Political Struggles in France: The Rise of…

A few more maneuvers, and the royal army is on July 2, 1652, able to hem in the Frondeurs in the Faubourg St. Antoine with their backs to the closed gates of Paris.

The royalists attack all along the line and win a signal victory in spite of the knightly prowess of the prince and his great lords, but at the critical moment Gaston's daughter persuades the Parisians to open the gates and to admit Condé's army.

She herself turns the guns of the Bastille on the pursuers.

An insurrectional government is organized in the capital and proclaims Monsieur lieutenant-general of the realm.

Molière, in order to please his patron, Monsieur (Monsieur being the honorific for the king's brother Philippe I, Duke of Orléans), who is so enthralled with entertainment and art that he is soon excluded from state affairs, in 1661 writes and plays Dom Garcie de Navarre ou Le Prince jaloux (The Jealous Prince), a heroic comedy derived from a work of Cicognini's.

Two other comedies of the same year are the successful L'École des maris (The School for Husbands) and Les Fâcheux, subtitled Comédie faite pour les divertissements du Roi (a comedy for the King's amusements) because it is performed for the first time during a series of parties that Nicolas Fouquet gives in August at Vaux in honor of Louis, who is already set upon his destruction (his disgrace had on May 4 been secretly decided upon).

These entertainments, a fête rivaled in magnificence by only one or two in French history, lead Jean-Baptiste Colbert to demand the arrest of Fouquet for wasting public money.

The conquest of the France-Comté was initially only supposed to be the prelude to a broad campaign in the spring.

The army's size has been increased to one hundred and thirty-four thousand soldiers.

The plan is that the King and the Maréchal de Turenne will conquer the remaining part of the Spanish Netherlands with sixty thousand men.

At the head of a force of ten thousand men, the brother of the King, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, is to advance into Catalonia, while the Prince de Condé, with twenty-two thousand men, is to defend against any potential offensive by the Holy Roman Empire in the dioceses of Metz, Toul and Verdun.

However, after Louis XIV has secured the Franche-Comté as a bargaining counter, the immediate question is whether he should bow to the demands of the triple alliance, or whether he should continue the war.

The Marquis de Louvois, the Secretary of State for War, as well as Turenne and Condé, favor continuing the war, as the situation seems advantageous, since the Spanish are significantly weakened.

On the other hand, the foreign minister, Hugues de Lionne, and the finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, both prefer to see a peace treaty signed quickly, as the costs of continuing the war are incalculable (so far it has cost most than eighteen million livres), and the international conditions do not make a victory seem likely.

This is especially the case since Spain has in the meantime signed the Treaty of Lisbon with Portugal and can now concentrate on the war with France.

Louis XIV is forced to realize that France is no match for the coalition of Spain, the Netherlands, England, and Sweden, and therefore announces a cease-fire until the end of March 1668 and starts negotiations.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the most important French composer of his generation and the outstanding French composer of oratorios, had gone to Rome in about 1667, where he is believed to have studied composition, perhaps with Giacomo Carissimi.

On his return to France about three years later he had become chapelmaster to the dauphin but had lost that position through Jean-Baptiste Lully's influence.

He had composed the music for a new version of Molière's The Forced Marriage, first performed 1672, and collaborated with him again in 1673 in The Imaginary Invalid.

After Molière's death, Charpentier had continued to work for the Théâtre Français until 1685.

From perhaps 1670 to 1688, he had as his patron Marie de Lorraine, known as Mademoiselle de Guise, and from 1679 he composed music for the dauphin's chapel (Lully died in 1687).

He had in 1692 become composition teacher to the Duke d'Orleans.

He produces his greatest stage work, Médée, to Thomas Corneille's text, in 1693.

French satiric moralist Jean de La Bruyère is best known for one work, Les Caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec avec Les Caractères ou les moeurs de ce siècle (1688; The Characters, or the Manners of the Age, with The Characters of Theophrastus), which is considered to be one of the masterpieces of French literature.

He had studied law at Orléans, and through the intervention of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the eminent humanist and theologian, had become one of the tutors to the Duke de Bourbon, grandson of the Prince de Condé, and remained in the Condé household as librarian at Chantilly.

His years there were probably unhappy because, although he was proud of his middle-class origin, he was a constant butt of ridicule because of his ungainly figure, morose manner, and biting tongue; the bitterness of his book reflects the inferiority of his social position.

His situation, however, afforded him the opportunity to make penetrating observations on the power of money in a demoralized society, the tyranny of social custom, and the perils of aristocratic idleness, fads, and fashions.

The portrait sketches are expanded because of their great popularity; eight editions of the Caractère will appear during La Bruyère's lifetime.

Readers begin putting real names to the personages and compiling keys to them, but La Bruyère denies that any is a portrait of a single person.

Topical allusions in his book—La Bruyère attacks the extravagance and warmongering of the king himself—make his election to the French Academy difficult, but he is eventually elected in 1693.