Mazarin’s Fall

The chapter examines the crisis of authority that had emerged in early 1650 between cardinal Mazarin and Condé, and provides a character assessment of the two protagonists. Mazarin’s decision to resolve the crisis by arresting and imprisoning Condé, his brother, and his brother-in-law generated a variety of damaging consequences, including military operations conducted against the royal armies by Turenne, while opposition progressively focused hostility on Mazarin and his style of government. During a crucial few weeks in January 1651, open condemnation of the cardinal, above all by the Parlement of Paris, undermined the remnants of Mazarin’s power and forced him to release the princes. Despite Mazarin’s hopes for a rapprochement with Condé, he was expelled from France and ultimately settled in exile at Brühl in the territory of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. The rest of the chapter explores Mazarin’s inability, both practical and psychological, to accept the permanence of his exile, and his attempts to exert maximum pressure, through correspondence and allies at court, on Anne of Austria, the queen mother, to recall him to France. The chapter concludes with the comprehensive failure of this policy when, on the eve of Louis XIII’s thirteenth birthday and the declaration of his official majority, the regency government promulgated an edict reiterating Mazarin’s criminal behaviour and his banishment in perpetuity (6 September 1651).

Condé’s Miscalculation and Mazarin’s Gamble

The chapter begins by looking at the various ways, beyond applying pressure to the queen mother, by which Mazarin had sought to secure his return from exile, and their equal lack of success. This account is interwoven with an account of Condé’s political alienation after his return from imprisonment; his failure to develop stable political relationships either with Anne of Austria or the king’s uncle, Gaston d’Orléans; and the series of self-inflicted blows that he managed to inflict on his own power and standing. Frustrated by his declining influence and afraid of re-arrest, Condé refused to appear at the ceremony of the king’s majority and left Paris to establish a base of military resistance in Guienne, focused on the already rebellious city of Bordeaux. The initial months of Condé’s revolt saw his troops defeated and driven southwards by royalist forces. Despite Mazarin’s absence, the government showed that it had the capacity to crush Condé’s revolt. Yet for the cardinal, Condé’s rebellion was the great opportunity to justify ending his exile, returning at the head of mercenaries that would bring support to a supposedly beleaguered crown. Mazarin’s return to France in January 1652 had precisely the opposite effect, reviving the flagging rebellion and bringing together a wave of opposition from those hitherto neutral or sympathetic to the crown. In the rapidly shifting political and military context of early 1652 Condé slipped away from his army in Guienne, joined up with the forces of Gaston d’Orléans and Spanish troops aiding his rebellion, and inflicted a surprise defeat on royalist forces at Bléneau (6/7 April 1652).

Casting Models

This chapter examines the representation of the women rulers Tomyris, Zenobia, and Artemisia II in the gallery books and dramas produced during Anne of Austria’s regency in seventeenth-century France. It examines the ways in which the dynamic of gender and sovereign virtue is varyingly cast, and the construction of exemplarity diversely negotiated, in the reception of the three rulers. While Artemisia is aligned with a gendered female virtue, Zenobia is cast as the morally androgynous ‘complete prince’, and Du Bosc’s Tomyris subverts the very concept of a binary sexual ethics. Furthermore, their reception demonstrates the ways in which the rhetoric of exemplarity at the time hinges on the erosion of distance and difference, as ancient and modern examples are merged in the instruction and glorification of contemporary women, not least the rulers Anne of Austria and Christina of France, duchess of Savoy.

Tricky, Fine, and Trapped: Painting the Femme Forte in Early Seventeenth-Century France

Between the late 1620s and late 1640s, Jacques Blanchard, Simon Vouet, and Claude Vignon all painted the femme forte (strong woman), an exemplary, heroic femal type whose popularity was linked to the presence of Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria on the royal stage of France. This article puts early seventeenth-century French paintings of femmes fortes into conversation with period discourse regarding the reception of paintings and the status of women. Pictorial representation tended to cast the femme forte into contexts that compromised her exemplary status. Nude, on the verge of death by her own hand, the figure of the femme forte invited the very kind of sensual consumption that the femme forte herself attempted to disavow. Yet the ultimate threat posed by the femme forte was that her image might ‘trick’ male viewers into unwise actions.

How did Cracow welcome the Archduchess? Wedding and coronation ceremonies of Anne of Austria and Sigismund III Vasa in 1592

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