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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]

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]