Louis XIV
Page 6
All through this confused and tumultuous year, Anne of Austria had to rely on two divergent sources of advice: Far away in Bruhl, Mazarin wrote letter after letter telling the regent what to do, while, right in Paris, she relied on the newly reconciled Gondi. This time, the cardinal’s hat was not merely promised him: The French Ambassador in Rome was ordered to ask the pope for the promotion, so Gondi helped the queen whittle down Monsieur le Prince’s power and popularity; since he had so recently belonged to the party he was now fighting and knew its weaknesses, he was quite effective.
Then there was Turenne. Now that Condé was free again, he veered back toward the Crown. “Monsieur le Prince came to see M. de Turenne as soon as he knew he had arrived, took him to the Louvre and thence to dinner with him, after which there was the usual gathering at the Hôtel de Longueville; but M. de Turenne, after that day, would go there no more because he had quickly realized that only private interests mattered.”41 As for the king, he, too, played his part in this imbroglio. Anne of Austria now took him into her confidence, and he helped her by being especially amiable to those - Condé first and foremost - whom she was trying to fool.
It soon began to work: Condé in jail had had great appeal; Condé in person was as haughty and quarrelsome as ever. It was in the midst of this swirl of alliances made and broken that a most important event took place: On September 5, 1651, Louis XIV reached his thirteenth birthday, the age at which the king, in France, ceased being a minor.
Of course, there were great and appropriately splendid celebrations. During a grand cavalcade all through Paris, “His Majesty, dressed in clothes so heavily embroidered with gold that one could see neither the fabric nor the color, seemed so tall that it was hard to believe he was not yet fourteen.”42 There was a séance royale at the Parlement in the course of which Anne of Austria officially ended her regency, and the king, having been proclaimed of age, told her: “Madame, I thank you for the care you were pleased to take of my education and the administration of my realm. Pray continue giving me your advice; I wish that, after myself, you be the head of my Council.”43 And once the ceremonies were over, nothing much was seen to have changed; as Mme de Motteville commented: “The King’s majority did not give the Queen the peace she had expected; but it gave her strength with which to face a second war.”44
Ostensibly, Louis XIV was now to begin his rule: All the acts of the government would bear his name instead of the queen’s; disobedience to the government would be an affront to the king’s person. That was unquestionably a help; at the same time, it was perfectly plain that, although mature beyond his years, the monarch would do no more than carry out his mother’s policies.
Just how well the combination would work was almost immediately put to the test. After much urging from his sister, Mme de Longueville, his brother, the prince de Conti, and his friend, M. de Marcillac, Condé left Paris, signed a treaty with Spain, and started a new civil war: After Turenne, now mercifully back doing his duty, Condé, the First Prince of the Blood Royal, had formed an alliance with the enemy against his own sovereign, all for the sole purpose of forcing the queen to grant him even more favors than he had been offered in the negotiations held to avert a break.
At first, it looked as if Condé’s rebellion would be short-lived; although a number of provinces followed the prince, it was expected that they would return to normal once the king appeared in person, so at the head of a small army, Louis XIV, Anne of Austria, and the Court set out toward the Southwest, while Monsieur stayed sulking in Paris. That had at least one happy consequence: At long last, and without difficulty, the king was able to leave Paris, nor, expecting as he did to return at the head of a triumphant army, did he foresee any repetition of the humiliating incidents of January 1651.
Those expectations were well on their way to being realized when, yet again, the whole picture suddenly changed. In an effort to solidify the peace, the regent had agreed to outlaw Mazarin as her last official act. With the king fully of age, the rationale for the Fronde had become obsolete, and Condé’s latest adventure looked simply like the greed of an overambitious prince; it was thus unlikely to attract much support. If, however, Mazarin were to return, people would feel they had been duped by the government, Condé’s cause would become popular, and the war would start in earnest. It would therefore seem that Mazarin’s recall was the one mistake to avoid.
But that was just what the queen and king proceeded to do. It may not seem surprising that Anne of Austria should have recalled the minister she trusted and admired (it says a good deal about her sense of gratitude, since she could have let things remain as they were and turned instead to Gondi), but that Louis XIV should have sent the cardinal a notably warm letter requires an explanation, especially since he was now in a position to refuse approval to any of his mother’s official acts.
The simple fact is that, as they left Paris, the queen and king faced a crucial choice: Mazarin’s exile had been forced on them by the Parlement and the great nobles; if it were allowed to continue, the monarchy would suffer a defeat all the more serious in that the Declaration of 1648, transferring many of the king’s powers to the Parlement, was still in effect, and, clearly, any future minister who displeased the same people was likely to suffer a similar fate. Under those conditions, Louis XIV, unable to govern as he saw fit, would have been king in name only. Still, had the cardinal been a dishonest or incompetent minister, his recall would hardly have been worth its consequences. It is because both Anne of Austria and Louis XIV were convinced of the contrary that they both felt it essential to recall the one man who could help them not only in reestablishing the traditional power of the Crown but also in concluding the kind of peace with Spain for which France had been fighting. Well aware of the risks, they chose present difficulty because it was the best road to future success.
As Mazarin, along with a little army of 8,000 soldiers paid by himself, made his way toward Poitiers, where he was to meet the Court, the expected happened. An anonymous correspondent of Condé’s, who reported to the prince from Paris on January 27, 1652, makes the situation very clear: “M. d’Orléans has received a letter from the King in which His Majesty informs him that he could not without injustice deny M. le Cardinal permission to come back and justify himself or refuse the help he was bringing. That is why He asks him to share his feelings, and to join the Court where he would be very welcome. M. d’Orléans answered that he could not go to court if M. le Cardinal returned, and that he would do whatever he could to prevent his presence in office. To that end, I hear that on Wednesday evening a Treaty of Union will be signed by Mme d’Orléans, who has a power of attorney from her brother, the duc de Lorraine, with M. d’Orléans, in which M. de Longueville and Monsieur le Prince will also be parties. It is thought that the duc de Lorraine will come in person at the head of his troops, and that M. de Beaufort* will command those of His Royal Highness … Mademoiselle is raising two thousand men and will pay for them herself …
“Thursday, at the Parlement, a decree was voted to send the King new written remonstrances and that no peer or marshal of France would be received† until the declaration given against M. le Cardinal had been carried out.”45 The Fronde was, once again, well under way. Worse, it looked as if it might succeed.
The king of Spain, who for once acted promptly, sent troops to Paris even as he reconquered Catalonia, and these met with the little army under the duc de Beaufort, while in Paris Monsieur traded on his prestige as a royal prince to close the capital to his nephew: By May 1652, the rebels could claim, rightly, that their forces were several times stronger than the king’s, and that, further, they were led by one of the two greatest generals in France.
Luckily for the Court, however, it, too, had a few important strengths. Turenne, now firmly committed to the king, was appointed to command the royal troops: Mazarin could not have made a better choice, and the rebel troops were led by frivolous, often incompetent officers so that Condé’s orders were often poorl
y carried out. On March 13, 1652, for instance, the prince wrote his friend the marquis de Jarzé: “The comte d’Harcourt came yesterday with all his troops right in the middle of the area where all my troops were encamped because the guards I had ordered posted did not do their duty; that is why my troops could not be mustered and so I had to recross the Garonne instead of giving battle … I write you all this hastily so that you can withdraw your own troops.”46 Obviously, this sort of disorganization gave the king’s army a substantial chance. And finally, there was the mystique attached to the person of the king: Even at the worst moments, its power could not be ignored.
Still, in June and early July, the Court’s position was almost desperate. Among the many sources confirming this distress, we can turn to one particularly expert witness: the young duke of York, Charles I’s second son, who knew at first hand just how monarchies perished. “At the beginning of that year [1652],” he wrote in his memoirs, “the Court was reduced to the last extremities: few subjects were faithful to their King; even those whose very self-interest ought to have tied them closely to the salvation of the state were the main instruments of the troubles which were rending it under the specious pretext, which has ever been that of rebellious men, that they wanted to remove bad advisers from the King’s councils. In order to make this complaint more plausible, they especially attacked the minister [Mazarin], shouting that it was shameful to see France governed by a foreigner while so many princes of the blood royal were both more entitled and abler than the Cardinal to carry on the government. These princes led the protesters, and they were followed by most of the nobles and the most important people in the realm. The largest cities and most of the Parlements* had joined their ranks; and although the duc de Longueville belonged to no party, it was well known that he leaned toward the princes, and Normandy† with him, and that he only pretended to be neutral so as to join the strongest party without risk to himself.”47 Obviously, this situation was an all too familiar one for the young man.
Turenne himself knew that the situation was well-nigh desperate. “The Court was in extreme trouble,” he wrote. “[T]he King’s army numbered no more than eight thousand men; that of the princes, in Paris, had five thousand, and the Spaniards, together with the army from Lorraine, came up to twenty thousand men. Normandy refused to receive the King. The evening this news reached the Court, M. de Turenne … learned that it had decided to retreat towards Burgundy … He immediately said that if that was the case, everything would be lost.”48 Turenne was perfectly right: Once a Spanish army moved into Paris, it would not soon come out again; as for the fleeing king, he ran every chance of eventual capture by superior forces. Clearly, the time had come for audacity, and it was Louis XIV’s luck that the leader of his small army was a man whose extreme coolness in battle was allied to the soundest military judgment of the age. At Turenne’s urging, therefore, it was decided to fight Condé’s army and move to Compiègne, some fifty miles north of Paris, where the Spanish army could be cut off from its bases in the Netherlands. On April 7, 1652, the battle was engaged near the little village of Bléneau; the forces in presence numbered some 15,000 men; only a few hundred men were killed, but by evening, Turenne’s superior organization had prevailed. Condé retreated instead of the Court, and the monarchy, for the moment at least, was saved. As for Condé, he returned to Paris, which he now took over from Monsieur.
Although not yet fourteen, Louis XIV was anything but an idle spectator of all these convulsions. Already he had stunned a delegation of the Parlement by tearing up, without reading them, the remonstrances it had brought to him. Now, when the rebel princes sent an embassy to him, instead of negotiating the kind of peace that would have left them all-powerful, he simply told the ambassadors that they would have to talk to his minister; when they answered that their instructions forbade their ever meeting Mazarin, he ordered them to follow him and took them in to the minister himself.
The king’s intense and personal resentment of the Frondeurs was caused by what he saw, rightly, as their assault against the powers of the Crown, but he was also well aware that, because of the grandees’ whims, his people were suffering greatly. Armies, in the seventeenth century, were almost as devastating as the worst of natural catastrophes; looting, arson, rape, murder - these usual accompaniments of all military operation left the countryside ravaged and deserted, nor was the royal army less at fault, in this respect, than that of the Fronde. Already in 1652, Louis XIV felt directly responsible for the welfare of his subjects. His correspondence with Turenne on this topic is all the more eloquent in that his fortunes were at their lowest ebb: He might be forgiven for worrying more about his own future than that of the peasants in the area of operations. That he didn’t, at so desperate a time, says a great deal about his notion of what it was to be a king.
Thus, on April 28, he was writing the commander in chief: “I receive complaints from every quarter about the extreme disorders caused by the troops in my army … who pillage through towns and country and do not even spare noble houses.”49 Again in May, he tried to protect his subjects: “It is with great displeasure that I have received a complaint from the inhabitants of Melun, which is that on the eleventh of this month sixty to eighty German cavalry men, or some other foreign troops belonging to my army, of which you are in command, took a hundred and fifty cows from the neighborhood of the same town whose inhabitants had already lost several plow horses which were taken from them; and when several of the most notable men of this town went, with the poor people to whom the cows belonged, all of them unarmed, to recover them from the soldiers who had stolen them, offering money, they [the soldiers] killed in cold blood several of the said inhabitants and of the poor people who were with them.”50 For a thirteen-year-old king beset by the most serious troubles himself, this letter is impressive, indeed.
Faced with the seemingly impossible situation which confronted him, Louis XIV might have gone one of two ways: Many a boy his age would simply have retreated from the world and let his mother cope with the countless problems which afflicted the government. For Louis, however, this reaction simply was not a possibility: Only the other way seemed to him both fruitful and honorable. Now that he was no longer a minor, he felt that the fate of the monarchy rested on his shoulders. Of course, there could be no question of his assuming power alone: He knew very well that he was too young and inexperienced for that, but the very act of retaining Mazarin, whom he had the power to dismiss, spoke volumes. The minister implemented - and determined - the government’s policy, but only with the approval of the king.
Still, in spite of all those weighty decisions, he remained an exuberant boy. “At Corbeil,” La Porte noted, “the King had Monsieur* sleep in his bedroom even though it was so small that only one person could get through at a time. In the morning, when they woke up, the King, without thinking, spat on Monsieur’s bed, who immediately and on purpose spat on the King’s. The King, a little angry now, spat in Monsieur’s face. Monsieur then leapt on the King’s bed and pissed on it; the King did the same on Monsieur’s bed … and soon after they grappled and started to fight. During this affray I did what I could to stop the King, but since I got nowhere, I called for M. de Villeroy who put a stop to it all. Monsieur had become angry much faster than the King, but the King was much harder to appease than Monsieur.”51 Besides the eloquent comment on the difference between the two brothers’ characters, this text is interesting in that it shows how simple, not to say poverty-stricken, the life of the royal family had become.
As spring drew into summer, the situation looked as if it might be improving. Mazarin suggested to the queen that she agree to his dismissal against the right concessions - essentially the abrogation by the Parlement of the Declaration of 1648. Needless to say, this accord was to be only a sham and the cardinal was to be recalled as soon as the government was a little stronger. In the meantime, on July 2, the royal army prepared to fight before Paris. At first, it looked as if Condé had been beaten, but th
e gates of Paris opened just in time to save the prince’s army, then closed as the king’s troops were reaching them. The king had been deprived of a decisive victory through the intervention of the Parisians led by none other than Mademoiselle, his cousin, who reveled in her newfound military role. More infuriating still, a few hours later, when a charge by Condé’s army was broken up by Turenne’s troops, and it looked as if victory were finally at hand, smoke was seen to rise from the towers of the Bastille, near which the fighting was taking place: Mademoiselle, once again in charge, had ordered the guns of the old fortress to fire on her cousin’s army. This time, there was no overcoming the setback, and the fight ended in failure. The Fronde, which had nearly seen its last day, was given a new lease on life.
As for the king, he never forgot that a combination of his cousins - Condé and Mademoiselle - with most of the great nobles had nearly cost him the throne. Despite what the Frondeurs thought, times had changed. Even the imperious Richelieu had assumed that putting up with the princes’ endless plots and rebellions was simply a fact of life: Time after time, Monsieur had betrayed Louis XIII and been forgiven. Now, for the first time in French history, the king looked at the games played by his relatives and neither forgave nor forgot.
Bad as the Court’s situation might be, however, that of the two princes was even worse. The judges of the Parlement, who had watched their country estates being burned and pillaged by both armies, and who stood to lose even more if the war continued, were willing to submit to the king provided only that Mazarin was dismissed; that would leave both Condé and the duc d’Orléans high and dry, unable to negotiate from a position of strength. So together, they provoked riots by accusing the Parlement of having become pro-Mazarin; upon which, after some bloodshed, part of that tribunal fled Paris, settled itself in Pontoise, and worked on a reconciliation with the king. While in Paris, on July 20, the rump appointed Monsieur lieutenant general - i.e. dictator - and Condé commander in chief of all the armies.