Fronde, La. A period of civil insurrection (1648-53) during the minority of Louis XIV, named after the fronde, or sling, used in children's games. It saw the union of two uneasy allies with different reasons for revolting against Mazarin's policies: the parlements, who wished to limit the fiscal powers of the royal government, and the turbulent high nobility, whose power had been eroded under the administration of Richelieu and who grasped the opportunity to reassert their traditional independence. During four years of desultory skirmishing throughout France, Paris swung first one way then another; at one point the court and Mazarin were forced to flee, as a series of concessions followed by retractions heightened the atmosphere of instability. Condé, the uncle of the king and the highly successful commander of the French army during the 1640s, was arrested in 1651, unleashing a second period of revolt; but his involvement with Spain, still technically at war with France, cost him the support of the parlements, and Retz, who had been responsible for rallying the Parisian mob against Mazarin, was won over to the royal side by the promise of a cardinal's hat. Louis XIV was able to enter Paris in triumph in 1652; Bordeaux and other provincial cities continued to resist royal authority until 1653, but peace was restored by October of that year.
The Frond witnessed several deeds of daring, not least by noblewomen such as the duchesse de Montpensier and the duchesse de Longueville. It figures prominently in the memoirs written about this period by Retz, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de la Guette, and others, and it saw the prolific outpouring of pamphlet literature known as mazarinades, which express in virulent and often pungent terms factional opposition to the hated first minister of the crown. It is often taken to be the watershed of the century, dividing the swashbuckling, optimistic mood of the 1630s and 1640s from the more sombre outlook of the generation of Pascal and Racine.
[Ian Maclean]
