France

E1

a

Henry IV

Henry IV’s most obvious task after 1598 was to pursue the process of pacification in a still bitterly divided France. This process began at home. To ensure his succession, Henry had his childless marriage to Margaret annulled in 1599 and then married Marie de Médicis, an Italian princess. Marie, who was sympathetic to the Holy League, bore him three sons and three daughters in the next ten years.

To bring order to the state, Henry imposed his will on the parlements and other state agencies. Through the efforts of his superintendent of finance, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully, he restored France’s fiscal health. He made tax collection more efficient, established the paulette—a tax that allowed venal (purchased) offices to be inherited—and reduced the interest rate on state loans. He also improved the state’s credit rating by resuming state payments on the debt, which had lapsed for more than a decade. By avoiding major military conflicts, Henry kept financial demands on the state at a minimum. As a result, he was able to lower general taxes.

Tax reductions and the restoration of peace helped generate a mild economic boom, which contrasted sharply with conditions in previous years, when hunger, wolves, and freebooting military bands stalked the countryside. France’s recovery and Henry’s buoyant personality made him popular with his contemporaries, and despite his many mistresses and nine bastard children, Henry was held up as a model king for centuries. The ugly aftershocks of the Wars of Religion were far from spent, however. On May 14, 1610, Henry was assassinated by François Ravaillac, a Catholic zealot who had been inspired by the Holy League.

E1

b

Louis XIII and Richelieu

Henry’s death left the state in the unsteady hands of Marie de Médicis. She was appointed regent for her eldest son, Louis XIII, who was nine years old. Marie leaned in the direction of the parti dévot (devout party), a loose regrouping of league elements plus the Jesuits and other monastic orders. Benefiting from a widespread resurgence of Catholic devotion in Europe, the dévots favored renewed efforts to eradicate Protestantism. They thus supported an alliance with the Habsburgs, champions of the Counter Reformation who had also been partners with the Holy League.

---

---

After relying upon more moderate ministers, Marie turned to dévot Concino Concini as her chief adviser. The result was Louis’s marriage to Anne of Austria, daughter of the Spanish king, and his sister’s marriage to Anne’s brother. Concini’s rise irritated many nobles, some of whom began courting the Protestants. A meeting of the Estates-General in 1614 failed to resolve outstanding issues. This failure is one reason why the Estates-General did not meet again until 1789.

In 1617 Louis seized control of the state. He had Concini imprisoned and later killed, exiled his mother to Blois, and recalled many of Henry IV’s advisers. But these measures hardly helped the Protestants, for Louis now took the initiative against them. Between 1620 and 1622, he personally led several military campaigns against Protestants, with the result that by 1625 all Protestant strongholds, except La Rochelle, had collapsed.

In 1624 Armand Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, was appointed to the royal council. Acting much like a prime minister, he immediately became a commanding figure and soon formed a lasting partnership with Louis. Strongly influenced by the Holy League, Richelieu was a protégé of Marie de Médici and supported further measures against the Protestants. In 1628 La Rochelle, a Protestant stronghold fortified by the English, was successfully assaulted. This success paved the way for the long-sought unification of the kingdom and imposition of the Catholic faith. After 1629 Richelieu left the Protestants alone, and during succeeding decades they were victimized far less than they had been during the previous century. But their situation again deteriorated in the 1660s under pressure from the monarchy.

Richelieu’s restraint against the Protestants infuriated the dévots, and so did his foreign policy. Because the Habsburgs threatened France’s eastern and southwestern borders, Richelieu concluded that France had to support the Protestant German princes, who since 1618 had been battling the Catholic Habsburg alliance in the Thirty Years’ War. Richelieu resorted to force abroad only gradually. In the 1620s he fought for French interests in Savoy against the Spaniards, but France did not openly declare war on Spain and the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor until 1635.

The war went badly at first. In 1636 Spanish forces invaded eastern France—the second Spanish intervention in France in 50 years. But Spain was eventually driven out, and the French went on the offensive in the late 1630s. By Richelieu’s death in 1642, France had conquered Alsace in the east and Roussillon in the south. Under Richelieu’s successor, Jules Cardinal Mazarin, France made peace with the Holy Roman Empire in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and with Spain in the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. These treaties recognized French acquisitions in Alsace, Artois, Picardy, Lorraine, and Roussillon. They also established the legal basis for continued French interference in the empire. Henceforth, France had the authority to thwart any Habsburg effort to expand imperial control of Germany. Of all the major participants, France clearly lost the least and gained the most from the Thirty Years’ War. From 1659 to 1713 France dominated Europe in much the same way that Spain had a century earlier.

Religious conflict and foreign war provided the occasion and the excuse to build the French state. Following no preconceived, coherent plan, Richelieu extended many well-established practices, but he also promoted bureaucratic procedures that were more modern. Thus, he created a large clientele of officials immediately loyal to him. He increased the number of venal officeholders, who in some years provided as much as 40 percent of all royal revenues. At the same time, he made important innovations. For example, he regularized the use and extended the responsibilities of nonvenal administrators called intendants, who oversaw the monarchy’s operations within provincial districts known as généralités.

Richelieu was very much aware of the cultural dimensions of building the state. He established the Académie Française (see French Academy), an organization of 40 literary scholars responsible for standardizing the French language. The Académie produced the official French dictionary. Richelieu was also a master propagandist who employed a stable of writers to justify French policies at home and abroad.

Richelieu’s achievements and his policies won him important enemies, particularly among the dévots, of whom he had once been a member. In 1630 a group of dévots—including Marie de Médicis; the king’s brother Gaston, duc d’Orléans; and the minister Michel de Marillac and his brother, Louis de Marillac—lobbied Louis to dismiss Richelieu. After wavering temporarily, Louis instead turned on the dévots during the Day of Dupes in November 1630. Michel de Marillac was imprisoned and his brother was beheaded. Gaston went into temporary exile, while Marie left France forever. Gaston was involved in two more coups directed against Richelieu—one in 1632 and one in 1642—but neither was any more successful than the first. Richelieu died in 1642, master of France, and his patron and partner, Louis XIII, died a year later.

E

2

Louis XIV

Richelieu and Louis left behind a monarchy more imposing than it had ever been. But they also left behind a heavy burden, particularly since the new king, Louis XIV, who reigned from 1643 to 1715, was only four years old at his accession, and France once again fell under a regency.

E2

a

The Regency

Regency government almost always meant weak royal authority. This regency also suffered from the fact that it was headed by two foreigners—the king’s Spanish mother, Anne of Austria, and Jules Cardinal Mazarin, an Italian-born protégé of Richelieu. Although Mazarin was a wily strategist, he and Anne faced awesome tasks. They had to prosecute the as-yet-unconcluded wars with the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. They also had to deal with spreading resistance to rising taxes imposed to pay for war. During Richelieu’s administration, direct taxes had nearly tripled. Refusal to pay taxes and peasant revolts directed against the state’s fiscal policies had become commonplace by the 1630s. Despite rising revenues, Mazarin and Anne had to cope with an impending state bankruptcy. At the same time, they had to handle a growing conflict between venal officeholders and the intendants. Finally, they had to deal with the legacy of Richelieu’s heavy-handed policies and uneven distribution of state patronage, which had alienated powerful members of the nobility. The nobility now sought to cash in on the government’s apparent weakness.

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.

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.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain