Mazarin’s Quest: The Congress of Westphalia and the Coming of the Fronde (review)

For many undergraduates, the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 represents either the end or the beginning of the two-part slog they must make through the once widely required (and somewhat resented) Western Civilization survey sequence. It gained its pre-eminence as a place marker when in the nineteenth century, nationalist historians—led by the French—imputed to it the origins of the modern nation-state system. French historians such as Augustin Thierry, Jules Michelet, and Hippolyte Taine extolled its architect, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, for his brilliance in gaining Alsace and forestalling the Hapsburg attempt to unify Germany. It is therefore most welcome that Paul Sonnino, a distinguished scholar of early-modern French politics and diplomacy, overturns this hackneyed interpretation by going back to the sources. This method, of course, owes its provenance to these same nineteenth-century historians. Sonnino discusses these various primary sources—Mazarin’s Carnets and correspondence, the papers of the French plenipotentiaries, and the letters and memoranda of other diplomats at the peace conference—in the introduction.

Sonnino pursues what he calls an “existential approach” (p. 170) of the complex and tortuous negotiations largely from Mazarin’s point of view from the cardinal’s ascendancy at the French court in the early 1640s to the outbreak of the Fronde in 1648. It might more aptly be viewed as a psychological study of a man—Mazarin—whose ambitions for himself and the monarchy led him, just as France gained the military advantage, to gamble away the possibility of a lasting, comprehensive peace and instead plunged France into domestic tumult, another decade of war with Spain, and won the lasting suspicion if not enmity of the Dutch. When examined closely, the Peace of Westphalia did not look as good for France as it did two centuries later. In a sense, this book forms a kind of prelude to his well-regarded study of Louis XIV’s war with the Dutch in 1672 (Cambridge, UK, 1988).

Sonnino’s study assumes of its readers a more than passing knowledge about early-modern French and European affairs. The first chapter moves briskly through the essential background on Richelieu’s motives and aims in entering the Thirty Years’ War. While certainly his creature, Mazarin in time departed fundamentally from his master’s desire mainly to secure France’s borders against Hapsburg encirclement. Mazarin’s own precarious position both in the queen’s affection and at court encouraged him to be too clever and assume otherwise needless risks, principally the annexation of the Spanish Netherlands. Among the most impressive features of this book is Sonnino’s fine-grained analysis of Mazarin’s continuous tactical maneuvers and the constant give-and-take amongst all the parties involved in these talks. Particularly fascinating is how he used his own envoys. When Mazarin sought to project a conciliatory demeanor, he encouraged the devout Claude de Mesmes, Count d’Avaux; for a more hard-nosed approach, he sent in the feisty Abel Servien. Yet D’Avaux and Servien proved hard to control and represented longstanding contrarieties that had bedeviled French foreign policy since the reign of Henri II: how to balance domestic pressures to align with the Catholic Hapsburgs over against the pragmatic interest to support the enemies of the Hapsburgs, be they Catholic, Protestant, or even Muslim. Mazarin’s chief accomplishment was to separate the Austrian Hapsburgs from the Spanish branch, which was no mean feat; his willingness to betray the Swedes in favor of Brandenburg Prussia, with imperial connivance, eventually proved more momentous than anyone at the time could reasonably have anticipated. Yet the longer Mazarin put off acceding to a peace that France’s foes could accept, the more he alienated his allies and strengthened his enemies both at home and abroad. The decisive moment actually came in 1647 when the Dutch, fearing a peace that established French hegemony, agreed...