The most hated man in France was dying, and the young king who owed him everything stood watching — already calculating his first moves as absolute monarch.

The Death of the Sun King's Shadow: When Mazarin's Grip Finally Broke

The Italian Cardinal Who Made France a Superpower — and Died Unloved

Cardinal Mazarin's death on May 29, 1661 freed Louis XIV to become the absolute Sun King he had trained him to be.

Paris, May 29, 1661. In the Château de Vincennes, the candles burned low as Cardinal Jules Mazarin drew his final, rattling breaths. The man who had steered France through civil war, forged the Peace of Westphalia, and transformed a boy-king into Europe's most powerful monarch was dying — and not a soul in the kingdom would mourn him.

The twenty-two-year-old Louis XIV stood vigil, watching the mentor who had shaped his every political instinct slip away. Mazarin's skeletal hands, once heavy with rings plundered from a dozen noble families, now clutched rosary beads. The cardinal's famous art collection — Titians, Correggios, entire galleries of Renaissance masterpieces — lined the walls of his chambers, a fortune amassed while France's peasants starved.

Born Giulio Mazzarino in the Abruzzo region of Italy, he had risen from papal diplomat to become the most hated man in France. During the Fronde civil wars of the 1640s and 50s, Parisian mobs had burned him in effigy, written thousands of scurrilous pamphlets — the 'Mazarinades' — accusing him of everything from sodomy to stealing the crown jewels. Twice he had fled into exile. Twice he had returned, more powerful than before.

No…

💡 Mazarin was so obsessed with his art collection that on his deathbed, servants heard him wandering his gallery at night, whispering to his paintings: 'Must I leave all this?'