Mazarin had largely pursued the policies of his predecessor, Cardinal Richelieu, augmenting the Crown's power at the expense of the nobility and the Parlements.

The Frondeurs, political heirs of the turbulent feudal aristocracy, had originally sought to protect their traditional feudal privileges from an increasingly centralized and centralizing royal government.

Furthermore, they believe their traditional influence and authority is being usurped by the recently ennobled (the Noblesse de Robe) who administers the Kingdom and on whom the Monarchy increasingly begins to rely.

This belief intensifies their resentment.

This time it is Turenne, before and afterwards the most loyal soldier of his day, who heads the armed rebellion.

Listening to the promptings of Madame de Longueville, he resolves to rescue her brother Condé, his old comrade in the Freiburg and the Nördlingen.

He hopes to do this with Spanish assistance; a powerful Spanish army assembles in Artois under the archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor-general of the Spanish Netherlands.

But peasants of the countryside rise against the invaders; the royal army in Champagne is in the capable hands of Caesar de Choiseul, comte du Plessis-Praslin, who counts fifty-two years of age and thirty-six of war experience; and the little fortress of Guise successfully resists the archduke's attack.