MAZZARINO, GIULIO. — Cardinal, chief minister of France, b. at Pescina (L’Aquila) 14 July 1602, d. at Paris 9 March 1661. His father, Pietro, of a good family from Palermo, came to Rome to live with a Jesuit uncle and became administrator of the Abruzzo estates of Prince Filippo Colonna; MAZZARINO lived in Rome on familiar terms with the prince’s sons, who in 1619 sent him, as companion to their son Girolamo (later a cardinal), to Spain. After two years he was recalled, enlisted as a captain in a papal regiment sent to guard the Valtellina until the Peace of Monzone (1626), and performed more diplomatic than military missions. Returning to Rome, he took a degree in law in 1628; then at Milan with Cardinal A. Barberini, while Pope Urban VIII strove to maintain peace in Italy, he became the travelling intermediary in protracted and fruitless negotiations between Milan, Turin and Mantua. On 29 Jan. 1630 and again later he met Richelieu at Lyons; on 26 Oct. 1630, beneath Casale, he thrust himself between the moving ranks and succeeded in having an armistice he had just concluded accepted—an episode that had European repercussions. He took part in the Treaty of Cherasco (6 Apr. 1631) and in the secret treaty between France and Savoy, at the wish of Urban VIII, who, suspicious of Spain, preferred a French presence in Italy to balance the powers. Sent to Paris in 1632, he entered the Church so as to remain in the papal diplomatic service, though he never received any of the major orders; he was canon of S. Giovanni in Laterano and vice-legate of Avignon, but on returning to Rome in 1636 he realized that Spain would not permit the hoped-for cardinalate. On 4 Jan. 1640, therefore, he became Richelieu’s chief diplomatic agent, and on the latter’s deathbed was designated his successor; the next day the King named him a cardinal.
The gentle character of MAZZARINO soon showed itself when he advised the gravely ill King to pardon his brother Gaston d’Orléans and other grandees. After the King’s death on 14 May 1643, MAZZARINO, designated by him as first in the regency council for the widowed Queen Anne of Austria, induced her to ask the Parlement to annul the limitations placed on her authority, and from it received confirmation of his high position (18 May 1643). Sustained by the Queen’s unshakable confidence (which certainly included a special affection for him, though it is fanciful to try to define its forms), MAZZARINO directed French policy until his death. In five years, by striking ever harder at the Emperor in Germany, he forced him to the Peace of Münster (24 Oct. 1648), which gave France the Austrian Alsace and reduced the Empire to a hollow federal system. Spain, however, remained in arms; MAZZARINO attacked it even in the State of the Presidi, occupying Portolongone (1646) as a base against Naples, and in 1647 urging Francesco I, Duke of Modena, to besiege Cremona. These Italian wars were for MAZZARINO merely diversions, since, like Henry IV and Richelieu, he believed France’s true interests lay toward the Rhine and the Low Countries. Spain, refusing peace, counted less on arms than on the deep discontent of all classes in France with the war, which was more bitterly directed against a government of two foreigners (the Spanish Queen and the Italian MAZZARINO). He had hoped to overcome internal hostility by triumphing over the Empire; instead, on 26 Aug. 1648, in an act of royal energy against the Parlement, Paris filled with barricades—the beginning of the first Fronde, or Fronde of the Parlement, which refused to register royal edicts raising new taxes. Three months after the success of the Peace of Westphalia, the court had to flee from Paris to St-Germain. Against rebellious Paris, however, troops from Germany under Condé could be used, but only to fall under his arrogance, so that the Regent had him arrested (18 Jan. 1650). Immediately the revolt promoted by the princes themselves spread through France, while the Spaniards penetrated Champagne with the help of the Prince of Turenne (Dec. 1650); in Feb. 1651 the Parlement, joining the princes’ cause, issued a decree banishing MAZZARINO, who retired to Brühl near Cologne, whence he secretly directed the Queen. The exiled MAZZARINO refused Spanish offers and waited for the inevitable dissensions among his enemies to allow him to return and direct French policy toward the success he, a foreigner, felt absolutely confident of, though many of his conquests were now being lost. In the autumn of 1652 Paris rebelled against Condé, who went over to the enemy; the King returned, now of age, and on 3 Feb. 1653 MAZZARINO returned in triumph. In the next six years he tried to recover lost positions, reviving the war in Lombardy by the Duke of Modena. But the Fronde had left too many ruins, and to bend Spain he had to resort to an alliance with England (even though Cromwell had beheaded the King, brother-in-law of Louis XIII) and promise him Dunkirk, captured in 1646. Thus, with the Spaniards defeated at the Dunes under Condé, the Peace of the Pyrenees (11 Nov. 1659) was reached, restoring to France the Cerdagne and Roussillon, lost since 1493, as well as some Flemish towns, and with the hand of Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip IV, the hope of the Spanish succession. The Infanta renounced it in exchange for a dowry of 500,000 crowns that was never paid. To obtain this marriage, desired by the Queen, MAZZARINO had firmly opposed the King, who wished to marry his niece Maria Mancini. A few months after the King’s marriage MAZZARINO died, and Louis XIV, faithful to his master’s advice, never took a chief minister but assumed the functions and labors himself.
Only in the last century has the judgment of French historians on MAZZARINO changed; they had willingly echoed the libels of the Fronde (Mazarinades) and the accusations in memoirs by contemporaries against the hated Italian. It has been recognized that he carried out and developed Richelieu’s and Louis XIII’s program and made possible the greatness of Louis XIV’s early reign, with his exceptional devotion to the French cause. The outburst of hatred against MAZZARINO was caused not so much by the undeniable defects of his government (which were those of Richelieu) as by the strain created by the enormous fiscal pressure of the war (multiplied by the brutal tax-farming system), by the easy accusations against the weak government of two foreigners, and by the resentment of classes and men who had been humbled but not uprooted by Richelieu. The Fronde united all these selfish interests under Spanish pressure, and thus MAZZARINO, by liquidating them, could prepare the way for Louis XIV’s full absolutism at home and for France’s primacy in a Europe half-destroyed by forty years of war.