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“The king, our master, is a captive,” said M. Mole, voicing to the Parliament the queen’s complaint.

“He was a captive, in the hands of Mazarin,” replied the Duke of Orleans; “but, thank God, he is so no longer.”

The people had won. Mazarin was beaten. He hastened to La Havre, where the princes were then confined, and set them at liberty himself. His power in France, for the time, was at an end. He made his way to the frontier, which he crossed on the 12th of March. He was just in time: the Parliament of Paris had issued orders for his arrest, wherever found in France.

We must end here, with this closing of the contest between Mazarin and the Fronde. History goes on to tell that the contest was reopened, Mazarin returned, there was battle in Paris, the Fronde failed, and Mazarin died in office.

The popular outbreak here briefly chronicled is of interest from the fact that it immediately followed the success of the insurrection in England and the execution of Charles I. The provocation was the same in the two nations; the result highly different. In both cases it was a revolt against the tyranny of the court and the attempt to establish absolutism. But the difference in results lay in the fact that England had a single parliament, composed of politicians, while France had ten parliaments, composed of magistrates, and unaccustomed to handle great questions of public policy. Richelieu had taken from the civic parliaments of France what little power they possessed, and they were but shadowy prototypes of the English representative assembly. “Without any unity of action or aim, and by turns excited and dismayed by the examples that came to them from England, the Frondeurs had to guide them no Hampden or Cromwell; they had at their backs neither people nor army; the English had been able to accomplish a revolution; the Fronde failed before the dexterous prudence of Mazarin and the queen’s fidelity to her minister.”

There lay before France a century and a half of autocratic rule and popular suffering; then was to come the convening of the States-General, the rise of the people, and the final downfall of absolute royalty and feudal privileges in the red tide of the Revolution.