The disappearance of [royal councilor Pierre] Broussel caused Parisians to become deranged, to run through the streets crying out that they were done for, that they must have their protector, that they would gladly die for his cause. They assembled, stretched chains across all the streets, and in a few hours had set up barricades in every quarter of the city.
FRANÇOISE DE MOTTEVILLE, MÉMOIRES
If historians have largely overlooked barricade events prior to May 12, 1588, it has been in part because earlier incidents produced no obvious sequel and appeared to be without lasting historical consequence. In contrast, the Day of the Barricades in Paris can be shown to have had a far-reaching impact, both in the capital and beyond. The city registers document what we might call “barricade consciousness”: an emerging awareness on the part of residents of the power that chains, barrels, and paving stones had placed in their hands.
Over the months that followed the 1588 uprising, Paris was kept on almost constant alert by apprehensive municipal authorities, who ordered the chains to be inspected three times by spring 1589. As the king’s army approached the city in early July of that year, deputies were commanded to collect 2,000 casks from inns, taverns, and wine merchants’ shops. These were to be stored in the suburbs, where they would be available for the construction of barricades should an attack materialize. A similar alarm was issued on August 31, less than a month after the assassination of Henri III. This time, militia colonels and captains were ordered to fill barrels with earth and position them in front of houses in the central districts, but not to deploy them to block streets without express orders of the prévôt de marchands.1
Although none of these scares resulted in the actual construction of barricades in Paris, the technique was rapidly spreading to new locations, thanks to the activities of the Holy Union. Lyon, the second largest city in the realm and another Leaguer stronghold, reacted to the killing of the duc de Guise and his brother the cardinal by revolting against the king. On February 23, 1589, residents spent the night building barricades. Though their mobilization was poorly organized and short-lived, its impact was immediately felt in the next most populous of French cities; the historian Antoine de Ruffi says that the news of barricades going up in Lyon was what caused Marseille to join the Holy League.2 Two years later, Marseille itself would build its first barricades when control over the city was being disputed by rival factions of the League.3 And in 1594, it was again Lyon’s turn to resort to the use of barricades as part of a protest concerning the Spanish succession.4
Thus, in the span of five short years, a spree of barricade construction had broken out, involving each of the country’s three largest cities. After a thirty-year lull, Bordeaux and Dijon were the next regional centers to be added to the list of sites adopting the new tactic (in 1625 and 1630 respectively). A series of related incidents in southwestern France, offshoots of the rural tax protest movement known as the jacquerie des Croquants, provided the first occasion, in 1635, on which multiple barricade events were recorded in a single year. These continued through 1637, by which time a reproducible pattern of behavior involving barricade construction seemed well established. It was based, however, on small to medium-sized events, none of which could even remotely compare with the 1588 insurrection. What was needed to enshrine the barricade as part of a uniquely French repertoire of collective action was for it to be associated with some new event of major proportions that would validate the tactic’s claim to historical significance.
That event occurred in 1648 in circumstances reminiscent in certain respects of those we have encountered in earlier eras. Parisians of that period, like contemporaries of Etienne Marcel, had to endure their own unrelenting cycle of violent conflict, known as the Thirty Years’ War, even as the reverberations of the Reformation still managed to give these struggles a religious cast that recalled the Wars of Religion. Though the treaty of Westphalia brought hostilities among major continental nations to an end by October of that year, the French monarchy remained in financial disarray, exhausted by decades of war and the continual struggle against the Spanish Habsburgs and burdened by rising taxes and failing harvests. Ironically, the same year that brought peace to Europe also witnessed the onset of a series of civil wars in France—and with them, the return of the barricade.
Like much of the rest of Europe, French society was dramatically affected by the rapid demographic advance that characterized the first half of the seventeenth century. In the countryside, heightened population pressure tended to increase the value of land and depress the level of real wages, making it difficult for the rural poor to survive. Even better-off peasants were hurt by a combination of high taxes and disappointing grain harvests from 1630 onward. One result was a massive exodus from rural areas.
Conditions in the cities were hardly better. The agricultural crisis caused the price of foodstuffs to spike higher even as it led to the stagnation of the urban economy. Paris suffered these consequences in a particularly acute form because in-migration had swelled its population to nearly a half million.5 At times, the capital seemed to be a cauldron of unrest, and its municipal administration, now called the Bureau de Ville, had at its disposal only a token force of unarmed policemen and 300 “archers.”6 Any sizable disturbance would have to be handled by the urban militia (milice bourgeois) or by the roughly 4,000 Swiss and 6,000 French guardsmen stationed in or near the capital for the protection of the royal family and King’s Council. The potential for unrest seemed ever-present, and although the city jealously guarded its special privileges—including the traditional exemption from the billeting of troops—its status as the seat of royal government still meant that local political turmoil inevitably had national repercussions.
Despite these challenges, and though it could be recognized only in retrospect, the death of Louis XIII found France poised on the brink of one of the most glorious periods in the history of the monarchy. The continuity in leadership made possible by Louis XIV’s long reign—from 1643 until his death in 1715—would provide a respite from the succession crises and contested rule that had plagued earlier eras. The Sun King’s strength of will plus the ample time he had to shape consistent policies together helped establish the preeminence of the central state in France.
But Louis was not yet five years old at the time he ascended the throne. His father, who distrusted his own wife, left a will that made his brother Gaston, duc d’Orléans, the real power in the Regency Council. With the complicity of the Paris parlement and the acquiescence of Gaston, this arrangement was overturned, and Louis’s mother, Anne of Austria, was granted the authority to manage affairs of state until the king’s assumption of personal rule in 1661. Throughout this period, the queen regent relied heavily on the counsel of Cardinal Mazarin, who had effectively inherited the position left vacant by the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642.7 A gifted strategist when it came to foreign policy, Mazarin was far less skillful in the conduct of domestic affairs. His profligate spending, cynical manipulation of rival factions, and high-handed personal style made him extremely unpopular with the general population and with Parisians in particular.
The Estates General, so active in the time of Etienne Marcel, had not been convened since 1615 and seemed moribund. Its role in advising the crown and moderating government policy had to some extent been assumed by the parlements, to which the people looked as the only possible check on Mazarin’s seemingly unlimited power.8 In effect, certain types of new laws—including the all-important category of new taxes—had to be registered by parlement before they could be enforced. It was usually the 120 members of the Paris parlement who discussed and commented upon such proposals and who had the right to present “remonstrances”—objections based on members’ judgment that the new legislation was inconsistent with existing laws or would have adverse consequences for the kingdom. Remonstrances might result in the modification or abandonment of the proposed legislation, but if the King’s Council persisted, the normal outcome was the registration of the new statute.
Beginning under Richelieu, however, the parlement would sometimes make a point of offering new rounds of remonstrances, declining to accept the royal will until the extraordinary measure known as the “bed of justice” (lit de justice) had been invoked. This was a procedure, reserved for those supposedly rare cases where the normal process had not led to mutual accommodation, through which the government could break the stalemate by arranging for the king to appear in person before a special session of the parlement. After explaining why he was not disposed to take that body’s advice and having thus assumed personal responsibility for the new law, the king was then within his rights to force its registration over members’ objections. But in the 1640s—with a child king seated on the throne of France and the government led by the hated Cardinal Mazarin—the parlement of Paris dared to claim for itself unprecedented authority over the creation and even the implementation of certain statutes. By presenting remonstrances to laws that had already passed through a lit de justice, it contested the right of the King’s Council to govern without the parlement’s express consent.9
This opposition was motivated by an intriguing mix of principle and self-interest. The creation and sale of new offices in the royal courts caused existing parlementaires to object that this means of raising cash was an abuse of royal authority designed to circumvent the power of the parlements to consent to fiscal legislation. Like the recently instituted appointment of intendants and other royal officers responsible only to the king, it was seen as a power grab on the part of the increasingly centralized and absolutist state. But at the same time, members’ objections could also be seen as an attempt to protect their own prerogatives and to prevent the dilution of the value of property, in the form of offices, that they (or their ancestors) had previously purchased.
It is difficult to assess the political thrust of the resistance. The position adopted by the more outspoken parlementaires might well be viewed as “revolutionary,” since, in refusing to be bound by the lit de justice and by violating long-established practice, they were also challenging the notion that the sovereign’s will, as communicated through his ministers, was the highest expression of the interests of the nation. But, as the historian Roland Mousnier has pointed out, their actions were in another sense profoundly conservative, since their goal was often to preserve the fiscal and social privileges that members of the parlements and other officeholders enjoyed.10 Similarly, their classic liberal desire to resist centralization and act as a counterweight to the increasingly concentrated powers of the monarchy often led them to oppose the essentially progressive tendency to replace privileges and exemptions with a more even-handed treatment of different regions or different categories of subjects by the state. Far from upholding the notion of the separation of powers, they proposed to rein in the unchecked power of the sovereign by adding new legislative and even executive authority to their own judicial responsibilities. It required only the right precipitating incident to escalate this muddle of contradictory political impulses into the period of incipient civil war known as the Fronde.11
Anne of Austria and the members of the Royal Council clearly considered the enlarged role that the Paris parlement was claiming for itself an illegitimate usurpation of the government’s authority. Despite the important customary role reserved for that body in the approval of new taxes, its involvement in “political affairs” was viewed by the king’s ministers as meddling, motivated only by members’ personal animus for Mazarin (or perhaps the hope of gaining favor among the people) in flagrant disregard for the consequences that could follow if the country went bankrupt in a time of war.
Bankruptcy was a distinct possibility. The French treasury was so seriously depleted at the time of Louis XIII’s death in 1643 that the state had already spent the next three years’ anticipated tax revenues.12 High on the Paris parlement’s list of complaints was the government’s failure to pay timely interest on the rentes, the bonds through which loans had been obtained from well-to-do members of the city’s power structure. Most troubling of all, in 1647, Maréchal Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne, was obliged to put down a mutiny, because France had fallen so far behind in paying the wages of its mercenary soldiers.
Desperately short of funds and unable to count on the parlement’s cooperation, the King’s Council explored every alternative. In 1644, it declared that it would enforce a neglected, century-old statute that imposed heavy fines on the owners of buildings constructed without authorization outside the walls of the capital. When surveyors were sent into these areas to determine the amount of the fines, they were chased out by owners angered at the prospect of increased taxes and renters anxious over increases in the cost of housing.13 The parlement did its best to defend residents’ interests, though it was unable to negotiate a satisfactory compromise with the king’s ministers. When surveyors were sent back into the suburbs, this time with armed guards, riots ensued. Omer Talon, acting as the parlement’s spokesperson, secured an interview with Mazarin at which he made a point of reminding the cardinal that the immediate cause of the barricades of 1588 had been just such an ill-considered show of force.14 When, despite this warning, the government persisted in trying to complete the survey, the result was widespread agitation, and the project had to be abandoned. By that time, however, the parlement had positioned itself as the champion of the popular cause, and a pattern had taken firm hold linking street protests to any attempt on the part of the crown to extract revenue by coercive means.
The government next tried to raise the level of excise taxes on provisions brought through the city gates and, after being stymied in its efforts to further manipulate the rates on bonds, threatened to pass legislation that would suspend interest payments altogether. The popularity of parlement soared when its members refused to register the proposed new laws. Members openly attacked the corruption and inefficiency that characterized the cumbersome system of tax collection and criticized the council for being unwilling to undertake the sort of fundamental reforms that alone might correct the state’s chronic fiscal imbalance.15
Now on the defensive, the crown came up with a series of plans aimed at splintering the opposition and relieving the budgetary shortfall at the expense of the royal courts. It proposed using its leverage over a special tax that officeholders paid on a nine-year cycle to ensure that their positions would remain hereditary, called the “Paulette” (after Charles Paulet, who came up with the idea), as a means of gaining compliance from the parlement on proposals for new taxes.16 However, all of its efforts managed only to forge a new sense of solidarity among the royal courts, which soon formed a coalition that began to elaborate its own program of fiscal reforms.
Over the regent’s objections, deputies from all four courts began work in mid-June 1648 on a new charter whose principal aims were to protect the effective monopoly that officers of the royal courts held over the dispensing of justice in France and to assign to the parlements responsibilities for the collection as well as the approval of new taxes.17 In the process, they were able to demonstrate that the prime cause of the budgetary difficulties of the French state was the disorderly administration of the revenue system, thus creating the presumption that the entire tax structure would have to be revamped. Fearing efforts by the monarchy to intimidate members of the royal courts, delegates also sought to abolish lettres de cachet and provide legal safeguards against arrest and imprisonment for more than twenty-four hours without due process.18
These reform efforts, which struck at the core of the absolutist conception of the monarchy, quickly garnered support from provincial parlements and municipalities. After energetically resisting them for weeks, Anne of Austria appeared to capitulate in mid-July 1648, when she dismissed her superintendent of finance, Michel Particelli d’Hémery, in disgrace and appointed Maréchal Charles de La Porte, duc de La Meilleraye, as his replacement. At the same time she renewed the Paulette tax on terms very favorable to the members of the royal courts and accepted all of the reform proposals except the restrictions on the crown’s powers of arbitrary arrest and detention. The formal granting of this package of reforms on July 31 was met with jubilation by the population of the capital, which identified strongly with the parlement. What the revelers did not immediately realize was that the regent and her advisors were merely bargaining for time and had a pointed reason for rejecting any limitation on the use of lettres de cachet.
On August 22, Paris learned that French armies under the command of Louis de Bourbon, prince de Condé (known to history as the Grand Condé), had decisively defeated the Spanish army near the town of Lens, in the Pas de Calais.19 The king, still a child of ten but already wise in the ways of the court, is said to have responded to the news with glee, remarking that the gentlemen of the parlement were going to be very angry, since this great military victory would, in all likelihood, shift the balance of power in favor of the government’s war policy.20
The queen mother, urged on by Mazarin and other members of her entourage, resolved to seize this opportunity to break the back of the parlement’s resistance by banishing key opposition leaders.21 She arranged for a Te Deum, a formal mass of thanks, to be celebrated in Notre-Dame on August 26. That morning, rows of royal guardsmen lined the route that led the king and queen mother from their residence in the Palais-Royal to the city’s cathedral (to follow the 1648 events, see map 3, pp. 28-29). The delegation from parlement, dressed in ceremonial red robes, was quite large, perhaps because members hoped to dispel the suspicion that this triumph of French arms, which added luster to the French crown and might increase support for a costly war, was unwelcome to them.22
When the service ended shortly after noon, the royal family departed, but the ranks of royal guardsmen did not immediately withdraw.23 Small detachments were sent to the homes of at least three members of the parlement with lettres de cachet ordering their arrest. Président Edouard Charton was alerted in time to escape by climbing the wall of his garden. Less fortunate was Président René Potier de Blancmesnil, who was seized and quickly taken off to the prison at Vincennes. The most difficult task, the arrest of Pierre Broussel, a councilor in the Grande Chambre, was undertaken by Lieutenant Comminges of the queen regent’s personal guards.24
The plan for a stealthy abduction fell to pieces when Broussel’s household servants began to shout from the windows that their master was being kidnapped. The squadron of soldiers that had accompanied Comminges managed to spirit the councilor, still wearing slippers, into a waiting coach.25 Neighbors failed in their attempts to cut the horses from their traces and then to smash the coach itself, and the party made good its escape. But before it could rejoin the larger groups of guardsmen still posted along the royal family’s route, the coach broke down in the vicinity of the Palais de Justice. A new crowd—this time composed of boatmen and porters from the nearby Seine as well as artisans from the Cité quarter and a scattering of “beggars and vagabonds”26—had begun to gather before a carriage could be commandeered from a passing noblewoman. A second hair’s-breadth escape, followed by a change to yet another coach, brought the occupants to the Château de Madrid near the Bois de Boulogne. Broussel is reported to have had a chance encounter with Queen Henrietta of England, who was staying there, after taking refuge in her native France from the civil war then raging in her adopted country. He was soon whisked away to the château at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, en route to his intended place of detention in the fortress at Sedan.27
FIGURE 9. The people demand royal councilor Pierre Broussel’s freedom during the Fronde. A handful of rebels—diverse in terms of class, age, and gender—have taken up positions behind a partially completed barricade at left and threaten a group of royal guards, while a cleric (possibly Coadjutor Paul de Gondi, the future Cardinal de Retz?) attempts to intervene. By convention, a vestigial chain, no longer part of the actual barricade, is pictured in the right foreground. Genouillac [c. 1880?] n.d., 2: opposite p. 372.
At seventy-three years of age, Broussel was among the most senior and most respected members of the royal court. Unlike many of his colleagues, whose purchase of judicial office was aimed at achieving noble status, Broussel had no thought for social advancement. Though comfortably well off, he passed for being poor. He owned no carriage, affected a simple lifestyle, and was considered incorruptible. This already gave him one claim upon the loyalty of the people of Paris. A second was his inveterate opposition to autocratic power, most concisely summarized in Broussel’s view that “the Sovereign is best served by being disobeyed.”28 His neighbors in the rue Saint-Landry, near Notre-Dame, were passionately attached to this venerable figure, whom they were used to seeing pass through the streets on foot, on his way to the nearby Palais de Justice.
It was thanks to this sense of personal loyalty to a man seen as the advocate of ordinary Parisians that news of Broussel’s arrest propagated like a thunderclap through the charged atmosphere of the Ile de la Cité. The response was immediate. Shops closed. Local residents stretched the chains at the ends of their blocks. The alarm bell of the nearby church of Saint-Landry rang out. People gathered in the streets, broke the windows of houses whose occupants refused to pledge their solidarity, and prepared to confront companies of the Royal Guard. As it happened, most of those units were hastily withdrawn once commanders realized that the rank and file were unwilling to confront angry residents. Maréchal de la Meilleraye had to bring up the only mounted soldiers immediately available—the chevaux-légers, no more than fifty men in all—to clear the streets and urge merchants to reopen their shops.29
Although chains had been drawn in most quarters of the city on August 26, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that barricades only appeared during the night that followed or on the next morning.30 This was a direct response to two actions taken by the authorities. First, the queen ordered all units of the French Guard stationed in the suburbs to enter the city and take up positions in battle formation before the poorly defended Palais-Royal. This measure, thought to portend an all-out attack on insurgents, first frightened, then angered Parisians, who jealously guarded the bourgeois militia’s exclusive right to police the city.
The second and even more critical strategic error was a directive from the prévôt de marchands, Jérôme Le Féron, for militia officers to place their units and their weapons in a state of readiness. The city fathers apparently continued to believe that, whether from attachment to the monarchy or out of fear of civil unrest, the militia would remain unquestioningly loyal. That view overlooked the fact that many militia units were led by officers who were themselves members of the parlement, and that the rank and file were overwhelmingly hostile to Mazarin and his policies.31 The municipal authorities’ action accomplished what the initial mobilization of the common people had not, for the respectable middle class, which constituted the backbone of militia units, had previously been reluctant to take up arms. Now, with explicit orders to intervene, “the fire was completely lit.”32
FIGURE 10. Chains and barricades during the Fronde. This image, from a popular latter-day history of France, presents a scene that must have been common during the Second Day of the Barricades. Chains have been stretched across a narrow residential street and lightly reinforced so as to serve as a neighborhood checkpoint. Local residents are shown mounting guard behind this temporary barrier, ready to challenge anyone seeking to enter. A discussion seems to be in progress in the background, no doubt taking as its themes slogans such as those on the placards: “Long Live the King!”; “Free Broussel!” Anquetil [1805] 1851, 521.
Most sources relate that the night of August 26 passed peacefully enough, even though both camps were caught up in frenetic activity. Royal troops were busy securing an avenue of escape for the royal family by seizing the porte Saint-Honoré and the roads leading to it.33 On Mazarin’s advice, the queen mother dispatched Pierre Séguier, her chancellor, to appear before the parlement on the morning of August 27. He had been instructed to make known her displeasure at members’ recent behavior, declare the annulment of all the actions they had undertaken since July 31, and announce her intention of initiating a lit de justice to impose the legislation proposed by the government over their objections. He was specifically to forbid the chambers from assembling to discuss political matters and enjoin them to return to the business of meting out justice to individual petitioners.
Unfortunately, Séguier was unable to carry out his mission, because he never reached the Palais de Justice that morning. He encountered chains stretched across the rue Saint-Honoré and learned that two of the main bridges that would normally have provided access, the Pont-Neuf and the pont Saint-Michel, had been similarly closed off, forcing his coach to take an alternate route. Soon after coming up against the first barricades, he abandoned his vehicle along the quai des Grands Augustins and tried to reach the Palais de Justice on foot. Recognized and quickly surrounded by an angry mob, he retreated to a nearby house to seek protection from the rabble, which had progressed from shouting curses to throwing stones. There Séguier hid in a closet, while his pursuers conducted a frantic but futile search. A detachment of French and Swiss guardsmen, soon followed by a small cavalry force under the personal command of Maréchal de la Meilleraye, came to his rescue, but not before an officer, three or four Swiss guardsmen, and an adjutant in the chancellor’s guard had been killed in fighting at close quarters, and the chancellor’s daughter and another passenger in his carriage were wounded by shots fired from a distance. When Meilleraye’s soldiers fired into the crowd, several more were killed. Five or six hundred local residents responded by raising a flag, made by tying a linen rag to a stick, and marching on the Grand Châtelet. As they approached their objective, the local militia captain sounded the alarm and ordered the chains extended. Neighborhood residents immediately began reinforcing these barriers. The mobilization quickly spread to other quarters and, within a half hour, the city, now bristling with barricades, was on full alert.34
Meanwhile, in the parlement, members had suspended the hearing of legal cases and turned to a discussion of the actions they should take on behalf of their imprisoned colleagues. With the arrival of news of the preliminary skirmishes in the city, they decided to proceed en masse to the Palais-Royal in order to place their urgent recommendations before the queen mother. At least 150 members, dressed in their somber black robes, set out together. Their route obliged them to cross eight barricades, made of “beams placed crosswise and barrels filled with paving stones, or earth, or rubble.”35 Most were defended by twenty or thirty armed men who, when the delegates came in sight, raised a welter of apparently contradictory cries, including “Vive le Roy!” “Vive le parlement!” and even “Vive M. de Broussel!”36 Once the barricades had opened and the parlementaires had passed through, streams of supporters—perhaps as many as 20,000—followed in their wake.37
When admitted into the queen’s presence, the group’s spokespersons respectfully requested the release of their colleagues. Their petition was met with utter intransigence on the part of Anne of Austria, who accused them of having stirred up the people and declared that she would not act on their requests until they had managed to restore order to the streets. Though senior parlementaires tried to point out that it was impossible to compel obedience from an emotional crowd that recognized no leader, and insisted that nothing less than the loyalty of the capital city was at stake, their entreaties appeared to fall on deaf ears.
As the delegation prepared to leave, the premier président of the parlement, Mathieu Molé was admitted to private chambers, where he was able to speak with the queen mother in the presence of her senior advisors. With difficulty, she was persuaded to relent so far as to promise the return of Broussel and Blancmesnil if the parlement would agree to stop dabbling in political affairs and spend the remainder of its session handling the individual cases brought before it.
When Molé reported this outcome to his colleagues, some insisted that they adhere strictly to their rules of procedure by returning to their own chambers to discuss the proposal in a setting where there could be no suspicion that they had acted under compulsion. Talon reported that as the delegates made their way out of the palace, they were given encouragement by domestic servants in the royal household, who whispered, “Hold firm and you will get your councilors back,” and that some of the French guards even declared out loud that they would lay down their arms rather than fight against the city’s residents.38
But the delegation was about to learn that not everyone approved of the conciliatory stance that the parlement had adopted. Hardly had its members begun to make their way along the rue Saint-Honoré when Premier Président Molé was brought to a complete halt before an imposing barricade at the crossing of the rue de l’Arbre-sec by a man brandishing a pistol in one hand (fig. 11). He brought his other hand to rest on Molé’s arm, warning him that he would not be allowed to pass unless accompanied by Broussel.39 He even threatened to take Molé hostage to secure the release of Broussel. His words and manner were sufficiently menacing to persuade a number of the officers of the parlement standing in the forward ranks of the delegation that they would do better to retreat into nearby houses or adjoining streets. With great dignity and courage, the premier président reproached his aggressor for his disgraceful impudence and, with the help of Président à mortier Henri de Mesmes, tried to explain that Broussel was not being held in the Palais-Royal, as members of the crowd believed, but far away in Saint-Germain. Soon, however, as it became apparent that no amount of argument would overcome the crowd’s refusal to let them pass, the remaining members of the delegation retraced their steps to the Palais-Royal.
FIGURE 11. Premier Président Mathieu Molé confronted by insurgents. At the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue de l’Arbre-sec, Molé is stopped at a barricade and refused passage until he has secured Broussel’s release. Anquetil [1805] 1851, 536.
After being admitted a second time, the parlementaires were given the light refreshment they had been denied earlier, as well as a room in which to conduct their discussions. Deliberating in the presence of the duc d’Orléans, the chancellor, and other high officials, they were able to set aside the procedural objections of 40 of the 120 remaining members and agree upon an arrêté, or formal declaration, that ostensibly satisfied the queen mother’s requirements.40 Knowing they would have to face the crowd outside, they were careful to arrange to have letters prepared in the king’s name ordering the release of the prisoners and the dispatch of royal coaches to bring them back to Paris. Blancmesnil, held on the outskirts of the city, had already regained his freedom late that evening, but only Broussel mattered in the eyes of the people, and the barricades therefore remained in place, secured by armed residents, through the night.
At five o’clock the next morning, the municipal authorities were still unable to persuade residents to remove their barricades. Those on guard held their ground—obstinately, if somewhat apologetically—saying that they needed to remain armed until the issue had been finally settled for fear that vagabonds and disorderly persons circulating through the city might begin stealing and pillaging.41 And indeed, when Broussel still had not arrived by eight A.M., the situation in the capital seemed on the verge of deteriorating all over again.
Fortunately, Broussel’s coach finally entered the capital at the porte Saint-Denis around ten o’clock on the morning of August 28. Along the route leading to his home, the barricades opened and the people greeted him with shouts of joy and by discharging their muskets in the air. With their “protector” safely returned to their midst, Parisians grudgingly complied with the parlement’s directive to remove the barricades and lay down their arms. In most parts of the city, calm was restored almost as quickly as it had been disrupted two days earlier, and by two o’clock that afternoon, the chains had been lowered, the barricades demolished, and the shops reopened42
Just two incidents marred this swift demobilization of the capital. The first was an inadvertent result of Broussel’s return, for inhabitants made so much noise with their shouts of joy and celebratory gunshots in the streets through which he passed that residents of other quarters, unaware of the reason for the clamor, thought they were hearing the reaction to a cavalry charge and began building barricades anew. Fifty additional structures were raised in the space of one half hour.43 In the faubourg Saint-Antoine, the departure from the Bastille, between five and six P.M., of three wagons loaded with powder, bullets, and wicks, caused a fresh commotion. Believing this to be a prelude to an attack by royal forces, local residents seized these supplies and placed their quarter on an emergency footing. In a twinkling, barricades were rebuilt there and in adjoining districts. The people refused to listen when Maréchal de la Meilleraye explained that this transfer of munitions resulted from an order he had issued several days before, and that he had, in the subsequent tumult, forgotten to countermand. Fortunately, the daily bread shipment arrived on time, at six o’clock the next morning. When no further sign of military action materialized, the barricades were removed, and this last pocket of insurgency stood down.44 This peaceful outcome was also facilitated by the queen mother’s decision to grant a request from Prévôt de Marchands Le Féron that she return half the guardsmen to their quarters and remove from the vicinity of Paris the four hundred cavalrymen whom Meilleraye had recently stationed in the Bois de Boulogne.
FIGURE 12. Barricade at the porte Saint-Antoine, Paris, August 27, 1648. This engraving is based on a contemporary print, the earliest depiction of a barricade of which I am aware, now held by the Bibliothèque nationale. The setting is the customs gateway separating the city proper from the faubourg Saint-Antoine. Note the chains, barrels, and gabions. Bordier and Charton 1860, 2: 225.
Just days after the dismantling of the barricades, the regent invited Prévôt de Marchands Le Féron, the aldermen (échevins), and the colonels and captains of the bourgeois militia to the Palais-Royal. Her stated purpose was to thank them for their “loyal service” to the king during the recent riots. She also used the occasion to reassure the people that, contrary to a rumor then in wide circulation, there was absolutely no thought of removing the king from Paris.45
This was a commitment that the strong-willed queen would keep for less than a fortnight. With the political situation still at impasse, the prospect of effectively being held hostage by the populace was intolerable to her. On September 12, citing her son’s need for a “change of air” while the Palais-Royal was being cleaned, the queen removed the court to Rueil. This step had been advised by Mazarin, probably in the hope that the triumphant return of Grand Condé’s army, then en route from Flanders, would decisively tip the balance of power. But though the Condé’s contempt for the parlement had only increased in the wake of the recent insurrection, his reluctance to subordinate himself to the cardinal was stronger still. Without the cooperation of the commander-in-chief of the army, no plan to force the capital to submit could succeed, and the court was obliged to compromise. The royal family returned to Paris at the end of October, and the regent agreed to the registration of reforms worked out by representatives of the royal courts. Direct taxes were to be reduced by 20 percent, and the crown agreed not to use lettres de cachet against magistrates or create new judicial or financial offices for a period of four years.
But once again, royal concessions were neither sincere nor lasting. With the parlement continuing to meet on nonjudicial matters, the queen resolved to effect a second strategic withdrawal from the capital. On January 5, after celebrating Twelfth Night with the traditional “king’s cake,” the royal family went to bed. At two in the morning, the king and queen mother were awakened and rushed in secrecy to a waiting coach, in which they stole out of the city accompanied by a small escort of notables. This clandestine departure must have made a powerful impression on the ten-year-old king. His retinue’s unexpected midwinter arrival at the empty and unheated castle at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he was obliged to sleep on a bed of straw, combined discomfort with humiliation, conditions of the body and spirit that lay outside his customary experience. Raised in the belief that the universe revolved around him, the future Sun King’s ambivalence toward Paris had its roots in the events of those troubled days.46
The furtive flight of the royal family enraged Parisians.47 Convinced that a military confrontation was now inevitable, the parlement set about raising an army of some 15,000 soldiers to defend the capital against attack or siege. The great aristocratic warriors began choosing sides in the impending conflict. Initially, the Grand Condé, the victor of Lens, headed up the regent’s forces, while Turenne, Armand de Bourbon, prince de Conti (Condé’s brother), and the ducs de la Rochefoucauld, Elbeuf, and Beaufort all entered the lists on the side of the parlements. Within the year, however, a new dynamic, driven by the exigencies of the warring armies and princely rivalries, had taken over, reshaping these coalitions and redefining the objectives of the civil war.48 The first phase of the conflict, the Fronde parlementaire, had ended.
What most impressed eyewitnesses about the barricades of the Fronde was how swiftly they were erected in neighborhoods all over the city. The simultaneity of their appearance was, in fact, cited as prima facie evidence of a high degree of coordination among the insurgents, though contemporary sources have consistently failed to support this. On the contrary, in virtually every incident of the period, the leaders of the crowd remain completely anonymous, though there must have been one or more individuals who seized the initiative in the attack on Comminges’s carriage or the chase after Chancellor Séguier along the quai des Grands Augustins.49 Whatever authority they may momentarily have exercised never extended beyond the immediate situation.
The explanation was self-evident to Queen Mother Anne of Austria’s lady-in-waiting Françoise de Motteville: “Of so many ill-intentioned people, not one wished to declare himself the leader of the canaille in revolt.”50 Her disdainful judgment was no doubt a correct characterization of the attitude of French aristocrats, who took no active part in this initial mobilization. But the urban middle class seems to have had no such scruples about associating with the rabble. Olivier d’Ormesson, another eager observer, was struck by the way that residents took to barricade construction “with such alacrity and industry that those who have been in the army say that soldiers could not have done as good a job.” Divine intervention was the best explanation he could come up with for the way Parisians were able to coordinate their actions with so little forewarning: “I think that God was directing the thoughts of the entire people. It is a marvel that in the absence of any leader or any plan worked out in advance, the bourgeois everywhere in Paris had the same idea for retrieving M. Broussel.”51
The absence of clear leadership was also the excuse that Premier Président Molé offered when the queen mother demanded that he end the unrest in the streets, for who could tame the unruly spirits of an aroused populace?52 Several additional eyewitnesses testify that the erection of barricades was undertaken spontaneously by the people, who had neither leaders nor any well-defined plan of action.53 All of these comments underscore what contemporary observers found most remarkable about the Second Day of the Barricades: the apparent contradiction between its vast scope and apparent coherence on the one hand, and its utter lack of overall direction on the other.
Historians have, of course, sought to pinpoint the animating spirit of the Fronde parlementaire in various quarters. Broussel is most frequently mentioned, but he became the focus of the August uprising only as a victim of government persecution. His arrest may have furnished the populace with a suitable rallying point, but there can be no pretense that he actively assumed the role of insurrectionary leader—one for which he was not only poorly suited but unavailable, since he remained under detention during the entire revolt.
Alternatively, it might be argued that the parlement as a whole, or at least its individual leaders, supplied the impetus for the insurgency. It had, after all, taken over responsibilities once shared between the municipal administration (which had surrendered much of its independence to the monarchical state since the time of Etienne Marcel) and the Estates General (which had not been convened for more than a generation). It was, moreover, particularly well positioned to mobilize resistance in the capital, Mousnier observes, because colonels of the bourgeois militia “were nearly always members of the royal courts.”54 But though it may have prepared the ground for the seeds of rebellion through its stubborn opposition to the maneuvers of the Royal Council, the parlement remained an essentially deliberative body. Content, for reasons of its own, to see the spread of the initial street demonstrations, its members never identified with the popular movement. Their mistrust of the common people was warmly reciprocated by many Parisians, as the confrontation in the rue Saint-Honoré made apparent. Molé, already suspect because he was a royal appointee, defined his role not as the people’s advocate but as mediator between them and the government.55 He and his colleagues were little inclined to ally themselves with bands of rude insurgents. And though members of the Parisian crowd might express their own opposition to the government by crying “Vive le Parlement!” it is doubtful that they would have welcomed an attempt by the magistrates to seize control of the popular movement.56
Still, there is one candidate—or perhaps I should say self-nominee—for the role of instigator of the 1648 rebellion. Paul de Gondi, coadjutor of Paris, was a controversial figure, notorious for his overweening ambition and consistently portrayed by his contemporaries as a master of intrigue.57 Gondi’s own memoirs recount how, sometime after midnight on August 26, he sent for Maître des comptes Miron, the militia colonel in the Saint-Germain de l’Auxerrois quarter, from whom he secured a promise to assemble and arm the forces under that officer’s command as soon as Gondi gave the signal. Gondi then ordered another of his confederates to stand by in the rue Saint-Honoré, ready to seize the guard post at the Barrière des Sergens and build a barricade for use against the guards stationed in the Palais-Royal.58 Do these revelations establish that Gondi was the counterpart of Mayenne or Charles II de Cossé in 1588?
In fact, in spite of all the circumstantial detail that he artfully inserted into his narrative, there is good reason to doubt that Gondi qualifies as the leader of the 1648 revolt. We must first keep in mind that this version of events is based almost entirely on two primary sources—one written by Gondi himself and the other by Guy Joly, his close associate.59 Neither offers much in the way of practical details on how the conspiracy was carried out. Neither specifies the mechanism that would have allowed Gondi’s directives to be transmitted to insurgents spread across a still peacefully sleeping city between 1 A.M. on the morning of August 27, when Gondi and Miron are reported to have met, and 6 A.M. when protests resumed and barricade construction began. Indeed, in the absence of an apparatus like the one that the Paris Sixteen had provided in 1588 or the sort of private army at the disposal of the duc de Guise, it appears that no one, least of all Gondi, had the means to exercise effective control over the events of August 1648.60
Yet barricades undeniably did spread throughout the city, for contemporary observers left no doubt that every quarter was involved. Though the figures seem exaggerated, some sources claim that more than 100,000 men were under arms, and that the number of barricades constructed reached as high as 1,260.61 Even if we discount these lofty estimates, what seems clearly established is that for three days running, all normal business was halted and freedom of movement within the city curtailed. How, then, are we to reconcile the state of near paralysis that overtook the capital of France with the apparent lack of effective leadership?
Here is where well-defined routines of urban protest, once widely assimilated by the general population, could make all the difference. A local uprising in a city well versed in the art of insurrection might even dispense with the need for a tightly integrated command structure to the extent that participants acted according to a well-defined set of roles and expectations. This body of shared knowledge explains how barricades could appear almost simultaneously throughout the city, even though most groups of insurgents remained isolated within their separate neighborhoods. The lack of leadership might, it is true, severely handicap efforts to develop a strategic plan of action or impede the emergence of an effective provisional authority, such as the one that Guise and the Sixteen swiftly organized in 1588. But a well-practiced repertoire of contention could, under the right circumstances, be sufficient to mobilize a discontented populace interested in restoring the status quo ante, as with the move to force the release of Broussel and the withdrawal of troop reinforcements from Paris in 1648.
In this respect, heightened barricade consciousness was crucial. The reappearance of this tactic on a large scale and its ability to blanket the city so quickly and completely reflected Parisians’ awareness of the precedent of 1588 and the handful of smaller incidents since that time, a point frequently made by contemporary chroniclers. When the struggle for political power caused the military presence in the capital to be increased in 1648, much as it had been in 1588, Prévôt de Marchands Le Féron asked the queen to order the recently arrived soldiers removed, “lest shops be closed and barricades built.”62 Members of the queen’s inner circle “involuntarily recalled the barricades of 1588,” even as they struggled, in the heat of this fresh confrontation, to maintain a falsely optimistic outlook.63 Madame de Motteville herself might claim that she could have “died of astonishment” when told that Paris was covered with barricades, for her impression was that such things only happened in tales from the time of Henri III, but her comment betrays an uneasy knowledge of the capital’s history and its potential to breed unrest.64
Demonstrating barricade consciousness among the common people who, unlike the elite, generally remained mute, is a challenging task. The evidence that has survived typically comes to us more indirectly, as with Joly’s presumption that “the barricades constructed under Henri III must have served as a lesson” for the insurgents of 1648.65 Occasionally, we are reminded by concrete actions that the memory of the events surrounding the First Day of the Barricades was still alive, as with Gondi’s report of an officer in the militia wearing a gorget bearing the painted likeness of the monk who had assassinated Henri III in 1589 inscribed “Saint Jacques Clément.”66 Of course, popular memories were, for the most part, transmitted by word of mouth rather than formal learning or written records. Keep in mind that the events of 1588 had taken place just sixty years earlier and were thus within the reach of living memory. New generations of Parisians had heard their parents’ and grandparents’ stories and formed a mental image of the city’s aspect when it rallied behind the cause of the duc de Guise. Along with this came an understanding of how barricades were constructed and what they could accomplish. This folk knowledge—what I call the lore of the barricade—was the underpinning for a routine of collective action rooted in an oral tradition.
This flexible template for barricade combat was a precious resource that allowed the insurgents of 1648 to overcome the absence of careful planning or universally recognized leaders and—in the span of a few hours and largely without instruction or supervision—immobilize the greatest metropolis on the Continent. The Second Day of the Barricades, even more clearly than the First, showed that the common people possessed a capacity for large-scale mobilization and a genius for improvisation that long predated their supposed emergence from the shadows and onto the historical stage at the time of the 1789 Revolution.
The barricades of 1648, like those of 1588, began as an act of neighborhood defense. This essentially communal response took hold in nearly ever quarter of the city, yet virtually all of the critical events took place along a narrow geographical corridor that had been vividly outlined on the morning of August 26 by a double row of uniformed soldiers. Though they were there to guard the route the royal party would follow on its way to the mass of celebration in Notre-Dame, they also starkly outlined the main axes of power, running between the procession’s points of origination and termination. At one end stood the Palais-Royal, where the king and queen mother resided, and alongside which Mazarin also lived. At the other was the Ile de la Cité, where, in addition to the great cathedral, the Palais de Justice, seat of the Paris parlement, was situated. The royal cortège, the abduction of Broussel, Meilleraye’s initial sortie, Séguier’s abortive mission and hectic flight, and the procession of parlementaires all followed roughly this same trajectory, consisting of a main segment that ran east-west along the rue Saint-Honoré and a shorter north-south leg leading via the Pont-Neuf or pont Saint-Michel to the island at the center of Paris.67
It was along this same route that the rebels concentrated their barricades. Their first concern was naturally to inhibit the free circulation of royal troops through the inner city. Soon, however, they extended their reach along the quays of the Seine, confining the king’s soldiers to a few strong points in proximity to guard posts along the main thoroughfares, and finally to the immediate vicinity of the Palais-Royal itself. The way the barricades were positioned gave insurgents a much more subtle command over the urban space they inhabited than is often recognized. We have seen that in the early hours of August 27, Chancellor Seguier, dispatched by the queen regent to deliver a reprimand to the parlement, encountered structures that blocked his way, forcing him to make a detour and eventually to abandon his coach. Yet on the same morning, Coadjutor Gondi, whom the people considered sympathetic to their cause, had no difficulty traveling along essentially the same trajectory between the archbishop’s residence (also on the Ile de la Cité) and the regent’s palace.
The procession that members of the parlement made to the Palais-Royal at the height of the unrest is an even clearer example of the ability to discriminate that barricades placed in the hands of crowd members. As long as the robed parlementaires followed a path that the barricade defenders approved of—westward to present their petition to the queen—the rebels eased their passage through every obstacle. But when they tried to retrace their steps without having first secured Broussel’s freedom, they were brought to a sudden standstill. Only after returning to the palace to carry out their mission to the insurgents’ satisfaction were they permitted to proceed across the barricaded city to their assembly chambers. Indeed, even after the crisis appeared to be resolved, the crowd refused to let two royal coaches pass, relenting only when told they were being sent to retrieve the prisoners (and not until signed orders for Broussel’s release could be produced).68 What these examples make clear is that the barricade, for all its effectiveness in restricting the displacement of troops about the city, could also display a selective permeability that allowed the civilian population to assert its mastery over the urban environment in a fairly nuanced manner.69
Descimon has pointed to a different sort of polarity, also geographical in origin, that governed the unfolding of events in Paris.70 At several levels, Parisians’ response was driven by the fear of strangers—l’étranger. The French term conflates two English meanings—foreigner and outsider—both of which were relevant to the political dynamic of 1648. Popular distrust of foreigners was aimed at the very highest reaches of the social hierarchy and applied specifically to Anne of Austria (who was actually a member of the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg) and Mazarin (who, though he had been a naturalized French citizen since 1639, was of Italian origin.) It most definitely embraced the primary instrument of their authority in the capital, the Swiss Guard (Gardes-suisses). More surprising to a modern reader, however, the term applied in only somewhat lesser degree to the other Royal Guard (sometimes referred to as the Gardes-françaises), who, though of French nationality, were not native to the city. As in 1588, and based on even more recent experience of marauding mercenary armies, Parisians lived in fear of what the introduction of so many “foreign” soldiers could mean for their lives and property, to say nothing of their prerogatives as residents of a free city.
But Parisians’ fears were also aroused by another category of “outsiders,” most of whom were actually inhabitants of the capital. Those who recorded the history of this period (for the most part members of the aristocracy or the propertied middle class) made numerous references to the presence in Paris of vagrants (vagabonds), the homeless (gens sans aveu), and the rabble (la canaille). In doing so, they raised the specter of the riots and looting that could be expected to occur if public order suddenly broke down. Maître d’Hôtel du Roi Jean Vallier, in fact, asserts that Parisians built barricades not in a spirit of rebellion against the king, “but to save themselves from the insolence and fury of the many rogues and reprobates who were only waiting for the chance to pillage the houses of the rich and to take revenge on their personal enemies.”71 Their alarm may not have been entirely without foundation, but municipal registers indicate that no deaths and only one casualty could be attributed to the depredations of such lawless elements.72 As Françoise de Motteville remarked, “Never has a disorder been so orderly, for an insurrection as vast and impetuous as this one might be expected to cause more harm than this one actually did.”73
Thus, those who manned the barricades of 1648, much like their counterparts in 1588, were motivated by what might be called as a “logic of alterity”—distrust and suspicion directed not only toward alien elites and the “foreign” troops that did their bidding but also against the Parisian underclass. Eyewitness accounts rarely provide a systematic overview of participants but leave the impression that only the crowds that first reacted to Broussel’s abduction on the Ile de la Cité had a plebeian flavor. They comprised boatmen, porters, beggars and vagabonds, in addition to many artisans. By the time that full-scale mobilization began the next morning, members of the bourgeois militia were in the ascendant.74 From that point forward, control over the insurrection remained firmly in the hands of the middle class, which relied on barricades to avert the dangers both of random acts of violence on the part of lawless social elements and of the more systematic use of coercion by royal troops bent on imposing the government’s will by force.
One further instance of barricade construction comes to light in histories of the Fronde, but what little we learn of it comes to us only through accounts of a non-barricade event. On July 2, 1652, a battle took place between armies commanded by the two most brilliant generals of the age. The soldiers of the king, led by Turenne, clashed beneath the walls of Paris with the army of the princely Fronde, commanded by Condé. In the last days of June, royal troops appeared to have the rebels cornered just west of the capital. Under an agreement worked out between the crown and city officials, Paris had pledged to maintain a strict neutrality by admitting neither camp within its walls. Condé, outnumbered two to one and at risk of being outflanked, undertook a forced march during the night of July 1 to 2. His last hope was to lead his army to the relative safety of the spit of land lying between the Seine and the Marne rivers at their point of confluence near Charenton, east of Paris. He succeeded in skirting the city to the north but, as he turned southward, was overtaken and attacked in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. There, Condé’s desperate soldiers miraculously happened across a set of “barricades” behind which they took cover. La Rochefoucauld, who was gravely wounded in that day’s combat, marveled at the lucky accident that this discovery took place at the single spot in Condé’s entire line of march where his soldiers had a chance of avoiding defeat.75 Thanks to the fortuitous presence of these structures, the rebels were able to stave off Turenne’s artillery and cavalry attacks for a precious few hours. This gave the duchesse de Montpensier enough time to persuade her father (the duc d’Orléans) and the municipal authorities to break their promise to the king by opening the city’s gates and allowing what remained of Condé’s beleaguered army to enter the city.76
Although the inconclusive engagement between these two great armies would not qualify as a barricade event as defined here (on grounds that it was a battle between professional military forces), the frondeurs’ appropriation of those discarded structures clearly points in the direction of an earlier episode that does fit our definition. Three contemporary sources stipulate that the heaps of rubble that saved Condé’s army from annihilation were the remnants of improvised barriers raised by local residents to protect themselves against skirmishers and plunderers accompanying the mercenary army of the duc de Lorraine.77 Unfortunately, this tells us only that an additional barricade event occurred sometime in May or possibly June 1652.
For the remainder of the seventeenth century—indeed, for well over a hundred years to follow—no other barricade event has come to light. This lengthy pause in the application of the technique begs for an explanation, one that appears to revolve around variations in the strength of the state. Certainly, the unrest that accompanied the Fronde must in part be understood as a consequence of the weakening of the French monarchy that had been apparent for some time. The free circulation of Mazarinades—songs, poems, and pamphlets attacking the cardinal and the King’s Council that were produced by the score—was evidence both of the low esteem in which the French people held their government and of that government’s impotence in trying to stem the flow of criticism and protest. Indeed, state ministers were unable to put a stop to the campaign of innuendo and ridicule, which even targeted “Mme Anne” (the disrespectful sobriquet that frondeurs used to refer to the regent, Anne of Austria).
It is also evident that the uprisings associated with the Fronde were themselves responsible for the further deterioration in the legitimacy of the state noted by contemporaries. Madame de Motteville argues persuasively that the effect of the monarchy’s inability to establish its domination, both at home and abroad, was as immediate as it was damaging. Even the Spaniards, recently defeated in battle and forced to sue for peace, were emboldened by their sense of the regent’s vulnerability to funnel resources to French factions that, for their own reasons, were prepared to challenge the state’s authority. Anne of Austria foresaw that the country’s enemies would take heart from the events of August 27, 1648, and was convinced that the spectacle of “a chancellor of France, without respect in Paris, whom the people had tried to murder in the streets while the king was present in the city, was a sure sign that the power of the prince was in suspense and the love of his subjects for their sovereign apparently extinguished.”78 Still, the paralysis of the French state would prove to be relatively short-lived. With the death of Mazarin and the beginning of Louis XIV’s personal rule in 1661, the power of the monarchy would not only be restored but enhanced.
The direct result of this resurgence of absolutist control was a tapering off of full-scale urban insurrections in general and of barricade events in particular over the remainder of the seventeenth century. René Pillorget has studied the incidence of insurrections between 1596 and 1715. He uncovered a total of 532 events in this 120-year span, or what amounts to 4.4 events per year on average. However, those events were rather unevenly distributed among the six chronological intervals into which he divided the period covered by his research. The six years from the start of 1648 to the end of 1653 (corresponding to the Fronde and its aftermath) witnessed the highest level of insurgent activity, with an average of eleven events per year. The fifty-five years of Louis XIV’s personal rule produced the lowest average of just two events per year.79 The results reported by Yves-Marie Bercé, who studied peasant revolts in the southwest of France during the seventeenth century, are consistent with this conclusion. He found that a tripling of the tax burden and an increase in the incidence of agricultural crisis over the last thirty years of the Sun King’s reign resulted in only sporadic rural violence.80
Jean Nicolas has compiled the most complete and meticulous survey of popular movements during the period in question, documenting a total of 8,528 incidents of protest activity, large and small, between 1661 and 1789. A majority involved some form of resistance to tax collection (3,336 cases) or reactions to subsistence crises like food riots or attacks on grain shipments (1,497 events in all.) This should be sufficient in itself to show that a decline in barricade events must not be confused with an overall reduction in contentious behavior. Indeed, the extension of the state’s authority actually made many types of protest, including clashes with police and royal troops, more frequent. However, even the growth in the number of revolts against judicial or military authorities (an additional 1,212 cases) seems not to have given rise to the construction of barricades.81
So while the extension of the state’s authority may actually have provided the occasion for many types of protest events to become even more frequent, it seems not to have led to the sort of insurrectionary episode that involved the building of barricades. Unlike the 1588 and 1648 peaks of urban insurrectionary activity, which corresponded to distinct moments of weakness, even crisis, for the French monarchy, what followed was a long period in which the stable exercise of state power caused a shift in the nature of collective action. Once Louis XIV took the reins of government in his own firm hands, barricades went into eclipse, returning only when the faltering rule of Louis XVI created the opportunity for the tactic to flourish anew. In short, the proliferation of barricade events required a combination of facilitating conditions among which the most common were: costly wars that strained an inefficient or corrupt fiscal system to the breaking point and often undermined the government’s legitimacy, especially when they resulted in military defeat; subsistence crises that demonstrated the monarchy’s inability to provide for its subjects’ most basic needs; and a regency or a challenge from a credible rival who was able to cast doubt on the king’s ability to provide strong leadership.
By 1648, the nation, exhausted by decades of war and the demands of a rapacious government, faced just such a crisis of legitimacy, compounded by “the presence of a child king, a Spanish queen who was held in contempt, and a foreign minister who was thoroughly detested.”82 These were the elements that provided the driving force behind the Fronde parlementaire and its construction of hundreds of barricades. For lack of leadership and clearly defined objectives, the insurrection of August 1648 served only to plunge French society into successive waves of civil war, princely rivalries, and bitter factionalism.
But the Fronde was nonetheless a critical turning point in French history. Two days after the battle of the faubourg Saint-Antoine in 1652, Condé’s forces alienated residents of the capital, who had given them sanctuary, by killing several prominent Parisians in the process of putting down a public assembly organized to lobby for peace.83 The resulting reaction against the arrogance and authoritarianism of the princes quickly escalated. It became clear that France, fed up with domestic strife and anarchy, would welcome the prospect of dependable government, which even rebellious Parisians had reluctantly concluded only the king could provide. The tide had turned against the forces of disintegration.
France did not immediately emerge from its troubled condition. Louis XIV’s minority had officially ended in 1651 when he turned thirteen, but Mazarin continued to direct the affairs of the French state until his death, when Louis XIV assumed direct control over the conduct of government. The king’s European ambitions kept the royal armies almost constantly at war, while the construction of the magnificent palace at Versailles exacerbated the country’s ongoing financial difficulties. But the cult of royalty that Louis the Great actively encouraged, along with the enhanced administrative and political effectiveness for which his brilliant reforming minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert laid the groundwork, prevented major schisms or large-scale rebellions from taking hold. The centralization and consolidation of the power of the monarchy took place largely at the expense of the traditional aristocracy and with the active collaboration of non-noble administrators, whom Louis XIV freely recruited and promoted. Gradually, the power of the central state began to gain the ascendancy.
I have noted that once the Fronde had passed, no barricades appeared in France for nearly a century and a half. The monarchy succeeded so well in displacing armed conflict from the territory of France to its borders or to the territory of its adversaries, in fact, that for cities like Paris, the threat of foreign armies seemed increasingly remote. One sure measure of the enhanced sense of security that the capital enjoyed can be found in Colbert’s projects to demolish many of the gates and walls that had protected the city for centuries.84 At about the same time, the chains that had previously assured the safety of urban neighborhoods fell into disuse and were eventually removed, as Paris developed a new self-image as the most enlightened and open city on the Continent.
But barricade consciousness never disappeared completely. Time would show that the seeds of rebellion lay dormant, not dead. Before examining the conditions in which they managed first to germinate and then to thrive once more, eventually spreading far beyond the borders of France, we need to form a picture of the incidence of barricade events over their entire history and more particularly during the long nineteenth century, the period to which the remainder of this study is devoted.
