The Fronde

Between 1648 and 1653 France was torn by a series of revolts against the regency that governed in the name of the boy king Louis XIV. First the law courts of Paris and then the great princes of the realm rose against Queen Anne of Austria and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin. Both waves of rebellion failed, and the disorder they caused helped convince the French that a strong, unchallenged monarchy was preferable. The name comes from the French word for a slingshot, first used as a sneer at the rebels.

Louis XIV inherited the throne in 1643 aged four, so power lay with his mother and Mazarin. France was paying for the Thirty Years' War and for a long war with Spain that had begun in 1635. To meet the cost, Mazarin raised new taxes, many of which fell on the wealthy townspeople whose stronghold was the parlements, the sovereign law courts. The Parlement of Paris, the most important of them, refused to register the new decrees as an attack on established rights. Many nobles, who had lost influence under Mazarin's predecessor Cardinal Richelieu, also hoped to recover their old position.

In May 1648 a levy on the Parlement's own officials provoked open defiance. The courts of Paris formed a joint committee that condemned earlier financial edicts and demanded constitutional reforms. In August, encouraged by the Prince of Condé's victory over the Spanish at Lens, Mazarin arrested parlementary leaders, and Paris rose and barricaded its streets. Without an army at hand, the court released the prisoners, promised reforms and slipped out of the capital in October.

The Peace of Westphalia, signed that same month, freed troops from the frontiers, and by January 1649 Condé was besieging Paris for the crown. Little blood was spilt. The Parisians refused to seek Spanish help, and the Peace of Rueil in March 1649 ended the first phase.

The second phase was a scramble for power and patronage among the great nobles, including the king's uncle Gaston of Orléans, Condé and his brother the Prince of Conti, and the future Cardinal de Retz, with influential women such as Madame de Longueville and the Duchess of Montpensier playing leading parts. In January 1650 Mazarin arrested Condé, Conti and Longueville. Marshal Turenne took up arms to free them with Spanish support, but was routed near Rethel in December 1650. The princes were released all the same, and Mazarin, hated by every faction, withdrew into exile.

He returned at the end of 1651 with a small army, and fighting resumed, now with Turenne serving the crown against Condé. In July 1652 royal forces trapped Condé's army outside the walls of Paris in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Gaston's daughter, the Duchess of Montpensier, persuaded the city to open its gates to the rebels and had the cannon of the Bastille fired on the royal troops. But the Parisians soon fell out with the princes, and Louis XIV entered the city in October 1652. Mazarin came back unopposed in February 1653.

Worn out by years of disorder, the country increasingly looked to the king as the guarantor of order. Historians see Louis XIV's later insistence on absolute rule as partly shaped by his memories of these years. Condé went over to Spain and fought against France until the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, after which he was pardoned and served the king loyally.

Our 1650 map shows the Kingdom of France at the height of the Fronde, still at war with Spain.