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  • Mazarin's Quest: The Congress of Westphalia and the Coming of the Fronde
  • Frederic J. Baumgartner
Mazarin's Quest: The Congress of Westphalia and the Coming of the Fronde.By Paul Sonnino. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-674-03182-1. Maps. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. vi, 307. $49.95.

Giulio Mazarini, aka Cardinal Mazarin, is usually seen as the principal architect of the Peace of Westphalia and, depending upon how the historian views the results of the peace, is praised or damned for it. Paul Sonnino takes a fresh look at the work of Mazarin and his diplomatic team at the peace sessions at Münster and Osnabrück in Westphalia. As he points out, the historian researching the topic is confronted with the problem not of the paucity of sources, almost always a major difficulty in writing on eras prior to Mazarin's time, but of an overwhelming amount of them. Many of them have long been in print, but the author used original documents in numerous archives and found that often the printed editions were badly abridged, leaving out what he regards as crucial information on what Mazarin intended his diplomats to present in the meetings of the Congress and how his mind changed from month to month.

The book begins with a synopsis of why and how Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII formally entered the Thirty Years War in 1635, the destruction of Habsburg power being the overriding goal. It then describes how Mazarin, originally in papal service, ingratiated himself with Richelieu and, much to everyone's surprise, was named prime minister (Sonnino's term) at his death in 1642. The death of Louis XIII early in 1643 left Mazarin in a precarious position, but his ability to charm the regent, Queen-Mother Anne of Austria, enabled him to keep power and enhance his authority. Writes Sonnino: "This adventurer who had risen from obscurity was fully convinced that he was the only person, out of 20 million Frenchmen, who knew what was good for the state" (p. 34). He describes how Mazarin took charge of the peace negotiations, already underway. His principal negotiators, Claude d'Avaux and Abel Servien, despised each other, but Sonnino [End Page 941]shows how their mutual hostility worked to French advantage, because one or the other was quick to object to a position the other held, thereby slowing the negotiating process and forcing Mazarin to come up with a better thought out proposal.

The book's core is a detailed study of the four years of negotiations that finally led to peace. It lays out the goals and hopes of states represented at the Congress and the process by which each state was forced to reduce its aspirations. It pays attention to military events in so far as they impinged on the work of the diplomats, or as several times happened, how they were set in motion to influence it. The author examines the mutual suspicions among the states and how on several occasions they derailed what appeared to most to be reasonable settlements. In respect to Alsace, the obtaining of which was one of the key French goals, Sonnino shows how the issue of whether the French king would be given a seat in the Imperial Diet if he were to receive full sovereignty resulted in an intentionally vague clause regarding French authority over it, which left Louis XIV in a position years later to annex it entirely.

By late 1647, most of the issues delaying peace had been resolved, but Mazarin continued to demand the Spanish Netherlands for France. Spain, which at one point was so desperate as to consider granting it, now dug in its heels, and the two Catholic kingdoms failed to achieve peace, even as the other parts of the war were settled with treaties collectively called the Peace of Westphalia. The author shows how tightly tied the failure to end the war with Spain was to the first events of the Fronde. Whether with one more military exertion Mazarin would have been in position to gain his goal is beside the point; the French people had run out...

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