Regent of France
Regency Period (1643-1651)
Upon Louis' death in 1643, Anne was named regent, despite his attempts to prevent her from obtaining the position. With the aid of Pierre Séguier, she had the Parlement of Paris revoke the will of the late king, which would have limited her powers. Their four-year-old son was crowned King Louis XIV of France. Anne assumed the regency but to general surprise entrusted the government to the chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, who was a protégé of Cardinal Richelieu and figured among the council of the regency. The Queen had a particular dislike of de Chavigny, the other chief advisor chosen by Louis XIII. He had been close to Richelieu and was the only real rival in experience to Mazarin. The evening that she became regent, she declared that Mazarin would be her chief minister and head of her government. Mazarin took up residence at the Palais Royal near Queen Anne. Before long he was believed to be her lover, and, it was hinted, even her husband.
The best example of Anne's loyalty to France was her treatment of one of Richelieu's men, the Chancellor Pierre Séguier. Séguier had brusquely interrogated Anne in 1637 (like a "common criminal", as she recalled) following the discovery that she was giving military secrets to her father in Spain, and Anne was virtually under house arrest for years. By keeping the effective Séguier in his post, Anne sacrificed her own feelings for the interests of France and her son Louis.
The Queen sought a lasting peace between Catholic nations, but only after a French victory over her native Spain. Instead of making peace with her brother Philip, she continued the war against Spain after the French troops achieved a decisive victory at the Battle of Rocroi in the Ardennes on May 19, 1643. She also gave a partial Catholic orientation to French foreign policy. This was felt by the Netherlands, France's Protestant ally, which negotiated a separate peace with Spain in 1648. Realizing that she had a duty to leave her son a strong kingdom, she embraced the policy of weakening the House of Austria, a policy Mazarin continued following in Richelieu's footsteps. Mazarin also took charge of the young king's political and military education, while Anne reserved for herself the religious and moral education.
In 1648, Anne and Mazarin successfully negotiated the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in which France had actively taken part to further its interests. Its terms formally confirmed the extensive autonomy that the various states of the Holy Roman Empire had enjoyed before the war. It granted Sweden seats on the Imperial Diet and territories controlling the mouths of the Oder, Elbe, and Weser Rivers. France, however, profited most from the settlement. Austria, ruled by the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand III, ceded all Habsburg lands and claims in Alsace to France and acknowledged her de facto sovereignty over the Three Bishoprics of Metz, Verdun, and Toul. Moreover, many petty German states sought French protection, eager to emancipate themselves from Habsburg domination. This anticipated the formation of the 1658 League of the Rhine, which further diminished Imperial power.
As the Thirty Years' War came to an end, a civil war known as the Fronde erupted in France. It effectively checked France's ability to exploit the Peace of Westphalia. Anne and Mazarin had largely pursued the policies of Cardinal Richelieu, augmenting the Crown's power at the expense of the nobility and the Parlements. Anne was more concerned with internal policy than foreign affairs; she was a very proud queen who insisted on the divine rights of the King of France.
Finding money was a primary preoccupation for Anne and the First minister Mazarin. Mazarin's new taxes on Parisians as per the decision of Anne had provoked the first Fronde, but the end of the Fronde did not resolve the problem. The government had borrowed huge amounts to finance the campaigns against the first Fronde and against Condé, and also had to pay for the continual travels of the Regent and the young King, and the elaborate festivities, parades, and cavalcades that accompanied their travel and every major event. The royal budget for 1653 was about 109 million livres, which amounted to eight hundred tons of silver or sixty tons of gold. Expenditures were the greatest between 1656 and 1659.
Twenty-seven agreements were made with bankers, who loaned the government 98 million livres to supplement the money collected through ordinary taxes. One effect of the enormous amount of money in the market during the period of the Regency of Anne and First Minister Mazarin was a decline in the value of the Livre tournois, the French royal unit of account, lost twenty percent of its value against the gold Florentine Florin coin. However, without the money lent by Nicolas Fouquet and other aristocratic financiers, Louis XIV could never have accomplished his early military and diplomatic successes.
In January 1648, while acting as regent, Anne received a request on behalf of artists who were affiliated with the crown or aristocracy. The artists, led by painter Charles Le Brun, wanted independence from the monopoly control of the guild of San-Luc, which fined the artists or seized their work. The painters and sculptors petitioned Louis XIV and the Queen Regent to form a new organization. They wanted to found an academy that would be for the visual arts what Académie Française was for French literature; this was to become the Académie Royale.
Revolts and Rebellions
As the Thirty Years' War came to an end, a civil war known as the Fronde erupted in France. It effectively checked France's ability to exploit the Peace of Westphalia. Anne and Mazarin had largely pursued the policies of Cardinal Richelieu, augmenting the Crown's power at the expense of the nobility and the Parlements. Anne was more concerned with internal policy than foreign affairs; she was a very proud queen who insisted on the divine rights of the King of France.
All this led her to advocate a forceful policy in all matters relating to the King's authority, in a manner that was much more radical than the one proposed by Mazarin. The Cardinal depended totally on Anne's support and had to use all his influence on the Queen to temper some of her radical actions. Anne imprisoned any aristocrat or member of parliament who challenged her will; her main aim was to transfer to her son an absolute authority in the matters of finance and justice. One of the leaders of the Parlement of Paris, whom she had jailed, died in prison.
The Frondeurs, political heirs of the disaffected feudal aristocracy, sought to protect their traditional feudal privileges from the increasingly centralized royal government. Furthermore, they believed their traditional influence and authority was being usurped by the recently ennobled bureaucrats (the Noblesse de Robe, or "nobility of the robe"), who administered the kingdom and on whom the monarchy increasingly began to rely. This belief intensified the nobles' resentment.
In 1648, Anne and Mazarin attempted to tax members of the Parlement de Paris. The members refused to comply and ordered all of the king's earlier financial edicts burned. Buoyed by the victory of Louis, duke of Enghien (later known as le Grand Condé) at the Battle of Lens, Mazarin, on Queen Anne's insistence, arrested certain members in a show of force. The most important arrest, from Anne's point of view, concerned Pierre Broussel, one of the most important leaders in the Parliament of Paris. In Paris, the members of the parlement called a special session to debate Mazarin's measures. The meeting was forbidden by Anne as Regent, but went ahead anyway. The parlement issued a charter, inspired by the writ of Habeas Corpus in England, which revoked the authority of the King's justice officials, forbade any new taxes without the approval of the parlement, and declared that no royal subjects could be imprisoned without due process of law.
Mazarin recommended to the Queen that she listen to the parlement and modify her decrees, but she was furious at their opposition. She waited until the right moment to strike back. The occasion she chose was the celebration of a major victory of the French Army over the Spanish at the Battle of Lens in Belgium on 26 August 1648. On the day that a special mass was held at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris to celebrate the victory, she gave orders to the Captain of her guards to arrest the leaders of the parlement, including the popular Pierre Broussel. News of the arrest quickly spread in Paris, and crowds came out into the street to protest and to build barricades. That evening Mazarin wrote in his journal, "the parlement has performed the functions of the King, and the people have deferred to it entirely."
People in France were complaining about the expansion of royal authority, the high rate of taxation, and the reduction of the authority of the Parlement de Paris and other regional representative entities. Paris erupted in rioting as a result, and Anne was forced, under intense pressure, to free Broussel. Moreover, on the night of 9–10 February 1651, when Louis was twelve, a mob of angry Parisians broke into the royal palace and demanded to see their king. Led into the royal bed-chamber, they gazed upon Louis, who was feigning sleep, were appeased, and then quietly departed. The threat to the royal family prompted Anne to flee Paris with the king and his courtiers.
Shortly thereafter, the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia allowed Condé's army to return to aid Louis and his court. Condé's family was close to Anne at that time, and he agreed to help her attempt to restore the king's authority. The queen's army, headed by Condé, attacked the rebels in Paris; the rebels were under the political control of Anne's old friend Marie de Rohan. Beaufort, who had escaped from the prison where Anne had incarcerated him five years before, was the military leader in Paris, under the nominal control of Conti. After a few battles, a political compromise was reached; the Peace of Rueil was signed, and the court returned to Paris.
Unfortunately for Anne, her partial victory depended on Condé, who wanted to control the queen and destroy Mazarin's influence. It was Condé's sister who pushed him to turn against the queen. After striking a deal with her old friend Marie de Rohan, who was able to impose the nomination of Charles de l'Aubespine, marquess of Châteauneuf as minister of justice, Anne arrested Condé, his brother Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and the husband of their sister Anne Genevieve de Bourbon, duchess of Longueville. This situation did not last long, and Mazarin's unpopularity led to the creation of a coalition headed mainly by Marie de Rohan and the duchess of Longueville. This aristocratic coalition was strong enough to liberate the princes, exile Mazarin, and impose a condition of virtual house arrest on Queen Anne.
Just as the first Fronde (the Parliamentary Fronde of 1648–1649) ended, a second one (the Fronde of the Princes of 1650–1653) began. Unlike that which preceded it, tales of sordid intrigue and half-hearted warfare characterized this second phase of upper-class insurrection. To the aristocracy, this rebellion represented a protest for the reversal of their political demotion from vassals to courtiers. It was headed by the highest-ranking French nobles, among them Louis's uncle Gaston, Duke of Orléans and first cousin Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, known as la Grande Mademoiselle; Princes of the Blood such as Condé, his brother Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, and their sister the Duchess of Longueville; dukes of legitimised royal descent, such as Henri, Duke of Longueville, and François, Duke of Beaufort; so-called "foreign princes" such as Frédéric Maurice, Duke of Bouillon, his brother Turenne (the Marshal of France), and Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse; and scions of France's oldest families, such as François de La Rochefoucauld.
Faced with the revolt of Parliament, Anne of Austria was tempted to use force, but Mazarin advised her to be moderate. On January 1649, the queen mother and her 11-year-old son left the Louvre Palace through the Porte de la Conférence for Saint-Germain, allowing Condé to occupy the capital. The appeasement achieved by the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which was fragile and did not prevent the prince's revolt, followed by the alliance of the two Frondes, which triggered a civil war lasting until 1652. During this long conflict, Anne of Austria accompanied her son in an itinerant life, left to the vagaries of the countryside. She relied on Mazarin, whom she supported, including during his two self-imposed exiles, despite the humiliations and treacherous pamphlets that targeted him personally.
Queen Anne played the most important role in defeating the Fronde because she wanted to transfer absolute authority to her son. In addition, most of the princes refused to deal with Mazarin, who went into exile for a number of years. The Frondeurs claimed to act on Louis's behalf, and in his real interest, against his mother and Mazarin. Louis's coming-of-age and subsequent coronation deprived them of the Frondeurs' pretext for revolt. Louis XIV, now of age to claim his throne, re-entered Paris in October 1652, accompanied by his mother and by Turenne. Mazarin had to wait longer to make his return, which was carefully orchestrated with his help. The Parlement de Paris was first transferred by Anne of Austria from Paris to Pontoise, to see how many members would accept her authority. A majority appeared at the meeting. Following the prepared plan, the Parlement respectfully asked that Mazarin be dismissed, and Anne of Austria agreed. Mazarin, knowing this was the plan, accepted this decision, and waited a respectful time in exile. He made his return to Paris in February 1653. He was welcomed with a triumphal banquet at the Hotel de Ville, where crowds earlier had demanded his downfall.
During this period, Louis fell in love with Mazarin's niece Marie Mancini, but Anne and Mazarin ended the king's infatuation by sending Mancini away from court to be married in Italy. While Mazarin might have been tempted for a short time to marry his niece to the King of France, Queen Anne was absolutely against this; she wanted to marry her son to the Maria Theresa of Spain, daughter of her brother, Philip IV of Spain for both dynastic and political reasons. Mazarin soon supported the Queen's position because he knew that her support for his power and his foreign policy depended on making peace with Spain from a strong position and on the Spanish marriage. Additionally, Mazarin's relations with Marie Mancini were not good, and he did not trust her to support his position. All of Louis's tears and his supplications to his mother did not make her change her mind. The Spanish marriage would be very important both for its role in ending the war between France and Spain, because many of the claims and objectives of Louis's foreign policy for the next 50 years would be based upon this marriage, and because it was through this marriage that the Spanish throne would ultimately be delivered to the House of Bourbon.
