The Fronde
France fought a five-year civil war against its own government while Louis XIV was a child, and it shaped everything he did afterwards. The name comes from a sling used by Paris street boys to throw stones at carriages. The first phase, from 1648, was parliamentary. The parlement of Paris, a court rather than a legislature, refused to register Mazarin's tax edicts and issued a programme demanding an end to arbitrary imprisonment, the suppression of the intendants and no new taxes without registration — which is close to what the English parliament was demanding in the same years, and Charles I was executed in January 1649 in the middle of it. Barricades went up in August 1648 when the government arrested a popular magistrate, and the court fled the capital at night in January 1649. The second phase was aristocratic and worse. Condé, the greatest French general of the age, changed sides twice, allied with Spain, and fought a battle in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in 1652 in which his cousin the Grande Mademoiselle turned the Bastille's guns on the royal army. The provinces were fought over, peasants starved, and the great nobles negotiated with the enemy. Paris turned against Condé, Mazarin returned, and the king entered his capital in October 1652 at fourteen. What he took from it was that the nobility and the parlements were dangerous and that he would never share power or live in Paris. Versailles is the answer to the Fronde. The comparison with England is the instructive part. The two crises began within a few years of each other over the same question of who may tax, and the English one produced a king's execution and a permanent parliamentary check, while the French one discredited resistance so thoroughly that absolutism was unopposed for a century.
- Year: 1648 CE
- Category: Political
