With the death of Cardinal Mazarin in March 1661 began the personal rule of the young Louis XIV. During the eighteen years which had passed since, as a boy of five, he had succeeded to the throne, effective power had been in the hands of the cardinal, first during the regency of Anne of Austria, and then for ten more years after the king had attained his legal majority in 1651. The opening years of Mazarin's rule, down to the collapse of the Fronde in 1653, had been a period of disorder, culminating in civil war. Not only had Mazarin been twice compelled to leave the country, but the absolute form of government established by Louis XIII and Richelieu had been gravely threatened; there had been barricades in Paris, and with the hostility to absolutism of the great nobles and the Parlements, the fate which had befallen the Stuart monarch on this side of the Channel seemed for a time to hang over his young French nephew.

Yet, thanks in part to the guile of Mazarin, the French monarchy emerged from the Fronde stronger than ever before; five years of civil war had brought nothing but devastation to considerable areas of France, and the great mass of the population longed only for peace. The opponents of Mazarin were too disunited to continue the struggle; within eight years of the collapse of the Fronde France entered upon the most absolute reign in her history. In foreign affairs Mazarin had brought to an end the war with the Emperor, begun by Richelieu, by the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648; two years before his death he had concluded with Spain the Treaty of the Pyrenees which not only put an end to a quarter of a century of war between the two countries, but marked the end of Spanish hegemony in Europe and of the threat of encirclement to France through the alliance of the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs.