The opposition of the judges and Jansenists, together with another cool wet spring that spoiled the crops, led Anne and Mazarin to change their minds about peace: in May 1648 they indicated to Madrid a willingness to open talks on the basis of the generous terms offered by Spain five months before. By then, however, Philip had made peace with the Dutch and repressed the revolts of both Naples and Sicily: he therefore determined to increase the military pressure on France. ‘All we need now,’ mused a Spanish diplomat, ‘is some moderate victory in the Netherlands in order to start some commotion in France that will open up a highway to an honourable peace.‘33 A few weeks later, a far greater ‘commotion’ than even the most optimistic Spaniard could have imagined paralyzed the French capital.
The Tipping Point: The Barricades of Paris
In April 1648 Mazarin attempted to drive a wedge between his domestic opponents. He offered the judges of the Parlement of Paris (and only them) the opportunity to renew the Paulette on the normal terms. Other officials could renew only if they agreed to forego their salaries for four years; while the maîtres de requêtes, still on strike, lost their right to renew altogether. This blatant attempt to divide and rule backfired disastrously. The judges of the Parlement voted to issue an arrêt d'union expressing support for all their colleagues and invited the other three ‘sovereign courts’ that met in Paris – the Cour des Aides and the Chambre des Comptes, which handled tax appeals and audits, and the Grand Conseil, which heard ecclesiastical disputes – to send delegates to meet with them in a special room in the Palace of Justice known as the Chambre Saint-Louis.
This defiance encouraged other discontented groups of civil servants to defy the regent, starting with the officials who administered direct taxes in the provinces: the Trésoriers de France. The trésoriers enjoyed many social and economic privileges, including automatic elevation to noble status after three generations of service as well as exemption from billeting, compulsory service in the militia and certain taxes. They therefore attracted men from good families (for example, Blaise Pascal and Antoine Arnauld came from trésorier families). The trésoriers also maintained their own trade union (syndicat), which held annual general meetings and supported a permanent secretary, a standing committee and permanent deputies in Paris as well as producing a newsletter. Despite this impressive organization, Mazarin revoked some of the tax exemptions of trésoriers and ended their freedom from billeting troops. The standing committee of the trésoriers retaliated by instructing its members to use any revenues they collected to pay their own salary arrears first, and to seek out and publicize any evidence of malversation of funds by any official appointed by Mazarin to raise new taxes. By mid-May 1648 the entire fiscal machinery of the French state had ceased to function.34
Realizing the dangers that now faced them, Anne and Mazarin put pressure on the judges by withdrawing the offer to renew the Paulette, prohibiting any further meetings in the Chambre Saint-Louis, and imprisoning some trésoriers in the Bastille – but these provocations fuelled further defiance. Starting on 30 June 1648, 14 judges from the Parlement and six from each of the three other central courts met daily in the Chambre Saint-Louis to discuss the various grievances of the kingdom. In a desperate attempt to produce a compromise that would allow the tax collectors to resume their work, Anne dismissed an unpopular finance minister and released the imprisoned trésoriers; but once again, concessions increased the self-confidence of the opposition. The judges now demanded that no civil servant be imprisoned without showing due cause; an end to the creation of new judicial offices; timely payment of salaries to judges; ‘forgiveness’ of all tax arrears; annulment of all loan contracts; and, above all, the abolition of the intendants.
In the Parlement of Paris, the frequent meetings produced greater confidence among the judges. They interrupted speeches of which they disapproved by hissing and stamping their feet; they held ‘divisions’ on important issues (thus the proposal to abolish the intendants passed by 106 votes to 66); and on occasion they forcibly held the premier président in his seat so that he could not halt the debate and passage of controversial measures.35 When she learned that the Spanish Army of Flanders was massing along the northern frontier, Anne capitulated. She agreed to renew the Paulette for nine years for all officials; to reduce the taille by one-eighth for the current year; to ‘forgive’ all tax arrears from before 1647; to free all those imprisoned for non-payment of taxes; and to revoke all commissions to the hated intendants.
Mazarin felt confident that these measures would end the crisis. In July 1648 he boasted to one of his colleagues that ‘Not only has all opposition ceased, but His Majesty has drawn inestimable advantage from [the situation], which clearly demonstrates that God dearly loves this government, leading it to its greatest good fortune by ways that seemed to lead exactly the other way.’ In particular, he enthused that, ‘for fear of something worse’, a consortium of partisans had ‘promised to provide a fixed sum to prolong the war as long as the obstinacy of the Spaniards makes it necessary. We had spent all [the revenues] of this and the next two years; now we have found a way of spending them a second time.‘36
Then, to the cardinal's horror, the Parlement of Paris voted to investigate the accounts of some partisans for evidence of fraud and excessive profits. All lending to the government immediately ceased, and Mazarin reluctantly instructed his negotiators at Münster to end the war in Germany immediately on the best terms available. ‘It is almost a miracle,’ he observed, ‘that amid so many self-made obstacles we can keep our affairs going, and even make them prosper; but prudence dictates that we should not place all our trust in this miracle continuing any longer.’ The cardinal lamented that the opposition of the law courts and the spreading tax-strike had brought the government to the edge of bankruptcy. ‘Shedding tears of blood’, he regretted that it had all happened at a time when, in Germany, ‘our affairs have never been in a more prosperous state’, but concluded: ‘The end of this long discourse is to convince you of our need to make peace at the earliest opportunity.‘37
Ironically, just one week after Mazarin signed this letter, the prince of Condé routed the invasion by the Spanish Army of Flanders at the battle of Lens – but the cardinal immediately threw away his advantage. Calculating that a Te Deum for the victory celebrated in Notre Dame Cathedral would provide the ideal opportunity to arrest the leading judges, including Pierre Broussel, the regent personally invited all of them to attend. A tiny miscalculation thwarted the plan. Normally, bodyguards surround the persons they are meant to protect and so when, at the end of the service on 26 August 1648, some judges noted the queen's guards lingering in the church after she had left, they raised the alarm. Since it was a market day, the areas around Notre Dame were all packed and some of Mazarin's targets escaped – including Broussel, who lived close to Notre Dame, but a detachment of guards arrived in hot pursuit and abducted him from his home.38
The arrest of Broussel, who was a militia captain as well as a judge, outraged his neighbours and dense crowds began to rampage through the streets shouting ‘Long live the king! Free the prisoner!’ and smashing doors and windows. To prevent looting, the militia companies mobilized and brought out the heavy chains that most Paris streets still maintained for emergency use, hanging them across the street and erecting barricades behind them to repulse any attack. As dawn broke on 27 August, Paris boasted over 1,200 barricades. According to one eyewitness, ‘Everyone, without exception, took up arms. One saw children five and six years old with daggers in their hands, and mothers arming them themselves.’ The militiamen declared that they would not lay down their arms until the regent freed Broussel; more alarmingly for the crown, at the royal palace the guards made clear that they would not fire on their compatriots.
Although Broussel's release and triumphant return home the following day calmed tempers and brought down the barricades, a ‘Great Fear’ continued to grip the French capital as householders worried that their property might be damaged
if either the ‘populace’ or the troops attacked. The judges, led by Broussel, took advantage of the uncertainty to continue their scrutiny of recent tax edicts, rejecting some outright and asking Anne to modify others. They also did nothing to prevent a torrent of literary attacks on her chief minister: the Mazarinades.39
The cardinal had made many enemies. Several prominent courtiers had hoped to succeed Richelieu, and envied the man who beat them; many clerics resented his practice of naming political allies to vacant ecclesiastical positions and his persistence in making war on fellow Catholics; while the judges loathed his fiscal innovations, which deprived them of authority and income. In the wake of the botched arrest of Broussel, a wave of pamphlets condemned the cardinal's policies, protested his foreign birth and mimicked his Italian accent. Coachmen intimidated recalcitrant horses with the threat, ‘Mazarin will get you’. Above all, gangs of young Parisians took to the streets with slings, known as frondes, which they used to smash the windows of the opulent Palais Mazarin. That ‘weapon of the weak’, reminiscent of David's overthrow of Goliath, gave its name to the revolt that would last for five years: the Fronde.40
The judges of the Parlement now systematically challenged the legality of each recent tax, encouraged by periodic demonstrations outside the court by irate taxpayers, until in October the regent abolished some taxes and reduced the taille for 1648 and 1649 to one-fifth of the previous level. Mazarin calculated that her concessions ‘deprived the king, in one way of another, of over half his revenues’ and once again instructed his negotiators in Westphalia to extricate France from the German war immediately on the best terms possible. ‘It would perhaps have been more advantageous for the conclusion of a universal peace had the war in the Empire continued a little longer, rather than hastening the settlement of outstanding matters as we did,’ he protested, because the emperor would now escape ‘the total ruin which, considering the lamentable situation to which his fortunes had been reduced, was imminent and almost ineluctable’. He was wasting his breath: recognizing their precarious situation, the French diplomats at Münster had already signed the final instruments of peace.41
The Fronde
Madame de Motteville, a perceptive member of the regent's household who had been in the royal palace on the ‘Day of the Barricades’, now lamented that ‘the people, in the hope of saving themselves from dues and taxes, dreamed only of tumults and changes’ and feared that the anti-royalist revolts in progress in England and Spain as well as in France formed part of an ‘evil constellation that menaced the well being of kings’.42 Anne of Austria evidently shared this pessimistic view, because she now issued a proclamation that accused the judges of plotting with Spain to seize her sons, hinting that they aimed to establish a Republic, and commanded all four sovereign courts to leave the city immediately for four separate destinations. She also ordered the prince Condé and his victorious army to blockade the capital.
Once again, the regent's maladroit actions united her opponents. Since she had lumped all the judges together as traitors, even those who had remained loyal until this point now subscribed to a declaration that Mazarin was ‘an enemy of the king and the state’. In January 1649 the royal family fled from their capital. The blockade forced the judges to make common cause with other opposition groups in Paris. The city magistrates loaned one million livres, while militiamen garrisoned the Bastille, the Arsenal and the city walls. The judges also sequestered all royal assets they could find in the capital and set up a wartime administration with committees to handle military, financial, ‘diplomatic’ and other business. The Paris clergy (many of them Jansenists), led by Paul de Gondi, archbishop-designate and later Cardinal de Retz, also lent their support with advice, sermons and pamphlets. So did many nobles, who flocked to Paris to join the judges, bringing their troops with them.
Initially, at least, most of the noble recruits to the Fronde acted out of principle. Richelieu had imprisoned them, sequestered their property and demolished their castles not only for plotting but also for lesser offences such as duelling. Now they sought to dismantle the machinery of prerogative rule that had both humiliated them and impoverished their vassals. They also favoured opening peace talks with Spain, believing that continuing the war would ruin France.43 Although the nobles lacked an established forum for discussing grievances – they could only meet legally in the States-General (none had been called since 1614) or in the provincial Estates (and by 1649 only those on the periphery of the kingdom still met regularly) – at first this scarcely mattered because it proved so easy to circulate their views in pamphlets. Paris boasted over 350 print shops, many of which had prospered from producing the multiple copies of government edicts required for distribution throughout the kingdom: when the flight of the royal family ended this lucrative source of business, printers compensated by publishing cheap political pamphlets (libelles, to use the more expressive French term of the day). Contemporaries commented on ‘the frightening quantity of pamphlets’, and one writer joked that ‘Half Paris prints or sells pamphlets and the other half buys them.’ He may have been right: the total number of publications between 1649 and 1653 far exceeded those produced during the rest of the century (Fig. 32).44
The pace of publication varied in response to political and military events: whereas fewer than one hundred items appeared in 1648, while the court still resided in the capital, over a thousand Mazarinades appeared in the first three months of 1649 after it left, with sometimes a dozen or more published in a single day (Fig. 33). The Mazarinades covered a wide range of topics and approaches. Some provided erudite discussions of political obligation, arguing that previous writers had ‘attributed more power to princes than is expedient for them to have, even for their own security'; that kings ‘owe us their protection just as we owe them our obedience'; and that the Parlement of Paris had replaced the defunct States-General as the lineal descendant of the Assemblies of the ancient Franks so that ‘no taxes can be levied on the king's subjects … without the consent of the Parlement, which represents the general assent of the people’.45 Others turned the great issues of the day into obscenities, such as the eight-page verse pamphlet about Anne's sex life that opened with the stanza:
People, doubt it no longer: It's true that he's fucked her
And through her hole Jules [Mazarin] pelts us with shit.
According to the Mazarinades, the cardinal's involvement in government ensured that everything in France ended up (in the words of one of them) ‘like either a brothel or a cemetery’.46
The quantity of political pamphlets is remarkable given that the winter of 1648–9 lasted almost six months, with intense cold followed by a rapid thaw and torrential rains that caused the Seine to burst its banks, inundating the city hall and surrounding houses. Floods south of Paris, which normally provided most of the capital's bread, combined with Condé's blockade, caused the price of a loaf of bread to leap from 9 to 18 sols in February 1649. Since an unskilled labourer at this time earned 12 sols a day (on days when he could find work), this increase spelled starvation.47
32. Pamphlet publication in seventeenth-century France.
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris, boasts a remarkable collection of pamphlets, whose contours reflect the political stability of the kingdom. The assassination of Henry IV in 1610 led to the publication of over 100 items, and the subsequent rebellions of Protestants and nobles sometimes produced over 400 items in a year; but these totals were dwarfed by the Mazarinades (tracts attacking the chief minister Cardinal Mazarin), which exceeded 1,000 in 1649 and again in 1652.
Those who lived outside Paris had to contend not only with snow, floods and famine but also with Condé's troops. As the regent's entourage travelled by coach near the capital in February 1649 they passed ‘through several villages where we noted a frightening desolation. They had been abandoned by their inhabitants. The houses were burnt and torn down, the churches pillaged.‘48 Those who could took refuge in the nearest convent, like
Port-Royal-des-Champs southwest of the capital, where Abbess Angélique Arnauld (sister of Antoine) did her best to provide protection, building barricades and putting horses in the chapterhouse, cows in the cellar, chicken and turkeys in the courtyard, and grain in the chapel. Nevertheless, as she lamented to a nun living in Paris, although
Nothing has happened to us yet, thank God, we have reason to fear that if this weather continues we will die of hunger just like you, because if they [the soldiers] take everything from us, as they do with others, we have no idea where to find food, since nothing remains in the countryside. . . The famine is at least as great here as in Paris, and in addition we are burdened with soldiers.
She also lamented that Port-Royal was ‘surrounded by the cruellest troops in the world, who have ravaged all the countryside around with all sorts of cruelty, sacrilege and malice’.49 Within the capital, starving crowds surrounded the Palace of Justice and shouted ‘Give us bread or give us peace.’ They welcomed an agent of Philip IV who arrived to invite the Parlement to mediate a peace between France and Spain. The Fronde seemed about to succeed – but, later that day, news arrived that in London a ‘High Court of Justice’ had tried, condemned and beheaded Charles I.
33. Monthly production of Mazarinades, May 1649–July 1653.
Pamphlets attacking the Cardinal rose dramatically in January 1649 after the Court left the capital and lost its ability to censor printers. Although the total production of Mazarinades during the siege of Paris early in 1649 dwarfs the titles triggered by subsequent events – such as the arrest of the prince of Condé in January 1650 and his release one year later – the monthly total still exceeded the annual total of previous years (see Fig. 32). Production fell equally dramatically when Mazarin returned to the capital – from 1,093 titles in 1652 to 18 in 1653.
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