From Richelieu and the fall of La Rochelle through Mazarin, the Fronde, Louis XIV at Versailles, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the wars of the Grand Siècle, the Regency and John Law's bubble, the Encyclopédie and the philosophes, the loss of New France, the American war, to the calling of the Estates General on the eve of the Revolution. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that built and broke the Ancien Régime.
Recalled by Marie de' Medici, the bishop of Luçon Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal de Richelieu, enters the royal council of Louis XIII. Within months he is its head. For eighteen years he will rule the state with the formula of his Testament Politique: 'to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the pride of the great, to raise the king's name'.
From Richelieu and the fall of La Rochelle through Mazarin, the Fronde, Louis XIV at Versailles, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the wars of the Grand Siècle, the Regency and John Law's bubble, the Encyclopédie and the philosophes, the loss of New France, the American war, to the calling of the Estates General on the eve of the Revolution. Slide across the centuries to read the major events that built and broke the Ancien Régime.
Recalled by Marie de' Medici, the bishop of Luçon Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal de Richelieu, enters the royal council of Louis XIII. Within months he is its head. For eighteen years he will rule the state with the formula of his Testament Politique: 'to ruin the Huguenot party, to abase the pride of the great, to raise the king's name'.
After fourteen months of siege and a famous sea-wall built by Richelieu across the harbour mouth to bar the English relief fleet, the Huguenot port of La Rochelle surrenders. Of the city's twenty-eight thousand inhabitants, perhaps five thousand survive. The political and military rights granted at Nantes are stripped two years later by the Peace of Alès.
After two decades of subsidising the Protestant powers against the Habsburgs, Richelieu brings France openly into the Thirty Years War. The Spanish capture Corbie and reach Compiègne in 1636 before the tide turns; the war will run for twenty-four years and bleed France white.
Five days after the death of Louis XIII, the young duc d'Enghien — the future Grand Condé — annihilates the Spanish tercios at Rocroi in the Ardennes. The new king, Louis XIV, is four years old; the regent is his mother Anne of Austria, and the government passes to Richelieu's Italian protégé, Cardinal Mazarin.
The Peace of Westphalia ends the Thirty Years War; France keeps Alsace less Strasbourg, and emerges the leading power of Europe. Within weeks the parlement of Paris rises against the wartime taxes of Mazarin. The Fronde — first of the lawyers, then of the princes — will paralyse the regency for five years.
Mazarin dies in March. The twenty-two-year-old Louis XIV announces that he will rule without a first minister: 'L'État, c'est moi'. In September he has the over-mighty superintendent of finances Nicolas Fouquet — whose château of Vaux-le-Vicomte had eclipsed any of the crown's — arrested by d'Artagnan at Nantes. Colbert takes the finances.
Claiming the Spanish Netherlands through his wife's right of devolution, Louis XIV invades in 1667. Turenne's army takes Lille, Tournai, and Douai in weeks. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle gives France twelve Flemish fortresses — and starts a half-century of pushing the northern border outward.
On 6 May Louis XIV transfers his household and the government from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the great new palace at Versailles. Some ten thousand courtiers, servants, and guards crowd into the gilded barracks. The most magnificent court in Europe is open.
Louis XIV revokes his grandfather's Edict of Nantes. Protestant temples are demolished, pastors exiled within fifteen days, the laity forbidden to follow them; royal dragoons quarter on Huguenot households until they convert. Perhaps two hundred thousand French Protestants flee to the Netherlands, England, Prussia, the Cape, and the American colonies.
Louis's invasion of the Palatinate triggers a great anti-French coalition under the Dutch stadholder William of Orange — who in the same year sails to England, deposes James II, and joins the British crown to the coalition. The Nine Years War (1688-1697) sees French frontiers strained from Catalonia to the Rhine; Vauban's fortresses hold the line.
On the Danube near Höchstädt, Marlborough and Prince Eugene of Savoy annihilate Marshal Tallard's army at the Battle of Blenheim. France loses thirty thousand men in a single day and her Bavarian ally. Defeats at Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) follow.
On 1 September Louis XIV dies of gangrene at Versailles, four days short of his seventy-seventh birthday. His son and grandson having predeceased him, his great-grandson — a five-year-old Louis XV — succeeds. Power passes to the dead king's nephew, Philippe d'Orléans, as regent; the court drifts back to Paris.
The Scottish financier John Law's experiment in paper money and Mississippi Company shares — backed by claims on Louisiana — collapses in panic in the rue Quincampoix. The first French paper-money bank fails; investors are ruined; and Frenchmen will distrust banknotes for a century.
Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert publish the first volume of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. By 1772 it will run to seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates. Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, d'Holbach, Quesnay — the great names of the French Enlightenment — contribute.
By the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years War, France cedes Canada and all her holdings east of the Mississippi to Britain, and Louisiana to her Bourbon ally Spain. New France — Quebec, Montreal, the Great Lakes, the Ohio country — is gone. The defeat at Quebec on the Plains of Abraham (1759) had already been decisive.
Louis XV dies of smallpox at Versailles on 10 May. His grandson, the nineteen-year-old Louis XVI, succeeds, with the young Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette as queen. He recalls the parlements, appoints Turgot to the finances, and is hailed as the king of a new beginning.
After Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, the foreign minister Vergennes signs treaties of alliance and commerce with Benjamin Franklin's American commissioners. The fleets of Suffren in the Indies and de Grasse at the Chesapeake, the army of Rochambeau in Virginia, give the Americans the victory at Yorktown in 1781.
On 21 November Pilâtre de Rozier and the marquis d'Arlandes ascend over Paris in the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloon. Benjamin Franklin watches from the Tuileries. Twelve days earlier the Treaty of Paris had been signed with Britain. The kingdom is full of light, and broke.
On 5 May, in the Salle des Menus Plaisirs at Versailles, Louis XVI opens the Estates General — the first since 1614. Twelve hundred deputies in three orders, six hundred for the Third Estate, hear a lacklustre speech on financial reform. The cahiers de doléances of the spring sit beside them, full of an angrier program.