The Fronde
The Fronde (fʁɔ̃d) was a series of civil wars in the Kingdom of France between 1648 and 1653, occurring in the midst of the Franco-Spanish War, which had begun in 1635. King Louis XIV confronted the combined opposition of the princes, the nobility, the law courts (parlements), as well as most of the French people, and managed to subdue them all. The dispute started when the government of France issued seven fiscal edicts, six of which were to increase taxation. The parlements resisted and questioned the constitutionality of the King's actions and sought to check his powers. The Fronde was divided into two campaigns, the Parlementary Fronde and the Fronde of the Princes. The timing of the outbreak of the Parlementary Fronde, 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 that 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. 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 Spanish Empire, which had promoted the Fronde to the point that without its support, it would have had a more limited character, benefited from the internal upheaval in France since it contributed to the Spanish military's renewed success in its war against the French between 1647 and 1656, so much so that the year 1652 could be considered a Spanish annus mirabilis. Only the later English intervention in the war in favor of France would change the situation.
