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The Fronde and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1648-1653
Paperback
Publisher: Goldenback
Published: Sep 27 2026
Pages: 624
Weight: 1.57
Height: 1.38 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In the summer of 1648, Parisian schoolboys hurl stones across the city ditches and scatter whenever the police appear. Within weeks their slingshot, the fronde, has become the emblem of a rebellion that brings the most powerful monarchy in Europe to the edge of collapse. For five years France tears itself apart. Twelve hundred barricades seal the streets of Paris. A ten-year-old king flees his capital by night, and his court sleeps on straw. Magistrates put a price on the head of the queen's Italian minister. The greatest general of the age allies with Spain against his own country, and a princess turns the cannon of the Bastille on the royal army. In Bordeaux, artisans meeting beneath the elm trees seize the city and correspond with Cromwell's republic.
Drawing on memoirs, pamphlets, and the harrowing reports of relief workers in the burned villages around Paris, this narrative history follows the Fronde from its fiscal origins to its violent end and its long afterlife. It shows how a revolt supported by judges, princes, merchants, and crowds collapsed under its own contradictions, and how a boy who lay still while strangers filed past his bed grew into Louis XIV, the most absolute king in Europe.
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