Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [181]
The most important event during Mazarin’s rule was a revolt known as the Fronde (FROHND). As a foreigner, Mazarin was greatly disliked by all elements of the French population. The nobles, who particularly resented the centralized administrative power being built up at the expense of the provincial nobility, temporarily allied with the members of the Parlement of Paris, who opposed the new taxes levied by the government to pay the costs of the Thirty Years’ War (Mazarin continued Richelieu’s anti-Habsburg policy), and with the masses of Paris, who were also angry at the additional taxes. The Parlement (par-luh-MAHNH) of Paris was the most important court in France, with jurisdiction over half of the kingdom, and its members formed the nobles of the robe, the service nobility of lawyers and administrators. These nobles of the robe led the first Fronde (1648–1649), which broke out in Paris and was ended by compromise. The second Fronde, begun in 1650, was led by the nobles of the sword, whose ancestors were medieval nobles. They were interested in overthrowing Mazarin for their own purposes: to secure their positions and increase their own power. The second Fronde was crushed by 1652, a task made easier when the nobles began fighting each other instead of Mazarin. With the end of the Fronde, the vast majority of the French concluded that the best hope for stability in France lay in the crown. When Mazarin died in 1661, the greatest of the seventeenth-century monarchs, Louis XIV, took over supreme power.
The Reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715)
The day after Cardinal Mazarin’s death, Louis XIV, age twenty-three, expressed his determination to be a real king and the sole ruler of France:
Up to this moment I have been pleased to entrust the government of my affairs to the late Cardinal. It is now time that I govern them myself. You [secretaries and ministers of state] will assist me with your counsels when I ask for them. I request and order you to seal no orders except by my command.… I order you not to sign anything, not even a passport … without my command; to render account to me personally each day and to favor no one.3
His mother, who was well aware of Louis’s proclivity for fun and games and getting into the beds of the maids in the royal palace, laughed aloud at these words. But Louis was quite serious.
Louis proved willing to pay the price of being a strong ruler. He established a conscientious routine from which he seldom deviated, but he did not look upon his duties as drudgery since he considered his royal profession “grand, noble, and delightful.” Eager for glory (in the French sense of achieving what was expected of one in an important position), Louis created a grand and majestic spectacle at the court of Versailles (vayr-SY). Consequently, Louis and his court came to set the standard for monarchies and aristocracies all over Europe. Just a few decades after the king’s death, the great French writer Voltaire dubbed the period from 1661 to 1715 the “Age of Louis XIV,” and historians have tended to call it that ever since.
Although Louis may have believed in the theory of absolute monarchy and consciously fostered the myth of himself as the Sun King, the source of light for all of his people, historians are quick to point out that the realities fell far short of the aspirations. Despite the centralizing efforts of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, seventeenth-century France still possessed a bewildering system of overlapping authorities. Provinces had their own regional courts, their own local Estates, their own sets of laws. Members of the high nobility, with their huge estates and clients among the lesser nobility, still exercised much authority. Both towns and provinces possessed privileges and powers seemingly from time immemorial that they would not easily relinquish.
ADMINISTRATION OF THE GOVERNMENT One of the keys to Louis’s power was that