. In 1648, Sully’s little-loved tax on bonds came up for renewal. The Paris Parlement protested vigorously. But, with Condé’s brilliant victory at Rocroi, several generals and 6000 troops captured, the war with Spain was ended in triumph for France through the Peace of Westphalia, which drew a line under the Thirty Years’ War, and left Anne with forces available to reinforce her position at home.
Acting against the advice of Mazarin, however, and given to fits of rage that turned her voice into a shrill falsetto, Anne in her capacity as regent ordered the arrest of three of the leading troublemakers in Parlement. One was an elder called Pierre Broussel. Unfortunately, Broussel enjoyed singular popularity with the Parisians, who hailed him as a “Father of the People.” On learning of his arrest, angry demonstrators forced Anne and Louis to take refuge in the Palais-Royal, which was not nearly so formidable a bastion as the Louvre. The next morning over a thousand barricades of chains, barrels, and paving stones were thrown up across the capital. Mazarin prevailed on Anne to give way, and Broussel was released. But the situation continued. The coach of the Chancellor, Segnier, was overturned and the barricades thrust forward to within a hundred yards of the vulnerable Palais. On 13 September 1648, the royal family fled Paris. It was an intolerable humiliation to fall on an impressionable young king. Meanwhile, his head swollen by his triumph at Rocroi, Condé was moving on Paris; and, in England, where Charles I was about to lose his, a dangerous example in rebellion had been set.
Poor France: it was roughly a hundred years since the country had been torn apart by the Wars of Religion; two centuries back she was being ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War. Only one century ahead she would be approaching the chaos of revolution; two centuries on and Paris would be plunged in the bloody insurrection of 1848; three centuries, and the country would barely be recovering from Occupation and Vichy. Now it was the time of the “Frondes.” In the words of Voltaire: “The civil wars started in Paris just as they did in London, over a little money.”8 And what was beginning was indeed a civil war, the first since the early days of Henri of Navarre. The rebels now called themselves frondeurs—or “slingshots”—because of pebbles that were flung through Mazarin’s windows, and perhaps thinking in self-flattery of David versus Goliath. But the Frondes were an exercise in infantile futility.
At the end of October 1648, Anne deemed it safe to return to Paris, to await the arrival of the twenty-seven-year-old hero, Condé. But with only 15,000 men, as Henri IV had discovered, Condé was not strong enough to besiege the city. Inside the rebels won a first success with the capture of the Bastille, where Broussel’s son was made governor. Once again, Anne and the child-King left Paris—reduced to penury by the exigencies of war. The crown jewels were in pawn, and the upholstery in Louis XIII’s old coach hung in tatters. Often young Louis and his brother went hungry. In 1649, shocked by how matters had got out of hand in London with the execution of the King of England, the moderates of Parlement produced an agreement to withdraw from the Bastille, in return for an amnesty. But it was only a truce.
Now France’s other great—and ambitious—soldier entered the list against the King. The choleric-looking Maréchal Vicomte de Turenne was egged on by his mistress, a troublesome beauty called Geneviève de Longueville (once heard to admit “I don’t enjoy innocent pleasures!”), into collusion with the Spaniards. To Turenne is attributed the somewhat cynical saying “Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons,” a tenet that would also inspire Napoleon. Together with Spanish battalions of Archduke Leopold, Turenne marched to within 30 miles of Paris.
Meanwhile, Grand Condé had proved himself a close ally of the monarchy. On 18 January 1650, Mazarin had him arrested, to which Condé snorted: “So this is what I get for my services!” Now, as Voltaire observed, “all parties came into collision with each other, made treaties and betrayed each other in turn.” 9 Upon his release from prison, Condé joined forces with the Parisians; Turenne, outraged by Condé’s arrogance, switched sides to support Anne and the King. Out of favour with all sides, Mazarin slipped out of Paris into temporary self-exile. It was a moment of highest danger for the monarchy; there were rumours that the old troublemaker Gaston d’Orléans was planning to seize Louis and proclaim himself regent. At the same time, his daughter, Louis’ mannish twenty-three-year-old cousin, the “Grande Mademoiselle” who had designs on the throne via the King’s bed, dressed herself up in armour like Joan of Arc—then took charge of an army to march off to join Condé.
By February 1651, Paris was in a ferment; blood flowed and the Hôtel de Ville was set on fire. Anne resolved to flee yet again, but Louis’ laying out of his boots and travelling suit the night before sparked off murmurs in the city of what was afoot. The mob burst through the gates of the Palais-Royal, demanding to see the infant-King. It was a potentially ugly scene, but Regent Anne played a cool hand, instructing Louis to feign sleep. An emissary of the mob, the captain of “Monsieur’s” guard, was taken into the royal bedchamber, where he was greatly discountenanced to find a sleeping child.
As they gathered round the bed . . . their old feelings of love returned and they showered a thousand blessings on the King . . . The mere sight gave them respect for him . . . Their anger disappeared: and having stormed in like furies they left like gentle subjects . . .
Recorded Mme. de Motteville, Anne’s lady-in-waiting.
Momentarily safe, Anne and the King remained precariously in their quarters under the threat of frondeurs. Mazarin continued to direct Anne by letter from exile in the Rhineland as Condé, “Monsieur” and the “Grande Mademoiselle” joined their forces in Paris. Writing to Mazarin from the sequestered Palais-Royal, Anne urged him to return: “I am having a difficult time . . . Adieu, I can’t go on . . .” But she did. Though belittled by unkind Parisians as being placid “like a fat Swiss woman” (except, of course, she was Spanish), Anne of Austria proved herself to be outstandingly courageous and resourceful, foiling one plot after another by Condé and “Monsieur,” while civil war incited by Condé ripped through the countryside. Skilfully Anne fostered the loyalty of Turenne, the only general who could match Condé, and who led the royal forces to a series of victories through the provinces. Facing defeat there, the Grand Condé then decided to stake all on one last throw: he would seize Paris. In the wings Mazarin played a waiting game, assured that “there was one man on whom he could always rely against Condé, namely Condé himself.”
In September 1651, at thirteen, Louis came of age. Riding in state to Parlement, which was sitting at the Palais de Justice, he declared in resolute tones:
Messieurs, I have come to my Parlement to tell you that, following the law of the land, I intend to take over the government myself; and I hope by the goodness of God that it will be with piety and justice.
Writing to Mazarin, a courtier praised the young King as having displayed “the bearing and intelligence of a man of twenty-five.” Louis appointed Anne as his chief counsellor, but made it plain that henceforth he in person would rule France and exact loyalty. In August he suspended Parlement and transferred it to Pontoise, whence it might operate in greater tranquillity than inside turbulent Paris. Louis was learning rapidly the art of governing.
Paris had been reduced to a miserable state of disorder. Intermittently besieged by Condé and his squabbling fellow princes, cut off from outside supplies, starvation was constantly in attendance, with fears of a repetition of the horrors of 1590. Murder, destruction of crops and pillage were the order of the day, with the troops on both sides plundering and living off the land as if it were conquered enemy territory. The death rate doubled, while births plummeted. Even five years after the end of the Frondes the main Paris hospitals had only space for a few thousand of the 40,000 beggars and vagrants put on the streets; many turned to robbery. Both Parlement and the Hôtel de Ville proved impotent to master the situation. The people, commented Voltaire sadly, “were like a stormy sea, whose waves are driven hither and thither by a hundred contrary winds.”10
ANNE AND LOUIS had also been driven from Paris four times in four years, which had devalued the monarchy. When Mazarin finally returned from Germany he marched at the head of a small army of 7000 men, wearing green ribbons to distinguish them from the yellowy-grey of Condé’s men, “not so much like a minister coming to resume his duties, as a sovereign retaking possession of his estates.” Condé remained just outside Paris, daily exercising less control over his army, but with his own arrogance undiminished. Louis, aged thirteen in early July 1652, watched from the heights of Charonne during the decisive battle of Saint-Antoine—fought on the edge of the present-day 4th and 12th arrondissements.
As Condé moved his hard-pressed troops behind the city walls, the Grande Mademoiselle—proving herself to be one more of those formidable Parisiennes—assumed a crucial role. Hurrying towards the fighting, past dead and dying frondeurs, and undeterred by the grisly sight of a dead man still astride his horse, she set up her HQ next to the Bastille. She found Condé in tears, weeping that “All my friends have been killed.” Defeat was staring him in the face; nevertheless, assuming command, the Grand Mademoiselle mounted the Bastille ramparts and herself ordered a battery of royalist heavy guns, currently pointing towards Paris, to be trained on the approaching cavalry of Turenne. Without hesitation, she ordered the cannon to be fired on the royal forces.
Later, attempting to minimise her role, “Mademoiselle” claimed that the cannon only fired “three or four salvoes,” but the damage to the royal forces as the heavy balls from their own guns crashed through the advancing cavalry had a definitive effect, for among the casualties was the nephew and heir of Mazarin, Paul Mancini. “Elle a toué son mari,” declared Mazarin in his fractured French; meaning that the Grande Mademoiselle had with her cannonade destroyed any hope she might have had of marrying Louis. Pulling up the Saint-Antoine drawbridge behind him, Condé retreated into the relative safety of the city walls. On 4 July a meeting of bourgeois and clergy gathered in the Hôtel de Ville to discuss the restoration of order. But it ended in massacre by Condé’s rag-tag supporters. A messenger reaching Gaston d’Orléans at the Luxembourg reported, “The Hôtel de Ville is on fire; they’re shooting and killing people, it’s the ghastliest sight in the world.” Mounting her coach with four other women and a strong escort, “Mademoiselle” sped to the Hôtel de Ville in the middle of the night, where she found much of the superb medieval building a heap of smouldering rafters. It was deserted; no one seemed in charge, save a revolutionary rabble.
Condé’s cause was thoroughly discredited. The Parisians never forgave him for bringing back the detested Spanish troops whom Henri IV had expelled. Though the battle of Saint-Antoine ended in a stand-off, on 14 October, Condé crept out of the city. A week later Louis re-entered. Parlement renounced its claims to have a voice in political and financial affairs; in return Louis undertook to ensure that office-holders would be paid off. The rebellious grandees were guaranteed pensions and lands—provided they never tried to force their way into the King’s council.
THE FRONDES WERE FINISHED. There was no unconditional surrender, and no savage reprisals. “Mademoiselle” and “Monsieur” were “invited” to disappear to their country estates, where, at Blois, according to Voltaire, tiresome Uncle Gaston “passed the remainder of his life in repentance . . . the second son of Henri-Quatre to die with but little glory.” Condé was sentenced to death, in absentia, but amnestied in 1660;39 though, if ever a warlord deserved to lose his head, or be locked up for ever in the Bastille, it was he. This would have been his certain fate under earlier, less forgiving, French monarchs. Later, back in favour, Condé was to win important battles against Louis’ foreign enemies; he conquered the Franche Comté in 1668, defeated William of Orange in 1674, and died peacefully in his bed at Fontainebleau in 1686, aged sixtyfive. To nobody’s astonishment more than his own, in February 1653 Cardinal Mazarin was invited back, received by Louis “as a father and by the people as a master,” and entertained at what remained of the Hôtel de Ville “amid the acclamations of the citizens.”11 The appreciative Italian flung money to the populace, but was said to have commented on their fickleness.
Thus ended the last great revolutionary struggle in France, until the year of reckoning, 1789. Though Louis had had to grant generous terms to the rebels, in return he expected total loyalty and obedience. All authority would now reside in the King alone.