Cardinal de Richelieu

French diplomat and religious leader

• Born: September 9, 1585
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: December 4, 1642
• Place of death: Paris, France

As cardinal, prime minister, and head of the royal council of King Louis XIII, Richelieu was the architect of centralized, absolutist government in France. His brilliant diplomacy helped to end the Habsburg domination of Europe and make France the foremost European power.

Early Life

Though he was to rise to be the most powerful person in France, Armand-Jean du Plessis, better known as Cardinal de Richelieu (duh-ree-shuhl-yewh), had relatively humble origins. As a result of a fortunate marriage, his family had risen to upper-middle-class status and had gained the seigneury (title) to the estates of Richelieu in the western province of Poitou. Richelieu’s father, François du Plessis, was King Henry III’s chief magistrate in Paris, where the future cardinal was born. Richelieu’s mother, Suzanne de la Porte, was the daughter of a member of the Parlement de Paris, and it has been said that Richelieu’s intelligence, instinct for hard work, and administrative talent derived from these middle-class origins.

The estates of Richelieu’s family were devastated during the French Wars of Religion, which raged from 1565 to 1598 between Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) and Roman Catholics, and the young Richelieu grew up determined to restore them. When Richelieu was five, his father died and his mother removed her five children from Paris to begin rebuilding the family fortunes. Richelieu, however, was later sent to school in Paris, where he was enrolled in a military academy, despite the fact that he was pale, thin, and sickly.

Among the ruined family possessions was the vacant bishopric of Luçon, near La Rochelle. In 1606, Richelieu journeyed to Rome to obtain a papal dispensation that would allow him to be consecrated as a bishop below the required age of twenty-six. Apparently, his intelligence and charm impressed the pope, and Richelieu was ordained a priest and consecrated as bishop of Luçon on April 17, 1607. As bishop, Richelieu immediately set to work to restore the morale of the parish priests and the obedience of a recalcitrant cathedral chapter. He became the first bishop in France to implement the reforms decreed by the Council of Trent in 1563. The reforms sought to restore strict moral discipline over the clergy and to educate them in church doctrine. Richelieu himself was a brilliant student of theology, and he wrote many papers on this subject, including an influential catechism used throughout the seventeenth century.

In fact, writing was, for Richelieu, the only effective channel for his ambitions and his need to control events around him. Throughout his life, he often suffered ill health, and only immense self-discipline allowed him to accomplish his tasks. Though he could be charming when absolutely necessary, he preferred to avoid emotionally taxing personal confrontations by arguing issues on paper. To many of his contemporaries, therefore, he appeared to be a remote and sinister figure enmeshed in a web of secrecy and intrigue. Actually, he was conscientious, hardworking, and dedicated to the elimination of forces he believed threatened the social and moral order and unity of France.

These forces threatened once again to throw the state into bloody anarchy in 1610, when King Henry IV , who had succeeded to the throne after the murder of Henry III in 1589, also was assassinated. Henry IV, originally a Protestant, had won the crown by converting to Catholicism and ending the Wars of Religion through judicious compromises with both sides. In 1599, he had issued the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed both religious and political rights to the Huguenots as well as the ability to protect them by maintaining garrisons in all the major cities they controlled. In effect, the Huguenots became a kind of separate republic within the kingdom.

Such an arrangement was bound to create tensions, and religion was used by prominent groups of nobles in their efforts to reduce the authority of the king and reassert the independence they had enjoyed during the Middle Ages. Henry IV’s son Louis XIII was only nine years old when his father was killed, so the nobility saw an opportunity to attack the regency of the Queen Mother, Marie de Médicis . Rather than risk an open war, they engaged in threats and protracted negotiations with Marie and her government. At one point in these negotiations, Richelieu was asked to serve as an intermediary, and this led to his being chosen as a delegate to the Estates-General of 1614.

Speaking for the Church, Richelieu offered a brilliant plea for the reestablishment of strong royal authority, vested in the regent, to prevent the destructive divisions that had previously torn France apart. Though the assembly broke up without reaching any substantial agreements, Richelieu had won the attention and affection of both the young king and his mother. A few months later, he was appointed chaplain to the new queen, Anne of Austria , an office with great political promise. Richelieu’s star had begun to rise.

Life’s Work

Cardinal de Richelieu has often been accused of seeking advancement through flattery of the Queen Mother, but this was a universal practice in the seventeenth century; apparently, Richelieu’s detractors were simply envious of his superior skills. In fact, it was these skills, used in negotiations with a disobedient faction of nobles, that led to his appointment as secretary of state in 1616. For the next ten years, his fortunes were tied to those of Marie de Médicis. When her Italian lover Concino Concini, who was also the virtual ruler of France, was murdered by a cabal of nobles, Richelieu went into exile to the papal enclave of Avignon. When Louis XIII, who then took over the reins of government, decided to be reconciled with the Queen Mother, Richelieu was again recalled to conduct the negotiations. For his success, in 1622, Richelieu was awarded the cardinal’s hat. Two years later, he was appointed to the royal council.

In 1624, Richelieu was called upon to resolve his first foreign policy crisis. For more than a century, France had been intermittently at war with the Habsburg Dynasty , which ruled areas on three sides of France: Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Netherlands. In addition, Spain controlled nearly all of Italy, which was broken into several smaller kingdoms and provinces. The Spanish now moved to capture the Valtelline, an important mountain pass through the northern Italian Alps to Habsburg Austria, from the Protestant Grisons, a Swiss community under a treaty of protection from France. Invoking the treaty, Richelieu astounded and impressed Europe by sending a French army in a lightning strike against the papal troops holding the pass for Spain.

Richelieu’s successful action alienated many Catholics within the Queen Mother’s faction who had been sympathetic to the Habsburgs. The cardinal had won the confidence of the king, however, and Louis appointed Richelieu head of the royal council, a post that made him essentially the prime minister. From this point onward, Richelieu used all of his talents to weaken the Habsburgs and strengthen the French position in Europe. Because France was not, at this time, as militarily strong as the Habsburgs, the accomplishment of this goal required a persistent program of small victories in a variety of situations—a chess game on a grand scale.

The board on which Richelieu played included virtually all of Europe, engaged in the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the last of the great religious wars between Protestants and Catholics. Richelieu was largely responsible for transforming this long and complex conflict into a political rather than a religious confrontation. He began by giving diplomatic support and subsidies to the enemies of Spain: In 1625, he arranged for Louis XIII’s sister to marry Charles I of England; in Italy, he assured that a French duke would inherit the duchy of Mantua to deny Spain a military route to Austria; and perhaps most important, he supported the Dutch Protestant rebels against their Spanish rulers and gave immense subsidies to the Swedish Lutheran king Gustavus II Adolphus , who had gone to war against the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor.

At the same time, Richelieu reorganized the French army and created a French navy virtually from nothing. After 1640, French armies won consistent victories against the Habsburgs. With the new navy, he sent colonial expeditions to Africa and Canada, chartered royal companies to develop the new colonies, and encouraged missionaries to convert indigenous peoples to Catholicism. He also attempted to strengthen the French economy by supporting export industries and eliminating the domestic trade barriers. Nevertheless, throughout his career, his primary efforts were centered on diplomacy, and he, or the army of agents he employed, were constantly negotiating alliances and treaties throughout Europe. He even supported the Muslim Turks of the Ottoman Empire against Austria. Ultimately, all these efforts resulted in the end of Habsburg domination and the rise of France as the foremost power on the Continent.

Richelieu sought security and power for France in international affairs; so, also, did he seek stability and order in France itself. He did everything he could, first, to reduce the ability of the nobles to cause civil conflict and, second, to create a royal bureaucracy that would be able to oversee the nobility and provide for consistent administration regardless of who was the head of state. To achieve these ends, Richelieu created a web of spies who ferreted out plots of discontented nobles, several of whom were beheaded. The power of the Parlement de Paris, which had attempted to control royal authority by modifying edicts before it registered them as laws, was forcibly limited. Peasant revolts in the provinces, often encouraged or supported by local nobles, were ruthlessly crushed. Richelieu also persuaded Louis XIII to enforce the laws making dueling—a major source of civil disturbances—punishable by death. Finally, Richelieu expanded the role of officers called intendants, who were sent throughout the kingdom to keep an eye on provincial governments and nobility. Thus, Richelieu was kept constantly informed of conditions throughout France. Eventually, the use of intendants was to evolve, as Richelieu planned, into a system of provincial governors and administrators directly controlled by the Crown. Richelieu’s efforts created a principle of centralization that not even the French Revolution could destroy.

Religion continued to be another source of division and disorder in French society. Although Richelieu realized that to end religious toleration could lead to a major civil war, he also believed that the military and political power granted to the Huguenots by the Edict of Nantes was a constant threat to the stability of the state. Richelieu did not attempt to convert the Protestants forcibly; rather, he simply limited their political rights and eliminated their military power.

Toward the end of his life, Richelieu, a profoundly pious man, found himself in conflict both with Pope Urban VIII over French policy in the Thirty Years’ War and with the hierarchy of the French church, which disagreed with Richelieu’s allocation of church revenues to support the war efforts. Even in his last months, he was not freed from the conspiracies of his enemies, and he was forced to send one of the royal favorites, the marquis de Cinq-Mars, to the block for treason. On his deathbed, Richelieu continued to work on the development of a stable civil government. After nominating his protégé, Jules Mazarin , to succeed him, he died, in the Palais Royal, on December 4, 1642.

Significance

Cardinal de Richelieu is remembered primarily as the architect of French power in Europe and centralization in royal government. In the area of foreign policy, he was instrumental in destroying the hold of the Habsburgs over European affairs. Through his intricate diplomacy and military successes, he brought France to the brink of leadership of the European powers. In so doing, he also raised the raison d’état (reason of state) to primacy as the principle of relations between European states.

Richelieu applied the raison d’état as thoroughly in France itself as in his foreign policy. He did not hesitate to use whatever means he believed were necessary to build and maintain the strength of his government and that of France. Yet, respecting history and tradition, he did not seek to overturn completely the accepted structures of administration. A true practical politician, he surprised friends and foes alike with his pragmatism and ability to compromise. He could also be ruthless and seemingly cruel; he justified the state use of force and even the circumvention of the law in matters of national security by insisting that the peace and welfare of the state were simply too important to be confined by the morality applied to personal behavior.

The theoretical vehicle through which Richelieu implemented state power was absolutism, and he is usually given credit for instituting this theory as the principle of authority in France. Louis XIV and other kings would later attempt to transform absolutism into a visible reality. Richelieu’s view of royal government was based on his theology, which supported the divine-right concept, in which the monarch was a sacred person who received his crown and powers from God alone. Thus, while bowing to the Papacy in spiritual matters, Richelieu insisted that only the king could be supreme in the secular realm. From this, his devotion to the stability and good order of the state led him logically toward all those measures designed to curb the nobles and the Huguenots, and to increase the power of the central government.

Bibliography

Bergin, Joseph. Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of Wealth. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985. Scholarly work based on financial records of Richelieu’s personal estates. In addition to providing an interesting perspective on Richelieu’s use of political office for personal gain—a practice both accepted and very common in his period—it offers fascinating detail on the management of landed estates and the conduct of business in the seventeenth century.

Bergin, Joseph, and Laurence Brockliss, eds. Richelieu and His Age. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992. Collection of essays by eight historians, who reject the depiction of Richelieu as an exponent of realpolitik and maintain he was a devout and politically astute diplomat with a genuine desire to establish a more just and peaceful Europe.

Burckhardt, Carl J. Richelieu and His Age. 4 vols. Translated by Bernard Hoy. London: Allen & Unwin, 1967-1972. Though somewhat lengthy for the general reader, this is by far both the best biography of Richelieu and the clearest explanation of French politics of the period. Burckhardt’s style is highly entertaining yet balanced and scholarly.

Church, William F. Richelieu and Reason of State. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. A detailed discussion of the conflict between political expediency and moral principles in policy making in seventeenth century France. The author examines the growth of the idea of the reason of state as it evolved in the policies of Richelieu.

Knecht, Robert. Richelieu. New York: Longman, 1991. Not a complete biography, but a reassessment of Richelieu focusing on the major features, achievements, and failures of his career.

Levi, Anthony. Cardinal Richelieu and the Making of France. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. Levi argues that Richelieu sought to create a French national unity as much through cultural symbolism as through political means.

Marvick, Elizabeth Wirth. The Young Richelieu: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Leadership. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Attempts to psychoanalyze Richelieu’s personality to discern how incidents in his youth influenced his approach to policy decisions and administration. Although based on the questionable assumption that it is possible to psychoanalyze a dead historical figure, the book is useful for its detailed information about Richelieu’s early years.

O’Connell, D. P. Richelieu. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1968. O’Connell views Richelieu as an intensely religious man who was forced to deal with the tension between policies that were necessary for the good of France and his own religious morality.

Parrott, David. Richelieu’s Army: War, Government, and Society in France, 1624-1642. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Detailed account of the administration, finances, and activities of the French army. Parrott challenges the conventional wisdom that the army helped create an absolute state, arguing that the expansion of war actually weakened Richelieu’s control of France and intensified political and social tensions.

Sturdy, David J. Richelieu and Mazarin: A Study in Statesmanship. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Concise and comparative analysis of the public and private careers of the two ministers, including an assessment of their historical significance.

Treasure, Geoffrey R. R. Cardinal Richelieu and the Development of Absolutism. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1972. A standard work by a well-known expert on seventeenth century France. Treasure views Richelieu not as the cold architect of absolutist monarchy but as a long-suffering minister, fighting for survival in the highly competitive political arena.