Mazarinades

Mazarinades are political pamphlets published in France during the time of the series of civil wars known as the Fronde (1648 to 1653). Most are scurrilous satires against Cardinal Mazarin, chief advisor to child-king Louis XIV, and essentially ruler of the country at the time. The collective name for these pamphlets comes from La Mazarinade, the most famous of them, published in 1651.

The Folger began collecting these pamphlets in 1954, and has since amassed one of the largest Mazarinades collections in North America, with at least 2,650 (many in multiple copies and variants) of the estimated 5,000 to 6,000 titles published. See "The Folger’s Mazarinades: Libraries within Libraries" and "Publishing Against the King: French Civil War Pamphlets" in The Collation, the Folger's collection-related blog, for more information.

The Folger's cache of Mazarinades

Folger call number DC124.M2925 var. Cage. A Mazarinade from 1651. The title roughly translates as "Unfortunate Prosperity, or the short history of Cardinal Mazarin, in which is set forth all the ruses and all the trickery that he used to achieve his prodigious fortune, with a relation of all the causes of his disgrace."

The Folger's Mazarinades have not been systematically cataloged, and therefore are mostly not (yet) to be found in the online catalog, Hamnet. A checkmarked copy of the nineteenth-century bibliography by Celestin Moreau and its supplements, kept in the Acquisitions Department, provided the authoritative record of the Folger's Mazarinade holdings until 2002, when newly-acquired examples started to receive accession-level records in Hamnet instead.

Until 2002, Mazarinades at the Folger were treated as if they were a single collection, with each newly-acquired example being added under the accession number of the initial group, 143966. (Dutch pamphlets in Knuttel's bibliography were treated the same way, under accession number 134829.)

In 2014/15, a database describing typographical features of 317 Mazarinades was created by Nadia Gabriel, Liz Layton, Katie Gucer, and Daniel Yabut under the direction of Goran Proot. Starting in September 2016, Mazarinades check-marked in the bibliographies began to be systematically added to Hamnet as part of the Mazarinades cataloging project.

Call numbers for Mazarinades

Before 2002, newly-acquired Mazarinades were all shelved under the call number DC124. Those bound together in volumes received only a collective volume number (e.g. DC124 v.29 Cage is the 29th volume on the shelf, and it contains dozens and dozens of pamphlets assembled by a 17th-century collector). Those shelved individually received a call number based on the corresponding number—or most nearly corresponding number—in Moreau's bibliography and its supplements (e.g. DC124 .M361 Cage is entry number 361 in Moreau). Chronologically by publication date of the bibliography, those call number are:

Vault call no.	Bibliography	Bibliography call no.
DC124 .M___ Cage	C. Moreau, Bibliographie des mazarinades, 3 vols. (Paris, J. Renouard et cie., 1850-51)
DC124 vol.__ Cage	C. Moreau, Bibliographie des mazarinades, 3 vols. (Paris, J. Renouard et cie., 1850-51), when the check mark has a number written above it. That number = volume number
DC124 .MA___ Cage	the "Additions and corrections" section at the end of Moreau's volume 3
DC124 .MV___ Cage	P. Vander Haeghen, "Notes biographiques [sic] sur les Mazarinades" from La bibliophile Belge, vol. 15 (1859) p. 384-395
DC124 .MS___ Cage	C. Moreau, "Supplément à la bibliographie des Mazarinades" from Bulletin du bibliophile, 15. ser. (1862) p. 786-829
DC124 .MM___ Cage	E. Socard, Supplément à la bibliographie des Mazarinades (Paris: Henri Menu, 1876), extracted from Cabinet historique tome XXII.
DC 124 .ML___ Cage	E. Labadie, Nouveau supplément à la bibliographie des Mazarinades (Paris: Henri Leclerc, 1904), extracted from Bulletin du bibliophile, 1903-1904.

Lists of Folger Mazarinades

The following lists can be downloaded here as PDF files:

• Annotated List of Moreau numbers (pdf)
• List of Folger Mazarinades in Lindsay and Neu (pdf)

Other resources

• Bibliographie des mazarinades (launched May 2019)