by Will Durant
Two further obstacles remained to Richelieu’s supremacy: the governors and the parlements. Resenting the loss of provincial revenue through malversation and incompetence in noble governors and in bourgeois or petty-noble magistrates, the Cardinal sent to each district “intendants” to supervise the administration of finance and justice and the enforcement of the laws. These royal appointees took precedence over local officials of whatever rank; local autonomy declined, efficiency and tax collections rose. Anticipated in some measure by Henry IV, suppressed by the nobles in the Fronde, consolidated by Louis XIV, adapted by Napoleon, this system of intendants became a major feature of the centrally controlled bureaucracy that henceforth administered the laws of France.
The Parlement of Paris thought it opportune, under a weak monarchy, to extend its functions from the registration and interpretation of the laws to the role of an advisory council to the king. Richelieu would not brook such rivalry to his Council of State; probably under his prodding, and with his sharp phrasing, Louis summoned the leaders of the Parlement and told them, “You are constituted only to judge between Master Peter and Master John; if you go on as at present I will pare your nails so close that you will be sorry.”24 The Paris Parlement yielded, and the provincial parlements followed suit. Even their traditional functions were curtailed; Richelieu set up “extraordinary commissions” to try special cases. France became a police state; the Cardinal’s spies were everywhere, even in the salons; lettres de cachet (orders in secret) became a frequent instrument of government. Richelieu was now, in effect, king of France.
V. THE CARDINAL SUPREME
With this concentrated power in his hands, he did everything for France, little for the people. He thought of France as a power, not as a sum of living individuals; he did not idealize the common man, and he probably thought it dulce et decorum that such men should die for their country; he would sacrifice them to make the future France secure from Hapsburg encirclement. He labored far into the night at the business of the state, but almost always on foreign policy. He had no time to improve the economy, except to ferret out tax evaders and bring revenue and “intelligence” to Paris with less leakage on the way. In 1627 he organized a public post.
Taxes were still collected by financiers to whom they had been “farmed”; these men had exacted twice, sometimes thrice, the amount they transmitted to the government. The nobility and the clergy were exempt from the major taxes; clever businessmen and the hoards of officials found ways of avoiding or appeasing the collectors; towns paid a small composition to escape the poll tax; the brunt of the burden fell upon the peasantry; Richelieu bled it to destitution to make France the strongest power in Christendom. Like Henry IV, he preferred to conquer enemies with money rather than with blood; many of the treaties with which he waged war included subsidies to allies and douceurs to potential foes. At times, desperate for funds, he advanced his own money to the treasury; once he hired an alchemist to make gold.25 Taxation and the state corvée—unpaid labor on the roads—co-operated with drought, famine, pestilence, and ravages by soldiery to bring peasants near to suicide; several killed their families and themselves; starving mothers killed and ate their infants (1639).26 In 1634, according to a probably exaggerated report, a fourth of the population of Paris begged.27 Periodically and sporadically the poor rose in revolts that were mercilessly suppressed.
Richelieu used the taxes to build armies and a navy; right would not be heard unless it spoke with guns. Having purchased the office of grand admiral, he fulfilled its functions resolutely. He repaired and fortified harbors, established arsenals and provision depots at the ports, built eighty-five ships, founded pilot schools, trained marine regiments. He raised a hundred regiments of infantry, three hundred troops of cavalry; he restored discipline in the army; he failed only in his efforts to banish its prostitutes. With his revitalized armament he faced the chaos of foreign relations bequeathed by the regency of Marie de Médicis, returned to the policy of Henry IV, and directed all his forces to one goal—the liberation of France from the cordon of Hapsburg power in the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and Spain.
Marie had allied France to Spain—i.e., in Richelieu’s view, she had submitted to the enemy; and she had alienated those on whom Henry IV had relied as friends—the English, the Dutch, and the Protestants of Germany. With the quick strategic eye of a general, Richelieu saw in the Valtelline passes that connected Austria and Spanish Italy the key to the united power of Spain and the Empire to exchange supplies and troops. For twelve years he struggled to win those passes; his wars against the Huguenots and the nobles distracted and defeated him; but he retrieved with diplomacy far more than he had lost in war. He had won to his faithful service François Le Clerc du Tremblay, who had taken the name Joseph on becoming a Capuchin monk; “Father Joseph” was sent everywhere on delicate diplomatic missions, and performed them skillfully; and France began to pair the gray-garbed monk as Éminence Grise—his Gray Eminence—with the red-robed Richelieu as Eminence Rouge. So aided, the Cardinal vowed that he would “prove to the world that the age of Spain is passing, and the age of France has come.”28
In 1629 the epochal conflict in Germany seemed about to end in the complete triumph of the Catholic Hapsburg Emperor over the Protestant princes. Richelieu turned the tables with money. He signed with Gustavus Adolphus (1631) a treaty by which the virile King of Sweden, aided by a million livres a year from France, was to invade Germany and rescue the Protestant states. The ultramontanists of France denounced the minister as a traitor to the faith; he retorted that neutrality was treason to France. When Gustavus died in victory at Lützen (1632) and most German princes yielded to the Emperor, Richelieu actively entered the war. He expanded the French armies from 12,000 in 1621 to 150,000 in 1638; he helped the revolt of the Catalans in Spain; his diplomacy gave him control of Trier, Coblenz, Colmar, Mannheim, and Basel; his troops took Lorraine and forced their way through Savoy to Milan, the center of Spanish power in North Italy.
Then the pendulum of fortune veered, and all these victories seemed meaningless. In July and August, 1636, a strong force of Spanish and Imperial troops crossed the Netherlands into France, took Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) and Corbie, advanced to Amiens, laid waste the green valleys of the Somme and the Oise. Richelieu’s armies were far away; the road to Paris lay open and defenseless to the enemy. The Queen Mother in Brussels, the Queen in St.-Germain, and her pro-Spanish party in France rejoiced, and counted the days before the Cardinal’s expected fall. In Paris angry multitudes pullulated in the streets, calling for his death. But when he appeared among them, outwardly calm on his stately horse, no one dared touch him, and many prayed God to give him strength to save France. Then appeared not only his courage, but his foresight and industry: he had long ago organized the citizens of Paris into a reserve militia; he had stored up arms and materials for them; now he inspired them with fervor, and they responded to his call; the Parlement of Paris, the corporations, and the guilds voted funds; in a few days a new army was on the march, and it laid siege to Corbie. Gaston of Orléans, in command, dillydallied; Richelieu came up, took charge, ordered assault. On November 14 Corbie was taken, and the Hapsburg troops retreated into the Netherlands.
In 1638 Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, leading a German army financed by Richelieu, took Elsass; dying a year later, he bequeathed it to France; Elsass and Lothringen became Alsace-Lorraine and began to be French. In 1640 Arras was taken. In 1642 a force under the command of the King and the Cardinal captured Perpignan, and the surrounding province of Roussillon was detached from Spain. Everywhere Richelieu seemed now the organizer of victory.
The unreconciled nobles, the Spanish faction at the court, the highborn ladies palpitating with intrigue, made a last effort to unseat the minister. In 1632, after long serving the Cardinal in diplomacy and war, the Marquis of Effiat died, leaving a widow and a handsome twelve-year-old son, Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars. Richelieu took the lad under his protection and intr
oduced him to the King; perhaps he thought with this toy to distract Louis from Mlle. de Hautefort, who was among the intriguantes. It so transpired. The King was charmed by the youth’s looks and wit and insolence, made him Master of the Horse, begged him to share the royal bed.29 But Cinq-Mars, maturing to twenty-one, preferred the pretty courtesan Marion Delorme and the exalted Marie de Gonzague, future Queen of Poland, now one of the Cardinal’s loveliest enemies. Probably at her suggestion, and inflamed by her strategic retreats, the youth importuned Louis for admission to the royal Council and for a command in the army. When Richelieu discountenanced these proposals, Cinq-Mars begged the King to dismiss the minister. Refused, he joined Gaston of Orléans, the Duke of Bouillon, and others in a plot to surrender Sedan to a Spanish army; with this army at their back the conspirators were to enter Paris and take possession of the King; and Gaston pledged himself to arrange the assassination of the Cardinal on the way to Perpignan. Cinq-Mars’ friend, Jacques Auguste de Thou, solicited the co-operation of the Queen. But Anne of Austria, expecting Louis’ early death and her elevation to power as regent, sent a hint of the scheme to Richelieu. He pretended to have a copy of the agreement with Spain; Gaston, believing it, confessed and, as usual, betrayed his associates. Cinq-Mars, de Thou, and Bouillon were arrested; Bouillon, as the price of pardon, confirmed Gaston’s confession. The two youths were tried by a court at Lyon; they were unanimously condemned, and they dignified their treason with a stoic death. The King hurried back to Paris to protect his power. Richelieu, mortally ill, was carried in a litter through a France dying of victories and crying out for peace.
VI. EPITAPH
What was he like, this Cardinal who was hardly a Christian, this great man who felt that he could not afford to be good? Philippe de Champaigne sent him down the ages in one of the most famous paintings in the Louvre: the tall figure saved from absurdity by raiment, given authority by red robe and hat, posing as if in some forensic plea, proclaiming his nobility in his clear-cut features and delicate hands, challenging his enemies with his sharp eyes, but pale with exhausting years and saddened with the consciousness of inexorable time. Here is the worldliness of power crossed with the asceticism of dedication.
He had to be strong to keep his faults from defeating his purposes. He began his career at court with an ingratiating humility, which he later avenged with a pride that admitted only one superior. Once, when the Queen visited him, he remained seated—a discourtesy permitted only to the King. He was (like most of us) vain of his appearance, avid of titles, resentful of criticism, eager for popularity. Jealous of Corneille, he wished to be known also as a dramatist and a poet; actually he wrote excellent prose, as his memoirs show. As readily as Wolsey he reconciled the following of Christ with a cautious attention to Mammon. He refused bribes and took no salary, but he appropriated the income of many benefices, alleging his need to finance his policies. Like Wolsey, he built himself so splendid a palace that before he died he thought it wise to present it to the Dauphin; so the Palais Cardinal became the Palais Royal; we may suppose that it was built for an administrative staff and diplomatic show rather than for personal extravagance. He was no miser; he enriched his relatives and could be generous with the money of the state. He bequeathed half of his personal hoard to the King, advising him to use it “on occasions which cannot abide the tardiness of financial forms.”30
What appears as his unfeeling cruelty was to him a necessity of rule: he took it for granted that men—certainly states—could not be managed by kindness; they had to be intimidated by severity. He loved France, but Frenchmen left him cold. He agreed with Cosimo de’ Medici that a state cannot be governed with paternosters, and with Machiavelli that the ethics of Christ cannot be safely followed in ruling or preserving a nation. “A Christian,” he wrote, “cannot too soon forgive an injury, but a ruler cannot too soon punish it when it is a crime against the state…. Without this virtue [of severity]—which becomes mercy insofar as the punishment of one culprit prevents a thousand from forgetting it—states cannot survive.”31 It was Richelieu who gave currency to the phrase raison d’état: i.e., the ethical code must give way to reasons of state.32 He seems never to have questioned the identification of his policies with the needs of France; hence he persecuted his personal enemies as firmly as he punished the foes of the King.
Within his castle and his diplomatic front he was human, longed for friendship, and felt the loneliness of the exalted. Tallemant’s gossipy Historiettes would have us believe that Richelieu tried to make a mistress of Marie de Médicis, who was twenty years older than he;33 it is highly improbable. There are other legends of the Cardinal’s secret amours, even with Ninon de Lenclos; and it would not have violated the mores of the time if the harassed statesman had consoled himself with contours. All that we know clearly of his affections is that he was profoundly attached to his niece, Marie-Madeleine de Combalet. Widowed soon after marriage, she wished to enter a convent, but Richelieu persuaded the Pope to forbid it; he kept her near him to manage his household, and he received from her a devotion intenser than most loves. She dressed like a nun and concealed her hair. Richelieu conducted himself toward her with all due propriety, but the Queens refused her the benefit of any doubt, and gave a lead to gossip that added another sting to the Cardinal’s tale. He loved “not man, nor woman neither,” and both took their revenge.
What he had above all was will. Few lives in all history have been so unified in their aim, so undeviating in its pursuit; the laws of motion could not be more constant. We must admire his devotion to his tasks, his wearing himself out in them through years of labor and nights without sleep. He dedicated those labors to those who could sleep without fear under cover of his sleepless care. We must concede him a surpassing courage, which faced powerful nobles and scheming women, stood them off, killed them off, dauntlessly, amid repeated plots against his life. He risked his head time and again on the issue of his policies.
He was seldom well. Having contracted a fever from the marshes of Poitou, he was subject to repeated headaches, which sometimes lasted for days on end. Probably his nervous system was genetically weak or congenitally injured; one sister was feeble-minded, one brother was for a while insane, and court rumor said that the Cardinal himself had fits of epilepsy and mad hallucinations.34 He suffered from hemorrhoids, boils, and a disease of the bladder; as in Napoleon’s case, his political crises were occasionally complicated by inability to urinate.35 More than once his illnesses led him to think of retiring; then, imprisoned in his will, he took hold again and fought on.
We cannot judge him fairly unless we see him wholly, including features that will take form as we proceed. He was a pioneer of religious toleration. He was a man of wide and sensitive culture: a connoisseur of music, a discerning collector of art, a lover of drama and poetry, a helpful friend of men of letters, the founder of the French Academy. But history properly remembers him above all as the man who freed France from that Spanish dominance which had resulted from the Religious Wars and which, in the League, had made France a pensioner, almost a dependency, of Spain. He achieved what Francis I and Henry IV had longed and failed to do: he broke the cordon strangulaire with which Hapsburg powers had encircled France. Later pages must detail the far-seeing strategy whereby he decided the Thirty Years’ War, saved German Protestantism as the ally of Catholic France, and made it possible for Mazarin to mold the constructive Peace of Westphalia. For France itself he created unity and strength at the cost of a dictatorship and a royal absolutism that in time generated the Revolution. If it is a statesman’s prime duty to make his people happy and free, Richelieu fell far short; Cardinal de Retz—a shrewd but not impartial judge—condemned him as having “established the most scandalous and dangerous tyranny that perhaps ever enslaved a state.”36 Richelieu would have replied that the statesman is required to consider the happiness and freedom of future generations as well as of his own, that he must make his country strong to guard it against alien invasion or dom
ination, and that for this purpose he may justly sacrifice a present generation for the security of its successors. In this sense Richelieu’s Spanish rival, Olivares, rated him “the ablest minister that Christendom has possessed these last thousand years”;37 Chesterfield ranked him as “the ablest statesman of his time, and perhaps of any other.”38
His return from his final victory at Roussillon was the funeral procession of a still living man. From Tarascon to Lyon he took a barge on the Rhone; at Lyon he remained till Cinq-Mars and de Thou were tried and dead; then, weak from the pain of an anal fistula, he had himself carried to Paris in a litter borne by twenty-four men of his bodyguard, and large enough to contain a bed for the dying man, a table, a chair, and a secretary to take dictation of army orders and diplomatic messages. Six weeks that death march took; and along the road people gathered to get a glimpse of the man to whom they could give not love but fear, respect, and reverence, as the awesome embodiment of both Church and state, the vicar of God and king. Arrived in Paris, he was moved into his palace without leaving his couch. He sent in his resignation to his master, who refused to accept it. Louis came to his bedside, nursed him, fed him, wondered what he would do if this incarnate will should cease. The Cardinal’s confessor, giving him the last sacrament, asked him if he had forgiven his enemies; he answered that he had never had any except the enemies of France. After a day of coma he died, December 4, 1642, aged fifty-seven. The King decreed an entire week of funeral ceremonies; through a day and a half sight-seers filed by his corpse. But in many provinces people kindled bonfires in gratitude that the iron Cardinal was dead.39
He continued for a time to rule France. He had recommended Giulio Mazarini as successor to his ministry; Louis complied. He left ten volumes of memoirs, recording the actions of the state as if they had been not his but the King’s. In his final years he had dedicated to Louis a Testament politique, “to serve after my death for the administration and conduct of your realm.” Here, amid some platitudes, are precise and pithy maxims of government, in a style rivaling any other prose of the time. He advises the King to avoid war, as something for which his Majesty was by nature unfit. “It is more profitable, and more glorious, to reconcile a dozen enemies than to ruin one.”40 Besides (he confided), the French are not constituted for war; at the start they are all ardor and bravery, but they lack the patience and flegme to await the propitious moment; as time goes on “they lose interest, and become soft to the point where they are less than women.”41 A king, like a general, must have a masculine courage capable of resisting emotional inclinations. He should give women no voice in government, for they follow their moods and passions rather than their reason.42 However, intellect in a woman is unbecoming; “I have never seen a woman of much learning who was not marred by her knowledge.”43 Women cannot keep secrets, and “secrecy is the soul of statesmanship.”44 “A prudent statesman will talk little and listen much.”45 He will watch lest he give offense by some careless word; he will never speak ill of anyone unless the interest of the state requires it.46 The King should get “a general knowledge of the history and constitution of all states, especially his own.”47 And the author asks some understanding for his ministry and his character. “Great men who are appointed to govern states are like those condemned to torture, with only this difference, that the latter receive the punishment of their crimes, the former of their merits.”48