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1652: The Cardinal, the Prince, and the Crisis of the 'Fronde'
David Parrott's book offers a major re-evaluation of the last year of the Fronde - the political upheaval between 1648 and 1652 - in the making of seventeenth-century France. In late December 1651, Cardinal Mazarin defied the order for his perpetual banishment, and re-entered France at the head of an army. The political and military crisis that followed convulsed the nation, and revived the ebbing fortunes of a revolt led by the cousin of the young Louis XIV, the prince de Conde. The study follows in detail the unfolding political and military events of this year, showing how military success and failure swung between the two sides through the campaign, driving both cardinal and prince into a progressive intensification of the conflict, while simultaneously fuelling a quest for compromise and settlement which nonetheless eluded all the negotiators' efforts. The consequences were devastating for France, as civil war smashed into a fragile ecosystem that was already reeling under the impact of the global cooling of the 'Little Ice Age'. 1652 raises questions about established interpretations of French state-building, the rule of cardinal Mazarin and his predecessor, Richelieu, and their contribution to creating the 'absolutism' of Louis XIV.
- GenresHistory
330 pages, Hardcover
Published September 30, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 6, 2025
France from 1453 to 1792 is a place and a period that I can always stand to read a little more about, and, having been impressed with Parrott's work on the French army in the Age of Richelieu, I've wanted to read this book since it was published.
Parrott has two salient agendas here. One, there is a tendency in French historiography to make the Cardinal Mazarin a hero of French state building, and Parrott is not really buying it. Yes, the cardinal was a loyal servant of the French throne, and was certainly competent, but he was also as self-serving as they come. This is not to mention that French political thinking at this point in time really didn't have conceptual space for a dominant prime minister, whatever the track record of Cardinal Richelieu. The elite of the French aristocracy thought they should be the men responsible for the regency around young Louis XIV, and that the Queen Mother (Mazarin's biggest supporter) and Mazarin himself should basically go away.
Two, Parrott is also writing about this period as though climate change really mattered, and that the Little Ice Age was a real impact on the French economy at the time. In the near collapse of French society in 1652, with private armies stalking the land and surviving on resources that could not be spared, some regions of France saw mortality rates that rivaled the worst of the Thirty Years War.
As for what made the matter of peace so intractable, the structural issue was that Conde the Great, and Cardinal Mazarin, were the tips of respective coalitions where loyalty was always, at some level, a commodity to be purchased, and there were almost too many followers to be paid off. This is even though the outlines of a political settlement were fairly obvious, particularly with the looming majority of Louis XIV.
While not the first book on the subject you should read, I thought this was great stuff, and well worth reading.
Parrott has two salient agendas here. One, there is a tendency in French historiography to make the Cardinal Mazarin a hero of French state building, and Parrott is not really buying it. Yes, the cardinal was a loyal servant of the French throne, and was certainly competent, but he was also as self-serving as they come. This is not to mention that French political thinking at this point in time really didn't have conceptual space for a dominant prime minister, whatever the track record of Cardinal Richelieu. The elite of the French aristocracy thought they should be the men responsible for the regency around young Louis XIV, and that the Queen Mother (Mazarin's biggest supporter) and Mazarin himself should basically go away.
Two, Parrott is also writing about this period as though climate change really mattered, and that the Little Ice Age was a real impact on the French economy at the time. In the near collapse of French society in 1652, with private armies stalking the land and surviving on resources that could not be spared, some regions of France saw mortality rates that rivaled the worst of the Thirty Years War.
As for what made the matter of peace so intractable, the structural issue was that Conde the Great, and Cardinal Mazarin, were the tips of respective coalitions where loyalty was always, at some level, a commodity to be purchased, and there were almost too many followers to be paid off. This is even though the outlines of a political settlement were fairly obvious, particularly with the looming majority of Louis XIV.
While not the first book on the subject you should read, I thought this was great stuff, and well worth reading.
July 7, 2022
If you like reading about political maneuvering, there are oodles of it in this academic book about the attempted coup/civil war in France in the mid-17th century.
I got into this because as a kid who had read The Three Musketeers, I wanted to read every single Alexandre Dumas book the library had, which was over twenty books. One of them was the Musketeers sequel (Twenty Years After) which takes place during the Fronde, but which is not fully explained in the novel. So I have wanted to know more about it ever since, but other readings have never touched on it.
The book uses a word that was new to me: "irenic", which apparently means "aiming or aimed at peace" and is generally associated with attempts to unify Christian apologetical systems via reason. This is apropos here because of the many factions contending for power in France at that time.
"The Cost of Civil War" chapter is probably the one that took the most work and of which the author is most proud, but which stuck out from the rest as rather boring. It's a deep dive into climate change of the period and the effects it wrought on food production, into the Bubonic plague, into the depredations of hungry soldiers on the population and so on. All relevant, but not what I'm reading the book for and in a chapter that goes on for far too long.
I found by the end that this is a sur-history, that is, more a commentary on previous histories and as such it does not detail all the basic facts and events. You will need to read something else, preferably first, to get all of that grounding.
In the end this is meant as a corrective to the praise for the first minister Cardinal Mazarin (the successor to Richelieu), so if he's a hero to you, be aware of that.
This might make for an interesting political board game, though requiring an unusually high number of players - eight, or some robot rules.
I got into this because as a kid who had read The Three Musketeers, I wanted to read every single Alexandre Dumas book the library had, which was over twenty books. One of them was the Musketeers sequel (Twenty Years After) which takes place during the Fronde, but which is not fully explained in the novel. So I have wanted to know more about it ever since, but other readings have never touched on it.
The book uses a word that was new to me: "irenic", which apparently means "aiming or aimed at peace" and is generally associated with attempts to unify Christian apologetical systems via reason. This is apropos here because of the many factions contending for power in France at that time.
"The Cost of Civil War" chapter is probably the one that took the most work and of which the author is most proud, but which stuck out from the rest as rather boring. It's a deep dive into climate change of the period and the effects it wrought on food production, into the Bubonic plague, into the depredations of hungry soldiers on the population and so on. All relevant, but not what I'm reading the book for and in a chapter that goes on for far too long.
I found by the end that this is a sur-history, that is, more a commentary on previous histories and as such it does not detail all the basic facts and events. You will need to read something else, preferably first, to get all of that grounding.
In the end this is meant as a corrective to the praise for the first minister Cardinal Mazarin (the successor to Richelieu), so if he's a hero to you, be aware of that.
This might make for an interesting political board game, though requiring an unusually high number of players - eight, or some robot rules.
June 13, 2022
Really enjoyed this book and found it very helpful in understanding the period, not just 1652,but the preceding years as well.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews