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HISTORY] 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 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. 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, 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 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.

Its first and shortest phase was the Fronde of the Parlement. At a period when all the world was a little mad, the parlement had imagined a loyalist revolt, and, though it raised an armed protest, this was not against the king but against Mazarin and the persons to whom he had

delegated power. But the parlement soon became disgusted with its allies—the princes and nobles, who had only drawn their swords in order to beg more effectively with arms in their hands; and the Parisian mob, whose fanaticism had been aroused by Paul de Gondi, a warlike ecclesiastic, a Catiline in a cassock, who preached the gospel at the dagger’s point. When a suggestion was made to the parlement to receive an envoy from Spain, the members had no hesitation in making terms with the court by the peace of Rueil (March 11, 1649), which ended the first Fronde.

As an entr’acte, from April 1649 to January 1650, came the affair of the Petits Maîtres: Condé, proud and violent; Gaston of Orleans, pliable and contemptible; Conti, the simpleton; and Longueville, the betrayed husband. The victor of Lens and Charenton imagined that every

one was under an obligation to him, and laid claim to a dictatorship so insupportable that Anne of Austria and Mazarin—assured by Gondi of the concurrence of the parlement and people—had him arrested. To defend Condé the great conspiracy of women was formed: Madame de Chevreuse, the subtle and impassioned princess palatine, and the princess of Condé vainly attempted to arouse Normandy, Burgundy and the mob of Bordeaux; while Turenne, bewitched by Madame de Longueville, allowed himself to become involved with Spain and was defeated at Rethel (December 15, 1650). Unfortunately, after his custom when victor, Mazarin forgot his promises—above all, Gondi’s cardinal’s hat. A union was effected between the two Frondes, that of the Petits Maîtres and that of the parlements, and Mazarin was obliged to flee for safety to the electorate of Cologne (February 1651), whence he continued to govern the queen and the kingdom by means of secret letters. But the heads of the two Frondes—Condé, now set free from prison at Havre, and Gondi who detested him—were not long in quarrelling fatally. Owing to Mazarin’s exile and to the king’s attainment of his majority (September 5, 1651) quiet was being restored, when the return of Mazarin, jealous of Anne of Austria, nearly brought about another reconciliation of all his opponents (January 1652). Condé resumed civil war with the support of Spain, because he was not given Mazarin’s place; but though he defeated the royal army at Bléneau, he was surprised at Étampes, and nearly crushed by Turenne at the gate of Saint-Antoine. Saved, however, by the Grande Mademoiselle, daughter of Gaston of Orleans, he lost Paris by the disaster of the Hôtel de Ville (July 4, 1652), where he had installed an insurrectionary government. A general weariness of civil war gave plenty of opportunity after this to the agents of Mazarin, who in order to facilitate peace made a pretence of exiling himself for a second time to Bouillon. Then came the final collapse: Condé having taken refuge in Spain for seven years, Gaston of Orleans being in exile, Retz in prison, and the parlement reduced to its judiciary functions only, the field was left open for Mazarin, who, four months after the king, re-entered in triumph that Paris which had driven him forth with jeers and mockery (February 1653).

The task was now to repair these four years of madness and folly. The nobles who had hoped to set up the League again, half counting upon the king of Spain, were held in check by Mazarin with the golden dowries of his numerous nieces, and were now employed by him in

warfare and in decorative court functions; while others, De Retz and La Rochefoucauld, sought consolation in their Memoirs or their Maxims, one for his mortifications and the other for his rancour as a statesman out of employment. The parlement, which had confused political power with judiciary administration, was given to understand, in the session of April 13, 1655, at Vincennes, that the era of political manifestations was over; and the money expended by Gourville, Mazarin’s agent, restored the members of the parlement to docility. The power of the state was confided to middle-class men, faithful servants during the evil days: Abel Servien, Michel le Tellier, Hugues de Lionne. Like Henry IV. after the League, Mazarin, after having conquered the Fronde, had to buy back bit by bit the kingdom he had lost, and, like Richelieu, he spread out a network of agents, thenceforward regular and permanent, who assured him of that security without which he could never have carried on his vast plunderings in peace and quiet. His imitator and superintendent, Fouquet, the Maecenas of the future Augustus, concealed this gambling policy beneath the lustre of the arts and the glamour of a literature remarkable for