by Will Durant
When Louis XIII visited Pau (1620) he was shocked to find not one Catholic church in which to perform his devotions.15 The young King looked with alarmed resentment upon a faith that threatened to divide not merely the soul but also the body of France. He searched anxiously, amid his court, for a man with enough iron in his blood to transform this sundering chaos of creeds and powers into a strong and united nation.
II. LOUIS XIII
He knew that he himself lacked the physical health and mental force needed to meet these challenges. Begotten in the forty-eighth year of a father perhaps weakened by sexual exuberance, he suffered from tuberculosis, intestinal inflammation, and an embarrassing impediment in his speech. Through long periods he was too weak to indulge in sports; he played and composed music, grew peas for the market, put up preserves, and helped in the kitchen. Heredity and disease left him no charms of figure or face; he was precariously thin, his head and nose were oversized, his pendulous underlip left his mouth always partly open; and his long, livid countenance harmonized with his deliberately drab costume. He suffered no more from nature than from his physicians, who in a single year bled him forty-seven times, gave him 215 enemas, and poured 212 drugs down his throat.16 He survived by engaging in sports when he could, hunting, joining his army, sleeping in the open air, and eating the soldiers’ simple food.
Beaten repeatedly by his teachers, he abominated education, and seems never to have read a book except for prayer. He read the canonical hours every day, accepted without question the faith taught him in his growing years, and always joined and accompanied to its end any procession that bore the consecrated Host. A neurotic tendency to occasional cruelty tarnished a disposition basically kind. He was shy, secretive, and morose, not much loving a life that had not loved him. His mother considered him feeble-minded, neglected him, and openly preferred his younger brother, Gaston; he responded by hating her and worshiping the memory of his father. He developed an aversion to women, and after some timid contemplation of Mlle. de Hautefort’s beauty he gave his affections to young men. Married politically to Anne of Austria, he had to be prodded into her bed. When she miscarried he left her intact for thirteen years. The court advised him to take a mistress, but he had other tastes. Then at thirty-seven, yielding to the demands of all France for a dauphin, he tried again, and grateful Anne gave the world Louis XIV (1638). Two years later she bore Philippe I of Orléans, who continued his father’s appreciation of male charms.
Louis was some inches a king. Suddenly, still a lad of sixteen, tired of Concini’s impudence and peculations, he gave secret orders for his assassination (1617); and when the Queen Mother protested against this termination of her favorite, he banished her to Blois and chose as his chief minister Charles d’Albert, who had suggested the stroke, and who was now made Duke of Luynes. Pressed by the Duke and Pope Paul V, Louis ordered the Huguenots to restore all property that they had appropriated from the Church. When Béarn ignored the decree, he marched into the province, compelled obedience, and brought Béarn and Navarre—once his father’s personal realm—under the direct rule of the king. The Huguenots made no immediate resistance; but in 1620 their General Assembly, meeting in their strongest city, La Rochelle, demanded the return of the restored property, as belonging to the people rather than to the Church; moreover, it apportioned France into eight “circles,” and appointed for each of them a chief administrator and a council to levy taxes and raise troops. Louis declared that France could not tolerate such a state within a state. In April 1621 he led one army, and his generals led three others, against the Protestant citadels. Several of these were taken, but Montauban, under Henri, Duke of Rohan, held out successfully. Incompetent generals allowed the war to drag on for a year and a half. The peace treaty of October 9, 1622, forbade Protestant assemblies, but left Montauban and La Rochelle in Huguenot hands. During these campaigns Luynes died (1621), and Richelieu climbed to power.
III. THE CARDINAL AND THE HUGUENOTS
How does a man make his way to the top? In those days it helped to be wellborn. Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu had for mother the daughter of an advocate in the Parlement of Paris, and for his father the Seigneur de Richelieu, Grand Provost of the Royal Household under Henry IV. The ancient Poitou family inherited the right to recommend to the king a candidate for the bishopric of Luçon. Armand, twenty-one, was so nominated by Henry (1606). Two years too young for episcopacy, he hastened to Rome, lied about his age, and delivered before Paul V so handsome a Latin harangue that the Pope surrendered the see. This fait being accompli, Richelieu confessed his lie and asked for absolution. The Pope complied, remarking, “Questo giovane sarà un gran furbo” (This youth will be a great knave).17
The young bishop described his bishopric as the “poorest and nastiest” see in France, but there was some money in the family, and he soon had his coach and his silver plate. He did not take his office as a lazy sinecure; he devoted himself assiduously to his duties, but he found time to flatter every influence and pull every wire. When the clergy of Poitou chose a delegate to the States-General (1614), Armand was their man. In that assembly his grave face, his tall, slim figure, his almost legal ability to grasp an issue clearly and present it persuasively, impressed everyone, especially Marie de Médicis. Through her and Concini he was made a secretary of state (1616). A year later Concini was killed and Richelieu lost his post. After a brief service with the banished Queen Mother at Blois he returned to Luçon. Marie plotted to escape; Richelieu was suspected of complicity; he was exiled to Avignon (1618); his political career seemed finished. But even his enemies recognized his abilities; and when Marie let herself out by night from a window of her castle at Blois and joined a force of rebel aristocrats, Luynes recalled the young bishop and commissioned him to win the Queen Mother back to reason and the King. He succeeded; Louis secured a cardinal’s hat for him and appointed him to the Council of State. Soon Richelieu’s superiority of mind and will made itself evident, and in August 1624, aged thirty-nine, he became prime minister.
The King found in him precisely the objective intelligence, the clear purpose, the tenacity of ends, and the flexibility of means wherein he himself was wanting; and he had the wisdom to accept the Cardinal’s guidance in the triple task of subduing the Huguenots, the nobles, and Spain. In his memoirs Richelieu remarked appreciatively, “The ability to let himself be served [to delegate authority] is not among the least qualities of a great king.”18 Louis did not always agree with his minister; sometimes he rebuked him; always he was jealous of him; now and then he thought of dismissing him. But how could he reject a man who was making him absolute in France and supreme in Europe, and who was bringing in more taxes than even Sully had gleaned?
The spirit of the Cardinal showed itself first in his treatment of religion. He accepted without discussion the doctrines of the Church, and added a few superstitions surprising in so powerful a mind. But he ignored the claim of the “Ultramontanist” party that the popes had full dominion over kings; he preserved the “Gallican liberties” of the French Church as against Rome; and in things temporal he subordinated the Church to the state as resolutely as any Englishman. He banished Father Caussin, who, as the royal confessor, had intervened in politics; no religion, in his view, should mingle with affairs of state. The alliances he formed for France were made with Protestant and Catholic powers indifferently.
He applied his principles firmly to Huguenots playing politics. Despite the peace of 1622, they had made La Rochelle a virtually sovereign city, under the control of its merchants, ministers, and generals. From that strategic port the merchants plied their trade with the world, and pirates sailed out to seize any booty or any ship, even those of France; through this port, given Huguenot permission, any enemy of France might enter. Louis too had violated the treaty; he had promised to demolish Fort Louis, which was a standing threat to the city; instead he strengthened it, and assembled a small fleet in the nearby harbor of Le Blavet. Benjamin (brother to Henri) de Roh
an, Seigneur de Soubise, commanding a Huguenot squadron, captured this royal fleet and towed it in triumph to La Rochelle (1625). Richelieu built another fleet, organized an army, and accompanied the King to the siege of the Huguenot stronghold.
Soubise persuaded the Duke of Buckingham to send an armada of 120 vessels to protect the city. It came, but suffered so sorely from the artillery of the royal forts on the island of Ré that it crept back to England in disgrace (1627). Meanwhile Richelieu, acting as general for his sick King, had captured all the land approaches to La Rochelle; it remained only to blockade it by sea. He ordered his engineers and his soldiers to build a mole of masonry, 1,700 yards long, across the entrance to the harbor, leaving an opening for the movement of the tides. These were so strong, rising and falling twelve feet, that the enterprise seemed impracticable; every day half the stones laid that day were washed away. The King grew weary of this bloodless warfare and went off to Paris; many courtiers expected him to dismiss Richelieu for failing to take the city by assault. But at last the mole was complete and began its scheduled work. Half the population of La Rochelle died of hunger. Only the richest could get a little meat; they paid forty-five livres for a cat, two thousand for a cow. Jean Guiton, the mayor, threatened to kill with his own dagger anyone who spoke of yielding. Nevertheless, after thirteen months of famine and disease, the city capitulated in despair (October 30, 1628). Richelieu entered on horseback, followed by soldiers mercifully distributing bread.
Half of France clamored for the total extinction of the Huguenots. Exhausted, they could only pray. Richelieu surprised them with peace terms that seemed to the Catholics outrageously lenient. La Rochelle lost its municipal independence, its forts, and its walls, but the persons and property of the inhabitants were spared, the surviving Huguenot troops were allowed to depart with their arms, and the free exercise of both the Protestant and the Catholic worship in the city was guaranteed. Other Huguenot towns, surrendering, received similar terms. Catholic property expropriated by Protestants had to be restored, but the temporarily homeless Huguenot ministers were compensated by a state subsidy of 200,000 livres, and, like the Catholic clergy, they were exempted from the head tax, or taille.19 A general amnesty was granted to all who had shared in the rebellion. Henry IV’s Edict of Nantes was confirmed in every essential by Richelieu’s Edict of Grace (June 28, 1629). Positions in the army, navy, and civil service were kept open to all without question of creed. Europe was startled to see French Catholics following and honoring Protestant generals like Turenne, Schomberg, and Henri de Rohan. “From that time,” said Richelieu, “differences in religion never prevented me from rendering to the Huguenots all sorts of good offices.”20 With a wisdom tragically lacking in Louis XIV, the great Cardinal recognized—as Colbert was to do—the immense economic value of the Huguenots to France. They abandoned revolt, gave themselves peacefully to commerce and industry, and prospered as never before.
IV. THE CARDINAL AND THE NOBLES
He proceeded with equal resolution, and less lenience, against the nobles who still held France to be many and not one. Feudalism was by no means dead. It had fought in the religious wars for control of the central government. The great nobles still had their fortified castles, their armed forces, their private wars, their private courts, their officers of law; they still had the peasantry at their mercy, and charged obstructive tolls on commerce traversing their domains. France, dismembered by feudalism and religion, was not yet a nation; it was an unstable and agitated assemblage of proud and semi-independent barons capable at any moment of disrupting the peace and the economy of the state. Most of the provinces were ruled by dukes or counts who claimed their governorships for life and handed them on to their sons.
It seemed to Richelieu that the only practicable alternative to this enfeebling chaos was to centralize authority and power in the king. Conceivably he might have labored to balance this by restoring some measure of municipal autonomy. But he could not restore the medieval commune, which had rested on the guilds and a protected local economy; the passage from a city to a national market had undermined the guilds and the communes, and required central rather than local legislation.I To minds frozen in the perspective of today, the royal absolutism desired by Richelieu seems but a reactionary despotism; in the view of history, and of the great majority of Frenchmen in the seventeenth century, it was a liberating progress from feudal tyranny to unified rule. France was not ripe for democracy; most of its population were ill-fed, ill-clothed, illiterate, darkened with superstitions and murderous with certainties. The towns were controlled by businessmen who could think in no other terms than their own profit or loss; and these men, hampered at every step by feudal privileges, were not disposed to unite with the lesser nobles, as in England, to establish a parliament checking the royal power. The French parlements were not representative and legislative parliaments; they were superior courts, nurtured and mortised in precedent; they were not chosen by the people, and they became citadels of conservatism. The middle classes, the artisans, and the peasants approved the absolutism of the king as the only protection they could see from the absolutism of the lords.
In 1626, in the name of the King, Richelieu issued an edict that struck at the very base of feudalism: he ordered the destruction of all fortresses except on the frontiers, and forbade, in future, the fortification of private dwellings. In the same year (his older brother having been killed in a duel) he made dueling a capital crime; and when Montmorency-Bouteville and the Count des Chapelles dueled nevertheless, he had them put to death. He confessed himself “much troubled in spirit” by this procedure, but he told his master, “It is a question of breaking the neck of duels or of your Majesty’s edicts.”21 The nobles vowed vengeance and plotted the minister’s fall.
They found an eager ally in the Queen Mother. Once the patron of Richelieu, she came to hate him when she saw him opposing her policies. When Louis fell gravely ill (July 1630), she and the Queen nursed him back to semihealth and asked, as their reward, the Cardinal’s head. In her own palace, the Luxembourg, Marie de Médicis, thinking Richelieu far away, repeated the demand with passionate urgency, and offered, as a willing replacement, Michel de Marillac, Keeper of the Seals. Richelieu, coming by a secret passage, entered the room unannounced and confronted the Queen Mother; she confessed that she had told the King that either she or he, Richelieu, must go. The harassed King withdrew and rode off to his hunting lodge at Versailles. Courtiers flocked around Marie, rejoicing in her expected victory. But Louis sent for Richelieu, confirmed him as prime minister, assured him of the royal support, and signed an order for Marillac’s arrest. The plotting nobles were thrown into angry confusion by that “Day of Dupes” (November 10, 1630). Marillac was allowed to live, but his younger brother, a marshal of France, was later indicted on a charge of peculation and was rather summarily put to death (1632). Louis ordered his mother to retire to her château at Moulins and to withdraw from politics. Instead, she fled to Flanders (1631), formed a court in exile at Brussels, and continued to work for Richelieu’s fall. She never saw the King again.
Her other son, “Monsieur,” Gaston, Duke of Orléans, raised an army in Lorraine and led it in open rebellion against his brother (1632). He was joined by several nobles, among them the highest in France—Henri, Duke of Montmorency, governor of Languedoc. Thousands of the aristocracy rallied to the revolt. Near Castelnaudary (September 1) the thirty-seven-year-old Montmorency engaged the forces sent against him by Richelieu. He fought till brought down by seventeen wounds; his and Gaston’s army, rich in titles but poor in discipline, fell to pieces under attack, and Montmorency was captured. Gaston surrendered and, as the price of pardon, named his accomplices. Louis ordered the Parlement of Toulouse to try Montmorency for treason; its verdict was death. The last of the ducal Montmorencys died without fear or complaint, saying, “I hold this decree of the King’s justice for a decree of God’s mercy.”22 Most of France condemned the Cardinal and the King for unfeeling severity
; Louis replied, “I should not be king if I had the feelings of private persons”; and Richelieu defended the execution as a necessary notice to the aristocracy that they too were subject to the laws. “Nothing so upholds the laws,” he said, “as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.”23