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Michel De Waele, David Parrott. 1652: The Cardinal, the Prince, and the Crisis of the ‘Fronde’., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 476–477, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae483
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Extract
French historian Denis Richet wrote that the Fronde was “an infantile disease of absolutism.” He thus placed this episode of civil unrest, which shook the Kingdom of France from 1648 to 1652, within an inexorable chain of events leading up to the reign of Louis XIV. The frondeurs, as its instigators were called, have generally been portrayed as either representatives of retrograde forces concerned first and foremost with defending their privileges against the rise of the state, or as visionaries anticipating the revolutionary chaos of the late eighteenth century. It is also clear that they were doomed to fail in light of the French government’s march toward modernity initiated by Cardinal Richelieu and then continued by Cardinal Mazarin, Anne of Austria’s chief minister when she served as regent for her young son Louis XIV. This failure perhaps explains why historians have shown little interest in the latter stages of the revolt. And yet, according to David Parrott, the year 1652 was a “distinct historical moment with decisive and lasting consequences” that recalls to mind the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Roman Empire. Neither Mazarin nor the great nobles who led the struggle against him were driven by a deep concern for the values that had guided France for centuries or for the future of France and its people, starting with the king and members of his nobility. Rather, much like Augustus and his adversaries, they “systematically hollowed out the values and ideas of the Republic, maintaining only a veneer of outward constitutional forms under which factional and personal interests dominated political decision-making and the allocation of power and resources” (9). The Fronde essentially died out in 1652, giving way to a newfound stability, but the words and actions that characterized those four tumultuous years continued to make their influence felt. And not in a good way, for they were words and actions “from which the recourse to service, loyalty, and obligation was notably absent” (10).
