ABSTRACT
On 18 January 1652, a parlementaire delegation was informed by Anne that the king personally had asked Mazarin to rejoin the council. On 23 January a royal decree quashed Parlement’s anti-Mazarinist declaration. Anne could intimate the king’s will but that was a different matter from an adult king, unmistakably his own master, speaking his own mind. Parlement issued a statement asserting that Mazarin had usurped the authority of the king: therefore orders issued in his name were acts of tyranny against king and subjects alike. It gave the semblance of a moral authority to the rebel cause but did not improve its prospect of victory. Parlement was not, as in 1649, being attacked. Few, even among the Condéan magistrates, relished the prospect of war coming again to the gates of Paris. Meanwhile all Parlement would do for Condé was to suspend the royal declaration against him. Their main concern was to preserve the neutrality of their zone of jurisdiction. How little they could sway the course of events was shown when Nemours led his troops on a destructive chevauchée across the centre of the country. They wanted Condé defeated and Mazarin expelled. They feared putting resolutions to the vote since that would only expose those irreconcilable aims. The more legality was flouted in general, the more they clung, to particular legal forms. For instance, they Condemned the duc de Rohan for seizing a Mazarinist head of a présidial court. 1 They scrutinised such accounts as could be obtained. Yet the political instinct was still strong and the hotheads had to be appeased. So in March the Chambre St Louis was reconvoked.
