War of the Fronde

Fronde

Part of the Franco-Spanish War (1635–59)

Battle of the Faubourg St Antoine (1652) by the walls of the Bastille, Paris

Date	1648–1653
Location	France
Result	Revolt suppressed

Belligerents

Kingdom of France

Parlements (1648–1649)
Princes of the Blood (1650–1653)

Commanders and leaders

Gaston of Orleans
The Grand Condé (from 1651)
Armand de Bourbon, Prince of Conti (from 1651)

The Fronde (French pronunciation: [fʀɔ̃d]) was a series of civil wars in France between 1648 and 1653, occurring in the midst of the Franco-Spanish War, which had begun in 1635. King Louis XIII confronted the combined opposition of the princes, the nobility, the law courts (parlements), and most of the French people, and yet won out in the end.

The Fronde was divided into two campaigns, the Fronde of the parlements and the Fronde of the nobles. The timing of the outbreak of the Fronde des parlements, directly after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) that ended the Thirty Years War, was significant. The nuclei of the armed bands that terrorized parts of France under aristocratic leaders during this period had been hardened in a generation of war in Germany, where troops still tended to operate autonomously. Louis XIV, impressed as a young ruler with the experience of the Fronde, came to reorganize French fighting forces under a stricter hierarchy whose leaders ultimately could be made or unmade by the King. A. Lloyd Moote argues that Cardinal Mazarin blundered into the crisis but came out well ahead at the end. The Fronde represented the final attempt of the French nobility to do battle with the king, and they were humiliated. In the long-term, the Fronde served to strengthen Royal authority, but weakened the economy. The Fronde facilitated the emergence of absolute monarchy.

The French word fronde means "sling"; Parisian crowds used slings to smash the windows of supporters of Cardinal Mazarin.

The insurrection did not start with revolutionary goals; it aimed to protect the ancient liberties from royal encroachments and to defend the established rights of the parlements - courts of appeal rather than legislative bodies like the English parliaments - and especially the right of the Parlement of Paris to limit the king's power by refusing to register decrees that ran against custom. The liberties under attack were feudal, not of individuals, but of chartered towns, where they defended the prerogatives accorded to offices in the legal patchwork of local interests and provincial identities that was France. The Fronde in the end provided an incentive for the establishment of royalist absolutism, since the disorders eventually discredited the feudal concept of liberty.

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