Cardinal Mazarin - Policies As Chief Minister

Policies As Chief Minister

Mazarin continued Richelieu's anti-Habsburg policy and laid the foundation for Louis XIV's expansionist policies. The victories of Condé and Turenne brought the French party to the bargaining table at the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War with the Peace of Westphalia, in which Mazarin's policies were French rather than Catholic and brought Alsace (though not Strasbourg) to France; he settled Protestant princes in secularized bishoprics and abbacies in reward for their political opposition to Austria. In 1658 he formed the League of the Rhine, which was designed to check the House of Austria in central Germany. In 1659 he made peace with Habsburg Spain in the Peace of the Pyrenees, which added to French territory Roussillon and northern Cerdanya—as French Cerdagne—in the far south as well as part of the Low Countries.

Towards Protestantism at home, Mazarin pursued a policy of promises and calculated delay to defuse the armed insurrection of the Ardèche (1653), for example, and to keep the Huguenots disarmed: for six years they believed themselves to be on the eve of recovering the protections of the Edict of Nantes, but in the end they obtained nothing.

Towards the pontificate of the successful Spanish candidate, Cardinal Pamphilj, elected pope (15 September 1644) as Innocent X (Cardinal Mazarin having arrived too late to present the French veto), there was constant friction. Mazarin protected the Barberini cardinals, nephews of the late pope, and the Bull against them was voted by the Parlement of Paris "null and abusive"; France made a show of preparing to take Avignon by force, and Innocent backed down. Mazarin was more consistently an enemy of Jansenism, in particular during the formulary controversy, more for its political implications than out of theology. On his deathbed he warned young Louis "not to tolerate the Jansenist sect, not even their name."