Part One: Two Rebellions
Or: Why England Got Parliament and France Got Versailles
Two Rebellions
Or: Why England Got Parliament and France Got Versailles
In the 1640s, two of Europe’s great monarchies faced rebellion. Both kings had overreached. Both faced coalitions of nobles, judges, and commoners who believed their traditional rights were being trampled. Both conflicts turned violent.
One king lost his head. The other’s grandson became the most absolute ruler in European history.
The difference is instructive.
England: The War That Worked
By 1640, Charles I had spent eleven years trying to rule without Parliament. He raised taxes through legal loopholes, imposed religious conformity that alienated Puritans, and generally governed as though medieval limits on royal power were suggestions rather than law.
A quick note on the players: Parliament wasn’t a modern legislature - it was an assembly of nobles, gentry, and wealthy commoners that the king was supposed to consult on major decisions, especially taxes. It had real power, but only when it was in session, and the king decided when to call it. The Puritans were Protestant reformers who thought the Church of England was still too Catholic - too much ritual, too much hierarchy, too much royal control over religious life. They wanted simpler worship and more local autonomy. Many of them sat in Parliament.
When Charles finally needed Parliament to fund a war against Scottish rebels, they weren’t in a forgiving mood. Parliament demanded reforms. Charles refused. Tensions escalated.
By 1642, it was civil war - Royalists against Parliamentarians, or as they called each other: Cavaliers (the king’s men, with their long hair and aristocratic swagger) against Roundheads (the Puritan reformers, named for their modest haircuts).
The war lasted seven years. It ended with Charles I on trial for treason against his own people - a legal theory that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier. In January 1649, he was executed outside the Banqueting House in London. A king, killed by his own subjects, with paperwork.
What followed was messy - a republic that became a military dictatorship under Cromwell, then collapsed after his death, then a restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. But the restoration came with conditions. When Charles II’s brother James II tried to reassert absolute power in 1685, Parliament simply replaced him in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
The principle had been established: English monarchs ruled with Parliament, not despite it. The pattern held.
France: The War That Didn’t
France in the 1640s looked remarkably similar. Louis XIV was a child. The real power was Cardinal Mazarin, chief minister and regent, who was centralizing authority and squeezing the country for taxes to fund ongoing wars.
The parlements - judicial bodies with quasi-legislative power - pushed back. In 1648, the Paris parlement issued a reform charter demanding limits on royal taxation and arbitrary arrest. Mazarin arrested the ringleaders. Paris erupted.
Barricades went up across the city. The royal family fled in the night. Mazarin backed down and released the prisoners. It looked like France might follow England’s path - traditional institutions checking royal overreach, the people in the streets backing them up.
Then the high nobility saw opportunity.
The Prince of Condé, the Duke of Orléans, and other great lords had their own grievances, their own ambitions, their own armies. What began as a constitutional movement became a chaotic civil war. The “Fronde” - named after a child’s slingshot, mocking the rebels as juvenile - consumed France for five years.
And it collapsed.
The Fork
Here’s where the stories diverge, and why it matters.
England’s rebels were unified by principle. Parliament had a shared institutional identity centuries old. The Puritan faction had religious conviction that bound them together. When they argued - and they argued constantly - they argued about how to limit the king, not whether to. The goal was clear even when the methods weren’t.
France’s rebels were fractured by ambition. The parlementaires wanted constitutional reform. The princes wanted personal power. Condé wanted to be chief minister. Orléans wanted to be regent. They formed alliances, broke them, switched sides, and fought each other as readily as they fought Mazarin. When Condé allied with Spain - France’s enemy - to pursue his personal vendetta, he stopped looking like a patriot and started looking like a traitor.
England’s conflict produced martyrs. Charles I on the scaffold became a powerful symbol, but he was their martyr - proof that even kings answered to law. The principle survived the man.
France’s conflict produced exhaustion. After five years of chaos, Parisians just wanted it to stop. When Mazarin returned and order was restored, most people were relieved. The rebellion hadn’t produced a new constitutional settlement. It had just produced suffering.
England was an island. No foreign army could easily intervene to save the king or crush Parliament. The conflict was domestic, decided by domestic forces.
France was surrounded. Spain intervened on behalf of the rebels, which delegitimized the rebellion. And France’s military vulnerability meant that a strong crown wasn’t just a preference - it felt like survival. A weak, divided France was a France that got invaded.
The Lesson Louis Learned
Louis XIV was ten when the Fronde began. He spent years being shuffled from palace to palace while nobles fought in his name. He never forgot.
When he took personal power in 1661, he set about ensuring it could never happen again. He built Versailles - not just a palace, but a system. The great nobles were required to attend court, spending their fortunes on fashion and their energy on jockeying for royal favor. They couldn’t rebel because they were too busy competing for the privilege of handing the king his shirt in the morning.
The parlements were stripped of their political power. The provinces were administered by royal intendants who answered to the crown. The army was professionalized and loyal to the state, not to individual lords.
The Fronde didn’t produce a French Magna Carta. It produced its opposite: the most centralized, absolute monarchy Europe had ever seen. The rebellion’s failure didn’t just fail - it immunized the system against future challenges, for generations.
France wouldn’t get its constitutional reckoning until 1789. And that one was far bloodier than England’s.
Why This Matters
We like to believe that power, pushed too far, inevitably triggers correction. That tyranny contains the seeds of its own destruction. That the arc of history bends toward justice, or at least toward balance.
Sometimes it does. England in the 1640s.
Sometimes it doesn’t. France in the 1640s.
The difference isn’t destiny. It’s conditions. Unity of opposition. Clarity of principle. Institutional depth. Geography and external pressures. Whether the people leading the resistance are fighting for something shared, or just fighting for themselves.
The pattern that flatters us - the one where the barons always eventually win - is the story told by the survivors. The other story, the one where the rebellion fails and the crown comes back stronger, gets forgotten. It’s not as inspiring. But it’s just as common.
When we look at our own moment and wonder whether the institutions will hold, whether the overreach will be checked, whether the pattern will complete - it’s worth remembering that the outcome was never guaranteed.
It depends on what people choose to do. And whether we can manage to do it together.
Together is key. Sometimes it seems like a dream.