Paris ne vaut pas une messe! - A Huguenot IN AAR

Chapter XXXI – King Nicolas


The Pyrenees are no more.

- Nicolas I Henri on the concluded war against Habsburg Spain.


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The Honour of the Estates
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With the treaty of Valladolid and the following resignation of the marshals, Nicolas hastened back to Paris. Europe in the second half of the 17th century was a continent vastly more inhospitable to travellers than it is today and as such a trip from the Ebro to Calais could take more than a week by horse. Having been away from court for so long had undoubtedly worried the young king greatly as it would leave him open for potential plots and hostile scheming. Thus the sooner Nicolas could be in Paris the better he would be off.

After a stressful tour de force, the king arrived in Paris no less than a fortnight after the ink had dried on the peace treaties with Spain. Alongside his Conceil des Affaires [1] Nicolas entered the capital without much ado and immediately went on to issue a proclamation that stated that the three estates of the realm were to assemble in Paris within a month in order for them to acknowledge him as their sovereign. The estates of the gentry, ministers and peasantry all duly did send their representatives to the royal court and after a day’s worth of bowing and thanking, Nicolas found himself safely on the French throne.


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The Foreign Puzzle
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Following his successful ascension in Paris, Nicolas began together with Rohan to forge the international prestige won through the militant feats into useful propaganda for use in foreign affairs. First and foremost a message had to be sent to Austria as a warning that future Habsburg provocations would be met with the same complete wrath that Spain had experienced. The best way to do this, Nicolas thought, would be to push the Huguenot bloc across the Rhine and into the very Holy Roman Empire itself. To understand this decision one has to understand the importance of the Rhine to the French people. The river had been the natural border between the Catholic-dominated Empire and Protestant France for many years, but the princes of the Rhine had practiced their Calvinist and Lutheran faiths ever since the reformation. As such, there was a linguistic barrier in the river’s waters, but a bridge could quite possible be found in the religious doctrines. It was known far and wide that the Habsburg Emperors disliked the open practice of the reformed faiths and as such, to extend friendship and protection to the protestant princes of the Rhine would be the equivalent to planting the fleur-de-lis banner in the Catholic backyard. A better gesture couldn’t have been found and the diplomats of France immediately began their work on the international opinion.



The French envoys soon discovered that the key to opening the door to the Rhine would be the principality of Alsace. After a series of conferences between the prince’s envoys and Rohan (who had been made first minister for foreign affairs) where the French showed indisputable proof that many of the by Alsace controlled fortresses on the Rhine actually belonged to France, the prince finally relinquished control of his military and internal powers to the French governor of Lorraine. The vassalisation of Alsace showed the prince of Baden that the new French monarch deeply cared for the cause of the German reformation and as such, he gladly accepted a French proposal for cooperation and friendship.

All the protestant states of the Rhineland were offered protection by the French court and none rejected it[2]. Switzerland, the Palatinate of the Rhine and Trier all fell into the Huguenot web of alliances and clientele. Even the Venetian Republic who had held on to the reformed faith pressed on them by Sully asked for French protection against possible assaults from both the Muslim Turks and the Catholic Italian states. Besides strengthening the French position within the Empire, the aggressive foreign policy also greatly undermined the Emperor’s authority. In some cases to such a degree that minor states backed by France coerced other minor principalities supported by Austria into submission before their cases had even been brought before the Imperial Court.







[1]See Chapter X
[2]Issues of guarantee


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Chapter XXXII – The New France




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Redrawing the Map
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The kingdom of France had been vastly expanded after the Bourbon succession with new land being gained both during the rule of Henri IV, the Marshals and Nicolas I Henri. Naturally many of these new provinces were already dominated by either Huguenots or ethnic French who welcomed their new masters with great joy. But that was not the case in the newly acquired Spanish provinces and in the former duchy of Lorraine. Here a majority of the populace was either Catholic or of another ethnic stock than French thus almost immediately sparkling a tense situation between ruler and ruled. At first the French government sought to combat the unrest in the provinces by stationing several regiments in the new lands. As a consequence the Royal Army (32,000 men) was redeployed to Lorraine while the Army of Flanders (22,000 men) was put in quarters in French Catalonia. However this situation didn’t yield enough results so the king and his cabinet both decided that a new order of day was needed in France. The old division of provinces would have to be revised with the addition of new conquests. Consequently, the newly taken territories were either merged into old French departments (as were the cases with Spanish Navarre and the county of Hainaut who respectively were integrated into French Navarre and the Isle-de-France) or simply created as new French provinces such as Lorraine and the March of the Ebro. The latter of the two was a creation of Rohan who proposed the name of the province as a reference to the old Frankish buffer zone of the Marca Hispanica. This was mainly done to add some sort of historic claim to the land, but also because it would logically mean that France considered Barcelona a natural province of hers as the city had been the capital of the ancient Spanish March.



Of the old marshals who had guarded France during the minority of Nicolas Henri only two took part in the new king’s cabinet and Conseil des Affairs. Francois de Bonne had died in his chambers at the Louvre shortly after the estates had honoured Nicolas Henri. At his deathbed the young king was close to tears as the old man had been like a grandfather to him who had been robbed of his beloved father at a young age. De Bonne was posthumously elevated to the status of Marshal General of France and his possessions and title as duke of Dauphine passed to his son in law Charles de Blanchefort. He was buried after a splendid procession near the tomb of his old comrade Henri IV and a marble relief describing his campaigns against the Spaniards in the summer of 1595 was erected around his ebony tomb[2]. Yet both Rohan and Sully prevailed still and held significantly sway in the decision making of the sovereign. Rohan had been elevated to governor of all Bretagne while Sully was in charge of the affairs of Champagne and Picardy. Many grumbled over the nepotism shown by Nicolas, but the king was a firm believer in the ideas of ancient Augustus who had run his administration based on talented men while making sure that neither gained enough power to challenge him. This fitted Sully well and the old warrior promised Nicolas to “make royal authority supreme in France and France supreme in Europe.” But to make France supreme the country needed to continue its aggressive foreign policy towards the Habsburgs and their Catholic henchmen. As a result Nicolas decided to plan the surrender of the last batch Alsatian independence to France. It would take some years to create the needed documents and persuade the prince to leave his throne, but Nicolas was confident that it would succeed. One way or another.






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The Fronde, what Fronde?
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Although the peasantry had had no reason to complain under the benevolent rule of the first Bourbon monarch they were getting increasingly annoyed and disturbed by the rise of power in the Louvre. Despite having sworn allegiance to Nicolas certain members of the more prominent rural classes began to conspire against the increasingly centralization from Paris. The recent burden from fighting a great war against Spain and supplying food and goods to the enormous armies beyond the Pyrenees had made many communities enraged. As the new division of France also included new and ambitious laws and regulations it proved to be the last incident needed to spark a popular revolt amongst the lowest estate of the realm. Revolts soon broke out in the minor provinces of Calais and Burgundy, although the garrison in Picardy soon quelled the rebellion in the first province almost without bloodshed.



Other revolts occurred in the Guyenne and in Poitou, but were either peacefully dissolved or crushed under the boots of the French Army. This was, however, not to be the case in Burgundy where the peasant leaders demanded autonomy and freedom of taxation to such a degree that Nicolas couldn’t be bothered asking twice if they wanted to surrender. Although faced with impossible odds (the entire Royal Army had moved into Burgundy from Lorraine) the rebels stood their ground and used their slings (Fronde in French thus the name of the popular opposition) as good they could only to suffer an extraordinary defeat. Half of them lay dead on the field when night came and the remaining rebels were fined heavily and the ringleaders either executed or exiled as serfs to the prince-bishopric of Liége.



Only too late had the first French estate seen the dangers they had put themselves in by willingly accepting absolutism. Their only hope would be that other estates realized this also and joined them in revolt or that the new king would act as his father had done and “guaranteed them a chicken in the pot every Sunday.” If that would be enough to quell the hunger for freedom only time would tell.




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