#1652: the cardinal the prince and the crisis of the fronde

[histoireettralala]

Anne of Austria and Mazarin: a more nuanced reading.

The question of the queen mother’s relationship with Mazarin has been the stuff of historical speculation since the mazarinades first spread notions of illicit sexual relations, secret marriage, and the cardinal’s ‘bewitching’ of the queen. Since then, slightly more decorous historical discussion has sought to establish the nature of the relationship, with the obvious underlying question of how emotionally dependent Anne was on Mazarin. Much of this relies on reading meanings into letters from Mazarin to Anne whose tone and expression could encompass the possibilities of frustrated physical passion, heightened seventeenth-century notions of sentiment and friendship, calculated emotional manipulation, and a great deal in between these three. The relevant question in this context is whether the queen mother could contemplate abandoning Mazarin and leaving him in permanent exile, either because the emotional ties were less strong than Mazarin wished to believe, or because Anne calculated, on behalf of her son, that the political price —or political risk— of restoring the cardinal was too high. Here the only real source, given the queen’s own silence, are the memoirs of contemporaries around her at court, and opinions in these are divided. If some of these writers assert that Anne would never abandon Mazarin, others were quite prepared to argue that the queen’s affections were conditional and perceptibly diminishing as Mazarin’s absence continued. A third group did not doubt Anne’s affection for the cardinal, but were more sceptical of her resolution and commitment to him in the face of persuasion and contrary arguments advanced by those in her entourage and in the council.

Some of the shrewdest commentary can be found in the memoirs of Marie d’Orléans, duchesse de Nemours, who was not an intimate of Anne like Mme de Motteville, but no enemy of the queen either. Nemours’ memoirs assert that commentators had been so obsessed with the notion that the queen was entirely controlled by Mazarin that they had failed to note just how little correspondence there was between the two of them, and the amount of mutual misunderstanding that grew up during Mazarin’s exile. The queen mother, she argued, had little taste for the work of government and little confidence that she could handle it well; despite this, Nemours adds, she had a good sense of political judgement based on scepticism about the motives of everyone. So it suited the queen to allow Mazarin to take responsibility for government, but when he was not present she was prepared to take the advice of others around her, even when this cut across the actions and policies that she had previously agreed with the cardinal. This interpretation of the queen’s motivation was not good news for Mazarin’s aim to shape Anne’s actions on the basis of his intermittent correspondence. And it was echoed by two of Mazarin’s strongest advocates at court: his nephew by marriage, the duc de Mercoeur, and his military ally, the maréchal du Plessis-Praslin. Both stressed that the queen was, in Mercoeur’s words, ‘susceptible to being pressured’ by those ministers and courtiers with whom she was more immediately in contact.

These pessimistic judgements were not fully accepted by Mazarin, but he was certainly concerned that Anne might get used to managing affairs of state without him. It was not possible to insulate the queen mother from those around her, and many of them were either his undeclared enemies or those who believed that Mazarin’s return would complicate an already precarious political situation. His response, as we have seen, was to keep his return as the unremitting focus of all his letters, while simultaneously expecting his allies and appointees in the council and at court to maintain the pressure on the queen by stressing the miseries of his exile and the benefits that would be brought by his presence.

All of this took its toll: Mazarin was prepared to confront the queen directly about the extent of her commitment to him, and his replies suggest that he received some written reassurances from Anne in return. But he was no less aware that even the most detailed and painstakingly written account of the political situation and the role she should play was less immediately influential than direct conversation with the queen. Unless he could count on those around Anne to remain ‘on message’, his letters could easily be forgotten; and many of these courtiers saw Mazarin’s stock as having fallen to the point where his concerns could be ignored with impunity. An additional hazard in trying to build up a group of cheerleaders around the queen came from Anne’s suspicions that Mazarin’s letters to others in the court circle may have offered different perspectives and information from those sent to her personally. The duc de Mercoeur explained in a letter to Mazarin that the queen insisted that all those at the court who received letters from Mazarin should read them out to her in her apartments. Mercoeur recognized that this had the potential to embarrass Mazarin, if not worse, and suggested that the cardinal should send information that he did not want disclosed to the queen in separate, additional notes that could be kept apart from the letter for public consumption.

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

[histoireettralala]

Ministerial rule: habituation is not acceptance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[..]

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

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

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

[histoireettralala]

"Graces exacted and torn..."

By the time, between 1666 and 1671, that Louis XIV drafted and had written his ‘Memoir for the instruction of the Dauphin’, his ambivalence towards cardinal Mazarin had become profound. In the lengthy chapter discussing the situation in France in 1661 when he assumed his ‘personal rule’ over the realm, he conceded that he should probably have acted sooner to establish his direct control over government. He then describes the situation in which Mazarin continued to govern for him, and it is immediately significant that Louis does not draw any sharp distinction between the period of the Fronde and the subsequent years of the 1650s. Throughout this whole period, Louis argued, the state ‘swarmed with conspiracies’, while at the court he received ‘very little disinterested loyalty’. He added that ‘those of my subjects who appeared to be the most submissive were as burdensome and dangerous for me as the most rebellious’. Of Mazarin he wrote that he was ‘a minister reinstated in spite of so many factions … who had rendered me some great services, but whose ideas and manners were naturally quite different from mine’. Warming to the theme, the king emphasizes that in 1661:

Disorder reigned everywhere . . . People of quality, accustomed to continual bargaining with a minister who did not mind it, and who had sometimes found it necessary, were always inventing an imaginary right to whatever was to their fancy; no governor of a stronghold who was not (himself) difficult to govern; no request that was not mingled with some reproach over the past, or with some veiled threat of future dissatisfaction. Graces exacted and torn rather than awaited, and extorted in consequence of each other, no longer served to obligate anyone, merely serving to offend those to whom they were refused.

Louis may have felt inhibited in intervening or checking the authority of his first minister, fearing in his words ‘that the false impression of a disgrace’ might re-excite the storms of the Fronde; but he was certainly true to his boast that during this time he ‘carefully observed’ everything around him.

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

[histoireettralala]

A regency in question.

The most fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of Richelieu's régime de l'extraordinaire did not, though, come from within the area of ideological debate. For Richelieu the most damaging concern was the reluctance of Louis XIII to provide him with the unconditional support that was vital to the legitimacy of his status and his claims to authority. Much has been written about the relationship between Louis and his cardinal-minister, some of it blatantly anachronistic and psychohistorically speculative. It is however clear that Louis, whether through his own judgement or through the prompting of those around him, grew ever more aware of the distortion of royal authority implied by his dependence on, and apparent subservience to, his ministerial servant. A major factor behind the literature of opposition, the fevered plotting and the organized conspiracies of the period after 1636 was Louis' own, frequently declared hostility to Richelieu's excessive power and control of the state. Many of those conspiring against Richelieu did so in the convinction that they were serving the king, rescuing him from subservience to an overbearing and manipulative minister. Yet Louis remained fundamentally ambiguous in his attitudes: partly because Richelieu sold him a vision of dynastic prestige and territorial gains built on the undermining of Habsburg power; partly because Louis recognized the sheer complexity of government, policy-making, and organization over which Richelieu and his subordinates presided, and felt no confidence that he could easily be replaced.

Opponents of the cardinal's pretensions found a further, even more widely supported, motive after 1638. Following the birth of the future Louis XIV and his brother, the convinction grew that Richelieu planned to seize control of the regency in order to secure the continuation of his own power and policies. Louis XIII's health started to deteriorate from 1640, and it was expected that Richelieu would survive his master. Before the birth of Louis' sons the succession had rested with the king's brother, Gaston d'Orléans, and Richelieu had no illusions that his own position would survive into the reign of King Gaston. But a royal minority opened a very different prospect.

Customary arrangements in a regency would give power either to the queen mother and/or to a council of princes of the royal blood; custom and traditional expectation determined what could and could not be enacted before the king came of age. To subvert this, to remove the queen from involvement in the regency and to establish a regency council dominated by Richelieu, would require substantial political leverage. In pursuit of this objective Richelieu was fortunate that Louis XIII may have distrusted his first minister's motives, but was even more concerned that his Spanish wife, Anne of Austria, would betray his legacy and make a concessionary peace with Spain […]

Few expected that Richelieu would predecease his master by a few months, and of course this resolved the particular anxiety about a ministerial regency. What Richelieu's death did not resolve was the debate about the legitimacy of government by first minister, and the pent-up resentment that this had generated since 1635. The vituperative denunciation of Richelieu's rule by Jean Le Boindre in the Parlement as "destroying the liberty of France… [which lay] oppressed under the weight of his own ambition" was widely echoed in memoirs and correspondence.

But Louis XIII remained committed in his last months of life to the war with Spain, and resisted the blandishments of those who, now freed from Richelieu's overbearing presence, urged him to consider again the immense burdens the war imposed on his people and the strategic rationale for continuing it.

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

[histoireettralala]

The real Mazarin ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[histoireettralala]

Condé vs Mazarin: power and legitimacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[histoireettralala]

What saved Mazarin

Mazarin's own position was paradoxical. He enjoyed the kind of public and unconditional support from the queen mother in the years after 1643 that Richelieu never received from Louis XIII. In that respect the perennial problem of the perceived illegitimacy of rule by an over-powerful first minister could be confronted by the insistence that obedience to the royal will trumped any constitutional distate for the way in which the rule had chosen to delegate their authority. But of course this was not the affirmation of an adult male king, but of a queen regent. The extent that it was permissible to delegate authority at all during a regency was open to legal debate, and to an array of assumptions and opinions shaped by custom and precedent. Insofar as the queen mother took advice from those immediately around her, the consensus, echoed repeatedly during the Fronde, was that this advice should come from the princes of the blood. Such a perception of the regency left no obvious legitimate space for a first minister, a servant of someone who was herself a servant of the young king.

What saved Mazarin, at least for a time, from the emergence of further opposition was a factor that has been insufficiently stressed in most accounts, but which was certainly not lost on contemporaries. The period from the victory at Rocroi through the battle won at Lens in August 1648 was one of outstanding French military success. Rocroi was followed by the capture of Thionville in summer 1643, by further progress in consolidating a grip on Roussillon and the bolstering of the Catalan revolt, and by the capture of Trino, securing the French position in Monferrato. The 1644 campaign produced further gains in Flanders, including the siege and capture of Gravelines, and turned a tactical defeat inflicted by the Bavarian army near Freiburg-im-Breisgau into a strategic success through an adroit manoeuvre that allowed the French army to take the fortress of Philippsburg on the Rhine, quickly followed by Mainz and Landau [..]

This foreign policy success deserves emphasis: it is the most obvious explanation for the relatively muted hostility to Mazarin's regime after 1643, despite fundamental questions about its legitimacy. Moreover, its reliance, like its predecessor, on narrow factional support, control of access to the crown, and close links between involvement in government and immoderate private profiteering, were all calculated to provoke anger and resentment amongst the rest of the political class. The military success itself could bring problems [..] What was preventing the achievement of a "good peace", given that a general European congress in which French was well represented was already in progress, and that from 1645 France and her allies held the upper hand militarily ? To many the answer seemed obvious it was neither in the political nor the financial interests of Mazarin and his clientele to conclude a settlement. To make peace would bring to an end the justification for the système de l'extraordinaire on which the ministry's claim to power and legitimacy rested: without war it would be impossible to justify such narrow ministerial control of the regency. Léon de Bouthillier, comte de Chavigny -no friend of Mazarin's after his disgrace in 1643, but an intelligent and astute observer- was clear that Mazarin could have made a good settlement that would have validated the war effort at any point from 1645. He held out, in Chavigny's opinion, because he knew that once a settlement had been concluded, his services would be dispendable.

Mazarin's actions certainly give some credence to Chavigny's charge.

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

[histoireettralala]

Entitlement and insecurity

Ever since his death, admirers as well as detractors of Mazarin have sought to deal with the implications of his inordinate private fortune, and the rapacity and illegality with which it was amassed around him. Not only did the stupefying global total of Mazarin’s assets and wealth —somewhere between 35 and 38 million livres— become known immediately after his death, but the political classes had been well aware that he had been relentlessly accumulating revenues, lands, benefices, and cash since 1653. The scale of his correspondence with his financial intendant, Jean-Baptiste Colbert; with his various financial agents; and with innumerable others with whom he had direct financial dealings leaves little doubt about the prioritization of this objective.

Most striking about Mazarin’s accumulation of wealth, however, was the extent to which he suborned the régime de l’extraordinaire itself to facilitate its accumulation. The correspondence of surintendant Fouquet with Mazarin, Colbert, and third parties throughout the financial upheavals, shortfalls, and scavenging of the 1650s makes evident both Fouquet’s enforced complicity and his simultaneous frustration. From 1655 he was working with what was in effect a shadow financial administration run by Mazarin, Colbert, and their clerks and agents, whose principal aim was to negotiate, profit, and exit at will from massively favourable financial contracts, which often cut across the deals that the surintendant needed to strike with broader groups of financiers. Historians have questioned the motives for accumulating a fortune on a scale not only far beyond contemporary rivals, including cardinal Richelieu, but greater than any other individual throughout the ancien régime. One motive was undoubtedly the insufficiently stressed sense of entitlement that was key to Mazarin’s character —the crown and the state owed him a vast obligation for his statesmanship and dedication to their service. Add to this the humiliation, discomfort, and danger that he suffered during the years of the Fronde and the entitlement was significantly increased. Yet paradoxically, entitlement ran hand-in-hand with a chronic insecurity about his future. As much as anyone else in France, Mazarin worried that the Fronde was the first act of a longer and unpredictable political drama. And unlike in 1651, when he allowed himself to be surprised by events and forced with minimal preparation into exile at Brühl, Mazarin from 1653 intended to prepare for any circumstance that might threaten his political control or force him out of France.

A huge chunk of Mazarin’s fortune at his death was composed of nearly nine million livres held in cash, a staggering sum given the general shortage of specie in circulation and the armies’ desperate need for cash during the last years of war. The largest parts of this hoard (more than two million and nearly 1.5 million livres respectively) were held close to the cardinal in Paris and deposited in Mazarin’s governor’s quarters at Vincennes. But other sums were spread amongst the frontier fortresses of Sedan (1.1 million), La Fère (600,000), and the port of Brouage (1.2 million), where Mazarin either was the governor himself or was confident of the governors in place. To this could be added at least two million livres of easily portable precious stones and jewellery.

Flight and prosperous exile was one evident possibility being contemplated by Mazarin. But so was the option of resistance and bargaining from a position of strength against whatever faction of ministers and grandees might seek to remove him from power. Since 1652 Mazarin had built a substantial private power base within France, controlling in person the frontier fortifications of La Fère, Philippsburg, and Breisach —the latter two contained within the governorship of Alsace, where he was governor following the 1654 demission of the comte d’Harcourt. He obtained the bishopric of Metz in 1652, and held it as an unconsecrated bishop. He added the lieutenant governorship of Metz in 1656, after the death of maréchal Schomberg, and consolidated his hold on the wider pays Messin with a series of appointments of his clients. On the western coast, by the end of the 1650s he held the governorships of La Rochelle, Brouage, Aunis, and the îles of Oleron and Ré. As the possessor himself of a formidable, interlinked network of coastal fortifications, or places de sûreté, Mazarin saw no reason to oppose Fouquet’s proposal to purchase and develop the port and fortifications at Belle Île, on the Breton coast. Yet at Fouquet’s trial in 1662–4, Belle Île was cited as prime evidence of his treasonable intentions.

Mazarin’s combination of entitlement and insecurity drove an acquisitive machine that continued through military crisis, the persisting downturn in climate conditions and agricultural productivity, and levels of crippling debt and impoverishment across France. It was compounded by a first minister who nonetheless constantly used the language of sacrifice, disinterested service, and personal poverty in such an exaggerated way as to excite the sarcasm, mockery, or contempt of the political classes. The mazarinades are a collective verdict on Mazarin’s self-representation as a tireless and selfless servant of the state. Of the reality, even Mazarin’s most sycophantic clients and allies were well aware. Without the mazarinades it might be possible to dismiss the self-parodying tone of much of Mazarin’s correspondence as baroque extravagance, more characteristic of the age than the man. Those mazarinades focused on the personality and political practice of the cardinal remind us that contemporaries drew the distinction. And although the physical evidence of the mazarinades could be largely suppressed as censorship became more effective from 1653, the way of thinking about Mazarin and the political culture he dominated continued through the 1650s. Leading by personal example, during and after 1652 Mazarin legitimized the predominant style of politics. His own calculations about motivation, advantage, and private benefit, barely shrouded by an overblown language of public service, all too easily provided a model for those around him, whose undeferential tone and self-interested actions took their cue from a minister who seemed to condone it through his own behaviour.

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