MAZARIN, JULES. - Cardinal, first minister of France, b. at Pescina (L'Aquila) on 14 July 1602, d. at Paris on 9 March 1661. His father, Pietro, of a good family of Palermo, having come to Rome to stay with a Jesuit uncle, became administrator of the Abruzzo estates of Prince Filippo Colonna; M. lived in Rome on familiar terms with the prince's sons, who sent him in 1619, as companion to his son Girolamo, later a cardinal, to Spain. Recalled after two years, he enlisted as a captain in a pontifical regiment, sent to guard the Valtellina until the peace of Monzone (1626), and occupied himself with missions more diplomatic than military. Returning to Rome he took his degree in law in 1628; then in Milan with Card. A. Barberini, when Pope Urban VIII was striving to maintain peace in Italy, he became the travelling intermediary of these long and vain negotiations between Milan, Turin, and Mantua. On 29 Jan. 1630 and on other occasions he met Richelieu at Lyon; on 26 Oct. 1630 he succeeded before Casale, throwing himself among the ranks already in motion, in having an armistice accepted which he had just concluded; an episode that had a European resonance. He took part in the Treaty of Cherasco (6 Apr. 1631) and in the secret one between France and Savoy, by the will of Urban VIII who, suspicious of Spain, preferred the French presence in Italy in order to balance the powers. Sent to Paris in 1632, he became an ecclesiastic in order to be able to remain in the pontifical diplomacy, but without ever receiving any of the major Orders; he was a canon of St. John Lateran and vice-legate of Avignon, but having returned to Rome in 1636 he realized that Spain would not permit the hoped-for appointment as cardinal. Therefore on 4 Jan. 1640 he became Richelieu's principal diplomatic agent, until, on the proposal of Louis XIII, he was created cardinal in 1641. By the dying Richelieu he was designated as his successor, and the day after his death the King named him first minister.
M.'s gentle character was revealed at once in his suggesting to the King, already gravely ill, the pardon of his brother Gaston d'Orléans and of other great men. The King having died on 14 May 1643, M., designated by him as first in the Council of the regency for the widowed queen Anne of Austria, induced her to ask Parliament to annul the limitations placed on her authority, and by her he was confirmed in the high position (18 May 1643). Sustained by the unshakeable trust of the Queen (who certainly had a particular affection for him, whose forms it is however fanciful to want to specify) M. directed French policy until his death. In five years, striking the Emperor ever more harshly in Germany, he forced him to the peace of Münster (24 Oct. 1648) which gave France Austrian Alsace and reduced the Empire to an empty federal system. Spain, however, remained under arms, and M. attacked her also in the State of the Presidi by occupying Portolongone (1646) as a base against Naples and in 1647 by urging Francesco I duke of Modena to besiege Cremona. These Italian wars were for M. purely diversions, since he, like Henry IV and Richelieu, believed that the true interests of France lay toward the Rhine and Flanders. Spain, refusing peace, counted, more than on arms, on the profound discontent of all classes of France with the war, more violent against the government of two foreigners (the Spanish Queen, the Italian M.). M. had deluded himself into overcoming internal hostility with the triumph over the Empire: instead already on 26 Aug. 1648, through an act of energy of the Crown against Parliament, Paris filled with barricades; thus began the first Fronde, or Fronde of the Parliament, which did not register the royal edicts of new taxes: three months after the success of the peace of Westphalia, the court had to flee from Paris to St-Germain. Against Paris in revolt, however, the troops of Germany led by Condé could be used, but only to fall under his arrogance, for which the Regent had him arrested (18 Jan. 1650). At once the revolt promoted by the princes themselves spread through France, while the Spaniards penetrated into Champagne with the help of the prince of Turenne (Dec. 1650); in Feb. 1651 the Parliament, joining the cause of the princes, issued a decree of banishment against M., who withdrew to Brühl near Cologne, whence he secretly directed the Queen. M. in exile refuses the offers of Spain and waits for the inevitable discords among his enemies to allow him to return to direct French policy toward that success in which he, a foreigner, has an absolute confidence, although now many of his conquests are being lost. In the autumn of 1652 Paris rebels against Condé, who goes over to the enemy; the King, now of age, returns there, and on 3 Feb. 1653, as in triumph, M. In the six following years he seeks to recover the lost positions, revives in Lombardy the war of the duke of Modena. But too many ruins has the Fronde left, and to bend Spain he must resort to the English alliance (even though Cromwell has had the King, brother-in-law of Louis XIII, beheaded) and promise him Dunkirk, conquered in 1646. Thus, the Spaniards commanded by Condé having been defeated at the Dunes, one arrives at the peace of the Pyrenees (11 Nov. 1659) which gives back to France Cerdanya and Roussillon, lost in 1493, besides some cities of Flanders and, with the hand of Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip IV, the hope of the Spanish inheritance. The Infanta renounced it in exchange for a dowry of 500,000 écus which was never paid. To obtain this marriage, desired by the Queen, M. had resolutely opposed the King who wanted to marry his niece Maria Mancini. A few months after the King's marriage M. died, and Louis XIV, faithful to the counsel of his teacher, never took a first minister, but assumed his functions and labors himself.
Only for a century has the judgment of French historians on M. been modified, a judgment that willingly echoed the libels of the Fronde (Mazarinades) and the accusations of the Memoirs of contemporaries against the hated Italian. It has been recognized that he completed and developed the program of Richelieu and Louis XIII and made possible the greatness of the first reign of Louis XIV, with his exceptional devotion to the French cause. The explosion of hatred against M. was caused not so much by the undeniable defects of his government (which were those of Richelieu) as by the discomfort created by the enormous fiscal pressure caused by the war (and multiplied by the bestial system of collection by contract), by the easy accusations against the weak government of two foreigners, and by the rancor of classes and men bent but not uprooted by Richelieu. The Fronde united all these egoisms under Spanish pressure, and thus M. was able, by liquidating them, to prepare the full absolutism of Louis XIV internally, as well as the primacy of France in a Europe half-destroyed by forty years of war.
