When every morning the regent rose between ten and eleven, the day officially began at Court: It was all very different from the pattern set under the late king. While Louis XIII liked to rise and retire early, avoided Paris for a variety of country palaces and lodges, and spent much time hunting, Anne of Austria kept Spanish hours, never hunted, and resided most of the year at the Palais Royal. Then, too, while her dour husband had disliked pomp, the regent was welcoming, amiable, and fond of ceremony. “The Queen,” wrote one of her courtiers, “knew all about everyone’s birth and merit and liked to notice them: proud and polite at the same time, she knew how to hold a court better than anyone and although virtuous actually enjoyed the atmosphere of flirtation which is essential to make things pleasant and urbane.”16 It was altogether a more civilized atmosphere which now prevailed, but in spite of this new sophistication, there was no attempt at reviving the interest in the arts which had been so characteristic of earlier monarchs.

That surprised no one. Anne of Austria was basically ignorant; she hardly ever read, had had the most neglected of educations, and was anything but an intellectual. As for painting and sculpture, they meant nothing to her; even architecture, that standard preoccupation of most princes, failed to interest her. The most one can say for her is that when she decided to have a convent built at the Val de Grâce, in what was then suburban Paris, she called on Le Vau, the best architect of his time, but then again, it was, most probably, on Mazarin’s advice.

This particular lacuna was an obvious setback when the time came to organize her sons’ education: Knowing so little herself, the regent was hardly in a position either to set standards or even to make a wise choice. She showed this inability when she chose a new Governess of the Children of France. Louis XIII had appointed Mme de Lansac because she was Richelieu’s creature. Now the queen promptly, and understandably, dismissed her. As her replacement, she chose Mme de Sénecé, an old friend whose only preoccupation was the defense of her prerogatives at Court and who cared nothing for her charges. The sub-governess, the amiable and cheerful Mme de Lassalle, loved to play with the two little boys. Wearing black feathers in her hair and a sword at her side, she commanded a company of children in mock military maneuvers to the great pleasure of the young king; while that may have begun the child’s inclination for all things related to war, it cannot be said to have taught him anything. When, at the age of seven, as was the custom, Louis XIV was turned over to the care of a governor, he was illiterate.

Still, helped, no doubt, by the child’s own predisposition, his governess had shown him how to behave with the dignity which became his rank. When, in 1645, the regent went to the Parlement to announce the victory just won at Nordlingen by the duc d’Enghien over the imperial troops, the king was naturally required to appear. Once in, he “bowed to the whole company; and after having looked toward the Queen as if to ask for her approbation, he said in a clear voice: ‘Messieurs, I have come here to talk to you of my affairs; my Chancellor will tell you my intentions.’

“He spoke those few words with a grace which gave great joy to the whole assembly, and that joy was followed by acclamations which lasted for a long time.”17

That little episode was, in fact, a good lesson for the young king: Appearances, he saw, were often divorced from reality. In spite of the public adoration accorded Louis XIV, the monarch was, in fact, a neglected child. After he and his brother Philippe had spent an hour at their mother’s lever, they went back to their own apartment where they took off the splendid clothes they wore in public and changed into old and often shabby garments; they then passed the time as best they could. And, already in 1645, there was considerable opposition to the government, partly because taxes were higher than ever, partly because Mazarin was generally - and unfairly - hated. Thus, the ovation given Louis XIV meant nothing: The Parlement fought his mother’s policies all the same so that, early on, the boy learned all about deceit and hypocrisy.

These lessons were confirmed by the next great event in the king’s life. According to custom, royal boys were taken away from their governess when they reached the age of seven and entrusted to a governor; this switch implied a complete change of personnel, an obviously painful moment for a child who suddenly lost all the people he knew. “After the King was taken out of the care of women,” La Porte, his First Valet de Chambre, noted, “I was the first who slept in His Majesty’s bedroom; that surprised him at first, since he no longer saw the women who used to take care of him; but what upset him the most was that I did not know the fairy tales with which the women used to make him go to sleep . . . I told the Queen that . . . if she allowed me to do so, I would read him French history . . . The Queen agreed . . . The King enjoyed this and was determined to be like the greatest of his ancestors; he would become very angry when told that he would be another Louis the Lazy.”*18

La Porte was given his job because he had been imprisoned on Louis XIII’s orders for carrying some of the queen’s secret letters - not, perhaps, the best of qualification for someone who was to be constantly with the child king; in fact, that little dig about Louis the Lazy was characteristic of the intrigues carried out by the valet de chambre: The lesson was, of course, that the sovereign must govern without a prime minister, and its implied consequence, that Mazarin was nothing but a usurper. This often repeated piece of propaganda was so effective that, according to La Porte, “one day, at Compiègne, the King, who was watching His Eminence pass by the terrace of the castle with a large suite, could not help saying, rather loud, ‘there goes the Sultan.’ Le Plessis told His Eminence, and His Eminence told the Queen, who pressed the King strongly to reveal the name of the person who had first said this, but he never would do so . . . It is true that he was already very secretive.”19 La Porte, no doubt, was lucky, since he must have been the author of the comparison between Mazarin and the sultan, but in order to indulge his own dislike, the valet de chambre was turning Louis XIV against a man who not only ran the country but was deeply devoted to the little monarch.

Almost more important, the cardinal had also just become superintendant of the king’s education. “The Queen, who . . . spoke often of her desire to have her children taught all the sciences [i.e., every subject], was completely at a loss when she had to order the way in which it was to be done . . . Princes must know many things: and surely it is not Latin they need most. Politics is the true grammar they must study, as well as history which can give them examples taken from every country . . . but that is unfortunately not a science which can be taught to children . . .

“That is why the Queen, who was sure that M. le Cardinal was the cleverest man in Europe, finally decided to make him responsible for the education of the King. She even left the choice of his Governor up to him, and it was the marquis de Villeroy who was chosen . . . He was the wisest man at Court; he had led armies, but his most important qualification was that he knew the kingdom itself better than anyone, and that he had both capacity for and knowledge of the affairs of state. The tutor who was placed under him was the abbé de Beaumont . . . who was hardly able to concentrate on improving the mind of a great prince. Both said that they behaved according to their superior’s instructions . . . The marquis de Villeroy,” Mme de Motteville goes on, “told me at the time, talking about the King, whose native intelligence he admired, that he had no control over the way he was brought up; and that if he had had his way, he would not have left so promising a mind without cultivation at the moment it was most needed . . . for he spontaneously liked to learn what he did not know . . .

“At that time, he was taught to translate Caesar’s Commentaries; he learned how to dance, to draw, to ride horses, and he was as good at all bodily exercises as a prince, whose profession they aren’t, should be . . . The Queen took great care to nurture, in the soul of that young prince . . . feelings of virtue, wisdom, and piety; she preferred preventing the alteration of his innocence by other young men of his age, rather than seeing him more aware of all the things which normally free youth from a certain shyness.”20

So much for one eyewitness account: Mme de Motteville, indeed, was in a position to know what she was talking about. The facts seem to change, however, when another eyewitness, La Porte, tells us what went on: “M. de Beaumont, the King’s tutor, took great pains to teach him and I can truthfully say that, at all the lessons which I attended, he forgot none of the duties of his position; but those who were around the King . . . instead of making him practice the lessons he had been taught kept him entertained with games.”21 Which, then, is it?

When Louis XIV had become a middle-aged man, he complained not infrequently about the poor education he had received; indeed, he went to a great deal of trouble to ensure that his son and grandchildren had the best tutors possible. In 1681, a diarist noted: “The King had all possible qualities of mind and body . . . and if he lacked anything, it was a little education, which Cardinal Mazarin, his governor, was unwilling to give him.”22 And a little later, Mme de Maintenon, that born educator, is known to have expressed amazement and horror at the way the king’s education had been neglected.

So general a consensus cannot be all wrong; in certain respects, Louis XIV’s education clearly left much to be desired, nor is it impossible to place the blame where it belongs: Mme de Motteville and La Porte give us all the clues we need. First, there were the king’s attendants. Their attitude was clear: They wanted to please the boy who would one day be in a position to make them rich and powerful, so they flattered him mercilessly - a fact of which, even as a boy of seven, Louis XIV was fully aware - and they did their best to amuse him. It is a rare boy, indeed, who when asked what he would like to do, clamors for a little more Latin, or an extra hour of mathematics: So instead of studying, the little king rode, played, or danced.

Then, there is one persistent myth which must be dispelled, the one according to which Mazarin deliberately sabotaged Louis XIV’s education so as to retain power when his charge grew up. That, in fact, he did the very opposite will become clear later, but he can fairly be accused of neglect. In the circumstances, however, he does have excuses: Constant financial crises, violent opposition, a foreign war soon complicated by unrest, then rebellion - more than enough for any one man. Quite obviously, the cardinal took on the superintendent’s job in order to prevent someone else from turning the king’s mind against him. That is, of course, understandable. Unfortunately, it contributed to the king’s ignorance - although one can hardly call anyone who speaks Italian and Spanish, as well as his native language, and knows a great deal of history, wholly uncultured.

 

By 1646, the harmony which had marked the beginnings of the regency was only a memory. The two powerful groups which at first had supported the new government, the aristocracy and the Parlement, were now turning against it; while the two had nothing in common, their united opposition could bring about an impossible situation. That, in the end, the middle class and the great nobles wanted completely different regimes was already clear, but both also began to see that a temporary alliance might at least bring about their common goal, the firing of Mazarin. They also assumed that the regent was weak and lazy, so that, once she was liberated from the cardinal’s influence, she would follow her new minister’s policy docilely. In fact, they were wrong in one essential point: Whatever the appearances, Anne of Austria was absolutely determined to stick by her minister because he was carrying out the very policy most likely to make France (and therefore Louis XIV) strong and glorious. The measure of her determination can, in retrospect, be seen clearly in her attitude to Philip IV: She distrusted herself when writing this beloved brother, she told Mme de Motteville, because “she was afraid that her affection might cause her to neglect the interests of her son the King.”23

Because Mazarin also had great charm, the queen undoubtedly grew fond of him, and that gave her new enemies just the handle they needed. Resisting the king was always a problem: The monarchy’s mystique was so strong that people had a way of falling to their knees before the Lord’s anointed; disobeying the regent was already a lot easier: She was, after all, only a woman, and in power solely because her son was too young to reign; fighting a minister, who was a foreigner* to boot, seemed perfectly normal, especially if his place depended on being the queen’s favorite or, worse, her lover.

There has, ever since the 1640s, been a vast outpouring of publications discussing the exact nature of Anne of Austria’s relationship to Mazarin: Was she or was she not his mistress? One side, leaning on a letter with a particularly warm ending (“I am dying, and Mazarin knows just why”) holds that she was; the other points out that Anne was given to verbal exaggeration and was far too proud of her birth and position to have an affair with a man of no birth at all, and that she was also too pious to commit so great a sin. That, on balance, seems the most likely; especially since the mechanics of adultery would have proved almost impossibly complicated. The queen was never alone: At least one, often two, of her ladies slept in her room; even her private conferences with the cardinal took place at one end of a gallery with the Court watching from the other end.

Unfortunately, even if, as is probable, Anne of Austria remained chaste, her obvious fondness for Mazarin made the reverse seem likely; worse, it affronted everyone. “The love that the people had felt until then for the Queen began to wane little by little. The absolute power she gave Cardinal Mazarin made her lose her own; and because she wanted him to be loved, she caused him to be hated,”24 Mme de Motteville noted, and she was right. Not only were royal favorites usually loathed: The cardinal’s permanence drove every ambitious man to a frenzy.

By 1646, one of these men was becoming an obvious danger. With the death of the old prince de Condé, the young and brilliant duc d’Enghien moved to the center of the stage. Notoriously proud and bad-tempered (as well as extraordinarily dirty), the new Monsieur le Prince was not only grand master of France, the highest post at Court, but also Governor of Burgundy, Berry, and Champagne, and the richest man in the country. Except for the always indecisive duc d’Orléans, he was the king’s closest relative; as if all that were not enough, he had just won a series of great victories. Finally, because he wanted to conquer an independent principality in Flanders, he now demanded full control of both army and navy.

Condé - as he was now called - felt nothing but contempt for Mazarin, but even that satisfying feeling was becoming tinged with impatience: It did not take a clever man to guess that opposition to the prime minister would soon have the prince’s support, along with that of his large following. Still, Mazarin was no fool: He promptly appointed Condé Viceroy of Catalonia and sent him off to besiege Lerida.

Even more dangerous at the moment, the Parlement had embarked on a kind of opposition which was rapidly veering from the loyal to the factious. Already in 1645, the lit de justice held for the registration of the new fiscal edicts had caused Attorney General Omer Talon to paint a stark and all too accurate picture of the overburdened people’s misery. Now the Parlement took on the role of defender of the poor and oppressed; this compassion would have been more convincing if its judges had not themselves been exempt from taxes, but, as it was, it earned an undoubted popularity. More, with a look across the Channel to the English Parliament which, just then, had defeated Charles I, it began, timidly at first, to claim power on the purse strings so as to control the government itself.

Mazarin, safe in the knowledge that he had the queen’s support, simply ignored this situation: Power, he knew, belonged to the monarch, and the notion that these middle-class magistrates might influence the regent’s policies seemed preposterous. As for Anne of Austria, she saw what was happening, but she knew her duty: The prerogatives left her by Louis XIII must be passed on to her son intact. There could be no question of compromise with the Parlement, so she mostly ignored it.

In spite of all this discord, the life of the Court continued as if all were well. In early March 1647, for instance, there was a theatrical evening offered by Mazarin, with Commedia dell’Arte players, and especially rich sets and costumes; afterward, “a ball was given on the stage of the theater; a hall had been created, all gilded and made by large frames filled with paintings whose deep perspective formed a fine sight for those who sat in the audience. This hall was furnished with seats and cushions which were placed in niches . . . At the far end, there was a throne placed on four or five steps with chairs and cushions and a canopy made of gold and silver cloth and tassels worthy of such splendor. Four great crystal chandeliers lit this hall which really looked magical . . .

“The King was dressed in black satin with gold and silver embroidery; the black was only visible to serve as a foil for the embroidery. Scarlet plumes and ribbons completed his costume, but the handsome features of his face, the sweet yet serious look in his eyes, the whiteness of his complexion together with his hair which was then very fair, adorned him even better than his costume. He danced admirably; and although he was then only eight years old, one could say of him that he was one of those who had the grandest air and certainly the most beauty.”25

The little duc d’Anjou, of whom the queen was very fond, was also becoming one of the Court’s ornaments, but while Louis was preternaturally serious and dignified, his brother Philippe gave a very different sort of promise. “That prince had wit as soon as he learned how to talk. The clearness of his thoughts went along with two praiseworthy inclinations . . . generosity and humanity. It might be wished, however, that the idle amusements he was allowed had been forbidden him. He liked spending his time with women and girls, dressing them and doing their hair: he knew what would make them look elegant even better than the most curious women . . . He was well built; his features were fine . . . His eyes were black, shiny and beautiful; their expression was sweet, yet grave . . . His black hair, which curled naturally, suited his complexion; and his nose, which looked as if it might become aquiline, was then handsome. One could think that, if the years did not lessen his beauty, he could dispute its crown with the fairest ladies; but it already seemed as if he would not be tall.”26 No doubt Mme de Motteville is right: Philippe’s effeminate tastes were strongly encouraged, but then, both Anne of Austria and Mazarin knew all too well that the king’s brother could be a permanent menace: Better for the duc d’Anjou to care about dresses than rebellions.

 

In this unstable situation, with plots and counterplots crisscrossing, a series of startling events made it look as if all might change. First, in late September 1647, the duc d’Anjou became ill, and, for a while, it was thought he might not survive. The queen, aside from her very real affection for Philippe, had another good reason to fear his death, since the duc d’Orléans would then become heir to the throne, a situation of much greater weight than that of uncle to the king. “[B]ut all pretended gaiety for different reasons: The Queen, who would have been desperate if she had lost the prince, pretended to be cheerful; and the duc d’Orléans, who would have been easily consoled, did not dare look sad for fear of being thought too false; but then, he was so frightened of looking pleased that he did not dare to joke or laugh about any topic.”27

As it turned out, the little boy soon improved, and the disappointed Monsieur was, no doubt, able to laugh again. But then, on November 10, 1647, the nine-year-old king began to feel unwell, “People thought it would not be anything; but the next day, he had a high fever, which frightened the Queen greatly . . .

“Two days later, the disease was seen to be smallpox, which at first reassured the Queen, who had feared it might be something worse. She left her apartment that day and slept in the patient’s room.

“As the King’s fever continued unabated, the Queen grew more worried with every passing moment and the physicians were unable to reassure her . . .

“The Queen, on this occasion, carried away by her feelings, was unable to put on a public face; and her anxiety showed that she felt a very great love for the King, more so than for her younger son. [The King] was given to her by God, after a thousand unfulfilled longings, and when she had even given up hope. He had rescued her from the wretched state to which Cardinal de Richelieu’s persecution had brought her. He had made her the Regent; and finally, he had been the first to claim all her love, so that she had only that left for Monsieur with which nature provides all good mothers . . .

“The King’s illness now caused her to become ill herself. The feelings of her heart were plain on her face, and I have never seen her so changed in so little time. Two or three days later, she was reassured when the King’s fever suddenly went down, and the pustules came out abundantly.

“Until the eleventh day of his illness, the King gave the Queen no worries other than those she had had before the pustules came out. She suffered because he did, but since these were sufferings common to all children, she was consoled in advance for the loss of his beauty as long as his life was safe. On the twenty-first, as she was hearing mass at Notre Dame, suddenly the King felt worse. His fever rose rapidly; he fainted and remained unconscious for three-quarters of an hour.

“When the Queen returned and found him thus, she felt the strongest pain, and nearly died herself. For the rest of that day, according to the physicians, he remained in great peril and the Queen never stopped crying. The duc d’Orléans stayed with her, which made her feel even worse; she found neither relief nor consolation in crying in front of him. That evening, until midnight, the King felt a little better; but the next morning, his illness grew far graver again. On the Sunday, the fourteenth day of his illness, he felt so ill that the physicians no longer expected him to live because since the time of his faint, three days before, the pustules had all gone back in; and although he had been bled four times, his fever was no lower . . .

“All that day the Queen was almost choked for she was not much given to crying and kept her sufferings to herself . . . but since no one can remain in that condition without showing it, she fainted that day by the King’s bed . . . finally at midnight God gave her back the child who was so dear to her and whose life was so necessary to France. The fever came down and the pustules reappeared; on Monday and Tuesday he was purged; and after that he grew progressively better.”28

Throughout the king’s illness, of course, everyone at Court made plans for a new reign. Monsieur, having caught on too late in 1643, was determined to grab power this time, in either his own name or that of the duc d’Anjou; the Parlement, for its part, was planning to make Monsieur and the prince de Condé co-regents while preparing a text which would prevent any foreign-born person from becoming a minister. On the evening of the king’s fainting spell, Monsieur’s entourage gleefully toasted the health of King Gaston I, while the queen, sobbing, knelt by the bedside of her dying son. That, in the end, the boy recovered therefore seemed especially maddening: After all their hopes, Mazarin was more powerful than ever; his enemies, who had twice come so close to triumph, now redoubled their efforts, and the ten-year-old king watched it all.

 

In this greedy, violent world, where slander was an everyday occupation and murder not uncommon, all the passions which had so long been repressed by Richelieu now flared up with extraordinary strength. All around Anne of Austria and her children, haughty nobles strutted, avidly looking for an opportunity to grab anything they could while the royal family led by Monsieur and Condé wanted nothing more than to replace Mazarin and the regent. Throughout it all, the most ardent devotion was professed for the person of the king while his true interests were firmly ignored by all except his mother and his foreigner of a prime minister: It was as sharp a lesson as any monarch has ever been taught. At ten, the unusually secretive Louis XIV already saw that he could count on virtually no one, that everyone was out to weaken his power and impoverish his realm, and that he could expect no pity.

At the same time, he was very aware of his semidivine status. Kings, he knew, were chosen by God, from whom they held their absolute power; thus resistance to their orders was something very like sacrilege. That, at any rate, was the theory; how far it was removed from the everyday reality in France was something the child could see all too well, and it seemed all the more scandalous to him that the very thorough religious education he was receiving confirmed his understanding of what it meant to be a king. Of course, like all his literate contemporaries, he was taught Latin, and the texts he was given to translate in 1647-48 make interesting reading.

“I know,” he wrote in his still childish script, “that a Christian prince’s first duty is to serve God and that piety is the source of all royal virtues.” And again: “I know that hypocrites do not serve God as they should because they worship him with words only. Therefore, I will adore God’s majesty not with words but with my heart, as I know that He will not be mocked . . .

“I must command myself before giving orders to others . . . The king who obeys his passions, will do nothing they forbid and refuse nothing they demand is not free . . . I must always remember that I am a king so that I will do nothing unworthy of my name.”29 Lofty principles, but interestingly, the boy took them seriously. Already, he controlled his feelings and never showed what he thought; as for his duty to God and his people, that suffered no more doubt than its corollary, the obedience that was due him.

All around him, however, he could see challenges to his mother’s authority. On January 15, 1648, the queen held yet another lit de justice to force the registration of new fiscal edicts. In truth, the Parlement had some reason to complain: The endless war was ruinously expensive while the government’s finances were increasingly mismanaged. Mazarin took no interest in matters such as taxes and expenses; the financiers who, with increasing frequency, lent the state money were thoroughly adept at making huge profits on the backs of the people; Mazarin himself, who was living in conspicuous splendor, looked as if he were stealing with the best of them when, in fact, most of his very large income was derived from ecclesiastical benefices.

That the Parlement should have refused registration, therefore, was not very surprising. Far more startling was the speech made by Omer Talon during the lit de justice in which he came up with a whole new constitutional theory. Edicts, he said, only became the law of the land once the Parlement had discussed them and authorized their registration. Why should the king’s presence make an edict legal when Parlement had already voted against it? It was neither logical nor moral, and he then went on to give a stark, moving, and all-too-accurate picture of the people’s sufferings.

Laments about the peasants’ ruin were nothing new, but when he attacked the very notion of the lit de justice, Talon took a giant step away from tradition. By representing the Parlement’s registration of an edict as the result of a deliberative act rather than a mere formality, Talon was saying that the judges were co-rulers with the king; that, in fact, the Parlement was a Parliament. As for where that sort of theory was likely to lead, that, too, was perfectly clear: Charles I of England was at that very moment a powerless prisoner of the Commonwealth.

Still, for the little boy who sat on a tall heap of velvet cushions, Talon’s words were not only an insult, they were also a clear example of the hypocrisy against which his tutor had warned him: If the Parlement had refused to register the fiscal edicts, it was less because it cared about the fate of the poor than because, in an effort to find money, the government had just created (and sold, as was the custom) twelve new offices of conseiller, the ordinary judges.

After that, the Parlement’s rebellion grew apace. First, it ignored the lit de justice and still refused registration. The queen punished it by revoking the edict making its members’ offices hereditary. Thus struck where it hurt, the Parlement turned to three other, part judicial, part administrative, chambers, the Grand Conseil, the Cour des Comptes, and the Cour des Aides, and decreed that all four were, henceforth, to be one body. Mazarin forbade this move; the courts paid him no attention and, on June 16, the union took place. And in spite of the queen’s fury, that revolutionary step was legalized by the helpless government. The new chamber then set about changing the very nature of the monarchy. The king lost the power to arrest or detain people arbitrarily; taxes were only legal if voted by the Parlement; immediately, that assembly proceeded to starve out the armies by decreeing the end of a quarter of the government’s income.

Clearly, the situation had become impossible. Since the time for a show of authority was now past, both Mazarin and Anne of Austria resorted to trickery: They pretended to like what was happening, while secretly asking the prince de Condé, who was leading France’s largest army, to help; then, on August 20, the prince won yet another crushing victory at Lens. “The gentlemen of the Parlement won’t like this,”30 Louis XIV commented when he heard the news, so clear had it become to the ten-year-old boy that the magistrates longed for the kind of bad news that would increase their power.

As it turned out, the victory proved exceptionally fruitful in that it led to the conclusion within three months of the Treaty of Westphalia, which finally crushed the ambition of the Austrian Habsburgs while giving France a new province, Alsace, as well as the role of arbiter in a divided Germany. But it also gave Anne of Austria a wholly mistaken illusion of strength. At the end of the Te Deum celebrated at Notre Dame, she had the four most extreme Parlement men arrested.

That very afternoon Paris rose. Its narrow streets were blocked by chains and barricades so that troops could no longer circulate, and it became clear that the Palais Royal itself was no longer safe. The queen, in deep humiliation, had no choice but to release her prisoners.

That quieted the riots, but the situation remained tense and government impossible, so Mazarin tried something new. On September 12, he and the king, with some difficulty, moved out to Rueil, the palace Richelieu had built himself some ten miles outside Paris, and the next day, the queen joined them. Now it was all up to Monsieur le Prince and his army: With his help, Paris could be reconquered and the traditional monarchy restored.

That Monsieur le Prince would play the role assigned to him was hardly in doubt: As a member of the royal family, he believed in the supremacy of kings and had nothing but disdain for those scriveners of the Parlement; besides, if free to rule as she pleased, the regent could pay for his help generously, and Condé was not only enormously proud, he was also very greedy.

Instead, he chose to play the arbiter between Crown and Parlement, thus showing everyone that he was, indeed, the essential man. On October 22, Anne of Austria, tears pouring down her face, signed a declaration accepting the constitution invented by the Parlement, adding bitterly that henceforth her son would be no more than a playing-card king. Two days later, her Declaration was registered by an overjoyed Parlement which went on to ignore the signing, the very same day, of the Treaty of Westphalia, and the Court returned to Paris.

Clearly, guile was called for, and luckily for the queen, Mazarin set out to justify his reputation as a diplomat. First, he sent Condé money which had been put aside to pay the troops. Naturally, Condé kept it. The Parlement, equally naturally, remonstrated. Condé, who felt he had been insulted, now turned against the magistrates and would have nothing more to do with them. It was a first step.

The next was also engineered by the cardinal, who understood all about human foibles. Both Monsieur and Condé wanted to dispose of a cardinal’s hat; only one was available: that was enough to turn the princes into instant enemies, and since Monsieur backed the Parlement, the queen could now count on Condé if she decided to fight the magistrates.

Still, Anne could do nothing if she remained in Paris, but obviously, the Parlement was not about to let her go. “On January 5 [1649], I went in to the Queen in the evening,” Mme de Motteville wrote. “I found her in her small study, peacefully watching the King at play and nonchalantly leaning on the corner of a table, apparently thinking only of what she was looking at . . . A moment later, Mme de La Tremoille . . . told me in a very low voice: ‘They say in Paris that the Queen will be leaving tonight.’ This surprised me. As an answer, I merely pointed to the Queen, and the peace of her mind; and shrugging my shoulders, I shared my surprise at this rumor with her.” It is perhaps useful to remember at this point that, although not in on state secrets, Mme de Motteville was not only one of Anne of Austria’s favorite ladies but an old friend as well. She could be expected, therefore, to recognize any sign of incipient nervousness.

“The Queen spent the rest of the evening in the same quiet mood which accompanied all the actions of her life,” Mme de Motteville goes on. “The only thing we noticed was that she seemed more cheerful than usual . . . In a word, we were so thoroughly taken in that we laughed with her at those who said that she would be leaving that same night . . .

“Having seen the Queen in her bed, we went off home . . . As soon as we had left, the gates of the Palais Royal were closed with the command not to open them again. The Queen got up again to think about her situation and confided her secret only to her First Woman of the Bedchamber who slept near her . . .

“The necessary orders were then given to the captains of the guard . . . The maréchal de Villeroy allowed the King to sleep until three in the morning; then he roused him, along with Monsieur,* and brought them to a carriage which was waiting for them at the garden gate of the Palais Royal. The Queen joined the King and Monsieur.”

From there, it was a very short ride to the Cours la Reine, safely outside the walls of Paris. This location was the rendezvous for the rest of the royal party: Mazarin, naturally, and all the other members of the royal family, who all arrived rubbing their eyes as they had had no more idea than Mme de Motteville of the queen’s plans.

“Once all the royal House was assembled,” Mme de Motteville continues, “they drove off to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. [Because all the King’s household goods moved with him and the trip was strictly secret], the King, the Queen and the Court found themselves there without beds, without attendants, without linens, without any of the things needed for the service of the royal family. The Queen, upon her arrival, went to sleep in a small bed which Cardinal Mazarin had sent out from Paris a few days earlier for this purpose. In the same way, he had provided for the King, and there were, further, two small camp beds, one of which he gave Monsieur and the other of which he kept for himself. Madame la duchesse d’Orléans slept that night on a bunch of straw as did Mademoiselle.* All those who had followed the court shared the same fate; and within a few hours, straw had become so expensive in Saint Germain that it could no longer be found at any price.”31

At least the queen and her children were safe. Their security was no mean achievement, especially since, in February, the news of Charles I’s execution arrived at Saint-Germain: The lengths to which a rebellious people might go were all too plain, and while no one expected the civilized French to imitate the notoriously unruly English, still it was best to be protected from the Parisians by Monsieur le Prince’s army. That essential safety did not come cheap, however: It is never a good thing for a monarch’s prestige to flee in the darkness of night from his people’s anger, and no age was more conscious of prestige than the seventeenth century. Of course, by her removal, Anne of Austria had preserved the essential - the person of the king and his right to rule as an absolute monarch - since she could now freely repudiate her earlier Declaration limiting the monarch’s power. But neither she nor Louis XIV ever forgot the humiliation endured that day and compounded in the following months. It was not only that Monsieur le Prince was now master of the situation, and consequently brusque, haughty, and disdainful: With the beginning of the civil war - for that is what the siege of Paris meant - taxes stopped coming in so that the royal family lived in a state of extreme penury. Pages, for instance, had to be sent away because they could no longer be fed, let alone paid; the crown jewels were pledged to raise funds and still the king often lacked the necessities of life: His kitchen, which was separate from the queen’s, had to be closed for lack of money. The queen, obviously, minded it all, but it was the young king who felt the deepest resentment. He knew what was owed him as God’s representative on earth; he expected to be treated with deep respect and full obedience. Instead, he was now watching his proud cousin humiliate the regent, and by implication, himself, while his rebellious subjects forced him to live, almost unattended, in virtual poverty. This unacceptable situation was the result of the government’s weakness, and that, in turn, came from the excess of power enjoyed by the grandees. The lesson was clear, and it impressed the boy far more thoroughly than anything ever taught by the abbé de Beaumont.

Within a week of the Court’s arrival in Saint Germain, most of the princes moved back to Paris and directed the city’s resistance. “The royal army took its quarters around Paris so as to starve it into submission. M. le Prince de Conti,* M. de Longueville,† M. d’Elbeuf,‡ M. de Bouillon§ and many other persons remained in the capital because they were sure that during the King’s minority one could not undertake something of so great consequence without the help of the princes of the blood. Immediately the Court sent to M. de Turenne to find out how he stood. He made it clear. He even wrote to M. le cardinal Mazarin that his friendship would cease if things went on the same way, and that when he [Turenne] crossed the Rhine** with his army to return to France, it would be only to reestablish peace, and not at all to help with a policy which he did not think ought to be so lightly pursued.”32 Turenne was the duc de Bouillon’s youngest brother, and while it was not unusual for one brother to hate the other - Condé and Conti were perfect examples - Turenne was almost unique in his devotion to a rich, complacent, and much less talented elder brother; besides which, he detested Condé and was not about to enter any enterprise in which the prince had the leading role.

That, however, created a dangerous situation: The Parisians were raising an army with the help of Spain, whose position as the enemy of France in no wise deterred them. If Turenne were now to join the Fronde - the name given the rebellion - Condé’s army would be caught between his forces and those of the Parisians with obviously disastrous consequences. At this point, the desperate Mazarin borrowed 800,000 livres from Condé and sent them to Turenne’s army so that it would remain in Germany. And when, in the early summer, the Parisians began to think that perhaps they had gone too far, the regent found herself as powerless as ever. Negotiations started with the Parlement, and the result, as before, reflected Condé’s preferences. The Declaration of 1648 remained in effect but no one had any illusions: Henceforth, it would be Monsieur le Prince who would rule the country.

On August 18, therefore, Louis XIV and Anne of Austria reentered Paris. “They were received with all the applause, all the cries of gladness usual to these occasions . . . Never had there been such a crowd to follow the King’s carriage and, because of this public rejoicing, the past began to look like a dream.”33 Not, perhaps, for everyone: All around the city a wide band of devastation testified to the usual accompaniment of civil wars.

The humiliations which seemed to have become a permanent fact of life to both queen and cardinal continued as well. In spite of frantic efforts on Mazarin’s part to conciliate Monsieur le Prince, the latter, drunk with pride and power, proceeded publicly and repeatedly to insult “the Sicilian blackguard,” as he called him to his face. There were the many times when Condé pulled the cardinal’s beard, the endless derogatory remarks, and finally a slap: this behavior all happened in front of the queen and, not infrequently, the king himself. Then, the prince’s many demands had to be satisfied, even when he went against the normally unbreakable etiquette, to advance the status of his followers.

Things went even further when Monsieur le Prince decided that the queen should have a lover, the marquis de Jarzé, chosen by himself. Anne of Austria, very properly, reprimanded the marquis before the entire Court when he pressed his suit. Because Monsieur le Prince had behaved just as arrogantly to everyone else, his downfall began to appear a distinct possibility.

First, of course, some of Condé’s friends had to be won over; the most active plotter among the former Frondeurs was an ecclesiastic, Paul de Gondi, the nephew and coadjuteur (successor) of the archbishop of Paris. Gondi, just then, could be bought: He, too, had been offended by Monsieur le Prince’s arrogance, besides which, he longed to be made a cardinal. So in the course of several secret meetings, Anne of Austria, who pretended to be half in love with the coadjuteur, promised him the promotion he wanted so badly, as well as influence in the government. Gondi, in return, offered his friends’ acquiescence to the queen’s revenge. All was now ready.

Until the very last moment, Mazarin and the queen behaved as if nothing had changed; then, on January 18, 1650, to the general stupor, Condé, Conti, and the duc de Longueville were arrested and jailed in the Vincennes fortress. Almost immediately, however, it became clear that the regent had not gone far enough, Condé’s wife and mother set off in one direction to rekindle the civil war, his sister, the duchesse de Longueville, in another. As for Turenne, who had been the prince’s enemy, he tells us himself what happened. “The very moment the prince was arrested, M. le Cardinal sent M. de Ruvigny to M. de Turenne with the assurance that he was perfectly safe and the promise of favorable treatment . . .

“M. de Turenne, although he believed this . . . and in spite of the fact that he had not been on good terms with Monsieur le Prince for some time, decided not to abandon the prince in his misfortune and left with four noblemen the very night of the arrest . . . He decided to act so as to force the Court to release Monsieur le Prince. “Accordingly, he sent messengers to all the troops which had been under Monsieur le Prince and to all the Governors who were friendly to Monsieur le Prince or displeased with the Court.”34

Coming from the general-in-chief of one of the king’s armies, this sort of insubordination is nothing short of stunning, so low had fidelity to the Crown fallen that the most vaporous notion of honor had now become more important than the plainest of duties. Of course, Louis XIV’s age was always a handy pretext, but even then, it was clear that the government no longer governed anything: Rebellion, far from being considered a crime, had become something like a question of good manners. The following letter, written by the young and fashionable comte de Bussy-Rabutin to his cousin, the marquise de Sévigné, is typical of that attitude; it is only one of hundreds: “I have finally declared for Monsieur le Prince, my fair cousin; it wasn’t without much repugnance, for I will be serving a prince who doesn’t like me against my King. It is true that I pity his [Condé’s] condition. I will therefore serve him while he is in prison as if he liked me, and if he ever comes out, I will resign my position and will immediately leave him once again to do my duty.”35

That really says it all: Duty to king and country had become something taken up or put off as easily as a pair of gloves. The ensuing anarchy is not hard to imagine, and as if all that were not bad enough, Turenne - the honest, devoted Turenne, the winner of many battles against the Spanish and Austrians - now turned to the very enemy he had been fighting so as to ensure the liberation of a prince he did not even like. Worse, he offered to give up what France had won with such effort: “The treaty was concluded in which M. de Fuensaldagne [an envoy of Philip IV] promised, in the name of the Most Catholic King, and Mme de Longueville and M. de Turenne promised in their own name not to make peace [with the Court] until Monsieur le Prince was out of prison and a just, generous, and reasonable peace was offered to Spain.

“Things being thus concluded, we prepared to open the campaign.”36

Because in our own time, childhood is often prolonged into the twenties, we forget how very fast people once grew up. In 1650, Louis XIV was only twelve, but he was also king, in an age when Condé, for instance, had won his first great victory at the age of twenty-two. And he knew very well that his God-given authority was mocked, that the realm was ravaged by opposing armies, and that he himself had been reduced to an almost unbearable position. Had he had any doubts, the state of his wardrobe would have enlightened him. “Every year, the King was customarily given twelve pairs of sheets and two dressing gowns, one for the summer, one for the winter,” La Porte noted. “[I]n spite of this, I watched him using six pairs of sheets for three whole years and one dressing gown of green velvet lined with rabbit fur in winter and summer alike for that same period so that, the last year, it barely reached half way down his legs; and as for the sheets, they were so worn out that I found him several times with his legs poking through them; and everything else was the same.”37 The king could hardly have had a more graphic reminder of his exact situation.

At least he was growing up to be strong, energetic, and healthy. Already by 1648, his doctors started the treatments which were to last his whole life: Once a month, he was given an extremely potent enema - it provoked, according to a note in the register, ten violent evacuations - or an equally strong purge; at least twice a year, he was bled. That for so many years this kind of abuse had no ill effect is an eloquent comment on the strength of Louis’s constitution, as is an incident reported by La Porte in late 1649. “Once . . . at Fontainebleau . . . after having undressed before going to bed, [the King] started to jump and tumble on his bed; and finally, he made such a leap that he hit his head on the tester across the bed; that hit made such a noise that I feared the worst. I immediately ran to the King and carried him back onto his bed, but found that he had suffered only a superficial wound.”38

In fact, the adolescent was skilled at all physical exercises, a bold and competent rider and a graceful dancer well able to play a role in the elaborate ballets put on at court when the times allowed. He was also clearly intelligent, aware of both events and people, and full of a sense of his own mission. Thus the second Fronde, as it developed in 1650, was not merely an adults’ game: He felt directly and painfully involved. That became even clearer in early February.

Mme de Longueville, Turenne’s cosigner, was one of the leaders of the rebellion: It was not only that she was Condé’s loving - some said too loving - sister, and the wife of the duc de Longueville, the head of the next closest branch of the royal family; she was also proud, ambitious, and eager to play a major political role, so she went off to capture Rouen.

This action was a major threat. Rouen was the capital of Normandy, one of the largest and richest cities in France and the key to Paris: Since it commanded the lower Seine, along which much of the city’s food was shipped, anyone who held Rouen could starve Paris. Obviously, something had to be done, but the government now commanded few troops, so together, the queen and Mazarin decided to rely on the strength of the average Frenchman’s devotion to his king: An expedition was mounted with the king at its head, and Rouen, which would probably have closed its doors to Mazarin and received Mme de Longueville, gave Louis XIV a warm and enthusiastic reception.

While this result was just the one for which Anne of Austria had hoped, it could also be seen as a deep humiliation for the young monarch. When major cities were now so close to revolt that only the king’s actual presence could keep them within their duty, then, clearly, the situation was almost desperate. Sure enough, worse was yet to come. In July, the queen decided to try the same method on Bordeaux, and this time, it failed: The king was refused entry into the third largest city in his realm. If now the old monarchical mystique failed, then hope was faint indeed.

Indeed, it began to look as if the war begun some twenty years earlier, pursued at such cost in men and money, and at last practically won, would also be lost. Although the maréchal du Plessis-Praslin won a battle at Rethel, in northern France, the Spanish armies were once again marching forward, compounding the devastation wrought by the contending French forces. And Mazarin, who was held responsible for this array of disasters, had undoubtedly become the most hated man in the country. Anne of Austria trusted him just as much as ever, but how long she would be able to protect him no one could tell. Most of the attacks on the government were naturally directed at the cardinal: The king was too young to be blamed, the queen still too respected, so Mazarin was traduced in every possible way.

When, at the end of the summer, the Court returned to Paris, the situation deteriorated still further. What had saved the Crown so far had been the conflicts pitting the princes against one another; now Gondi turned against the queen as soon as he found out she had not nominated him to the cardinalate, and set about reconciling the former adversaries with each other and the Parlement. By December, it was clear that Anne of Austria and her government had lost all support. When, on January 20, 1651, the Parlement’s chief magistrate, Premier Président Molé, came to the Palais Royal, he read the infuriated queen a violent remonstrance demanding the liberation of the imprisoned princes; it was no surprise, but the king, who was, naturally, present, exclaimed, when Molé had left: “Mother, if I had not feared upsetting you, I would, on three occasions, have told the Président to be silent and leave.”39

At this point, and very understandably, Mazarin lost his temper: During a meeting of the Council, he compared the rebellious nobles and the Parlement to the Englishmen who had just executed their king. That gave Monsieur the pretext he wanted for breaking with the prime minister, while the Parlement demanded the freedom of the princes and the dismissal of the cardinal. It was at this desperate juncture that both Anne of Austria and Mazarin decided that it was time to bring the twelve-year-old king into their confidence. In the deepest secrecy, Louis XIV was told their plan; then Mazarin, disguised as a musketeer and carrying the Crown’s remaining diamonds with him, fled to Saint-Germaine-en-Laye, fully expecting the king and queen to follow him. Unfortunately, as soon as his flight became known, Monsieur, prompted by Gondi, realized he had everything to lose by the king’s flight: While he remained in Paris, Monsieur was in charge; once gone, Monsieur was only one more rebel against whom the queen, with Mazarin’s advice, could proceed. Still, as was his wont, he dithered, and when Gondi asked him to sign an order that all the gates of Paris be closed, he hesitated so long that it was his wife who signed.

As for Louis XIV and Anne of Austria, they were now trapped. “On the night of the ninth to the tenth of February, the Queen had intended to flee . . . The duc d’Orléans said very audibly that one of the King’s principal officers had warned him about this; and by making his apprehension public, he soon made it spread to all the others . . .

“. . . This news soon alarmed the Parisians . . . and the duc d’Orléans decided to use the people’s fears . . . for he had good reason to prevent the King’s absence from Paris . . .

“The streets immediately filled with armed men . . . The Queen was told that the duc d’Orléans apparently wanted to take the King away from her . . . She was in bed, it was already past midnight . . .

“. . . The tumult grew constantly in the streets and the darkness made it all more fearful still.” At that moment, M. de Sourches came on a mission from Monsieur to make sure the queen had not left the Palais Royal. She told him that the king was asleep and that she herself was in her night clothes, but did not add that she had only just undressed when she realized the people were likely to break into the palace or that the king, though he was, indeed, under the covers, was fully dressed and only shamming sleep.

“De Sourches went in to the King’s room and, following the Queen’s order, he lifted the curtain behind which the young monarch was lying, and watched him sleep for a long time . . . Upon leaving the Palais Royal, he did his best to pacify the Parisians.” That, however, was a hopeless enterprise. The angry mobs now made their way to the palace gates and demanded that they be open. Anne of Austria, alone and unadvised, ordered that the people be let in. “Thus some of them came into the Palais Royal, shouting that the King must be shown to them, that they wanted to see him. The Queen, upon hearing this, immediately had all the doors opened and the people taken to the King’s bedroom. The rebels were delighted with this. They all crowded near the King’s bed; its curtains were all open and then, remembering their love for him, they blessed him again and again. They spent a long time watching him sleep and never grew tired of admiring him . . . Their anger was dissipated . . . They left as if they had been the most obedient of subjects.”40 It had been a very close call; only Anne of Austria’s coolness had saved the situation, for there cannot be much doubt that, if she had ordered the gates defended instead of opened, all the inhabitants of the palace would have perished that night.

Alive though they might be, however, the king and queen were unquestionably prisoners. In a last attempt at saving the situation, Mazarin went personally to Le Havre, where Condé had been transferred, and freed the prince himself, but it was all useless: He was left with no choice but flight and retreated to the Electorate of Cologne, across the Rhine, where he settled at the castle of Bruhl and soon refused Philip IV, who offered him anything he wanted if only he would come to govern Spain. Considering the way he had been treated in France, it was no mean proof of his devotion to the country and the queen, and, of course, he corresponded secretly with Anne of Austria, advising her from afar but well.

From then on, the scene in Paris resembled one of those endless, complicated, and artificial novels which were at that time much in vogue. Monsieur, after much hesitation, decided not to seize the regency, thus apparently consolidating the queen’s position, but his daughter, Mademoiselle, took over as one of the leaders of the Fronde.

The result was a kaleidoscopic shifting of alliances and alignments within the aristocratic element of the Fronde, with Condé, after much wavering, refusing to usurp the crown on the grounds that such actions did not fit someone of his birth. And the Parlement, realizing that its interests and those of the great nobles were altogether different, pursued its own line even though, and sometimes because, it conflicted with that of the other Frondeurs.

All through this confused and tumultuous year, Anne of Austria had to rely on two divergent sources of advice: Far away in Bruhl, Mazarin wrote letter after letter telling the regent what to do, while, right in Paris, she relied on the newly reconciled Gondi. This time, the cardinal’s hat was not merely promised him: The French Ambassador in Rome was ordered to ask the pope for the promotion, so Gondi helped the queen whittle down Monsieur le Prince’s power and popularity; since he had so recently belonged to the party he was now fighting and knew its weaknesses, he was quite effective.

Then there was Turenne. Now that Condé was free again, he veered back toward the Crown. “Monsieur le Prince came to see M. de Turenne as soon as he knew he had arrived, took him to the Louvre and thence to dinner with him, after which there was the usual gathering at the Hôtel de Longueville; but M. de Turenne, after that day, would go there no more because he had quickly realized that only private interests mattered.”41 As for the king, he, too, played his part in this imbroglio. Anne of Austria now took him into her confidence, and he helped her by being especially amiable to those - Condé first and foremost - whom she was trying to fool.

It soon began to work: Condé in jail had had great appeal; Condé in person was as haughty and quarrelsome as ever. It was in the midst of this swirl of alliances made and broken that a most important event took place: On September 5, 1651, Louis XIV reached his thirteenth birthday, the age at which the king, in France, ceased being a minor.

 

Of course, there were great and appropriately splendid celebrations. During a grand cavalcade all through Paris, “His Majesty, dressed in clothes so heavily embroidered with gold that one could see neither the fabric nor the color, seemed so tall that it was hard to believe he was not yet fourteen.”42 There was a séance royale at the Parlement in the course of which Anne of Austria officially ended her regency, and the king, having been proclaimed of age, told her: “Madame, I thank you for the care you were pleased to take of my education and the administration of my realm. Pray continue giving me your advice; I wish that, after myself, you be the head of my Council.”43 And once the ceremonies were over, nothing much was seen to have changed; as Mme de Motteville commented: “The King’s majority did not give the Queen the peace she had expected; but it gave her strength with which to face a second war.”44

Ostensibly, Louis XIV was now to begin his rule: All the acts of the government would bear his name instead of the queen’s; disobedience to the government would be an affront to the king’s person. That was unquestionably a help; at the same time, it was perfectly plain that, although mature beyond his years, the monarch would do no more than carry out his mother’s policies.

Just how well the combination would work was almost immediately put to the test. After much urging from his sister, Mme de Longueville, his brother, the prince de Conti, and his friend, M. de Marcillac, Condé left Paris, signed a treaty with Spain, and started a new civil war: After Turenne, now mercifully back doing his duty, Condé, the First Prince of the Blood Royal, had formed an alliance with the enemy against his own sovereign, all for the sole purpose of forcing the queen to grant him even more favors than he had been offered in the negotiations held to avert a break.

At first, it looked as if Condé’s rebellion would be short-lived; although a number of provinces followed the prince, it was expected that they would return to normal once the king appeared in person, so at the head of a small army, Louis XIV, Anne of Austria, and the Court set out toward the Southwest, while Monsieur stayed sulking in Paris. That had at least one happy consequence: At long last, and without difficulty, the king was able to leave Paris, nor, expecting as he did to return at the head of a triumphant army, did he foresee any repetition of the humiliating incidents of January 1651.

Those expectations were well on their way to being realized when, yet again, the whole picture suddenly changed. In an effort to solidify the peace, the regent had agreed to outlaw Mazarin as her last official act. With the king fully of age, the rationale for the Fronde had become obsolete, and Condé’s latest adventure looked simply like the greed of an overambitious prince; it was thus unlikely to attract much support. If, however, Mazarin were to return, people would feel they had been duped by the government, Condé’s cause would become popular, and the war would start in earnest. It would therefore seem that Mazarin’s recall was the one mistake to avoid.

But that was just what the queen and king proceeded to do. It may not seem surprising that Anne of Austria should have recalled the minister she trusted and admired (it says a good deal about her sense of gratitude, since she could have let things remain as they were and turned instead to Gondi), but that Louis XIV should have sent the cardinal a notably warm letter requires an explanation, especially since he was now in a position to refuse approval to any of his mother’s official acts.

The simple fact is that, as they left Paris, the queen and king faced a crucial choice: Mazarin’s exile had been forced on them by the Parlement and the great nobles; if it were allowed to continue, the monarchy would suffer a defeat all the more serious in that the Declaration of 1648, transferring many of the king’s powers to the Parlement, was still in effect, and, clearly, any future minister who displeased the same people was likely to suffer a similar fate. Under those conditions, Louis XIV, unable to govern as he saw fit, would have been king in name only. Still, had the cardinal been a dishonest or incompetent minister, his recall would hardly have been worth its consequences. It is because both Anne of Austria and Louis XIV were convinced of the contrary that they both felt it essential to recall the one man who could help them not only in reestablishing the traditional power of the Crown but also in concluding the kind of peace with Spain for which France had been fighting. Well aware of the risks, they chose present difficulty because it was the best road to future success.

As Mazarin, along with a little army of 8,000 soldiers paid by himself, made his way toward Poitiers, where he was to meet the Court, the expected happened. An anonymous correspondent of Condé’s, who reported to the prince from Paris on January 27, 1652, makes the situation very clear: “M. d’Orléans has received a letter from the King in which His Majesty informs him that he could not without injustice deny M. le Cardinal permission to come back and justify himself or refuse the help he was bringing. That is why He asks him to share his feelings, and to join the Court where he would be very welcome. M. d’Orléans answered that he could not go to court if M. le Cardinal returned, and that he would do whatever he could to prevent his presence in office. To that end, I hear that on Wednesday evening a Treaty of Union will be signed by Mme d’Orléans, who has a power of attorney from her brother, the duc de Lorraine, with M. d’Orléans, in which M. de Longueville and Monsieur le Prince will also be parties. It is thought that the duc de Lorraine will come in person at the head of his troops, and that M. de Beaufort* will command those of His Royal Highness . . . Mademoiselle is raising two thousand men and will pay for them herself . . .

“Thursday, at the Parlement, a decree was voted to send the King new written remonstrances and that no peer or marshal of France would be received† until the declaration given against M. le Cardinal had been carried out.”45 The Fronde was, once again, well under way. Worse, it looked as if it might succeed.

The king of Spain, who for once acted promptly, sent troops to Paris even as he reconquered Catalonia, and these met with the little army under the duc de Beaufort, while in Paris Monsieur traded on his prestige as a royal prince to close the capital to his nephew: By May 1652, the rebels could claim, rightly, that their forces were several times stronger than the king’s, and that, further, they were led by one of the two greatest generals in France.

Luckily for the Court, however, it, too, had a few important strengths. Turenne, now firmly committed to the king, was appointed to command the royal troops: Mazarin could not have made a better choice, and the rebel troops were led by frivolous, often incompetent officers so that Condé’s orders were often poorly carried out. On March 13, 1652, for instance, the prince wrote his friend the marquis de Jarzé: “The comte d’Harcourt came yesterday with all his troops right in the middle of the area where all my troops were encamped because the guards I had ordered posted did not do their duty; that is why my troops could not be mustered and so I had to recross the Garonne instead of giving battle . . . I write you all this hastily so that you can withdraw your own troops.”46 Obviously, this sort of disorganization gave the king’s army a substantial chance. And finally, there was the mystique attached to the person of the king: Even at the worst moments, its power could not be ignored.

Still, in June and early July, the Court’s position was almost desperate. Among the many sources confirming this distress, we can turn to one particularly expert witness: the young duke of York, Charles I’s second son, who knew at first hand just how monarchies perished. “At the beginning of that year [1652],” he wrote in his memoirs, “the Court was reduced to the last extremities: few subjects were faithful to their King; even those whose very self-interest ought to have tied them closely to the salvation of the state were the main instruments of the troubles which were rending it under the specious pretext, which has ever been that of rebellious men, that they wanted to remove bad advisers from the King’s councils. In order to make this complaint more plausible, they especially attacked the minister [Mazarin], shouting that it was shameful to see France governed by a foreigner while so many princes of the blood royal were both more entitled and abler than the Cardinal to carry on the government. These princes led the protesters, and they were followed by most of the nobles and the most important people in the realm. The largest cities and most of the Parlements* had joined their ranks; and although the duc de Longueville belonged to no party, it was well known that he leaned toward the princes, and Normandy† with him, and that he only pretended to be neutral so as to join the strongest party without risk to himself.”47 Obviously, this situation was an all too familiar one for the young man.

Turenne himself knew that the situation was well-nigh desperate. “The Court was in extreme trouble,” he wrote. “[T]he King’s army numbered no more than eight thousand men; that of the princes, in Paris, had five thousand, and the Spaniards, together with the army from Lorraine, came up to twenty thousand men. Normandy refused to receive the King. The evening this news reached the Court, M. de Turenne . . . learned that it had decided to retreat towards Burgundy . . . He immediately said that if that was the case, everything would be lost.”48 Turenne was perfectly right: Once a Spanish army moved into Paris, it would not soon come out again; as for the fleeing king, he ran every chance of eventual capture by superior forces. Clearly, the time had come for audacity, and it was Louis XIV’s luck that the leader of his small army was a man whose extreme coolness in battle was allied to the soundest military judgment of the age. At Turenne’s urging, therefore, it was decided to fight Condé’s army and move to Compiègne, some fifty miles north of Paris, where the Spanish army could be cut off from its bases in the Netherlands. On April 7, 1652, the battle was engaged near the little village of Bléneau; the forces in presence numbered some 15,000 men; only a few hundred men were killed, but by evening, Turenne’s superior organization had prevailed. Condé retreated instead of the Court, and the monarchy, for the moment at least, was saved. As for Condé, he returned to Paris, which he now took over from Monsieur.

Although not yet fourteen, Louis XIV was anything but an idle spectator of all these convulsions. Already he had stunned a delegation of the Parlement by tearing up, without reading them, the remonstrances it had brought to him. Now, when the rebel princes sent an embassy to him, instead of negotiating the kind of peace that would have left them all-powerful, he simply told the ambassadors that they would have to talk to his minister; when they answered that their instructions forbade their ever meeting Mazarin, he ordered them to follow him and took them in to the minister himself.

The king’s intense and personal resentment of the Frondeurs was caused by what he saw, rightly, as their assault against the powers of the Crown, but he was also well aware that, because of the grandees’ whims, his people were suffering greatly. Armies, in the seventeenth century, were almost as devastating as the worst of natural catastrophes; looting, arson, rape, murder - these usual accompaniments of all military operation left the countryside ravaged and deserted, nor was the royal army less at fault, in this respect, than that of the Fronde. Already in 1652, Louis XIV felt directly responsible for the welfare of his subjects. His correspondence with Turenne on this topic is all the more eloquent in that his fortunes were at their lowest ebb: He might be forgiven for worrying more about his own future than that of the peasants in the area of operations. That he didn’t, at so desperate a time, says a great deal about his notion of what it was to be a king.

Thus, on April 28, he was writing the commander in chief: “I receive complaints from every quarter about the extreme disorders caused by the troops in my army . . . who pillage through towns and country and do not even spare noble houses.”49 Again in May, he tried to protect his subjects: “It is with great displeasure that I have received a complaint from the inhabitants of Melun, which is that on the eleventh of this month sixty to eighty German cavalry men, or some other foreign troops belonging to my army, of which you are in command, took a hundred and fifty cows from the neighborhood of the same town whose inhabitants had already lost several plow horses which were taken from them; and when several of the most notable men of this town went, with the poor people to whom the cows belonged, all of them unarmed, to recover them from the soldiers who had stolen them, offering money, they [the soldiers] killed in cold blood several of the said inhabitants and of the poor people who were with them.”50 For a thirteen-year-old king beset by the most serious troubles himself, this letter is impressive, indeed.

Faced with the seemingly impossible situation which confronted him, Louis XIV might have gone one of two ways: Many a boy his age would simply have retreated from the world and let his mother cope with the countless problems which afflicted the government. For Louis, however, this reaction simply was not a possibility: Only the other way seemed to him both fruitful and honorable. Now that he was no longer a minor, he felt that the fate of the monarchy rested on his shoulders. Of course, there could be no question of his assuming power alone: He knew very well that he was too young and inexperienced for that, but the very act of retaining Mazarin, whom he had the power to dismiss, spoke volumes. The minister implemented - and determined - the government’s policy, but only with the approval of the king.

Still, in spite of all those weighty decisions, he remained an exuberant boy. “At Corbeil,” La Porte noted, “the King had Monsieur* sleep in his bedroom even though it was so small that only one person could get through at a time. In the morning, when they woke up, the King, without thinking, spat on Monsieur’s bed, who immediately and on purpose spat on the King’s. The King, a little angry now, spat in Monsieur’s face. Monsieur then leapt on the King’s bed and pissed on it; the King did the same on Monsieur’s bed . . . and soon after they grappled and started to fight. During this affray I did what I could to stop the King, but since I got nowhere, I called for M. de Villeroy who put a stop to it all. Monsieur had become angry much faster than the King, but the King was much harder to appease than Monsieur.”51 Besides the eloquent comment on the difference between the two brothers’ characters, this text is interesting in that it shows how simple, not to say poverty-stricken, the life of the royal family had become.

As spring drew into summer, the situation looked as if it might be improving. Mazarin suggested to the queen that she agree to his dismissal against the right concessions - essentially the abrogation by the Parlement of the Declaration of 1648. Needless to say, this accord was to be only a sham and the cardinal was to be recalled as soon as the government was a little stronger. In the meantime, on July 2, the royal army prepared to fight before Paris. At first, it looked as if Condé had been beaten, but the gates of Paris opened just in time to save the prince’s army, then closed as the king’s troops were reaching them. The king had been deprived of a decisive victory through the intervention of the Parisians led by none other than Mademoiselle, his cousin, who reveled in her newfound military role. More infuriating still, a few hours later, when a charge by Condé’s army was broken up by Turenne’s troops, and it looked as if victory were finally at hand, smoke was seen to rise from the towers of the Bastille, near which the fighting was taking place: Mademoiselle, once again in charge, had ordered the guns of the old fortress to fire on her cousin’s army. This time, there was no overcoming the setback, and the fight ended in failure. The Fronde, which had nearly seen its last day, was given a new lease on life.

As for the king, he never forgot that a combination of his cousins - Condé and Mademoiselle - with most of the great nobles had nearly cost him the throne. Despite what the Frondeurs thought, times had changed. Even the imperious Richelieu had assumed that putting up with the princes’ endless plots and rebellions was simply a fact of life: Time after time, Monsieur had betrayed Louis XIII and been forgiven. Now, for the first time in French history, the king looked at the games played by his relatives and neither forgave nor forgot.

Bad as the Court’s situation might be, however, that of the two princes was even worse. The judges of the Parlement, who had watched their country estates being burned and pillaged by both armies, and who stood to lose even more if the war continued, were willing to submit to the king provided only that Mazarin was dismissed; that would leave both Condé and the duc d’Orléans high and dry, unable to negotiate from a position of strength. So together, they provoked riots by accusing the Parlement of having become pro-Mazarin; upon which, after some bloodshed, part of that tribunal fled Paris, settled itself in Pontoise, and worked on a reconciliation with the king. While in Paris, on July 20, the rump appointed Monsieur lieutenant general - i.e. dictator - and Condé commander in chief of all the armies.

Once again, it looked as if chaos were only days away. Voltaire described the situation perfectly: “There was, at this time, no party but was weak; that of the Court was no stronger than the others; strength and money were lacking everywhere; factions were multiplying; the battles produced only losses and regrets on both sides.”52 Clearly, there was only one solution: Mazarin, “whom everyone blamed as the cause of the rebellion but who was only its pretext,”53 once again left France. Only this time, he went to Sedan, the independent principality on the northern border which belonged to Turenne’s brother, the duc de Bouillon, to the accompaniment of a royal proclamation praising his accomplishments. That was enough. Within days, even the rump of the Parlement started negotiating with the Court; Condé was forced to leave, and on October 20, the king, the queen, and the Court reentered the city. Ormesson wrote, “with the acclamations of the crowds and shouts of Long live the King from all the people, who surrounded His Majesty’s return with all the greater affection that he was bringing them the only possibility of living in peace after so many calamities.

“The next day, the King met his Parlement in the Gallery of the Louvre; he had a general amnesty registered in his presence, as well as the reunion of the two Parlements, that of Paris and that of Pontoise; he decreed the exile of some twelve conseillers who had been particularly violent Frondeurs; he forbade the Parlement ever to discuss the affairs of the state again without his permission; he ordered that no one serve the princes or accept a pension from them; and finally he called on the great nobles to come and render their respects to him within three days . . . The very next day, the Bastille was turned over to the King . . . This return of the King’s is a miracle, a work of God.”54 Strong words for someone whose office and family tradition tied him firmly to the Parlement, but the results were too clear for controversy: When, together with the princes, the Parlement had so weakened the Crown as to render it ineffective, the consequence had been civil war, general disorder, and widespread ruin.

As for the chiefs of the rebellion, they, too, were now only anxious for forgiveness. The duc d’Orléans was ordered to retire to his castle in Blois, and he remained there for the next six years; Mademoiselle, who tried staying on in Paris, was exiled to her estate at Saint Fargeau, a week’s travel away from the Court; the ducs de Beaufort and de Rohan were exiled as well; the king, who was clearly in charge, “settled in at the Louvre for good, having learned from the untoward events of the Palais Royal that private, moatless houses were not for him.”55 Only Condé continued the war but, abandoned by most of his former partisans, poorly financed by Spain, he was only able to skirmish in northern Champagne until, finally, he left France to be appointed commander in chief of the Spanish armies, thus putting himself wholly in Philip IV’s dependency. In France, his estates were seized, and on March 27, 1653, the Parlement, having tried the prince in absentia, convicted him of treason and condemned him to be beheaded.

As if all those changes were not proof enough that the Fronde was well and truly ended, the king, obviously in full control, recalled Mazarin, who reached Paris in February 1653. A year earlier, this move would have caused the most violent opposition; now, he was received with acclamations and, after being reinstated in his post of Prime Minister by Louis XIV, he proceeded to gather the reins of government once more while his most determined enemies, Messieurs of the Parlement, begged for the honor of visiting him so as formally to request his protection. Never, perhaps, has a minister’s situation altered so radically from general rejection to enthusiastic subjection. Just how true this status was soon became, if possible, even clearer: That spring, one of the many nieces the cardinal had brought over from Italy was betrothed, then married to the prince de Conti, Condé’s own brother. Mazarin had now scaled the same heights as Richelieu, but unlike his predecessor, he could govern an obedient country where opposition no longer existed.

* Louis the Lazy (986-987) was the last monarch of the Carolingian dynasty.

* Although Mazarin was naturalized a Frenchman under Louis XIII, most people still thought of him as Italian, especially since he spoke with a strong accent; to have a foreigner rule France was, of course, particularly galling.

* Strictly speaking, the little duc d’Anjou should already have been called Monsieur as he was the reigning king’s brother; most of the time, however, the duc d’Orléans, although now only the king’s uncle, was still called Monsieur.

* Mademoiselle was the appellation given to the king’s brother’s eldest daughter; thus here, the daughter of Gaston, duc d’Orléans; she was also known as Mlle de Montpensier.

* Condé’s younger brother, who, at the moment, was in love with his sister, Mme de Longueville.

† A very distant cousin of the king’s whose wife, Condi’s sister, was the leader of the Parisians.

‡ A prince of the House of Lorraine.

§ The owner of an independent principality on the northern border of France and a frequent rebel under Louis XIII.

** His army was then encamped in Germany pending ratification of the Treaty of Westphalia.

* This handsome, stupid, but popular young man was the son of one of Henri IV’s bastard sons.

† Peers and marshals of France, although created by the king, took rank from the date of their reception by the Parlement.

* France had thirteen Parlements; that of Paris was the most important one.

† Longueville was Governor of Normandy.

* Monsieur, in this case, is obviously the eleven-year-old due d’Anjou.