Cardinal Mazarin

Cardinal Jules Mazarin was an Italian cardinal, diplomat, and politician who served as the Chief Minister to the King of France from 1642 until his death in 1661. After serving in the papal army and diplomatic service and at the French court, he entered the service of France and made himself valuable to King Louis XIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who brought him into the council of state. After Richelieu’s death, Mazarin succeeded him as Chief Minister of France. At the time of King Louis XIII’s death in 1643, his successor, Louis XIV, was only five years old,  and his mother, Anne of Austria, ruled in his place until he came of age. Mazarin helped Anne expand the limited power her husband had left her. He functioned essentially as the co-ruler of France alongside the queen during the regency of Anne, and until his death Mazarin effectively directed French policy alongside the monarch.

Cardinal Mazarin by Pierre Mignard, 1658-1660. Mazarin succeeded his mentor, Cardinal Richelieu. He was a noted collector of art and jewels, particularly diamonds, and he bequeathed the “Mazarin diamonds” to Louis XIV in 1661, some of which remain in the collection of the Louvre museum in Paris. His personal library was the origin of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris.

Policies

Mazarin continued Richelieu’s anti-Habsburg policy and laid the foundation for Louis XIV’s expansionist policies. During the negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia, which concluded the Thirty Years’ War, Mazarin (together with the queen) represented France with policies that were French rather than Catholic. The terms of the peace treaties ensured Dutch independence from Spain, awarded some autonomy to the various German princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and granted Sweden seats on the Imperial Diet and territories to control the mouths of the Oder, Elbe, and Weser rivers. France, however, profited most from the settlement. Austria, ruled by the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand III, ceded all Habsburg lands and claims in Alsace to France and acknowledged her de facto sovereignty over the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Verdun, and Toul. Moreover, eager to emancipate themselves from Habsburg domination, petty German states sought French protection. This anticipated the formation of the 1658 League of the Rhine, leading to the further diminution of Imperial power.

The League was designed to check the House of Austria in central Germany. In 1659, Mazarin made peace with Habsburg Spain in the Peace of the Pyrenees, which added Roussillon and northern Cerdanya—as French Cerdagne—in the far south, as well as part of the Low Countries, to French territory.

Towards Protestantism at home, Mazarin pursued a policy of promises and calculated delay to defuse armed insurrections and keep the Huguenots disarmed. For six years they believed themselves to be on the eve of recovering the protections of the Edict of Nantes, but in the end they obtained nothing. Mazarin was also more consistently an enemy of Jansenism, more for its political implications than out of theology.

The Fronde

As the Crown needed to recover from its expenditures in the recent wars, the increase of taxes contributed to already growing social unrest. The nobility refused to be taxed, based on their old liberties or privileges, and the brunt fell upon the bourgeoisie.The Fronde began in January 1648, when the Paris mob used children’s slings (frondes) to hurl stones at the windows of Mazarin’s associates. The insurrection did not start with revolutionary goals but aimed to protect the ancient liberties from royal encroachments and to defend the established rights of the parlements—courts of appeal rather than legislative bodies like the English parliaments. The movement soon degenerated into factions, some of which attempted to overthrow Mazarin and reverse the policies of his predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, who had taken power for the Crown from great territorial nobles, some of whom became leaders of the Fronde.

In May 1648, a tax levied on judicial officers of the Parlement of Paris provoked not merely a refusal to pay but also a condemnation of earlier financial edicts and a demand for the acceptance of a scheme of constitutional reforms framed by a united committee of the parlement (the Chambre Saint-Louis), composed of members of all the sovereign courts of Paris. The military record of what would be known as the First Fronde (the Fronde Parlementaire) is almost blank. In August 1648, Mazarin suddenly arrested the leaders of the parlement, whereupon Paris broke into insurrection and barricaded the streets. The royal faction, having no army at its immediate disposal, had to release the prisoners and promise reforms, and on the night of October 22 it fled from Paris. However, France’s signing of the Peace of Westphalia allowed the French army to return from the frontiers and put Paris under siege. The two warring parties signed the Peace of Rueil (1649) after little blood had been shed.

The peace lasted until the end of 1649. In January 1650, an armed rebellion (the onset of what would know known known as the Second Fronde or the Fronde des nobles) followed the arrests of several nobles by Mazarin. By April 1651, after a series of battles, the rebellion collapsed everywhere. A few months of hollow peace followed and the court returned to Paris. Mazarin, an object of hatred to all the princes, had already retired into exile. His absence left the field free for mutual jealousies, and for the remainder of the year anarchy reigned in France.

In December 1651, Mazarin returned to France with a small army. The war began again, but this time some leaders of the rebellion were pitted against one another. After this campaign the civil war ceased, but in the several other campaigns of the Franco-Spanish War that followed, two great soldiers leading the Fronde were opposed to one another: Henri, Viscount of Turenne, as the defender of France and
Louis II, and Prince de Condé as a Spanish invader. In 1652, an insurrectionist government appeared in Paris. Mazarin, feeling that public opinion was solidly against him, left France again. Although in exile, he was not idle, and reached an agreement with Turenne. Turenne’s forces pursued Condé’s, who in 1653 fled to the Spanish Netherlands. Louis XIV, now of age to claim his throne, re-entered Paris in October 1652 and recalled Mazarin in February 1653. The last vestiges of resistance in Bordeaux fizzled out in the late summer of 1653.

“Louis XIV Crushes the Fronde” by Gilles Guérin, 1654. The Fronde represented the final attempt of the French nobility to battle the king, and they were humiliated. The Fronde facilitated the emergence of absolute monarchy.

Legacy

Following the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Mazarin, as the de facto ruler of France, played a crucial role establishing the Westphalian principles that would guide European states’ foreign policy and the prevailing world order. Some of these principles, such as nation-state sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs and the legal equality among states, remain the basis of international law to this day.
The French people suffered terribly in the Fronde, but the wars achieved no constitutional reform. The liberties under attack were feudal, not of individuals, and the Fronde in the end provided an incentive for the establishment of royalist absolutism, since the disorders eventually discredited the feudal concept of liberty. Royal absolutism was reinstalled without any effective limitation.  On the death of Mazarin in 1661, Louis XIV assumed personal control of the reins of government and astonished his court by declaring that he would rule without a chief minister.

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