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CAUSES OF THE REVOLT Although the Audijos uprising of 1664–7 mentioned briefly in recent surveys of peasant discontents, and although it has been the focus of a massive collection of published documents, its most interesting aspect has not been studied. The revolt coincided with the early years of Colbert's administration, a period of centralising étatisme, and it affected a number of small territories in the Pyrenees whose privileges and local institutions displayed considerable vitality. In the course of the rising these institutions did not always co-operate in defence of provincial immunities, but neither did governors and intendants always work together in their endeavours to assert the royal will. It is upon this clash of interests, especially in Béarn, rather than upon the details of the insurrection itself, that this paper is focused. The revolt was led by a petty gentleman of Chalosse, Bernard d'Audijos, who had served as a youth in a royal regiment at the end of the Fronde, when Henri de Baylens, marquis de Poyanne and lieutenant-general in Béarn and Navarre, had opposed Condé's German commander, Balthazar, in Gascony. Poyanne and other nobles of the sword were accused by the intendant of inaction or complicity during the guerrilla war waged by Audijos. In this, and in other respects, the revolt followed an established seventeenth-century pattern.It was provoked by the attempt of the central government to strengthen or assert its fiscal powers; it attracted the sympathy and sometimes the support of local society as a whole; and it was fought by peasantry whose villages suffered from the reprisals of the king's dragons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of the controversy between Boris Porshnev and Roland Mousnier a generation ago, studies of popular revolts and affrays have been centred in the seventeenth century. Even when they have begun by questioning Mousnier's general conclusions, nearly all these studies have ended by reaffirming them. Resistance to the agents of royal taxation was the dominant motif, and local solidarity between the social orders against the centralising state was more evident than the hostility of the labouring classes towards their betters. But there has been too great a readiness to apply the seventeenthcentury model to the risings of the later sixteenth century. In his popular overview of peasant revolt in both periods (and indeed beyond), Yves-Marie Bercé has taken the great Pitaud (or Pétault) revolt of 1548 as establishing a pattern which was to repeat itself continuously with one or two variations and exceptions. Two other recent surveys have modified the set image and given more attention to the peasant risings of the religious wars. In the long term Jean Jacquart finds the exploitative power of the seigneurial apparatus and the growth of peasant indebtedness to urban interests to be at least as disruptive of peasant political economy as state taxation. Distinguishing the risings of the later sixteenth century from those that followed, he attaches importance to warbands, seigneurial and church dues, and resentment of country against town as primary causes of peasant discontents. In contrast with Bercé, Jacquart stresses evidence for antiseigneurial motives in the Croquant movement of the 1590s, which he calls the most consciously revolutionary of all the revolts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the limitations of their own environment may often conceal from generations of historians certain important features of a particular age. Yet it is difficult to believe that until quite recently two fundamental aspects of the France of Richelieu and Mazarin were generally ignored and never related to each other. In venality of office and the endemic nature of popular revolt the motive forces of seventeenth-century France have been suddenly and dramatically revealed. The connection between them has been thought to provide an interpretative key to the last centuries of the ancien régime, but, unfortunately, the historian of venality of office, Roland Mousnier, and the author of the first general study of the mass risings under Richelieu, Boris Porshnev, have reached antithetical conclusions as to what this connection may be. M. Georges Pagès was the first to sense the significance of the two phenomena, but he commented on them separately. In 1932 he published an article sketching possible lines of inquiry into the evolutions of the system whereby the crown had alienated direct control of bureaucratic processes to a class who held their charges as venal and hereditary property. Pagès did not regard this system as some kind of administrative excrescence, nor even as a short-sighted financial expedient, but rather as the monarchy's unconscious acquisition of a firm base in the nation. When Richelieu and Mazarin attempted to recover the crown's authority by superimposing the intendants, the venal bureaucracy was provoked into open resistance in the Fronde.Both systems survived and expanded after the crisis, but the intendants became the executors of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘God Almighty raised up these two great princes sworn enemies to one another, and emulous of one another's greatness; an emulation that has cost the lives of two hundred thousand persons, and brought a million of families into utter ruin; when after all neither the one nor the other obtained any other advantage by the dispute than the bare repentance of having been the causers of so many miseries, and of the effusion of so much Christian blood.’ Many historians of the Habsburg–Valois wars have followed the broad outline of Blaise de Monluc's retrospective assessment, fascinated by what appears at first glance to be a destructive and almost incomprehensible duel between two highly cultured Renaissance princes: the Habsburg Charles V, and the Valois Francis I. Yet the wars, which took place in an age that produced both Erasmus and Machiavelli, involved many Christian and Muslim powers. They continued after Charles and Francis were dead, and their repercussions were felt throughout the known world either directly – as participants or victims of the fighting – or indirectly, since the struggle consumed Christian resources and enabled the Ottoman state to expand. And while the conflict was extremely destructive, states and individuals – such as Monluc – participated in the wars because they also brought considerable benefits. As the second decade of the sixteenth century dawned, however, it seemed that war had been banished from Christendom. In March 1518 Pope Leo X had proclaimed a crusade, and imposed a general peace upon all Christian states for five years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urchins and hooligans of seventeenth-century Paris used to have a game, one prohibited by the authorities, of shooting at people with a fronde, or sling; by this same term, too, contemporaries designated the revolution of the Fronde and its actors, the Frondeurs. A sling may seem a toy, yet it can do deadly harm. Correspondingly, most of the Fronde's historians have tended in different ways to consider it as a dangerous rebellion, yet one that was vitiated by a paradoxical levity. Particularly the part taken in it by fashionable men and women of the high nobility has caused it to be regarded as lacking the deep seriousness a proper revolution should display. The themes of enigma, confusion, and even senselessness also run through some accounts of it, owing to the discrepancy between its violence and apparent character as an attack upon absolutism and the vanity, cynicism, and playacting ascribed to its aristocratic participants. Thus, in a representative verdict Ernest Lavisse, author of a standard depiction of the subject, called the Fronde “a game, but an abominable game.” Louis Madelin summed it up as “a failed revolution” in which the nation never took part. Victor Cousin, a distinguished savant who wrote much about the aristocratic society of the period, described the Fronde as a series of intrigues with no serious object, an event without grandeur, and a pastime for gentlemen, wits, and belles. “To the ladies especially,” he remarked, “the Fronde belonged.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provincial rebellion, the revolts of provinces, regions, and entire subject kingdoms against their monarchical center, were endemic in early modern Europe, evidence of the fierce resistance provoked by the aggressions of royal state builders. To be sure, it might be said that much of the political history of medieval Europe was related to the growth and expanding functions of the state – or, if one prefers, to the emergence and consolidation of the state out of conditions of feudal independence and fragmentation of authority. Nonetheless, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed the transition to a new political order in the monarchies of Western Europe. Step by step, late feudal kingships evolved into much more centralized governments of an absolutist character, wielding ever larger bureaucratic resources to perform the tasks of national and imperial rule. Royal power steadily extended its reach in breadth and depth, equipping itself in the process with new administrative means to achieve the political integration of kingdoms, to govern dependent realms and imperial possessions, and to make polity, social order, and economy instrumental to its supreme will and interests. Understandably, contemporary legal and political thought was much preoccupied with rationalizing and facilitating these developments; or else, contrariwise, it set itself to formulate a case against the absolute power of kings. In 1576, in his encyclopedic treatise of comparative politics, Six books of the commonweal, Jean Bodin provided one of the most influential justifications for royal absolutism through his examination of the nature and necessity of sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We arrive finally at revolutionary civil war, the rarest type of revolution in the states and society of early modern Europe. It contains the conflicts that stand out from nearly all the others of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by their scope and duration and includes what many historians would probably regard as preeminently the “great” revolutions of the age. It was these that plunged states into the lengthiest and severest violence, split their political order the most deeply, and defied and defeated, temporarily or for good, the greatest monarchies. But far above and far as sight endures Like whips of anger With lightning's danger There runs the quick perspective of the future. Whether by their success or failure or by their ultimate fruitfulness or sterility, these struggles loom up to retrospective vision beyond most of the rest. They appear not merely as events of cataclysmic strife but also as symbols that intimate some destiny in their countries' history. Four revolutions belong to this category: the French civil war, or wars of religion, between 1562 and 1598; the revolt of the Netherlands from 1566 to 1609; the English revolution of 1640-60; and the Fronde in France from 1648 to 1653. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]