Cardinal Richelieu

Armand Jean du Plessis was born in Paris on September 9, 1585, the fourth of five children of François du Plessis, seigneur de Richelieu, and Suzanne de La Porte ^[1]. His father, a soldier and courtier who served as Grand Provost of France under Henry III and Henry IV, died of fever in 1590 during the Wars of Religion, leaving the family in strained circumstances. Suzanne raised the children partly at the family estate of Richelieu in Poitou, and royal favor, granted in memory of the father's service, kept the household afloat ^[2].

The boy studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, first in philosophy and then with a view toward a military career. Family fortunes redirected him. The bishopric of Luçon, a poor diocese in Poitou, had been granted to the du Plessis family as a source of income, and when his brother Alphonse refused the see to become a Carthusian monk, Armand agreed to take it in his place ^[1]. He was below the canonical age, so he traveled to Rome in 1607 to seek a dispensation from Pope Paul V, which he obtained. Consecrated bishop of Luçon at twenty-one, he returned to a diocese damaged by decades of religious war and set about reforming it with an energy that marked everything he later did ^[2].

Richelieu first reached a national stage in 1614, when the clergy of Poitou elected him as a deputy to the Estates General, the last such assembly to meet before 1789 ^[3]. His closing address on behalf of the First Estate caught the attention of the court, and in particular of Marie de' Medici, the queen mother who governed France during the minority of her son Louis XIII. In 1616 she made him secretary of state for foreign affairs and war ^[1].

His rise was interrupted almost immediately. In April 1617 the young king ordered the assassination of Concino Concini, his mother's Italian favorite, and seized power for himself. Richelieu, identified with the fallen regime, was dismissed and eventually exiled to Avignon ^[2]. There he wrote works of theology and waited. His opening came through the very quarrel that had ruined him: when Marie de' Medici escaped confinement and raised armed opposition to her son, Richelieu proved the one figure able to negotiate between mother and king. The reconciliations he brokered, sealed at Angoulême in 1619 and after the brief fighting of 1620, restored his standing ^[3].

Marie pressed Rome for his elevation, and in 1622 Pope Gregory XV made him a cardinal ^[1]. Two years later, in April 1624, Louis XIII admitted him to the royal council, and by August he was its head. He would remain the king's chief minister for eighteen years, an association between monarch and minister with few parallels in European history ^[4].

Richelieu described his program in plain terms: to ruin the Huguenot party as a political force, to abase the pride of the great nobles, and to raise the king's name among foreign nations to the rank it deserved ^[4]. The first goal came to a head at La Rochelle, the fortified Atlantic port that anchored Protestant military power in France. When the city rebelled with English support in 1627, Richelieu directed the siege in person, ordering a massive sea wall built across the harbor to cut off relief. La Rochelle surrendered in October 1628 after roughly fourteen months, its population devastated by starvation ^[1]. The Peace of Alès in 1629 then stripped the Huguenots of their fortified towns and armies while confirming their freedom of worship under the Edict of Nantes, a settlement that disarmed a state within the state without launching a new religious war ^[3].

The nobility received similar treatment. Richelieu ordered the demolition of fortified castles not needed for frontier defense and enforced the royal edicts against dueling, allowing the execution of the count of Montmorency-Bouteville in 1627 as a public example ^[2]. Conspiracies against the minister recurred throughout his ministry, and he answered them with trials and executions that spared neither rank nor youth, including the duke of Montmorency in 1632 and the royal favorite Cinq-Mars in 1642 ^[4].

The decisive test came in November 1630, on what became known as the Day of the Dupes. Marie de' Medici, now his enemy, demanded that Louis XIII dismiss the cardinal, and for several hours the court believed she had won. The king instead confirmed Richelieu in power, and the queen mother fled France in 1631, never to return ^[3]. From that day the minister's position, though never free of plots, rested on the settled confidence of the king.

Abroad, Richelieu subordinated confessional loyalty to what he and his circle called reason of state. Though a cardinal of the Roman Church, he judged the encirclement of France by Habsburg Spain and Austria a greater danger than Protestantism, and he acted accordingly ^[4]. He financed the Protestant king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden against the Holy Roman Emperor through the Treaty of Bärwalde in 1631, and he supported the Dutch Republic in its long war with Spain ^[5].

For a decade France fought by subsidy and proxy. In May 1635, after Spanish troops seized the archbishop-elector of Trier, a French ally, Richelieu carried France into open war against Spain ^[3]. The early years went badly: in 1636 a Spanish thrust reached Corbie, close enough to spread panic in Paris. Richelieu held his nerve, the invaders withdrew, and by the end of the 1630s French armies were gaining ground in Artois, Alsace, and Roussillon while French diplomacy encouraged the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal against Madrid ^[5].

The cost was enormous. Taxation rose steeply to pay for the armies, and peasant risings such as the Croquants in the southwest and the Nu-pieds in Normandy were put down with severity ^[4]. Richelieu did not live to see the peace, but the treaties of Westphalia in 1648 and the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 confirmed the outcome he had worked for: the Habsburg bid for hegemony was broken, and France emerged as the leading power on the continent ^[5]. He also expanded French naval strength and chartered trading companies for Canada, notably the Company of New France in 1627, tying his statecraft to Atlantic commerce and colonization ^[6].

Richelieu understood culture as an instrument of state as much as a private pleasure. In 1635 he founded the Académie Française, giving official standing to a circle of men of letters and charging the new body with regulating the French language, a task it still performs ^[7]. He rebuilt the Sorbonne at his own expense and directed that he be buried in its chapel, and he refounded and endowed printing and journalism through his support of Théophraste Renaudot's Gazette, the first French weekly newspaper ^[2].

His Paris residence, the Palais-Cardinal, held a theater and one of the largest art collections in Europe, including works by Leonardo, Titian, and Poussin along with hundreds of antiquities ^[6]. He bequeathed the palace to the crown, and it survives today as the Palais-Royal. Richelieu also wrote throughout his life: catechetical and controversial works from his Luçon years, and later the memoirs and the Testament politique, a treatise of maxims on government compiled with his secretaries and published after his death ^[4]. In Poitou he raised an entire planned town, also named Richelieu, beside a château that displayed his collection to visiting dignitaries ^[6].

Chronic illness shadowed the cardinal's final decade. He suffered from recurrent fevers, migraines, and painful abscesses, and he often conducted business from bed or from a litter carried between residences ^[2]. The strain of the war years was compounded by fresh conspiracies, the last and most dangerous led by Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, marquis de Cinq-Mars, the king's young favorite, who signed a secret treaty with Spain in 1642. Richelieu obtained proof of the plot, and Cinq-Mars was executed at Lyon that September ^[3].

By the autumn of 1642 Richelieu was gravely ill with pleurisy in addition to his older ailments. He died at the Palais-Cardinal in Paris on December 4, 1642, at the age of fifty-seven, after commending his methods and his chosen successor, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, to Louis XIII ^[1]. The king, himself dying, followed him within six months. Richelieu was buried in the church of the Sorbonne, where his tomb, carved by François Girardon later in the century, still lies. His grave was violated during the French Revolution, and his embalmed head was removed, passing through private hands until its reburial at the Sorbonne in 1866 ^[6].

Any list of Cardinal Richelieu achievements begins with the transformation of the French monarchy. By disarming the Huguenots, humbling the grandees, extending the use of royal intendants in the provinces, and treating the interest of the state as the supreme rule of policy, he prepared the absolutism that Louis XIV brought to completion ^[4]. Historians continue to debate how systematic his work really was, and how much of it rested on improvisation under the pressure of war and debt, but few dispute that the France of 1642 was governed far more firmly from the center than the France of 1624 ^[5].

His reputation has always been double-edged. Admirers from his own century onward saw the far-sighted architect of French greatness; critics saw a red-robed tyrant who taxed the poor without mercy and sent nobles to the scaffold. Alexandre Dumas fixed the sinister version in popular memory by casting him as the scheming antagonist of The Three Musketeers in 1844, an image that still colors how the public answers the question of who was Cardinal Richelieu ^[6]. Among the plain Cardinal Richelieu facts that outlast the fiction: the Académie Française he founded still meets, the Palais-Royal still stands, and the term eminence grise, born from his gray-robed adviser Father Joseph, remains in everyday speech ^[7]. Serious studies of European statecraft, from his contemporaries to modern scholars, keep returning to his ministry as the point where the modern idea of national interest took durable form, which is why a Cardinal Richelieu biography remains as much a study of the state as of the man ^[5].