The Fronde Suppressed

FEB 15 1653 · 12:00

Louis XIV, in Roman armour, trampling an allegorical figure of the Fronde (1653). Sculpture, Louvre-Lens. Place: Paris, Kingdom of France Figures: Louis XIV, fourteen years old · Anne of Austria, queen regent · Cardinal Mazarin, returning from exile · Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, in flight to Spain Five Years of Two Frondes The Fronde begins in 1648, the same year as Westphalia. The parlements of Paris refuse new taxes; the great nobles, led by Condé, take up arms against Mazarin and the regency. Twice the boy king is forced to flee the capital. Twice he returns. The second Fronde, the Fronde des princes, fuses noble revolt with foreign war: Condé takes a Spanish commission and fights against his own kingdom from the Netherlands. By the end of 1652 the rebellion has exhausted itself. Paris, sick of barricades and grain shortages, recalls the king. Louis XIV enters the capital on 21 October 1652. Mazarin returns from exile in February 1653. Confirmed. Bordeaux (the Ormée) capitulated on 3 August 1653 per Wikipedia (Fronde / Ormée). 'The previous August' is therefore off by ~6 months relative to Mazarin's February 1653 return — Bordeaux actually fell AFTER Mazarin's return, not before it. Suggest rewriting as: 'The last rebel stronghold, Bordeaux, falls in August 1653.' The kingdom is, for the first time since the wars of religion, undivided under one royal authority. The Model State The lesson Louis takes from his childhood is permanent: no parlement, no prince, no city is to be permitted an autonomous political will. When Mazarin dies in 1661 the king announces he will rule personally, without a first minister. The Roi-Soleil begins. Versailles is enlarged into a court whose function is to keep the high nobility under daily surveillance, gilded and disarmed. Other European chanceries study the result. The intendant system, the standing army of 300,000, the centralized treasury under Colbert, the codification of law and customs, the disciplining of provincial estates. French absolutism becomes the operating manual of post-Westphalian sovereignty. The Westphalian principle of 1648 (the sovereign is supreme within his borders) requires, the French case suggests, an internal machinery powerful enough to make that supremacy real. Prussia, Sweden, Austria, Russia, Spain, the Italian states all imitate, with local adjustments.