Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/609

MAZARIN S* RULE.] FRANCE 573 57. revolt in Guycimc, where he was strong. He reckoned on the help of Turenne and the Spaniards in the north ; but all calculations were certain to be vain in a war in which love and vanity, jealousies and mean ambitions, ruled su preme. Turenne at once went over to the court, and took command of the king s troops ; Mazarin came back, the king s majority was declared. A struggle for Paris followed, in which Turenne showed himself the master of his great rival, first checking him at Etampes, and then defeating him completely in the suburbs of the capital (1G52). Comic" with the remnant of his force took refuge in the town through the St Autoine gate. Next year, all being weary of the war, the young king was invited back to Paris ; Conde withdrew into Champagne and joined the Spaniards, with whom he remained till the peace of the Pyrenees. The New Fronde was entirely broken up ; the Old Fronde had long been weary of the whole affair ; Cardinal de Uetz was a prisoner at Vincennes, and his career was over. Ere long Mazarin, who had again withdrawn from court to Sedan, was recalled; the parliament of Paris, which in 1G54 de murred to the heavy cost of the Spanish war, was ordered by the king to abase itself; its meetings were forbidden; for nearly a century and a half its political action was sus pended. All this " burlesque war," this " war of children, with a child s nickname," " comic in its origin, its events, its prin ciple," as Michelet says of it, had been like the light scene which the skilful dramatist interposes between the great movements of his tragedy, at once to relieve the strained attention of the hearers and to heighten the effect of the catastrophe. It fills with light and merry motion the period between Richelieu and Louis XIV.; it was " the game of lively schoolboys in the interval between the lessons of those two stern and severe teachers." The Spaniards were still at war with France ; and nothing so clearly shows their utter exhaustion as their inability to take any serious advantage of the troubles of their adversaries. The civil wars over, France soon drove Spain to the wall. Condc, in command of Spanish troops could achieve nothing ; in 1654 the Spaniards failed at the siege of Arras, and the French took Stenay ; Louis XIV., who was with the army, perhaps here imbibed that love of sieges which always marked his military career. In 1655-165G the fortunes of the war were almost evenly balanced, the Spaniards having perhaps the best of it in the north ; and troubles with the noblesse began again, while the new opinions and party of Jansenius of Utrecht, which had been condemned by Pope Innocent X. in IG53, found great favour among the French clergy, who disliked the doctrines and tendencies of the Jesuits. From this time to the end of the reign of Louis XIV. the Jansenists of Paris are in more or less open op position to the court ; in these days they sympathized much with De Retz. Now, however, Mazarin s skill as a foreign minister enabled him to triumph over all opposition. The strong government of Cromwell had in 1G54 secured the V 1 tranquil progress of England by treaties with the chief n> northern powers and with Portugal ; now in 1655 he had to choose between alliance with France or with Spain. Nor could he hesitate. Spain still spoke her ancient tongue the tongue of intolerance and Catholic repression ; France in Mazarin s hand had been willing to tolerate the Huguenots, and to aid the Protestant party in Germany. A treaty be tween England and France was accordingly signed in October 1655, a treaty of peace and commerce ; a little later it was followed (March 1G57) by an offensive and defensive alliance. Six thousand English Puritans, led by Turenne, made an immediate change in the character of the war, and the Spaniards began at once to give way. In 1G58 Turenne caught them at the Dunes, not far from Dunkirk, and de feated them completely ; Dunkirk yielded, and was duly handed over to the keeping of the EngKsh ; the Spaniards 1659-01 were swept away, Gravelines, Fumes, Oudenarde, all fell ; Brussels was threatened. In August of this year Lionne, Mazarin s agent, on occasion of an election to the Holy Roman Empire, concluded an agreement with the princes on the Rhine for the upholding of the peace of Westphalia ; and France could show herself as the ally at once of England, Sweden, Bavaria, the ecclesiastical electors, the house of Brunswick. At last in 1659 Spain yielded, being utterly unequal to the strife. The peace of the Pyrenees gave to The France Gravelines, Landre cy, Thionville, and Montmedy, r eace f and Spain also ceded all she held in Artois ; though the duke of Lorraine was replaced at Nancy, the duchy of Bar, and some smaller places along the Champagne border, were ceded to France. In Germany itself Louis XIV. secured Juliers to the duke of Neuburg, and the original trouble which led to the Thirty Years War was finally settled eleven years after that war had ended. All French conquests in Catalonia were restored to Spain, while France became finally master of Roussillon and Conllans ; Cond<5 was par doned and taken into favour. Finally, the treaty involved a great marriage compact between Louis XIV. and the infanta Maria Theresa of Spain. The actual marriage, which took place next year, was garnished with a dowry never paid, and with a renunciation by the infanta of all her rights to the Spanish crown or Spanish possessions, which was thrust contemptuously aside when in 1GG7 Louis XIV. desired to get hold of the Spanish Netherlands, or when forty years later he placed the crown of Spain on the brows of his young grandson Philip. The peace of the Pyrenees and this Spanish marriage firmly established Louis XIV. on his throne as the most powerful monarch of Christ endom ; it was time for Mazarin to withdraw and leave his pupil in full command of the realm. He spent the last Mnza- year of his life in teaching the young monarch those lessons rin s end of king-craft on which he built up his career, taught him an 1(:liar - to avoid a first minister, instilled into him a belief that ill- faith in treaties was good policy, and urged him to cultivate his " natural gift of dissimulation"; called his attention to the miserable state of finance, and commended to him his trusted agent Colbert, as the man best fitted to bring order out of confusion ; finally, he placed his own huge fortune, some ten millions sterling of our present reckoning, wrung from the misery of France, at the king s disposal. Louis, however, replaced it honourably in the cardinal s hands, who left the bulk of it to his nieces, and with part founded his "College of the Four Nations" for the education of noble children from the districts added to France in 1648 and 1659. To this college he bequeathed that splendid library which he had based on Richelieu s fine collection, and had admirably enlarged by the care and skill of his librarian Naude. He had done what he could for arts, literature, and science, had established the academy of paint ing and sculpture, had pensioned Descartes in Holland, aud had introduced at Paris the Italian opera. In all the solid elements of good government he was entirely wanting ; and it remained for Colbert to struggle against his fate, the fate of serving a grand monarch, who would neutralize his endeavours to secure financial and commercial prosperity for France. Mazarin died in March 1661, leaving the state in the unfettered hands of Louis XIV., who, though now twenty-two years old, and a king for 1 8 years past, had as yet been little but a cipher on the throne. Nothing is more striking in all history than the con- rimrac- trast between the Louis whom men saw under Mazarin s ter of tutelage, and the Louis whom France long adored as her k s Great Monarch. In the earlier period there was the dull and tranquil docility of a great creature which as yet knows not its amazing strength, and has as yet none of the ambi tions of power, and has never tasted blood. His nature,