At the beginning of the seventeenth century France’s position appeared extremely weak. Struggling to recover from decades of religious civil war, France posed little threat to Spain’s predominance in Europe. By the end of the century the countries’ positions were reversed.

Henry IV (r. 1589–1610) inaugurated a remarkable recovery by defusing religious tensions and rebuilding France’s economy. He issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, allowing Huguenots (French Protestants) the right to worship in 150 traditionally Protestant towns throughout France. He built new roads and canals to repair the ravages of years of civil war and raised revenue by selling royal offices instead of charging high taxes. Despite his efforts at peace, Henry was murdered in 1610 by a Catholic zealot.

Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) became first minister of the French crown on behalf of Henry’s young son Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643). Richelieu designed his domestic policies to strengthen royal control. He extended the use of intendants, commissioners for each of France’s thirty-two districts who were appointed by and were responsible to the monarch. They recruited men for the army, supervised tax collection, presided over the administration of local law, checked up on the local nobility, and regulated economic activities in their districts. As the intendants’ power increased under Richelieu, so did the power of the centralized French state.

Richelieu’s main foreign policy goal was to destroy the Habsburgs’ grip on territories that surrounded France. Consequently, Richelieu supported Habsburg enemies, including Protestants during the Thirty Years’ War (see “The Thirty Years’ War”). For the French cardinal, interests of state outweighed the traditional Catholic faith of France.

Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602–1661) succeeded Richelieu as chief minister for the next child-king, the four-year-old Louis XIV, who inherited the throne from his father in 1643. Mazarin’s struggle to increase royal revenues to meet the costs of the Thirty Years’ War led to the uprisings of 1648–1653 known as the Fronde. In Paris magistrates of the Parlement of Paris, the nation’s most important law court, were outraged by the Crown’s autocratic measures. These so-called robe nobles (named for the robes they wore in court) encouraged violent protest by the common people. As rebellion spread outside Paris and to the sword nobles (the traditional warrior nobility), civil order broke down completely, and young Louis XIV had to flee Paris.

Much of the rebellion faded, however, when Louis XIV was declared king in his own right in 1651, ending the regency of his mother, Anne of Austria. Because French law prohibited women from inheriting the throne, royal authority was more easily challenged during periods when a queen-regent exercised power through a child-king. The French people were desperate for peace and stability after the disorders of the Fronde and were willing to accept a strong monarch who could restore order. Louis pledged to do just that when he assumed personal rule of his realm at Mazarin’s death in 1661.