The Bourbon Kings of France (10 page)

So much has been written about Louis XIV that it is impossible to think of him without prejudice. Many have admired him extravagantly, and as many have detested him no less fervently. It is not easy to distinguish the man from the King. He lived so completely in public that he almost ceased to exist as a private individual.

Louis ascended the throne in 1643, at the age of four and a half. He was already conscious of his superiority to other mortals; when Cinq Mars had presumptuously picked him up in his nursery, Louis had kicked and screamed till he was set down again. Even as a child he possessed a marked sense of theatre and must have relished his presentation to the Parlement in their red robes and bonnets. Their President, M Omar Talon, went on his knees before the boy to tell him that, to the lawyers, his chair of state represented ‘the throne of the Living God’, and that ‘the realm’s estates pay you honour and duty as they would to a God who can be seen’.

Anne of Austria swiftly persuaded the Parlement to set aside the late King’s will, which had left her only the title of Regent while giving the substance of power to a council of advisers. Like Marie de Medici, she meant to be all-powerful, and like Marie de Medici, real power lay with an Italian favourite. But there was little resemblance between the Concini and Giulio Mazzarini, better known as Cardinal Mazarin. This low-born adventurer, who was reputed to be the grandson of a Sicilian fisherman, had combined the careers of soldier, diplomat and cleric, first in the Papal service and then in the French, winning the approval of Louis XIII and Richelieu who obtained the Red Hat for him (though he only took minor orders and was never a priest). Where Richelieu had been nervous and harsh, Mazarin was suave and charming. His character was subtler, more accommodating. Never discouraged or depressed, his motto was ‘Time is on my side’. Tall, fair-haired and handsome—Richelieu said he looked like Buckingham—he knew how to please women. Anne of Austria was completely captivated: as Voltaire put it, ‘He had such dominion over her as a clever man may well have over a woman born with sufficient weakness to be ruled and sufficient obstinacy to persist in her choice.’ Even so, the court was taken by surprise when the Regent confirmed him in his post of First Minister.

No one expected Mazarin to continue in office for very long. The opposition which had plagued Richelieu descended on the court; they had suffered either on behalf of, or with, the Queen and they expected to be rewarded. This
Cabale des Importants
included the Duc de Vendôme, Henri IV’s son, and Vendôme’s own son, the gallant Duc de Beaufort; the Bishop of Beauvais (whom a fellow prelate described as a ‘mitred beast’); Marie de Hautefort, and, of course, Mme de Chevreuse. The latter shrilly insisted that Anne must return everything which Louis XIII had stolen from the great lords. After four months the Regent grew tired of her former friends, the last straw being a plot to murder Mazarin, and banished them.

Anne was a strong, vigorous woman, still goodlooking if somewhat full-blown. She ate enormously at all meals, and when angry screamed at those who displeased her. She was unconventional; during the torrid summer of 1646 she and her ladies, accompanied by little Louis, disported themselves in the Seine, clad in grey nightdresses. While the Regent may well have been in love with her First Minister, it is certain that she never lived with him; Anne was a devout Spanish Catholic and it would have been impossible for her to sleep with the Cardinal without her ladies knowing of such a spectacular liaison, as they themselves slept at the foot of her bed every night. None the less, she trusted Mazarin almost as a second husband.

In the long run it was fortunate for France that she did. Mazarin continued all Richelieu’s policies and abroad the benefits were quickly evident. The Thirty Years War came to an end in 1648 when Sweden, France and the Empire made a peace by which France gained Alsace (even if it was still nominally subject to the Emperor). The negotiations were conducted in French, the beginning of its long sway as the language of diplomacy. France remained at war with Spain, but the latter was now too weak to be of much danger.

Louis was an attractive little boy, bright, high-spirited and unusually goodlooking, though he lost some of his looks after catching smallpox in 1647. His education was designed to give him an ineradicable sense of the dignity of kingship; he had to copy out texts such as ‘Homage is owed to Kings; they do what they wish’. He was told to model himself on Saint Louis and on his grandfather. Henri IV was now referred to as
‘Henri le Grand’
in official documents, while one of Louis’s tutors, Bishop Péréfixe, compiled a eulogistic life for the young monarch’s edification. Anne is said to have told the boy not to copy his father because ‘People wept at the death of Henri IV, but laughed at that of Louis XIII’. However, Louis always remembered his father with affection.

Each night the Queen’s valet read him extracts from Eudes de Mezeray’s
History of France
, though Louis himself much preferred fairy-tales. He was taught riding, fencing and deportment, how to carry himself as a King; he also learnt the lute and the guitar, and how to sing and dance. He could speak good Italian and passable Spanish. Apart from basic arithmetic, he was given little instruction in mathematics and remained more or less ignorant of geography, economics and modern history.

His tutors were so obsequious that he christened one—Marshal de Villeroy—
‘Maréchal Oui-Sire’
, but it cannot be said that Louis was spoilt. Although fond of him, his mother regretted not having a daughter and preferred his delicate brother, Philippe, whom she called her little girl. If the King had his own household from the age of seven, his stockings were often in holes, while he never had enough sheets (for the rest of his life he slept with the bed clothes wrapped round his waist, and nothing over his chest and shoulders save a nightshirt). He was so much left to his own devices that once when he fell into the big fountain in the Palais Royal garden, he was not rescued until evening. On state occasions, however, he was paraded in a coat of cloth of gold and a plumed cavalier hat with a diamond buckle. He had toy soldiers of silver and toy cannon of gold, but his favourite possession was a miniature arquebus made by his father. Years later the King told Mme de Maintenon how he and his brother had roamed happily through the Louvre, teasing the maids and stealing omelettes from the kitchens. They used to play with a servant’s little girl—she pretended to be Queen and they acted as her footmen. But in 1648 life assumed an air so menacing that even children could not fail to notice it.

The Fronde was an expression of general discontent. Years of frustration and irritation had at last reached boiling point. But it was not an attempt at revolution in the contemporary English manner. There was an odd note of frivolity in its name, which meant catapulting—or even pea-shooting. A popular song ran:

Un vent de Fronde
S’est levé ce matin
Je crois qu’il gronde
Contre le Mazarin.

The attitude of the Frondeurs may have been negative and unconstructive, but they included the majority of articulate Frenchmen. There were to be two Frondes—the Fronde of the Parlement, and the Fronde of the Princes.

In five years, Mazarin had made himself even more hated than Richelieu. His financial methods—such as manipulating the
Rentes
(or government annuities) by withholding interest and then buying them cheap when the price fell—caused widespread bankruptcies among the bourgeois. Taxes were collected with such savagery that in 1646 over 20,000 Frenchmen were in prison for fiscal offences. At the same time the Cardinal displayed both avarice and ostentatious luxury—he was famous for his Titians and Correggios, his collection of gems and his exquisite library, notorious for hoarding bullion. Surrounded by a bevy of black-eyed nieces, always fondling some scented marmoset or lap-dog, speaking with a strong Italian accent, and embarrassingly obsequious, Mazarin aroused instinctive dislike in the Frenchmen of his time.

The office-holding
noblesse de la robe
was both alarmed and angered by the increasing power of the
Intendants
throughout the realm, which detracted from their prestige and diminished their influence. The Paris Parlement was finally infuriated beyond endurance by an edict of 1646 which made them pay duty on fruit and vegetables sent up from their country houses. They began to refuse any edicts which increased taxation, winning considerable popularity. In May 1648 they announced their intention of serving the public and rooting out abuses of state. They even developed a presumptuous theory that the will of the King was not law—events across the Channel had not gone unnoticed. Mazarin smelt danger and in July agreed to reforms suggested by the Parlement. Then news came of another triumphant victory by Condé (Enghien, who had now succeeded his father) at Lens, and the Cardinal felt strong enough to arrest the three noisiest lawyers. An attempt to rescue one of them, the demagogue Broussel, turned into a riot and then into a revolt; 200 barricades blocked the narrow streets. A deputation went to the Queen to demand Broussel’s release, and when it returned empty-handed it was nearly murdered by an armed mob. Despite the Queen’s tearful opposition—she threatened to strangle Broussel with her own hands—Mazarin released the lawyers. Shortly after, the Regent signed a Declaration of Reform.

In January 1649 Condé and a royalist army surrounded Paris, whereupon Anne and the King fled to Saint-Germain. The siege continued for three months. During this time Louis and his mother slept on truckle beds at a Saint-Germain denuded of furniture. Ladies had to make do with straw palliasses, while gentlemen lay on the floor. There were ballets and banquets, but the royal coffers were soon empty—Louis dismissed his pages because he could not feed them. The royal party can hardly have been cheered by the news from England; Charles I had been beheaded. Anne groaned, ‘This is a blow to make Kings tremble!’ However, the first Fronde came to an end when the Regent grudgingly confirmed her Declaration. The court returned to Paris in August 1649.

Mazarin and the Regent were now threatened by ‘Le Grand Condé’. The young warlord was an insufferably haughty little man with an overbred face like a bird of prey, who could never forget that he was First Prince of the Blood and possessed six dukedoms. He thought himself all-powerful, insulting both Anne and the Cardinal—on one occasion he pulled the latter’s beard. To his own astonishment Condé was arrested and imprisoned at Vincennes in January 1650. His friends soon raised the standard of revolt, beginning the Fronde of the Princes. All over France nobles rose, but at first the royal troops were successful (during one of these engagements, Louis was shot at). Meanwhile, behind Mazarin’s back, a debauched little abbé, Paul de Gondi (the future Cardinal de Retz), who was the co-adjutor to the Archbishop of Paris, was plotting to unite the two Frondes; he was able to do so because his office gave him a seat in the Parlement, where he ostentatiously wore a dagger known as the breviary of M de Retz. He intrigued to such effect that the lawyers allied with the Princes, and Parlement asked the Regent to release Condé and dismiss Mazarin.

Mazarin fled to Cologne, disguised as a musketeer, with Anne’s diamonds in his pocket. Gaston d’Orléans was proclaimed Lieutenant-General of France. Suspecting that the Queen was about to flee from Paris to join Mazarin, a Frondeur mob broke into the Louvre and demanded to see the King. Anne, who was on the point of leaving, hastily changed into a nightdress, while Louis leapt into bed—still wearing his boots—and pretended to be asleep. In single file the rabble of Paris shuffled past his bed, some daring to peer behind the curtains to see if he really were inside. Condé was released from Vincennes.

Gaston d’Orléans said that during these years the political scene changed so often and so swiftly that he was in a state of almost perpetual bewilderment. In September 1651 Louis was crowned at Rheims (during the celebrations he danced in a court ballet, wearing the costume of a ‘Sun King’). The ‘Eighth Sacrament’ confirmed him in his extraordinary and precocious self-confidence. Furthermore, he had achieved his legal majority and Mazarin, feeling secure again, returned. It was too soon. Condé, during his absence, had quarrelled with the Parlement and had left Paris, but he now advanced on the capital with an army—he may even have hoped to seize the throne. In the battles which followed Condé very nearly captured Louis. Anne was only persuaded to stay in Paris by her confidence in that great soldier, Turennes, the son of Henri IV’s old enemy, who had rallied to the Royalist party—she told him gratefully, ‘Without you every town in France would have shut its gates on the King.’ But Condé continued to advance. In July 1652 he fought a battle in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, during which
La Grande Mademoiselle
(Gaston’s daughter) trained the guns of the Bastille on Turennes’s troops and opened the gates to Condé. The royal forces withdrew, leaving Condé in occupation of the capital, and a massacre of Mazarin’s supporters ensued; law and order broke down, to such an extent that the Parisians began to starve. Shrewdly Mazarin left France for a second time. Finally Condé lost his nerve and retreated to Flanders.