France, 1600–1660

By 1600 Henri IV had won his crown in civil war and turned Catholic to keep it. In 1598 he granted the Protestants the Edict of Nantes and made peace with Spain at Vervins. He still had no lawful son. His first marriage, to Marguerite de Valois, was annulled in 1599, and in 1600 he married again.

Marie, daughter of the late Grand Duke Francesco of Tuscany, brought a large dowry, and on 27 September 1601 at Fontainebleau she bore a son, Louis. Five more children followed by 1609, among them Élisabeth, Gaston and Henriette-Marie, whose marriages would later tie the family to Spain, Lorraine and England. On 13 May 1610, before leaving for war on the Rhine, Henri had her crowned at Saint-Denis.

Maximilien de Béthune, a Protestant who had fought beside Henri at Coutras and Ivry, became superintendent of finances in 1598 and, in 1599, grand master of the artillery and overseer of roads and fortifications. He paid down the crown's debts, repaved the main roads, strengthened the frontier and stored a reserve of coin in the Bastille. Henri made him Duke of Sully in 1606.

Pierre Dugua de Mons, a Protestant gentleman of Saintonge who had fought for Henri, was named his lieutenant-general in North America in 1603, with a monopoly of the fur trade to pay for a colony. In 1604 he settled colonists on Saint Croix Island; after a winter of scurvy they moved to Port-Royal. Rival merchants had the monopoly revoked in 1607, and the colony was abandoned.

Samuel de Champlain had sailed up the St Lawrence in 1603 with the trader François Gravé Du Pont and spent 1604–1607 in Acadia with de Mons. In 1608 de Mons won a one-year renewal of his monopoly, fitted out ships at his own cost and gave Champlain command. On 3 July 1608 Champlain founded Québec, the start of lasting French settlement on the river.

On 14 May 1610, the day after Marie's coronation, the king's coach was held up by carts in the rue de la Ferronnerie on its way to Sully. François Ravaillac, a Catholic zealot from Angoulême, climbed onto a wheel and stabbed Henri to death. Within hours the Parlement of Paris declared Marie regent for her eight-year-old son. Ravaillac was torn apart by horses.

Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, had seized the French marquisate of Saluzzo in 1588 and would not give it back. Henri declared war in August 1600. By the Treaty of Lyon in January 1601 the duke kept Saluzzo but gave France Bresse, Bugey, Valromey and Gex. Throughout the quarrel he had been courting one of Henri's marshals.

Charles de Gontaut, Duke of Biron, Marshal of France and governor of Burgundy, had been one of Henri's great captains in the civil wars. Embittered when a fortress he had won went to a Protestant governor, he listened to offers from Savoy: the duke's daughter and Burgundy as his own, for homage to Spain. His go-between, La Fin, gave the king the evidence. Biron denied everything and was beheaded in the Bastille on 31 July 1602.

Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Duke of Bouillon, a Protestant marshal and sovereign prince of Sedan, was named by La Fin as knowing of Biron's dealings. He fled to Geneva and his lands were confiscated. In 1606 he begged the king's pardon and got them back under French protection. His sons, Frédéric-Maurice and the future Marshal Turenne, would carry the family into the next reign.

Jacques Davy du Perron, born a Calvinist and converted to Rome, had instructed Henri in the Catholic faith and helped win his absolution in Rome in 1595. On 4 May 1600, at Fontainebleau, he routed the Protestant leader Duplessis-Mornay in a public debate the king had ordered. Henri had him made a cardinal in 1604. A poet himself, he recommended a fellow Norman to the king.

François de Malherbe had greeted Marie in 1600 with an ode of welcome, but only in 1605 did Henri receive him and order a poem for his journey to the Limousin. Malherbe stayed as the court's poet until his death in 1628. He demanded plain, exact French and strict rules of verse, a discipline that shaped French poetry for a century.

Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan, orphaned at thirteen, served as a page of the king's chamber under the protection of Bellegarde, the king's first gentleman. He met Malherbe in 1605, and the older poet became his friend and master. Racan's pastoral play Les Bergeries made his name around 1619, and his life of Malherbe is one of the main sources on his teacher.

On 3 December 1603 Henri let the Jesuits back into France and gave them his château at La Flèche for a royal college, which opened in January 1604. In 1607 René Descartes, whose father sat in the Parlement of Brittany, entered it at eleven. He stayed until 1614 and learned his first mathematics from the Jesuits there.

Louis XIII was eight when his father was killed. He was crowned at Reims on 17 October 1610 and declared of age at thirteen, in October 1614, but his mother pronounced him too weak in body and mind to rule and kept the government in her hands.

Marie kept most of Henri's ministers but turned his policy round, away from war with the Habsburgs and toward friendship with Spain. Sully resigned on 26 January 1611 after a stormy quarrel in her council, and she spent his reserve on pensions that bought the great nobles' loyalty. Her trust went to two Florentines she had brought from home.

Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy, had been secretary of state under four kings and had long favoured an understanding with Spain. He helped push Sully out and became the regent's principal minister. In 1612 negotiations opened for a double marriage between the royal houses of France and Spain.

Leonora Dori, called Galigaï, had grown up beside Marie in the Pitti palace and followed her to France in 1600, where she married the Florentine Concino Concini. As the regent's confidante she sold access to her, amassed a fortune and won her husband his promotions.

Concini bought the marquisate of Ancre, was made a councillor of state in 1610 and on 7 November 1613 became a Marshal of France without having fought a battle. He collected governorships in Picardy. The princes, shut out of the regent's confidence, made the Italian upstart their grievance.

Philip III of Spain, at peace with France since 1598, agreed to the double match. His eldest daughter, Anne, would marry Louis XIII; his heir, the future Philip IV, would marry Louis's sister Élisabeth. The marriages joined the two Catholic crowns that Henri had been preparing to fight.

Anne of Austria was married to Louis by proxy at Burgos on 18 October 1615, renouncing her rights to the Spanish throne, and was exchanged for Élisabeth on the Bidassoa that autumn. Bride and groom were both fourteen. The marriage produced no child for twenty-three years, and until then Louis's brother Gaston was heir to the throne.

Élisabeth of France, Louis's younger sister, was married by proxy to the future Philip IV at Bordeaux the same day and became Queen of Spain when he succeeded in 1621. Her daughter, Maria Theresa, would marry Louis XIV in 1660 to end the war these marriages had been meant to prevent.

Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, first prince of the blood, led the nobles who resented Concini and the Spanish marriages. In 1614 he took up arms, and on 15 May the regent made terms with him at Sainte-Menehould, promising an Estates-General.

Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, governor of Saumur and the 'pope of the Huguenots', had lost the Fontainebleau debate to du Perron. After Henri's death he defended the Protestants' guarantees while keeping the hotheads quiet. From May to September 1611 the general assembly of the Protestant churches met in his town, and the regent renewed their fortified places of safety.

Henri, Duke of Rohan, Sully's son-in-law, had fought at the siege of Jülich in 1610. As the regency turned Catholic and Spanish he drifted into opposition and became the party's coming leader, but for a decade he held back from open revolt.

Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, Bishop of Luçon, sat for the clergy of Poitou at the Estates-General that Condé had forced. In February 1615 the clergy chose him to give their closing address, and he caught the regent's eye. He rose by serving her and her favourite, and in November 1616 he became a secretary of state, in charge of foreign affairs.

With Condé in prison, Concini dominated the council and filled the ministry with his own men, Richelieu among them. He kept a private army of several thousand soldiers. The king, now fifteen and legally of age, had no part in his own government.

Charles d'Albert de Luynes, a gentleman from Provence who shared the king's passion for hunting and became his Grand Falconer in 1616, was Louis's closest companion. With a few other intimates the king decided to break his mother's power and be rid of Concini.

Nicolas de L'Hôpital, marquis de Vitry, captain of the king's guard and Louis's companion since childhood, was ordered to arrest Concini. On 24 April 1617 he stopped him on the bridge into the Louvre; when Concini called for help, Vitry and his men shot him dead. Within days Vitry had Concini's marshal's baton.

Condé rose again in 1615, as the Spanish marriages went ahead. By the Treaty of Loudun of 3 May 1616 he won an amnesty, a million and a half livres and the presidency of the council. Back in Paris he set himself against Concini, and on 1 September 1616 he was arrested in the Louvre. He stayed a prisoner until 1619.

Pierre de Bérulle, a priest of the Catholic revival who had helped du Perron against Duplessis-Mornay at Fontainebleau, founded the French Oratory in Paris in 1611 on the model of Philip Neri's in Rome. Its priests lived in community to give the secular clergy a real spiritual life, and its houses spread across France in the reform of the clergy. Bérulle would later head the queen mother's council.

Luynes took Concini's place and much of his fortune, including the marquisate of Ancre. Galigaï was beheaded as a witch in July 1617, Marie was sent to Blois, and Richelieu was dismissed and later exiled to Avignon. In November 1619 the king released Condé from prison, which angered the queen mother and drove her to arm again.

In the summer of 1620 the great nobles rallied to the queen mother at Angers. Louis, eighteen, marched against them, and on 7 August 1620 his army scattered hers at Les Ponts-de-Cé on the Loire. The rebels were pardoned three days later.

Confined at Blois, the queen mother escaped on the night of 21–22 February 1619, climbing down a rope ladder from the castle, and rode to Angoulême, from where she defied her son's government.

Jean-Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, Duke of Épernon, once Henri III's favourite and long a pensioner of the regent, had been pushed aside by Concini. His riders escorted Marie from Blois to his town of Angoulême, and he took up arms for her until she was restored to court.

Luynes advised the king to recall Richelieu from Avignon to bring Marie to terms. Richelieu negotiated the Treaty of Angoulême of 30 April 1619 and, after the defeat at Les Ponts-de-Cé, her reconciliation at Angers. Marie came back to court, though not as regent, and her adviser had made himself useful to both mother and son.

César, Duke of Vendôme, governor of Brittany, was Henri IV's eldest son, by Gabrielle d'Estrées, and so Louis's half-brother. He had backed Condé in 1614, and in 1620 he joined the queen mother's second war, which ended at Les Ponts-de-Cé and in a pardon on 10 August.

Agrippa d'Aubigné, Henri IV's Protestant comrade-in-arms and the poet of the Huguenot cause, published his Histoire universelle from 1616. Its third volume, still freer in its attacks on the monarchy, was banned and ordered burned. Outlawed in 1620, he fled to Geneva, where he spent his last ten years.

Bérulle, head of the queen mother's council, worked for her reconciliation with the king, and when it was made he was named a councillor of state. His sympathies lay with Catholic Spain and Austria, which in later years set him against Richelieu.

From Les Ponts-de-Cé Louis marched south to Béarn, which his father had kept apart from the French crown and whose Protestant estates had refused to give church lands back to the Catholics. He entered Pau on 15 October 1620, restored Catholic worship and joined Béarn and Lower Navarre to France.

Luynes was made Constable of France on 31 March 1621; the sword had been offered first to the Protestant Lesdiguières, who would not convert. The king took Saumur in May and Saint-Jean-d'Angély in June, but the siege of Montauban failed after three months. Luynes died of fever on campaign on 15 December 1621.

François de Bonne, Duke of Lesdiguières, the old Protestant master of the Dauphiné and a Marshal of France since 1609, became a Catholic in 1622, and Louis made him Constable. He was the last man ever to hold that office.

The Protestant assembly at La Rochelle refused to accept the union of Béarn and divided the kingdom into military circles. Duplessis-Mornay stayed loyal to the crown, but it did not save him: in May 1621 Louis entered the town and suspended him as governor. The old man retired to his estates and died in 1623.

Rohan took command of the rising in the south. While the king besieged Montauban he raised troops outside it, and on 25 September 1621 he slipped some 700 men through the siege lines. In October 1622 he signed the Peace of Montpellier: the Protestants kept their worship, and of their fortified towns only La Rochelle and Montauban.

Benjamin de Rohan, seigneur de Soubise, Rohan's younger brother, led the Protestants on the Atlantic coast. He held Saint-Jean-d'Angély until it surrendered on 24 June 1621, and in April 1622 Louis routed his army on the island of Riez in Poitou. He escaped to raise the coast again.

Jacques Nompar de Caumont, Duke of La Force, governor of Béarn since 1593 and Biron's brother-in-law, commanded inside Montauban with two of his sons and held it until the king withdrew in November 1621. In 1622 he surrendered Sainte-Foy without a fight and received a Marshal of France's baton in exchange.

Restored to court, Marie set about decorating her new Luxembourg Palace. In 1621 she commissioned Peter Paul Rubens, who had first seen her at her proxy wedding in Florence, to paint her life; the contract was settled early in 1622. Twenty-four canvases, finished in 1625, turned her marriage, regency and quarrels with her son into heroic allegory.

Nicolas Brûlart de Sillery, Chancellor of France since 1607, had negotiated Henri IV's annulment, his marriage to Marie and the Treaty of Lyon. After Luynes died he and his son became the leading men of the king's council, cautious ministers who wanted no quarrel with Spain.

Pierre Brûlart, vicomte de Puisieux, married to Villeroy's granddaughter, had held foreign affairs since 1617. Like his father, he leaned toward an understanding with Spain.

Charles de La Vieuville became superintendent of finances in January 1623. On 4 February 1624 he had the chancellor and his son disgraced, and in April he let Richelieu into the council. Richelieu set pamphlets against him, and on 13 August 1624 La Vieuville was arrested for embezzlement and imprisoned at Amboise.

Richelieu, made a cardinal in September 1622 on the king's nomination, entered the council on 29 April 1624 and led it from August. He remained Louis's chief minister for eighteen years.

François Leclerc du Tremblay, a Capuchin friar known as Father Joseph, had worked with Richelieu since 1612 and first appeared in politics at the Loudun negotiations of 1616. His network of Capuchins served the cardinal as a secret intelligence service, and he became his confidential agent in diplomacy: the original 'grey eminence'.

After Luynes's death the queen mother made her way back to power. In 1622 she entered the king's council, and her adviser Richelieu, who had reconciled her with her son, came in with her favour behind him.

The Valtellina, an Alpine valley on Spain's road from Milan to Austria, had been left in the pope's keeping. On 24 November 1624 François-Annibal d'Estrées, marquis de Cœuvres, led five or six thousand French troops into it at Richelieu's order and threw out the papal garrisons. A cardinal's army had attacked the pope's soldiers to cut the Habsburgs' road.

Philip IV, king of Spain since 1621, needed the Valtellina to move men from Milan to Austria and on to Flanders. He left the conduct of his affairs to his favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares.

Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, Philip's favourite and chief minister for twenty years, wanted the valley back. From 1624 he and Richelieu, chief ministers on either side, directed the struggle between Spain and France until the cardinal's death.

Pope Urban VIII, whose garrisons had been expelled, sent his nephew Cardinal Francesco Barberini to Paris as legate in 1625 to make peace, and raised troops to retake the valley. With a Protestant revolt at home, Richelieu settled. By the Treaty of Monzón of March 1626 the valley went back to the Grisons, with Catholic worship alone allowed, and its forts were to be razed.

In 1625 Soubise rose again. He seized the island of Ré, attacked the royal fleet in the river Blavet in Brittany and took Oléron, making himself master of the Atlantic coast from Nantes to Bordeaux. La Rochelle joined him in August. Beaten at Ré in September, he fled to England and lobbied Charles I's court for help.

Henri, Duke of Montmorency, Admiral of France, led a royal fleet strengthened by twenty Dutch warships and seven English ones lent by Charles I. On 15 September 1625 he beat the fleet of La Rochelle, commanded by Soubise and Jean Guiton, off Saint-Martin-de-Ré, and royal troops retook the island.

Jean de Saint-Bonnet, marquis de Toiras, a favourite of the king who had fought at Saumur, Montauban and Montpellier, beat Soubise's men on Ré in September 1625. Louis made him governor of the island.

Henriette-Marie, Louis's youngest sister, was married by proxy to Charles I outside Notre-Dame in May 1625; the Duke of Chevreuse stood in for the groom. She was fifteen. The match was meant to bind England to France, and in a secret treaty Charles lent Louis the ships that fought Soubise.

Charles I, king since March 1625, quarrelled with his Catholic wife's French household and on 26 June 1626 ordered it sent home. Soubise won from him and his favourite, Buckingham, the promise of English fleets for the Protestants of La Rochelle. By 1627 England and France were at war.

Gaston, Duke of Orléans, Louis's younger brother, was heir to the throne while the king had no son. Louis and Richelieu meant to marry him to Marie de Bourbon, heiress to the Montpensier fortune. Gaston did not want her, and a party opposed to the marriage gathered round him. Anne of Austria, who wanted the succession kept for her own children, also hoped to stop the match.

Jean-Baptiste d'Ornano, Gaston's governor, urged him to refuse the marriage. Louis made him a Marshal of France in 1626, then had him arrested quietly during a court concert in May. He died a prisoner that September without confessing anything.

Marie de Rohan, Duchess of Chevreuse, Luynes's widow and Anne of Austria's closest friend, was the cardinal's great enemy. She joined the party against the marriage, which drew in Condé and the king's half-brothers, the Vendômes, and she seduced the young courtier Chalais into it.

Henri de Talleyrand-Périgord, comte de Chalais, master of the king's wardrobe, was arrested at Nantes in July 1626. The king's half-brothers, the Vendômes, had been seized in June, and Gaston had made his peace and accepted the marriage. Chalais confessed and was beheaded at Nantes by an unskilled substitute executioner who needed some thirty blows. Chevreuse fled to the Duke of Lorraine.

Marie de Bourbon, Duchess of Montpensier, married Gaston at Nantes on 6 August 1626, with the king, the queen and the queen mother present. She died in Paris on 4 June 1627, a few days after bearing a daughter, Anne Marie Louise, heiress to her fortune: the future Grande Mademoiselle.

Bérulle obtained from Rome the dispensations for Henriette-Marie's marriage to a Protestant king and served as her chaplain in her first year in England. Since 1609 he had also been the spiritual director of a young priest, Vincent de Paul. Urban VIII made him a cardinal in 1627.

In 1613 Bérulle placed Vincent de Paul as tutor in the house of Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, general of the galleys, whose son would become the Cardinal de Retz. A sermon at Folleville on the Gondi estates in January 1617, which brought crowds of peasants to confession, showed him his mission. In 1625, with Gondi money, he founded the Congregation of the Mission to preach in the countryside.

After studying law at Poitiers, Descartes joined the Dutch army at Breda in 1618. There he met a man who changed his studies. In the 1620s he lived in Paris among mathematicians and in 1628 he settled in the Dutch Republic, where he wrote all his major works.

Isaac Beeckman, a Dutch schoolmaster trained in medicine, met Descartes at Breda in November 1618 over a mathematical puzzle posted in the market. He taught him to treat nature as matter in motion, described by mathematics, and Descartes dedicated his Compendium of Music to him. They fell out in 1629 over who had taught whom.

Marin Mersenne, a Minim friar who had studied at La Flèche like Descartes, settled in Paris in 1620 and came to know him there. After Descartes left for Holland, Mersenne became his link with French scholars, passing on letters, manuscripts and objections. His circle grew into a correspondence of some 140 scholars: the post-box of Europe.

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Charles I's favourite, landed on the Île de Ré in July 1627 with some 6,000 men, to win a base opposite La Rochelle and bring the city into the war. He besieged Toiras in the citadel of Saint-Martin, but his ladders were too short for its walls, and in November he sailed home having lost most of his army.

John Felton, a lieutenant who had survived the Ré expedition, was owed back pay and had been refused promotion; he blamed Buckingham for both. On 23 August 1628 he stabbed the duke to death in a Portsmouth inn as he prepared a new fleet for La Rochelle. The fleet that sailed under another commander in September never broke the dyke.

Toiras held the citadel of Saint-Martin against Buckingham for three months, while small boats slipped through the English blockade with food. A final English assault on 27 October failed.

Marshal Henri de Schomberg brought a relief army across to Ré in November 1627 and, with Toiras, drove the English off the island. Buckingham lost some 5,000 of his 7,000 men. The king's army could now turn on La Rochelle itself.

Richelieu ran the siege in person. Engineers ringed the city with twelve kilometres of trenches, eleven forts and eighteen redoubts, held by an army of 30,000. To close the harbour, four thousand workmen built a seawall some 1,400 metres long across the channel, on a foundation of sunken hulks filled with rubble.

Clément Métezeau, the king's architect, who had built the new town of Charleville for the Duke of Nevers, took up the idea of blocking the channel in November 1627, after an Italian engineer's first barrier was broken by the winter seas. His dyke shut out every English relief fleet.

François de Bassompierre, a courtier since Henri IV's day who had won his marshal's baton in the Protestant war of 1621–22, served with the king's army before La Rochelle in 1628. Three years later Richelieu would put him in the Bastille, where he stayed until the cardinal was dead.

Jean Guiton, the shipowner who had commanded La Rochelle's fleet against Montmorency, was elected mayor in May 1628 and led the city's defence. Famine and disease cut its people from some 27,000 to 5,000. On 28 October 1628 La Rochelle surrendered unconditionally; its walls were razed and its main Protestant church was made a cathedral.

When Vincenzo II, the last Gonzaga duke of Mantua, died on 26 December 1627, his cousin Charles de Gonzague, Duke of Nevers, a French peer, claimed Mantua and Montferrat and reached Mantua in January 1628. Spain would not have a French client beside Milan: its governor laid siege to Casale, Montferrat's fortress, while Savoy took its share of Montferrat.

The Emperor Ferdinand II, overlord of both duchies, confiscated them on 1 April 1628 pending his own judgment. When France intervened for Nevers in 1629, he sent troops from Germany into Italy. A dynastic quarrel had become a war between France and both branches of the Habsburgs.

Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, now allied with Spain, guarded the Alpine pass below Susa. In March 1629 the French army, with Louis and Richelieu present, forced it, and the duke had to let the French through to relieve Casale. Louis left Toiras to hold the town and turned back to France.

Back from Italy, Louis marched into the Protestant south. Privas fell on 28 May 1629 after a fifteen-day siege and was sacked and burned. Alès surrendered on 17 June. Bassompierre fought at Privas.

Rohan and Soubise had held out in the south after La Rochelle, and Spain had sent the rebels money. With Alès lost, Rohan accepted the Peace of Alès, which Louis signed on 28 June 1629: the Protestants kept their worship but lost their political assemblies, their fortresses and their places of safety. Rohan left for Venice.

Ambrogio Spinola, the Genoese general who had taken Breda for Spain and quarrelled with Olivares, landed at Genoa in September 1629 to command in Italy. On 23 May 1630 he laid siege to Casale. Imperial troops took Mantua in July. A truce stopped the siege on 4 September, and Spinola died three weeks later.

Toiras, left in Casale by the king, held it against Spinola through the summer of 1630, beating off assaults after Spanish mines blew up part of the defences. He visited the dying Spinola during the truce.

Giulio Mazzarino, a young papal diplomat, had shuttled between the courts and camps for a year and first met Richelieu at Lyon in January 1630. On 26 October, as Schomberg's relief army faced the Spanish lines outside Casale, he galloped between them crying 'Pace! Pace!' with an agreement for the Spanish to leave. The battle never happened.

Richelieu's war in Italy, fought against Catholic Spain, turned the queen mother and the devout party against him. In September 1630 Louis fell gravely ill at Lyon, and Marie pressed for the cardinal's dismissal. On 10 November, at her Luxembourg palace, she told her son to choose; that evening, at Versailles, Louis chose Richelieu.

Michel de Marillac, keeper of the seals and leader of the devout, wanted peace with Spain and reform at home; through 1629 and 1630 he and Richelieu had fought a hidden war in the council. He lost the seals at once and died a prisoner at Châteaudun in August 1632.

Louis de Marillac, Michel's half-brother and a Marshal of France, was commanding the army in Italy with Schomberg. On the king's orders, sent through Schomberg, he was arrested in his camp in Piedmont on 21 November and later tried for embezzlement.

Charles de L'Aubespine, marquis de Châteauneuf, a diplomat in the cardinal's confidence, received the seals Michel de Marillac had lost. Richelieu's control of the council was complete.

The queen mother had brought Richelieu into power and now wanted him gone. Her friends celebrated his fall on 10 November; by the next day it was plain that the king had kept him, and they were the dupes. Marie never regained her place in her son's council.

Théophraste Renaudot, a Protestant-born physician from Loudun, had met Father Joseph there, and in 1618 he was named commissioner for the poor. Around 1630, with the cardinal's support, he opened his Bureau d'adresse in Paris, an office that matched employers with workers, sellers with buyers and the poor with help.

Sent to Compiègne after the Dupes, Marie slipped away on 19 July 1631 and crossed into the Spanish Netherlands. She never saw France again. She died at Cologne in July 1642, in a house lent to her by Rubens.

Gaston, still heir to the throne, took his mother's side and left France for the court of Lorraine at Nancy. There he fell in love with the duke's young sister and raised troops for a return in arms.

Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine, a prince of the Empire, sheltered Gaston and let him marry his sister. In 1633 French troops invaded Lorraine in revenge for that support, and in 1634 Charles abdicated under French pressure and went into the Emperor's service. Lorraine stayed in French hands for most of the next thirty years.

Marguerite of Lorraine, sixteen, married Gaston secretly at Nancy on the night of 2–3 January 1632, without the king's consent. Louis had the marriage declared void by the Parlement in 1634. Only on his deathbed in 1643 did he allow it, and the couple married for the third time that July.

In the summer of 1632 Gaston invaded France, and Henri, Duke of Montmorency, governor of Languedoc and Henri IV's godson, raised his province for him. At Castelnaudary on 1 September Montmorency charged the king's army, fell with seventeen wounds and was taken. Gaston made his peace and abandoned him. On his way to the scaffold Montmorency revealed Gaston's secret marriage.

Louis de Marillac was tried first at Verdun and then by a second commission sitting at Rueil, in Richelieu's own house, with Châteauneuf presiding. Condemned for embezzlement by a majority of two votes, he was beheaded on the Place de Grève on 10 May 1632. His half-brother Michel died a prisoner that August.

Marshal Schomberg, who had relieved Ré and marched to Casale, commanded the king's army in Languedoc and beat the rebels at Castelnaudary. Montmorency, condemned by a court again presided over by Châteauneuf, was beheaded at Toulouse on 30 October 1632. Schomberg himself died that November.

France paid others to fight the Habsburgs. By the Treaty of Bärwalde of 23 January 1631 Richelieu promised Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden 400,000 Reichsthaler a year for five years to keep 36,000 men in Germany. Gustavus crushed the imperial army at Breitenfeld that September and swept through Germany, but he was killed at Lützen in November 1632.

Axel Oxenstierna, Sweden's chancellor, took charge of the war and headed the regency for the child queen, Christina. In 1633 he founded the League of Heilbronn, binding the German Protestant states to Sweden, which he led until 1635. French money kept flowing.

On 30 May 1631 Renaudot brought out La Gazette, the first weekly newspaper in France, with the cardinal's backing. It gave the crown a regular printed account of the wars, the trials and the conspiracies that followed the Day of the Dupes.

In 1633 Châteauneuf betrayed a plan against Lorraine to the Duchess of Chevreuse, who passed it to Duke Charles. Richelieu took away his seals and jailed him at Angoulême for ten years. The seals went to Pierre Séguier, a magistrate of the Parlement, who became Chancellor in December 1635 and served Richelieu, Mazarin and Louis XIV until 1672.

François Le Métel de Boisrobert, poet and playwright, had been introduced to Richelieu in 1623 and wrote for him as one of his five authors. It was Boisrobert who suggested to the cardinal that a private circle of writers could become a public academy.

Valentin Conrart, a secretary to the king born to Calvinist parents, had opened his house in 1629 to a group of writers who met to read and criticise each other's work. Richelieu made himself their protector; Conrart drafted the rules and became the first permanent secretary. Royal letters patent founded the Académie française in 1635.

Jean Chapelain, poet and critic, had urged on Richelieu the classical unities of drama. He drew up the plan for the Academy's grammar and dictionary, the work its charter set it: to give French exact rules and make it fit for the arts and sciences.

On 6 September 1634 the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, Philip IV's brother, joined Ferdinand of Hungary, the Emperor's son, to crush the Swedes and their German allies at Nördlingen; Charles IV of Lorraine fought on the imperial side. The Cardinal-Infante went on to govern the Spanish Netherlands from Brussels. France's war by proxy was failing.

Philipp Christoph von Sötern, archbishop and elector of Trier, had put his lands under French protection and let French troops into the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein. On 26 March 1635 Spanish troops took Trier by surprise and carried him off; he stayed a prisoner for ten years. France demanded his release.

On 19 May 1635 a French herald rode into Brussels to deliver Louis XIII's declaration of war to the Cardinal-Infante. When no one would receive him, he threw it down in a city square. The war with Spain lasted twenty-four years.

After Nördlingen the Swedes needed France more than ever, and France could no longer fight through them alone. In 1635 Oxenstierna came to Compiègne to negotiate with Richelieu, but refused to bind Sweden's hands for a short-term subsidy.

Prince Thomas of Savoy-Carignano, youngest son of Charles Emmanuel, had gone over to Spain. In 1636 he led the Cardinal-Infante's invasion of Picardy with the imperial generals Piccolomini and Werth. They took Corbie on the Somme on 15 August, and their horsemen raided as far as Pontoise. Paris panicked.

Louis raised a new army and retook Corbie in November 1636; the old Protestant marshal La Force served at the siege. The war's taxes bore down on the countryside, and in 1637 the peasants of Périgord and the southwest rose as the Croquants.

On 5 September 1638, after twenty-three years of marriage, Anne gave birth at Saint-Germain to a son, Louis, called Dieudonné, the God-given. Gaston was no longer heir, and his power to bargain with the throne was gone.

Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, a Protestant prince who had lost his lands after Nördlingen, entered French pay in 1635, promised Alsace. In 1638 he won at Rheinfelden, repulsed Charles IV of Lorraine at Thann and on 17 December took Breisach, the key fortress of the Upper Rhine. He died in July 1639, and Richelieu took over his army.

Pierre Corneille, a Rouen lawyer turned playwright, had written for Richelieu as one of his five authors before going his own way. Le Cid, a tragicomedy about a Spanish hero, opened at the Théâtre du Marais in the winter of 1636–37 and was a sensation. Rival writers attacked it, and Richelieu put the quarrel to his new Academy.

At Richelieu's command Chapelain drew up the Sentiments de l'Académie sur le Cid, which faulted the play for breaking the classical rules. The new Academy had become an arbiter of public taste, on the cardinal's side.

In 1637 Descartes published his Discourse on Method, with three essays on optics, meteors and geometry. Mersenne circulated it among French mathematicians and gathered their objections.

Pierre de Fermat, a councillor in the Parlement of Toulouse who did mathematics as a pastime, had corresponded with Mersenne since 1636. He challenged Descartes's optics and claimed priority for his own method of maxima and tangents; Descartes attacked him in letters to Mersenne in 1638. Étienne Pascal took Fermat's side.

Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran, friend of the Flemish theologian Jansen and a disciple of Bérulle, had directed the nuns of Port-Royal since 1633 and gathered devout followers in Paris, allied with the Parlement, who set him at odds with the cardinal. In 1638 Richelieu had him imprisoned at Vincennes, where he stayed until the cardinal died.

In 1640 the Catalans rose against Spanish troops quartered on them and Olivares's demands. Pau Claris, a canon of Urgell and president of the Generalitat, turned to France: on 16 January 1641 he proclaimed a Catalan republic under French protection, and on 23 January recognised Louis XIII as Count of Barcelona. Franco-Catalan troops beat the Spanish at Montjuïc on 26 January. Claris died a month later.

On 1 December 1640 Portuguese conspirators threw off sixty years of Spanish rule and proclaimed the Duke of Braganza king as John IV. France backed him and signed an alliance with him in Paris on 1 June 1641. Spain now had to fight in Portugal and Catalonia as well as Flanders and Italy.

Frédéric-Maurice, Duke of Bouillon, Henri de Bouillon's elder son and Turenne's brother, had joined the Count of Soissons and Spanish troops to beat a royal army at La Marfée outside Sedan in 1641. Forgiven and given command of the army in Italy, he joined the next plot as well.

Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, had been placed beside the king by Richelieu and made Grand Equerry at nineteen. He came to hate his patron. In 1642, with Gaston and Bouillon, he made a treaty with Spain for troops to bring the cardinal down. Arrested at Narbonne in June, he was beheaded at Lyon on 12 September.

François-Auguste de Thou, son of the historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou and heir to his post as master of the king's library, knew of the treaty with Spain and did not reveal it. His silence was taken as guilt, and he was beheaded at Lyon the same day as Cinq-Mars.

Gaston denounced his accomplices to save himself, as he had before; Ornano, Chalais and Montmorency had already died for him. Bouillon, arrested at Casale with his army, bought his life by ceding his principality of Sedan to the crown.

With Catalonia in revolt, Louis and Richelieu went south in 1642 to besiege Perpignan, capital of Roussillon. In June the plot was uncovered and Cinq-Mars was arrested at Narbonne. Perpignan surrendered on 9 September, and Roussillon with it.

Richelieu, worn out and long ill, died in Paris on 4 December 1642, five months after Marie de' Medici had died in exile at Cologne. He had recommended his successor to the king, and the king took his advice.

Mazarin had moved to Paris in 1640 in Richelieu's service and had become a cardinal in 1641. On 5 December 1642 the king took him into his council.

Louis XIII died on 14 May 1643, leaving a four-year-old son and a will that bound his widow to a council of regency. Five days later the Duke of Enghien destroyed a Spanish army at Rocroi.

Étienne Pascal, one of Mersenne's circle, was made the king's commissioner for taxes at Rouen in 1639, where the tax records were in chaos. To spare him the endless sums, his son Blaise, not yet nineteen, built in 1642 a machine that could add and subtract: the first Pascaline.

On 18 May 1643 the Parlement set aside Louis XIII's will at Anne's request and gave her full powers as regent for her four-year-old son. She kept Mazarin, the dead cardinal's man, as her chief minister, and kept up the war against her own brother, Philip IV.

Michel Le Tellier, a magistrate who had served as intendant with the army in Piedmont from 1640, owed his rise to his friendship with Mazarin. In 1643 he became secretary of state for war and ran the commissions, supplies and pay of the armies, the administration behind Enghien's and Turenne's campaigns.

Abel Servien, once Richelieu's secretary of state for war and disgraced in 1636, had known Mazarin since the Mantuan negotiations. Mazarin recalled him and sent him to Westphalia with the Count of Avaux to negotiate peace with the Emperor.

Claude de Mesmes, Count of Avaux, a veteran of embassies to Venice, Rome and the northern courts, shared the French delegation with Servien. The two quarrelled so bitterly that Avaux was recalled, leaving Servien to finish the treaty.

François de Vendôme, Duke of Beaufort, César de Vendôme's son and Henri IV's grandson, had expected the new regency to reward Richelieu's old enemies. When Anne kept Mazarin, he and the Duchess of Chevreuse led the 'Importants' in a plot against the cardinal in August 1643. Beaufort was arrested in September and held at Vincennes until he escaped on 31 May 1648.

Francisco de Melo, a Portuguese nobleman in Spanish service and acting governor of the Spanish Netherlands, invaded France as Louis XIII lay dying and laid siege to the fortress of Rocroi.

Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, Condé's 21-year-old son and Montmorency's nephew, had been given command of the army of Picardy. On 19 May 1643 he attacked Melo at Rocroi: his cavalry swept round behind the Spanish lines and broke their infantry, and the Spanish army was virtually destroyed. On his father's death in 1646 he became Prince of Condé.

Jean de Gassion, a cavalry commander from Pau, led horsemen beside Enghien at Rocroi and was counted one of the makers of the victory. He was made a Marshal of France at thirty-four and died of wounds at the siege of Lens in 1647; Renaudot wrote his life.

Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne, the younger son of Henri de Bouillon and still a Protestant, was made a Marshal of France in May 1643 and fought the Bavarians in southern Germany: at Freiburg beside Enghien in 1644, and in May 1645 at Mergentheim, where he was surprised and routed.

Franz von Mercy, commander of the Bavarian army from 1643, had destroyed a French army at Tuttlingen, held off Enghien and Turenne at Freiburg and routed Turenne at Mergentheim. Enghien and Turenne joined forces against him again, and at Nördlingen on 3 August 1645 Mercy was killed by a musket ball and his army beaten.

Carl Gustaf Wrangel succeeded Torstensson in 1646 as commander of the Swedish army in Germany. He and Turenne joined forces to march through Bavaria and Württemberg, and on 17 May 1648 they beat the imperial and Bavarian army at Zusmarshausen. Bavaria lay open, and that autumn the Emperor made peace.

Cornelius Jansen, Saint-Cyran's friend since their student days at Louvain, became bishop of Ypres in the Spanish Netherlands in 1636 and died two years later. His Augustinus, published in 1640, set out a stern doctrine of grace drawn from St Augustine.

Released after Richelieu's death in 1643, Saint-Cyran went back to directing Port-Royal, but he died that October. Port-Royal's little schools for boys had opened under his guidance in 1638.

Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld, made coadjutrix of Port-Royal as a child, had reformed her convent's discipline and in 1625 moved it to Paris. From 1635 she followed Saint-Cyran's direction, and around Port-Royal gathered nuns, priests, teachers and laymen living in retreat, the solitaries.

Antoine Arnauld, her brother and the youngest of twenty children, a doctor of the Sorbonne, published On Frequent Communion in 1643 with Saint-Cyran's encouragement. It argued against frequent communion without strict preparation, set off a quarrel with the Jesuits and made him the public theologian of Port-Royal.

Charles Le Brun, a young painter whom Chancellor Séguier had placed with Simon Vouet and paid to study in Rome with Poussin from 1642, came home to lead the artists who wanted to be free of the Paris guild. With Séguier's backing their petition reached the regent, and in February 1648 the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture was founded.

Michel Particelli d'Émery, son of a Lyon banker of Lucchese family, controller-general from 1643 and then superintendent, paid for the war with new levies, among them taxes on houses built outside the old walls of Paris and on goods entering the city. In 1648 the sovereign courts of Paris joined together to demand limits on taxes and royal agents; on 9 July the regent dismissed him.

On the night of 5–6 January 1649 Anne took the boy king out of Paris to Saint-Germain, and Condé, back from Lens, blockaded the capital for her with the royal army. His own brother and sister were inside with the rebels.

Pierre Broussel, an elderly councillor of the Parlement, was popular for opposing the new taxes. On 26 August 1648, during the thanksgiving for Lens, Anne had him arrested. By morning Paris was barricaded, and two days later the regent let him go.

Jean-François Paul de Gondi, coadjutor to his uncle the archbishop of Paris and once Vincent de Paul's pupil, used his hold on the parishes and the city crowd to make himself a leader of the revolt. The Fronde was his stage, and he later wrote its most famous memoirs as the Cardinal de Retz.

Mathieu Molé, first president of the Parlement since 1641 and a friend of Saint-Cyran, defended the court's rights but played a conciliatory part. During the barricades he went to the queen to demand Broussel's release, and in March 1649 he made peace with the regency at Rueil.

Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti, Condé's younger brother and Richelieu's godson, was named generalissimo of the Parisian rebels in January 1649, against the army his own brother commanded.

Anne-Geneviève de Bourbon, Duchess of Longueville, sister of Condé and Conti, born in her parents' prison at Vincennes in 1619, brought her younger brother and her husband into the Fronde. During the siege she lived in the Hôtel de Ville, where she gave birth to a son.

Henri d'Orléans, Duke of Longueville, governor of Normandy since 1619, had joined Marie de' Medici's rising in 1620 and had led the French delegation at Münster. In 1649 he took his wife's side and tried to raise Normandy.

François de La Rochefoucauld, Prince of Marcillac, the duchess's lover since about 1645, brought his family's following to the rebellion and fought in the siege of Paris. Years later his Memoirs and Maxims distilled what he had seen of ambition in the Fronde.

Enghien, Prince of Condé since his father's death in 1646, commanded against the Spanish in Flanders. On 20 August 1648 he beat their army at Lens. Six days later, during the thanksgiving for the victory in Paris, the regent struck at her critics in the Parlement.

Servien signed the Treaty of Münster with the Emperor on 24 October 1648. France gained Breisach and the Habsburg lands and rights in Alsace, and its long war with the Emperor ended; the war with Spain went on.

Ferdinand III, emperor since 1637, beaten in Bavaria by Turenne and Wrangel, made peace with France at Münster and with Sweden at Osnabrück. Spain had already made peace with the Dutch, but not with France.

Condé had saved the regency and now behaved as its master. On 18 January 1650 Mazarin had him arrested with Conti and Longueville. A year later the Parlement, Gaston and the Paris Frondeurs combined against the cardinal; in February 1651 he fled to Brühl near Cologne, and the princes went free. He kept governing from exile.

César de Choiseul, comte du Plessis-Praslin, Marshal of France and from 1649 governor of the king's brother Philippe, led the royal army against the princes' rescuers. He held Reims against Turenne and on 15 December 1650 beat him and his Spanish allies at Rethel.

Turenne made his peace with the court in 1651 and in 1652 took command of the king's army against Condé. On 7 April he saved the court near Gien, at Bléneau, and on 2 July he caught Condé outside the walls of Paris at the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. That year he married La Force's daughter.

Louis XIV was declared of age on 7 September 1651. In October 1652, with Paris weary of Condé, the fourteen-year-old king rode back into his capital. Gondi, now Cardinal de Retz, was arrested in December, and Mazarin returned in February 1653.

With her brothers and husband in prison, the Duchess of Longueville failed to raise Normandy, escaped by sea to Holland and reached Stenay, where Turenne held the frontier fortress. There she negotiated with the Spanish and pushed Turenne to revolt.

Turenne went over to the princes in 1650 and invaded northern France with a Spanish army to free them, until he was beaten at Rethel.

Frédéric-Maurice, Duke of Bouillon, his elder brother, joined the princes' party in 1650. Mazarin won him back that year with the promise of lands for lost Sedan, which he received in 1651.

Freed in February 1651, Condé quarrelled with everyone. In September he raised Guyenne and in November allied with Spain. After the fighting at the gates of Paris he lost the city's support, and in October 1652 he left France to command Spanish armies against his own king.

Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, Gaston's daughter by his first wife, took her father's side. On 2 July 1652, as Turenne pressed Condé against the closed gates, she had the Porte Saint-Antoine opened to his men and the guns of the Bastille fired on the royal army. She was exiled from court for it.

Christina, Queen of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus's daughter, came to Descartes through the French ambassador Pierre Chanut. In 1649 she invited him to Stockholm to teach her and plan a scientific academy, and sent a ship to fetch him.

Descartes reached Stockholm on 4 October 1649. He tutored the queen at five in the morning in the northern winter, caught pneumonia and died on 11 February 1650, far from the college at La Flèche where he had first learned mathematics.

Nicolas Fouquet, procurator-general of the Parlement since 1650, had stayed loyal to Mazarin through his exile and guarded his interests. On the cardinal's return he asked for and received the superintendence of finances on 7 February 1653, jointly with Servien. He raised money for the war through the great financiers who lent to the king.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a merchant's son from Reims, had been Le Tellier's secretary before he took charge of Mazarin's private affairs in 1652. He watched the state's money too: in a memorandum to Mazarin he showed that less than half the taxes reached the king and attacked Fouquet's management.

Hugues de Lionne, Servien's nephew and Mazarin's most trusted diplomat, went to Madrid in 1656 for preliminary peace talks with Spain. They failed, and Mazarin looked for a stronger ally.

Don Juan José of Austria, Philip IV's only acknowledged illegitimate son, came to govern the Spanish Netherlands in 1656. With Condé he stormed Turenne's lines at Valenciennes in July 1656. In June 1658 he marched to save Dunkirk, besieged by Turenne and the English.

Condé, now commanding Spanish troops against his own king, had fought at Arras in 1654 and helped storm Turenne's lines at Valenciennes in 1656. At the Dunes he fought beside Don Juan and shared his defeat.

On 14 June 1658, with Cromwell's infantry beside him, Turenne broke the Spanish army in the dunes outside Dunkirk. Dunkirk surrendered ten days later and was handed to the English as promised.

After Valenciennes Mazarin turned to Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England. By the Treaty of Paris of 1657 England sent 6,000 infantry to fight beside Turenne, for the promise of Dunkirk. Exiled English royalists fought on the Spanish side.

Opponents of Port-Royal drew five propositions on grace from Jansen's Augustinus and sent them to Rome. In 1653 Pope Innocent X condemned them as heretical in the bull Cum occasione.

Arnauld answered that the condemned propositions were not in Jansen's book. In 1655 two letters on Jesuit methods in the confessional brought a motion of censure in the Sorbonne, and in February 1656 he was expelled from the faculty.

Blaise Pascal, close to Port-Royal since 1646, took up Arnauld's defence in eighteen anonymous Provincial Letters in 1656–57, mocking the Jesuits' casuistry. They did not save Arnauld. Two years earlier his letters with Fermat on how to divide the stakes of an unfinished game had founded the theory of probability.

Giovanni Battista Lulli, a Florentine boy whom the Chevalier de Guise had brought to Paris in 1646 to serve the Grande Mademoiselle, left her household when she was exiled. In February 1653 he danced beside Louis XIV in the Ballet royal de la nuit, where the young king appeared as the rising sun, and in March he was made composer of the king's instrumental music.

Madeleine Béjart, an actress and a shrewd manager, had founded the Illustre Théâtre in Paris in 1643 with Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. The company went bankrupt in 1645, and she and her partner took a new troupe on the road through the provinces for twelve years.

Poquelin, now calling himself Molière, was jailed for a day over the troupe's debts in 1645. On tour he won the patronage of the Prince of Conti, governor of Languedoc, until Conti turned to religion. In 1658 the troupe came back to Paris and played before Louis XIV in the Louvre.

Philippe, Duke of Anjou, the king's younger brother, took the company under his name as the Troupe de Monsieur in 1658, and with his help it was allowed to share the Petit-Bourbon theatre with Scaramouche's Italian players.

Luis de Haro, Olivares's nephew and Philip IV's chief minister since 1643, met Mazarin on the Isle of Pheasants in the Bidassoa, where Anne and Élisabeth had been exchanged in 1615. On 7 November 1659 they signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees: France kept Roussillon and gained most of Artois, and Condé was pardoned.

Maria Theresa, Philip IV's daughter by Élisabeth of France and so Louis's double first cousin, married Louis XIV at Saint-Jean-de-Luz on 9 June 1660. Like her aunt Anne before her, she renounced her claim to the Spanish throne, but the renunciation was tied to a dowry of 500,000 écus that Spain never paid.

Lionne, made a minister of state in June 1659, was Mazarin's negotiator for the treaty. In it Mazarin left his Portuguese allies to fight Spain alone.

Marie Mancini, Mazarin's niece, was the young king's first love, and Louis wanted to marry her. Anne and Mazarin would not allow it: on 22 June 1659 she was sent away from court to Brouage, and Louis accepted the Spanish match.

In 1660 Louis made Turenne Marshal General of his camps and armies, a rank only six soldiers ever held. The rebel of 1650 had become the crown's first soldier.

Pardoned by the treaty, Condé returned to France and submitted to the king. He got back his titles and lands but not his independence, and lived quietly at Chantilly until Louis gave him commands again.

Gaston, who had plotted against every government since 1626 and abandoned his accomplices each time, had been sent to Blois by Mazarin in 1652. He died there on 2 February 1660.

Philippe, the king's brother, received Gaston's duchy of Orléans in 1660 and became the new Monsieur: a prince raised in Mazarin's court, not against it.

On 18 November 1659 Molière's Les Précieuses ridicules, his satire on the salons' affectations, opened at the Petit-Bourbon and set Paris talking. When the hall was pulled down in 1660 for the Louvre's new wing, the troupe was given the theatre in the Palais-Royal, which Richelieu had built in his own palace.

Claude Lancelot, a teacher in Port-Royal's little schools since their founding in 1638, had tutored the Duke of Chevreuse and the princes of Conti. In 1660 he and Antoine Arnauld published the General and Rational Grammar, which explained language by the logic of thought. That year the schools were closed and Lancelot was sent away.