Richelieu initially blamed the revolt on his financial advisers – ‘I fail to understand why you do not devote more thought to the consequences of the decisions you take in the council of finance,’ he scolded them: ‘It is easy to prevent even the worst misfortunes, whereas after they occur no remedy can be found’ – and, since the alienated civil servants (including local judges) refused to act against the rebels, he agreed to suspend some of the unpopular new taxes. Nevertheless, as Hugo Grotius (then Sweden's ambassador in Paris) correctly predicted, ‘winter, when the soldiers return to their garrisons, will cool these hot tempers'; and in November 1639, Richelieu sent an army into Normandy, where it defeated the ‘Army of Suffering’ in a pitched battle that lasted several hours (as with the Croquants, the Nu-Pieds included many army veterans).19 The troops then executed the captured leaders and imprisoned the rest before they dispersed into garrisons. Meanwhile Chancellor Pierre Séguier, head of the kingdom's judicial system, toured the duchy and imposed ‘exemplary punishments’ in order ‘to rule out any recurrence of similar disorders in the future’.20
Nevertheless domestic discontent continued. Late in 1639, Louis's finance minister complained presciently that ‘People want to pay nothing more, neither old nor new taxes. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel, no longer having the ability to choose between good and bad policies. I fear our foreign wars will degenerate into a civil war.’ This risk increased after catastrophic weather in 1640 and 1641 ruined the crops, drove up bread prices and caused many to abandon their farms. Richelieu now predicted that ‘If the council of finance continues to allow the tax-farmers and bankers full liberty to treat His Majesty's subjects according to their insatiable appetites, France will surely fall victim to a disorder similar to that which has befallen Spain … By wishing to have too much, we shall create a situation in which we shall have nothing at all.‘21 But the cardinal saw no way out. ‘Given the small experience that I have in financial matters,’ he complained petulantly in February 1642, ‘it is impossible for me to judge whether to accept or reject’ a new fiscal expedient. Admittedly, he drew up an ambitious plan for reform that would both reduce expenditure dramatically and shift the tax burden from direct to indirect levies – but acknowledged that it would only take effect ‘après la paix [after the peace]’. It therefore remained a dead letter.22
Meanwhile, France's war effort produced few results. For a moment, in 1640, the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal against Philip IV held out the promise of a speedy victory (see chapter 9 above). France's envoy in Barcelona later recalled that
Our affairs, which were not going very well in the Low Countries, and still worse in Piedmont, suddenly began to prosper on all sides (even in Germany) because our enemy's forces, being retained in their own country and recalled from elsewhere to defend the sanctuary [Castile] became weak and slow in all the other theatres of war. [This] gave us the means to gain the upper hand.
Meanwhile a Francophile observer likewise gloated that ‘These internal ailments are the true means to abase the pride of Spain, or to force it to make a reasonable peace’.23
These hopes were quickly dashed because France suffered its own ‘internal ailments’. In 1641 the count of Soissons, a disaffected cousin of the king exiled for his part in an earlier plot, issued a manifesto that promised ‘to restore everything to its former place: re-establishing the laws that have been overthrown; renewing the immunities, rights and privileges of the provinces, towns and personages that have been violated; … ensuring respect for churchmen and nobles’. The conspirators mobilized an army, but Soissons foolishly lifted the visor of his helmet with a loaded pistol and pulled the trigger as he did so. Even the cardinal's agents believed that ‘If monsieur the count had not been killed, he would have been welcomed by half of Paris. Indeed such is the general feeling of all France that the whole country would have rallied to his side.’ The following year a plot by Louis's catamite and favourite courtier, the marquis of Cinq-Mars (known as ‘Monsieur le Grand’: ‘Mr. Big’), to get rid of Richelieu as a prelude to making peace with Spain and retrenching at home, came within an ace of success. But then Louis's troops forced the surrender of Perpignan and advanced to the Ebro. Richelieu's gamble therefore seemed to have paid off – but he died in December 1642. Louis XIII accepted Richelieu's suggestion that Giulio Mazzarino, now known as Cardinal Jules Mazarin, should become his chief minister; but, four months later, Louis himself died and his widow, Anne of Austria, Philip IV's sister, immediately named Mazarin president of the council of regency for her 4-old son, Louis XIV.
Anne's decision astonished almost everyone, and alienated both those who had aspired to the position and all xenophobes. Many believed that the cardinal also became Anne's lover – a suggestion supported by the passionate letters they exchanged when they were apart – but the physical relations of the couple (whatever they might be) were irrelevant, because the cardinal obviously enjoyed Anne's complete confidence, so that only armed rebellion could dislodge him. In any case, the victory of the future prince of Condé over the Spaniards at Rocroi five days after Louis XIII's death gave the new regime a spectacular boost. So despite another disastrous harvest in 1643 – which caused the price of bread to reach its highest level in half-a-century, and frosts that destroyed the vines so that in May 1644 rioters in Paris surrounded Chancellor Séguier shouting ‘Have mercy!’ – Mazarin decided to keep on fighting.24
The tense domestic situation alarmed France's negotiators at the peace congress in Westphalia (see chapter 8 above). In April 1645 one of them reminded Mazarin that although recent successes placed within his grasp ‘a glorious peace that would greatly extend the boundaries of the French empire’, it would be rash to expect ‘the same for some future date, because public affairs, which are so subject to revolutions, could be transformed either by the recovery of our enemies’ fortunes, or by the decline of our own, or by the birth of some domestic division that would destroy in an instant all our advantages and our hopes’.25 It was prescient advice, but Mazarin ignored it: instead he made refusal to pay taxes a capital offence and sent out more of the hated intendants to supervise the collection of as much revenue as possible.
For a while, Mazarin's gamble worked. With better harvests, popular revolts abated and tax revenues increased, permitting new conquests at the Habsburgs’ expense in Flanders, Germany, Italy and Catalonia. Still, some of the cardinal's colleagues feared for the future and, as soon as the 1646 campaign ended, advocated the immediate conclusion of a settlement
That is solidly grounded, rather than hold out for a better one that can only be gained by prolonging the war, in which events are always doubtful. Victories are not won by the manifest justice of the cause or by the size of the armies: instead God, whose secrets cannot be known, gives victory to those He wishes to raise up; and, to humiliate others, brings setbacks that are beyond human understanding.
Mazarin expressed some sympathy for this view, even extolling ‘the art of quitting when one is ahead, because then one keeps what one has won’, but he failed to follow his own admirable advice.26
Matters came to a head in 1647. The crown not only spent all its revenues for the year in advance, but also anticipated those for 1648, 1649 and part of 1650. The funds required to keep the army fighting could now come only by creating more new taxes and mortgaging their future yields to some banker in return for immediate advance payments in cash; but each edict creating a new tax required the approval of the judges of the various Parlements, who might either refuse to ‘register’ the edict (and thus prevent its collection) or ‘interpret’ it (that is, reduce its application, and therefore its yield, in some way). To avoid this outcome, Mazarin silenced outspoken judges (and other critics) by issuing lettres de cachet (which placed the recipient under house arrest) and took the young king to a lit de justice at the recalcitrant Parlement of Paris, which obliged its judges to register controversial new tax edicts. Some judges protested that such conduct was ‘tyranny’ and
thereby emboldened some of those affected by the new taxes to withhold payment; but Mazarin paid no attention, and instead in November 1647 sent another set of edicts creating new taxes for registration. Three of them would prove especially contentious: an excise duty on foodstuffs coming into Paris; a tax on lands alienated from the royal domain; and the creation of several new public offices for sale to the highest bidder. The cardinal made clear that the Paulette would not be renewed until all these measures had been registered.
Mazarin had chosen a dangerous moment for confrontation on three counts. First, as a Parisian diarist observed, these new taxes came at a time when the government had imprisoned ‘people of all social backgrounds, not after due process before a court of law, but simply on a warrant from the royal council and a list [of names] signed by the minister of finance’. In the year 1646 alone, some 25,000 people went to jail for failing to pay their taxes. Second, the failed harvest of 1647 left both the capital and the court short of food. As Mazarin complained to a colleague: ‘If some astrologer had predicted that, at the end of this year, the king and queen would have no bread to eat, he would have been dismissed as mad and outrageous; and yet he would have told the truth.’ Finally, the cardinal failed to heed his predecessor's warning about treating Paris with great care: ‘One must never awake this great beast,’ Richelieu had written. ‘It should be left asleep.‘27
Paris was the largest city in Christendom in the mid-seventeenth century, with 20,000 houses and over 400,000 inhabitants, but it had enjoyed exemption from most taxes. The new edicts threatened to change this, by levying excise duty on incoming foodstuffs and taxing alienated domain lands (many of them near the capital). Early in January 1648, hundreds of Parisians gathered outside the Palace of Justice, while the Parlement debated the new edicts, chanting ‘Naples, Naples’ – a pointed reminder of the rebellion in another capital city provoked by imposing an unpopular tax (see chapter 14 below). Someone in the crowd struck one of the judges as he emerged, and when guards attempt to make an arrest, the women in the crowd counter-attacked and forced them to flee. Two days later, when the regent went to hear Mass in Notre Dame, several hundred women ‘shouted at her and demanded justice’.28 That night Anne and Mazarin deployed troops around the capital – but, in response, the city's militia companies assembled and ostentatiously ‘tested’ their firearms as a sign that they would fight if attacked. Instead, therefore, on 15 January 1648 Anne and Mazarin brought the young king to another lit de justice at the Parlement of Paris to force through some of the other tax edicts previously sent for registration.
The Revolt of the Judges
During the discussion of the unpopular tax edicts, Pierre Broussel, a 73-year-old judge in the Grand Conseil (and also one of the city's militia captains) made a bold statement in defence of the Parlement’s right to reject ‘royal actions contrary to the well being of the state and God's commandments, as these edicts are, not only because they contain clauses prejudicial to the well being of the state but because they were presented in contravention of the customs and protocol of the assembly, which must always enjoy its powers freely’. Just like opponents of government innovations elsewhere, Broussel and his colleagues sought to ground the discussion of individual grievances on general principles, citing in support Scripture, history and institutional custom. The King's Advocate, Omer Talon, did the same. At the lit de justice, he reminded the 9-year-old king: ‘Sire, you are our sovereign lord. Your Majesty's power comes from above and, after God, you are responsible for your actions to no one except your own conscience. But your glory requires that we should be free men and not slaves.’ Warming to his theme Talon reminded Louis that
For the past ten years, the fields have been ruined and the country folk reduced to sleeping on straw because they have sold their furniture to pay their taxes – which even then they cannot do in full. To maintain the luxury of Paris, millions of innocent souls are obliged to live on black bread and oats. All that your subjects have left, Sire, is their souls – and if they could, they would also have put those up for sale long ago.
Talon then reviewed the hardships created for both townsmen and civil servants by the new taxes that the Parlement had just been forced to register and then, turning to Anne, admonished her:
Tonight, in the solitude of your oratory, think of the sorrow, bitterness and consternation of all the servants of the state who today see their goods confiscated, even though they have committed no crime. And add to that thought, Madam, the desperation of the countryside, where the hope of peace, the honour of battles won, and the glory of provinces conquered cannot feed those who lack bread.29
The speeches of Broussel and Talon immediately appeared in print, and encouraged several groups directly affected by recent taxes to petition Parlement to ‘interpret’ (that is, to modify) the edicts that they had just been forced to register. The most surprising petitioners were the maîtres de requêtes: lawyers who worked for the royal council. Since on appointment each maître gained noble status, which exempted him and his family from paying most taxes, aspiring lawyers were willing to pay 150,000 livres, plus the annual Paulette, in order to guarantee such a lucrative position. The maîtres therefore objected vehemently to the tax edict forcibly registered on 15 January 1648 that created 12 new similar positions – because it would inevitably reduce the number of lucrative cases that each would handle and hence the resale value of existing offices. The following month, the maîtres went on strike and asked the Parlement to ‘interpret’ the edict. The judges not only agreed to investigate their grievance: they also authorized an examination of the other edicts just registered.
The government now made a serious error. Instead of restricting discussion to a specific (albeit contentious) issue, Anne invoked issues of principle. She ordered the judges to consider whether or not any edict registered during a lit de justice could be modified. She thus overlooked the danger inherent (in the words of one perceptive protagonist, Cardinal de Retz) in ‘lifting the veil that must always cover what one might say and what one might believe concerning the rights of the People and the rights of kings, which always keep the best harmony when silent’.30
Meanwhile the opposition of the Paris judges stimulated defiance from colleagues elsewhere. The Parlement of Brittany arrested and imprisoned the officials sent from Paris bringing similar tax edicts for registration, while the Parlement of Toulouse sentenced to hard labour any excise collector who began to collect the new duties. The order to double the number of judges in the Parlement of Provence excited such passionate opposition that the first man to purchase one of the new offices was stabbed to death, and posters went up warning other prospective purchasers to expect the same. Everywhere tax payments ceased.
It seems surprising that Mazarin did not foresee the consequences of his policies but, like most other seventeenth-century European statesmen, he rejected the modern political consensus that governments should always place domestic imperatives above foreign issues. Instead (not without reason) he felt supremely confident that the revolt of Sicily and Naples would lead Philip IV to use force to regain control, which would benefit France in three ways: first, the troops sent to Naples would come from Catalonia, allowing French forces there to make progress; second, a Spanish attack on Naples would ‘kindle rather than put out the fire'; and, third, that ‘fire’ would prevent Spain from defending its positions in northern Italy.31 Mazarin therefore rejected the advantageous peace terms offered by the beleaguered king of Spain: to cede all France's gains in the Low Countries permanently, and those in Lombardy and Catalonia for 30 years, in return for peace. Had Mazarin accepted these terms – far better than France would ever receive again – he could have immediately diverted the troops in the Netherlands to Germany, and thus extracted far better terms at the Peace of Westphalia. Instead, in the hope of gaining yet more, he poured all available resources into campaigns in Catalonia and Lombardy.
The decision to continue the war with another Catholic monarch alie
nated not only the dévots, but also another religious group who became known as the ‘Jansenists’. In 1640 a huge Latin treatise entitled Augustinus had appeared from the pen of Cornelius Jansen (author of the best-selling Mars Gallicus, above). It argued at great length that humans had fallen so far from their original innocence and perfection that only the most rigorous and sincere devotion could merit salvation: conventional piety would not suffice. Resenting the numerous editions and translations of Jansen's earlier anti-French polemic, Richelieu secured papal condemnation of the Augustinus and had it banned. Nevertheless, shortly after the cardinal's death Antoine Arnauld, a Paris priest, published Frequent Communion, an eloquent tract in French that popularized the main ideas of Jansen's virtually unreadable Latin folio tomes. In particular, it condemned the practice of taking frequent communion, advocated by the Jesuit Order (among others), as a way of ‘appeasing’ God: instead, Arnauld argued, the laity should take the sacrament only when they had purged all impiety from their hearts and minds. Following Richelieu's example, Mazarin sent a copy of Frequent Communion to Rome and requested a papal condemnation. He also planned to send its author there for trial on charges of heresy – but whereas Jansen was a subject of Philip IV, Arnauld was the son of a French judge and scion of a prominent Parisian family. The judges of the Parlement of Paris argued not only that France had plenty of theologians competent to determine the orthodoxy of Arnauld and his work, but that sending a French subject to Rome would open the door to papal intervention in the affairs of the French Church. In the words of Orest Ranum, Anne's decision gave Arnauld and ‘the Jansenist cause more support in Parisian society than he or his predecessors had ever hoped for. For the first time, radical members of the Parlement argued that the Queen Mother was a foreigner subverting French laws.‘32
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