France

E2

b

The Fronde

At virtually the same time that France was concluding its involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, the revolt known as the Fronde erupted in Paris. The crisis began when the monarchy ordered the Parlement of Paris to register a package of fiscal measures, including tax hikes. If the parlement failed to register the package, the monarchy threatened to suppress payments on the parlement’s venal offices and revoke the paulette, the tax that allowed venal offices to be inherited. The parlement not only protested against the package, it also demanded the reduction of the intendants’ powers and the approval of the parlements to new taxes. When the monarchy arrested one leading member of parlement, mass demonstrations broke out in Paris, forcing Anne and her family to leave the city. A compromise that favored the parlement was reached in March 1649.

But disorders that had festered for years in the countryside now exploded, as the return of plague and hunger revived memories of the not-so-distant Wars of Religion. Leading nobles, including Gaston, Louis de Bourbon prince de Condé, and Armand de Bourbon prince de Conti, joined the conflict and struggled for position. In the chaos, thousands of pamphlets, the Mazarinades, were circulated in Paris, attacking the cardinal and foreigners in general. Mazarin withdrew to Cologne in 1651, from where he continued to direct Anne until he returned the next year. Condé assumed leadership of anti-Mazarin forces and made an alliance with Spain.

At this point, the parlement withdrew to a more moderate position, and Paris turned against Condé. Condé’s internally divided faction failed to develop a coherent alternative to royal absolutism and lost ground on the battlefield. The Fronde slowly collapsed in 1652, allowing Louis XIV to return to Paris. Louis had celebrated his 13th birthday a year earlier and could thereby legally assume responsibility for the state. Although the Fronde petered out, resistance continued for some years. This resistance took the form of tax strikes and religious opposition to Mazarin. This opposition was based in Paris and led by Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, and a dissident Catholic movement, the Jansenists (see Jansenism). Despite his travails, Mazarin, who died in 1661, had proved a worthy successor to his patron, Richelieu.

The Fronde clearly illuminated fault lines in the structure of the French monarchy that made it more brittle than it sometimes seemed. Yet it had little permanent effect on the state. If anything, the Fronde, like the far more devastating religious wars, gave further impetus to the growth of state power by demonstrating the need for a strong monarchy to maintain order.

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Louis XIV was fortunate to come of age just as the armed insurrection of the Fronde was crumbling and France’s principal foreign enemies since the early 16th century—Spain and the Holy Roman Empire—were in sharp decline. Historians debate whether Louis took full advantage of these opportunities. But it is clear that during his long reign, France assumed a leading position in Europe, both politically and culturally.

E2

c

Foreign Policy

After Mazarin died and the king assumed personal responsibility for running the state, Louis’s foreign policy led France into four wars: the War of the Devolution (1667-1668); the Dutch War (1672-1678); the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-1697), also called the Nine Years’ War; and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). These wars were increasingly long and costly and generated anti-French propaganda. They earned Louis a reputation for reckless, overweening ambition and cruel tyranny that he has never entirely lost. Most modern historians now take a more balanced view. Louis did bully and threaten weaker powers, such as the Dutch, and occasionally terrorized an area, as in 1688 and 1689 when he devastated the Palatinate, the area west of the Rhine River in Germany. But he was also capable of moderation. It now appears that—aside from achieving personal glory—his primary goal was not, as opponents alleged, to conquer Europe, but rather to secure France’s vulnerable borders.

The main such area was the long-contested, ragged eastern border with Germany and the Netherlands. Here, Louis made possibly his most critical blunder when he abandoned the old Dutch alliance against the Spanish and unnecessarily threatened and then attacked the Netherlands in 1672. The Dutch responded by striking new alliances at various times with Sweden, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and England. In 1689 England joined dynastically with the Netherlands under William of Orange. These alliances eventually wore down French forces and contained French ambitions.

The succession in Spain became a critical issue in 1700, when the Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, died without a direct heir. Before he died, he deeded the Spanish throne to Louis’s grandson, Philip, duc d’Anjou. Louis could hardly refuse the chance to break the old Habsburg vise around France. He accepted Charles’s will, although he thereby aroused great fears in England and the Netherlands that France and Spain would eventually merge into one superpower. War might have been averted, but Louis precipitated it by reasserting Philip’s rights to the French throne before Philip assumed the Spanish throne and by moving aggressively in the Spanish Netherlands (roughly present-day Belgium).

The result was the War of Spanish Succession, in which France suffered a string of humiliating defeats. Only at the end of the war did France manage to restore some military balance. The Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713, and subsequent treaties gave international recognition to Philip’s accession to the Spanish throne (Philip V (of Spain)). But Spain relinquished its rights to the Spanish Netherlands and its Italian possessions, which went to Austria. To win international recognition, Philip had to renounce his rights to the French throne, although he soon renounced this renunciation. France had acquired the eastern province of Franche-Comté earlier, and the Treaty of Utrecht confirmed France’s acquisition of Alsace and Strasbourg.

Although hardly overwhelming in scale, Louis’s territorial acquisitions were important and prepared the way for further rounding out France’s eastern frontier. The transfer of the Spanish throne from Habsburg to Bourbon hands was arguably even more significant. It removed a base of hostile operations on France’s southern border that had long caused trouble. It also led to the formation of an advantageous diplomatic and military alliance with Spain during the 18th century. Thus, France did benefit from Louis’s foreign and military policies, even if these wars cost heavily in terms of lives, money, and ultimately European public opinion.

E2

d

Domestic Policies

Louis XIV’s domestic policies are harder to evaluate. The pursuit of war put heavy financial demands on the state. In response, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who managed the state’s finances until he died in 1683, pushed through a series of financial reforms. However, he was not able to correct the fundamental weaknesses of the state’s fiscal system. He streamlined the process of tax collection by creating the unified General Tax Farm, an organization composed of collectors of indirect taxes, and by making the intendants responsible for gathering direct taxes, which he tried to make more equitable. Colbert was a mercantilist—that is, someone who believed that the wealth of the world was more or less fixed and that to increase its revenues the government should actively work to expand production, enhance exports, and limit imports. Among his reforms, he lowered internal tolls, raised tariff barriers to imported goods, and established and granted state monopolies to commercial and manufacturing enterprises (see Mercantilism). Although most of these state companies failed, Colbert did bring a temporary order to state finances. This order was disrupted after Colbert’s death, when Louis’s wars also became longer and more expensive.

By the end of Louis XIV’s reign, the monarchy was so financially squeezed that it adopted one desperate, old, and dubious fiscal measure after the other in attempts to cover expenses. These included contracting massive loans, selling venal offices merely to raise revenue, and tampering with the currency. But the crown also experimented with new, more promising initiatives. These initiatives included the capitation—the first nearly universal tax levied according to status and income—and the Council of Commerce, an advisory board on trade policy that included merchants.

E2

e

French Colonial Empire

By the late 17th century, a French colonial empire began to take shape. Although some French traders and fishermen had ventured overseas earlier, the French colonial empire effectively began under Francis I. He supported French voyages of exploration along the Atlantic coast of North America and in the Canadian interior. Sponsored by trading companies enjoying state monopolies, the first permanent French settlements were made in the Americas under Henry IV. The explorations of Samuel de Champlain led to the founding of Québec City in 1608 as a fur-trading post. Competition with England arose immediately, and in 1613 the English attacked a French encampment in present-day Maine. Both powers allied with opposing factions among the Native American tribes, thereby amplifying the conflict (see New France).

Under Louis XIII, the first French colonies in the Caribbean were established in Martinique and Guadeloupe. At first these colonies relied on indentured white servants for labor in the sugarcane fields, but gradually they shifted to African slaves. Colbert sought to breathe new life into colonial trade and settlement by amalgamating established trading companies and by forcing the pace of migration to the colonies. Neither the unified trading companies, including the French East India Company (see East India Company) based in India, nor the settlement policies were noticeably successful. Although French explorers continued to widen French claims in North America, the French population of Canada in the 1680s stood at only about 10,000. Partly for this reason and partly because the French navy was weak, England was able to seize Nova Scotia and the asiento—the right to sell slaves in the Spanish colonies—from France by the early 18th century.

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f

Louis’s Absolutism

The authoritarian quality of Louis’s rule has often been exaggerated. Louis certainly did enhance the cult of royal authority. He did this most conspicuously through his belligerent foreign policy and the grandiose court he built at Versailles, which he located away from the people and political pressures of Paris. Versailles and its lifestyle elevated the private person of the Sun King, as Louis was called. Thousands of courtiers focused attention on his every activity from morning to night. The nation’s best and brightest intellectuals and artists were enlisted to enhance Louis’s glory in historical writing, music, poetry, art, and architecture, all of which flourished under his reign. So brilliantly did Versailles shine that knowledge of French culture and language became common among elites across Europe. Louis also increased surveillance of and control over his subjects by building up the military, creating a Parisian police force, and tightening the system of book censorship.

At the same time, Louis normally sought to rule by way of negotiation and compromise, not by intimidation and command. Although the Parlement of Paris lost its right to protest before registering royal edicts in 1672, Louis often consulted the parlement when advancing his initiatives. Similarly, in dealing with local matters, Louis’s government did not undermine the wealth and status of traditional French elites. Rather, it enhanced these elites to the point of sharing tax revenues. Versailles itself, although a showcase for the crown, also served the interests of the courtiers. They came there not only to watch Louis dress, but also to earn pensions, win government appointments, and gain public confirmation of their privileged status. Moreover, the Versailles court was only one pillar of aristocratic social life. Another was Paris, where aristocrats mixed more freely with middle-class intellectuals and socialites in informal, private gatherings called salons, which prominent women held in their homes.

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