Fronde

a series of antiabsolutist uprisings in France that lasted from 1648 to 1653. The Frondeurs came from various social strata and at times pursued divergent goals.

Oppressive taxes and the hardships brought by the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48 led to many uprisings by the peasants and the urban lower classes. The tax policy of Cardinal Mazarin’s government aroused the opposition of the parlement of Paris and the bourgeois circles associated with that body. The parlement formed a temporary bloc with popular antifeudal forces and demanded several reforms, some of which were bourgeois in nature.

Mazarin’s attempt to arrest opposition leaders, such as P. Broussel, provoked a mass armed uprising, which broke out in Paris on Aug. 26–27, 1648. Mazarin took the young Louis XIV out of the insurgent capital, and royal troops blockaded the city in January and February 1649. The Parisians were supported by a number of provinces, but the Parisian bourgeoisie and the parle-ment’s noblesse de robe (hereditary nobles who acquired their rank by holding a high state office), frightened by the upsurge of the popular movement and the radical character of pamphlets and leaflets that were being printed, entered into negotiations with the royal court.

In 1649 the Fronde of the parlement came to an end, but popular disturbances continued. At the beginning of 1650 leadership of the opposition was assumed by reactionary court circles, who merely wanted to pressure the government into granting them such benefits as pensions and lucrative posts; this phase of the Fronde was known as the Fronde of the princes. The insurgent noblemen and princes, supported by retinues of gentry and by foreign (Spanish) troops, made use of the peasant uprisings and the democratic movement in the cities. During the Fronde of the princes the most revolutionary elements of the French bourgeoisie attempted to continue the struggle against absolutism; thus, in Bordeaux the Fronde assumed in this period the character of a bourgeois-democratic republican movement.

In 1651 the aristocratic Frondeurs succeeded in forcing the resignation and exile of Mazarin, who soon returned to France with hired troops. A prolonged civil war ensued. By the end of 1652, Mazarin, by means of bribes and concessions, had persuaded most of the aristocratic Frondeurs to effect a reconciliation. Their leader, the prince de Conde, who in 1651 had gone over to the service of the Spanish king, was forced to leave Paris, despite the military support of Spanish detachments. By mid-1653 the resistance in the most stubborn and radical center of the Fronde— Bordeaux—had been suppressed.

The defeat of the Fronde led to a feudal reaction in the French countryside from the 1650’s to the 1670’s and facilitated the establishment of Louis XIV’s autocracy.