Fronde
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the name of a political faction which played a conspicuous part in French history during the minority of Louis XIV., and which gave rise to the celebrated insurrectionary movement known historically as the War of the Fronde. The members of this party obtained the derisive name of Frondeurs (slingers), from the pertinacious lampoon warfare which they waged against both the powerful minister of that day, Cardinal Mazarin, and the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria. Mazarin, as a foreigner and a parvenu, enjoyed the detestation of the French people-both patrician and proletarian-and especially had incurred the opposition of the Parliament of Paris to his measure. In 1648 Mazarin ventured on the bold step . of arresting two of the most popular members of the latter body, and on the next day (la journée des barricades) the Parisians rose in arms, dispersed some of the royal troops sent out against them, and barricaded the approaches to the Louvre, compelling the court party to retire to St. Germain, and thus leaving Paris in the hands of the insurgents. Upon the Prince de Condé advancing to besiege the capital, the parliament called the citizens to arms, when the Prince de Conti, the Duc de Beaufort ("Le Roi des Halles," and son of Henry IV.), and numerous others of the great nobles of the kingdom, came forward to head the insurrection. The famous Cardinal de Retz also joined the movement, nor was beauty wanting, in the persons of the Duchesses de Longueville le and de Montbazon, to inspire the popular cause. The too, changed sides and Prince de Condé, went over to the malcontents, with party shortly afterward whom the court patched up a treaty of peace of but brief duration. Fresh contentions arose, and Mazarin caused the arrest of Condé and Conti, two of the princes of the blood. This step on the part of the hated Italian excited a revolt in the provinces, and Marshal Turenne hastened to the rescue of the Frondeur princes, but was routed in the battle of Rethel (1650). The cardinal, however, enjoyed but a mere temporary supremacy; the parliament again agitated against him, and procured his banishment from France, leaving the Prince de Condé master of the situation. Subsequently, the contest degenerated into a war of intrigue. Some of the Frondeur leaders were influenced by the queen to desert their party, and others were bought over by the cardinal's gold. Ultimately, all parties being weary with these dissensions, the court agreed to remove Mazarin, and a general amnesty was proclaimed. Condé, who refused to be a party to these terms, now finding his desperate, entered the Spanish cause service; while Mazarin, after a time, returned to Paris, and again obtained the reins of government.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The chain of events Collier's set out in 1921 is still the accepted one: the arrest of members of the Parlement of Paris in August 1648, the Day of the Barricades, the court's flight to Saint-Germain, Turenne's defeat at Rethel in December 1650, Conde's departure into Spanish service, and Mazarin's return to power, with the troubles running down by 1653. What has shifted is the explanation. Where Collier's put the blame on hatred of Mazarin as a foreigner and a parvenu, on aristocratic ambition and on the glamour of figures like the Duchesse de Longueville, historians since the mid twentieth century have set the Fronde against the crushing tax demands of the war with Spain, the grievances of the venal officeholders whose offices and salaries the crown was squeezing, and the wave of peasant and urban revolts across Europe in the same decades, often treated as part of a general crisis of the seventeenth century. Its long shadow is also read differently: the humiliation of the boy Louis XIV in rebellious Paris is now routinely cited to explain the absolutism and the move to Versailles that followed.
Written for this edition, 2026.