The Government of France

Abstract

In 1610, Henri IV, the first Bourbon king of France, was assassinated; his son and heir, Louis XIII, was eight years old. Since a king of France did not reach his majority and rule directly until his thirteenth birthday, Louis’s widowed mother Marie de’ Medici served as Regent and governed in his name until he came of age on 27 September 1614. Louis’s reign was not only long (it lasted until 1643), it covered some of the most tumultuous decades in the history of France before the Revolution. In the 1610s and 1620s, court intrigue, the manoeuvres of aristocratic factions, ministerial instability, extensive socio-economic distress, riot, rebellion, religious division and conflict and, further afield, the onset of the Thirty Years War, confronted the French state with such a prodigious array of problems that these and the following decades have often been dubbed France’s ‘age of crisis’.¹ Whilst some problems were of recent origin, others went back a century or more and related to questions of the long-term constitutional, political, social and economic development of France. Louis XIII was brought to the throne by an act of violence against his father, and violence in one form or another provided an abiding backdrop to his reign.