Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  News of the regicide spread rapidly, thanks to the Gazette de France, published by Théophraste Renaudot (the king's doctor) every Saturday, sometimes supplemented midweek by ‘extraordinary issues’. Copies sold for two sols, and those who could not afford a copy of their own could still read one at a newsstand or listen to others reading aloud. Each issue of the Gazette balanced domestic stories that stressed the stability and felicity of France and its royal family (the ballets and religious devotions attended by the king; the victories of his armies) with stories from abroad that revealed chaos or catastrophe (atrocities in Germany; prodigies and portents that foretold misfortunes for others). News of the regicide in London, coming so soon after news of the murder of Sultan Ibrahim in Istanbul, produced a wave of incredulity, indignation and revulsion throughout France. It was ‘the most remarkable thing to happen in many centuries,’ claimed one commentator. ‘Let people just consider what has happened in neighbouring kingdoms,’ screamed a pamphlet. ‘Ask Renaudot what happened in Constantinople a few months ago, because the case of England is too odious. Is it possible that people remain in ignorance of these events? Is it possible that they do not see where it all leads?‘50

  The Paris judges saw ‘where it all leads’ clearly enough. To distance themselves from the ‘parricide’ in England, they offered their condolences and a pension to Queen Henrietta Maria, and opened peace talks with the regent. Eventually, in return for Anne's promise to confirm all her previous concessions and to grant an amnesty to her opponents, in March 1649 the Parlement of Paris annulled its edicts against Mazarin.

  This defection shattered the Fronde. Many nobles, whose paramount goal had been to remove the cardinal from power, continued their defiance; while crowds of Parisians gathered outside the Palace of Justice shouting ‘No peace! No Mazarin’ and, more alarmingly ‘Republic!’ At this point, Philip IV again offered to open peace talks with France, but (in view of the weakness caused by the Fronde) he now demanded not only the withdrawal of all French troops from Catalonia and Lorraine but also an end of all aid to Portugal. Mazarin angrily rejected these ‘exorbitant demands’ and early in 1650, in exasperation, the prince of Condé joined the Fronde.

  ‘Monsieur le prince’ (as everyone called him) enjoyed many advantages. He was the king's close relative, third in line to the French throne; he enjoyed enormous prestige as the victor of Rocroi and Lens; he possessed both wealth and eloquence (in Latin as well as French). He also maintained a printing press in his Paris headquarters and a team of writers who produced a stream of propaganda. Nothing suggests that Condé wanted to displace his royal cousin on the throne, or to dismember France by carving out a state of his own: he probably aimed to replace Anne as regent, and seemed close to achieving this goal when, in January 1650, Mazarin acknowledged that he was Condé's ‘very humble servant’ who would further the prince's interests in all matters. The prince's triumph lasted just two days: Anne's guards suddenly arrested and imprisoned him, together with his two principal supporters.51

  Most of the judges regarded these arrests as another example of arbitrary power and immediately declared their support for the prince, while Condé's supporters and relatives in Normandy, Burgundy and Guyenne promptly defied the central government. Their revolt unleashed a conflict that lasted for three years because the central government lacked the money to prevail. ‘If you were here,’ Mazarin confessed to a colleague abroad in spring 1650,

  You would know that every day the royal household is on the verge of bankruptcy, that the queen of England [Henrietta Maria] has dismissed her household and entered a convent because we cannot provide a monthly pittance, and that the treasury ministers have not yet found a penny for … our troops in Flanders.

  The following summer, wet and windy, brought no relief; and (according to a contemporary history) 1651 began with ‘a deluge that seemed to presage the misfortunes that later afflicted the poor kingdom’ of France. ‘War had led to excesses; taxes had ruined the population; famine had sent many to their graves; and despair had led to uprisings.‘52 Virtually all French troops at home were either mutinous, because they lacked pay and food, or commanded by nobles in open defiance of the crown. Even areas that saw no fighting suffered from natural disasters. In Provence, the combination of plague and the highest grain prices of the century provoked almost 70 popular revolts; while in Picardy, local clergy visiting their parishioners found families too weak even to answer their door because they had not eaten for several days.53

  In February 1651, Anne bowed to the demands of both nobles and judges and released Condé and his colleagues; while Mazarin, fearing that the former prisoners would seek their revenge, fled ignominiously to Germany. He left Paris in chaos. On the one hand, torrential rains caused the Seine to burst its banks again, flooding many Parisians’ houses; on the other, the hundreds of aristocrats who had gathered to demand release of the three princes now created a forum, the ‘Assembly of Nobles’, wherein they could express their numerous grievances against the central government: non-payment of interest on bonds; lack of employment (and therefore salaries); repeated violation of their traditional immunity from taxation, recruiting and billeting. Unusually, the Assembly admitted no distinction of rank, so that its pronouncements (all printed and widely circulated) went out in the names of princes, peers, barons and ordinary gentlemen alike. Everyone took turns to preside at the daily meetings. The Assembly insisted that Anne convene the States-General, and in order to get the nobles to go home, she eventually promised to convene one on 8 September 1651.54

  It seems astonishing that the nobles took Anne's promise seriously, because the day before the scheduled meeting, Louis XIV would turn 14: when, according to French law, he would come of age and the regency would end. Although several groups optimistically drew up lists of grievances (Cahiers de doléances) the government did not even bother to issue writs to summon the deputies: the States-General would not meet again until 1789. Realizing that he had been duped, Condé fled Paris and signed a formal alliance with Philip IV. Soon afterwards, Anne and Louis also left the capital to join Mazarin, who had re-entered France at the head of a powerful contingent of German troops.

  The court's departure from Paris provoked another flood of Mazarinades: no fewer than 1,600 appeared in the course of 1652 – sometimes 10 published on the same day (see Fig. 33). As before, the pamphlets targeted Mazarin; so did a series of striking broadsheets affixed in public places. One of these took the form of a ‘wanted poster’, which sentenced the cardinal to death for the damage he had done to France: each copy came with a rope that passed through two holes around the cardinal's neck, so he could be hanged in effigy.55 Jansenists also now entered the fray, led by Robert Arnauld, brother of Antoine and Angélique, with a pamphlet entitled The Naked Truth, which offered a penetrating analysis of the origins of the Fronde that laid equal blame on Mazarin and Condé – and for good measure compared them with Cromwell, the ‘usurper and tyrant of England’ and ‘the Mohammed of this century’.56

  This second peak in the production of Mazarinades coincided with a new siege that produced starvation in the capital. Condé returned briefly in April 1652, hoping to create a new central government, but when his supporters seized the Hôtel de Ville and murdered his leading opponents, popular opinion turned against him. At one point scores of women gathered outside Condé's headquarters vociferously demanding peace. The prince got into a shouting match with the ‘peace women’ and unwisely accused them of accepting money from Mazarin: ‘We are not for hire,’ they shouted back, ‘unlike your murderers at the Hôtel de Ville.‘57 Condé fled from Paris again, and this time made for Bordeaux, where a coalition of craftsmen, lawyers and merchants had set up a city government, known as the Ormée, which sought inspiration and assistance from England. With the help of some English advisers, the city's leaders drew up a republican constitution as shouts of ‘No kings! No princes!’ echoed through the streets.58

  Meanwhile, Mazarin prepared a counter-attac
k. He persuaded a group of financiers to provide him with enough loans to win over some of the judges by paying their debts and granting them pensions, while Anne conferred lands and titles on potential supporters: 17 noble families became ‘peers of the realm (duc et pair)’, a relatively new and extremely rare honour. In October 1652, Louis XIV re-entered his capital and immediately held a lit de justice that annulled all legislation enacted by the Parlement over the previous four years. He also forbade the judges in future from meddling in ‘affairs of state and the management of finance'; prohibited any proceedings ‘against those whom the king has appointed to govern’ (such as Mazarin); abolished the ‘Chamber of Justice’ established in 1648 to investigate profiteering among the crown's bankers; and exiled his most obdurate critics.59

  Nevertheless, Louis still faced many domestic enemies. Guyenne remained in full revolt, supported by Spanish and British troops, while Condé and several regiments commanded by his clients and noble allies fought in the Spanish Netherlands alongside the troops of Philip IV. Above all, the Paris clergy openly opposed Mazarin after December 1652, when he arrested Pierre de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz and the designated successor (‘coadjutor’) of the archbishop of Paris. Although by no means Mazarin's only clerical critic – even Vincent de Paul, later sanctified for his pious life and works, demanded that the cardinal should abandon ministerial office – Retz took the lead in fomenting anti-government intrigue in the capital, first in the hope of replacing Mazarin as chief minister and then, as that prospect waned, with a view to turning France into a republic on the English model.60 From prison, Retz begged his noble relatives and clerical colleagues to organize an uprising that would secure his release, and a ‘clerical Fronde’ began among the parish clergy of Paris, almost all Jansenists who already resented the government's persecution of those who revered the Augustinus. In May 1653, Mazarin persuaded the pope to issue a bull that categorically condemned Jansenism, naming five propositions allegedly contained in Jansen's writings as heretical; but this tactic only served to intensify the opposition of the Paris priests – some 50 in number – who now assembled regularly to discuss the affairs of the archdiocese.61

  The ‘clerical Fronde’ drew strength from Mazarin's inability to crush his other opponents. Although royal troops forced the surrender of Bordeaux, ending the Ormée, Condé took command of Spain's armies in the Netherlands and in 1654 seemed poised to march on Paris. At the same time Retz escaped from prison, intending to rally his supporters once more. Hundreds of people converged on Notre Dame, where the cathedral chapter – in defiance of the government – sang a Te Deum to celebrate their hero's escape, but chance now saved Mazarin: while escaping, Retz fell and dislocated his shoulder and could not ride. Instead he had to rest and, during his recuperation, the Paris clergy attacked the Jesuits (many of them outspoken apologists for the government). These unseemly clerical disagreements unleashed the wickedly funny series of Provincial Letters by Blaise Pascal, which purported to explain the various controversies while discrediting virtually all the protagonists.

  Then came the landmark winter of 1657–8, followed by snowmelt augmented by torrential rains: many rivers burst their banks, including the Seine which flooded Paris for the third time in a decade. Since farmers could not sow their crops, the following harvest was very poor, forcing even Mazarin to recognize that, since he lacked the resources to mount another campaign, it was time to practise ‘the art of quitting when one is ahead’. In spring 1659 he accepted Philip IV's peace overtures and gained for France northern Catalonia and some areas in the South Netherlands (see chapter 9).62

  The Audit of War

  The quarter century of war, climatic adversity and political crisis between 1635 and 1659 reduced France to a shadow of its former self. The year 1652 saw the worst demographic crisis of the entire ancien régime. Grain prices in the capital rose so high that even charlatans failed to make a living – ‘I have not pulled a tooth or sold any of my magic powders for three months’, the most famous of them complained – while in the surrounding countryside, the combination of hostilities and harvest failure made the rural population ‘believe everything and fear everything’. At Port-Royal-des-Champs, Angélique Arnauld observed that ‘we see nothing but poor people who come and tell us that they have not eaten today, and some say they have not eaten for two or three days’.63 As soldiers destroyed crops, burnt houses and stole possessions, it seemed to Abbess Arnauld that ‘the war has ruined everything. Almost everyone is dead and the rest recruited and gone to the war, so we will have trouble tilling the fields for lack of labourers.’ The surviving parish registers confirm her bleak assessment. In one parish, the ‘great cruelties and great ravages’ of the troops, combined with poor weather, ‘forced the inhabitants to flee to safety, and 250 people died’ – a fourteen-fold increase in normal mortality – and, throughout the Île-de-France, burials soared while conceptions plummeted, leading demographers to conclude that ‘almost a quarter of the population vanished in the single year’ (Fig. 34).64

  34. War, climate and mortality in Ile-de-France during the seventeenth century.

  The records of Créteil, a village seven miles south-east of Paris, reveal a close link between climate and mortality throughout the seventeenth century: burials rose with the cold and rain of 1631 and 1693–4, and the heat wave of 1676. The worst demographic crisis of the village – indeed, of all Bourbon France – occurred in 1652 during the Fronde revolt, when a combination of floods, a catastrophic harvest, and military operations increased burials fourteen-fold.

  The exhaustive research of Pierre Goubert on the Beauvaisis, a region of rich farmland north of Paris, likewise revealed a ‘crisis – economic, social, demographic, physiological and moral – of an intensity and duration hitherto unknown’. Goubert noted that ‘For five consecutive years, from 1647 to 1651, agriculture was the victim of bad weather; the most disastrous harvests being those of 1649 and 1651'; and, he added, ‘The result was a steep rise and heavy extension of poverty and mortality, and a sharp fall in births.’ The population of the Beauvaisis fell in these years by about one-fifth and did not regain its pre-Fronde level until the mid-eighteenth century. The demographic crisis also produced a major change in landholding. On the one hand, ‘crushed by debt, the small peasants had to give up a large part of their land to their creditors'; on the other, the burgesses of Beauvais bought up ‘hundreds of hectares of land’ from impoverished peasants and nobles, while those able to produce more grain than they required sold it at a huge profit, which they used to buy up vacant freeholds and acquire leases on the numerous ecclesiastical estates of the region. ‘In short, the terrible years of 1647 to 1653, which decimated the Beauvaisis, left a profound mark on peasant society and decisively widened social differences.‘65

  Depopulation and devastation on this scale demoralized even the most resilient. ‘If one ever had to believe in the Last Judgment,’ wrote one Parisian in 1652, ‘I believe it is right now'; while the following year another claimed that ‘two-thirds of the inhabitants of the villages around Paris are dead of illness, want and misery’. Abbess Arnauld feared that the general desolation ‘must signify the end of the world'; while in 1655 the king's uncle Gaston of Orléans declared that ‘the Monarchy was finished: the kingdom could not survive in its present state. In all the Monarchies that had collapsed, decline began with movements similar to the ones he discerned [now]; and he launched into a long list of comparisons to prove his statement from past examples.‘66 Some historians have gone even further than the duke, suggesting that the plight of the French Monarchy during the Fronde was greater than in 1789, and that the territorial integrity of the kingdom might not have survived a Frondeur victory.67 Moreover, another disastrously wet winter and spring in 1661 caused another famine: the price of bread in the capital tripled, exceeding even the level during Condé's siege a decade before, while in many parts of the kingdom marriages fell by half, and conceptions by three-quarters. In all, Louis XIV may have lost an
other 500,000 subjects.68

  The Sun King

  Nevertheless, the French Monarchy survived the Fronde and Louis XIV became the most powerful ruler in western Europe. In part, this outcome arose from contingency. Abroad, France benefited from miscalculations by its enemies. Above all, the intransigence of Philip IV between 1648 and 1655, when he held the upper hand, saved Mazarin from having to trade land for peace, while Spain's eventual decision to concede virtually all its territorial losses appeared to vindicate the policies that the cardinal had pursued so recklessly. At home, Mazarin's most dangerous rivals either overplayed their hand (like Condé) or else lost the initiative at a critical moment (like Retz after he fell off his horse). Moreover, the various opponents of the crown lacked a single agenda: the judges, princes, nobles, clerics, urban patricians and popular leaders all stood for something different and often devoted more energy to destroying their erstwhile allies than to wresting concessions from the crown. Sometimes even individual groups splintered: in 1652 two of the leading Frondeur princes fought a duel that killed one of them (and both of his noble seconds). The movement also lacked a unifying ideology: Protestantism had become a spent force, while Jansenism still looked to Rome rather than to Paris for inspiration. Finally, the nobility was deeply divided between the hereditary (‘sword’) aristocracy and the newer ‘robe’ nobility, made up of judges and other royal officials who had purchased their exalted status. Had the States-General met in 1651, the ‘robe nobility’ would probably have sat with the urban delegates in the Third Estate (as they had done in 1614) rather than with the ‘sword nobility’ in the Second Estate (as they would do in 1789).