Armand-Jean du Plessis, cardinal and duke de Richelieu
French cardinal and statesman
byname The Red Eminence, French L’éminence Rouge
(, (cardinal and duke of ),: )
born September 9, 1585, Richelieu, Poitou, Fr.
died December 4, 1642, Paris
Main
chief minister to King Louis XIII of France from 1624 to 1642. His major
goals were the establishment of royal absolutism in France and the end
of Spanish-Habsburg hegemony in Europe.
Heritage, youth, and early career.
The family of du Plessis de Richelieu was of insignificant feudal
origins but by intermarriage with the legal and administrative classes
had risen to some prominence and had acquired the seigneury of Richelieu
in Poitou. Armand-Jean’s father, François du Plessis, seigneur de
Richelieu, was grand provost (chief magistrate) to Henry III, and his
mother, Suzanne de la Porte, was the daughter of a councillor of the
Parlement of Paris (the supreme judicial assembly). In his intelligence,
administrative competence, and instinct for hard work, he resembled his
middle-class ancestors.
He was five years old when his father died, leaving estates that had
been ruined by inflation and mismanagement during the Wars of Religion
(1562–98), and he was conscious from his earliest years of the threat of
penury. This inspired in him the ambition to restore the honour of his
house and evoked in him the sense of grandeur he was to attribute
vicariously to France. His provident mother, with three boys and two
girls, set about reorganizing the family’s precarious resources. The
principal of these was the benefice of the bishopric of Luçon near La
Rochelle, which had been granted by Henry III to the Richelieus under
the Concordat of 1516. Unrest of the cathedral chapter threatened a
revocation of the grant, and it became necessary for a member of the
family to be consecrated bishop as soon as possible. Henri, the eldest
son, was heir to the seigneury of Richelieu; and Alphonse, the second
son, had become a Carthusian monk; so the obligation fell on
Armand-Jean, who was a student.
The prospect of a career in the church was not displeasing to the
thin, pale, and at times sickly boy, for he had an inclination toward
learning, a facility for debate, and a relish for the prospect of
governing the lives of others. Because he was below the canonical age
for consecration upon the completion of his studies, he needed a papal
dispensation. To gain it he went to Rome, where Paul V fell victim to
the young man’s skill as a charmer. On April 17, 1607, at the age of 22,
he was ordained priest and consecrated to the see of Luçon. He found on
his arrival a diocese ruined by the Wars of Religion, a hostile chapter,
and a demoralized clergy, but his opponents quickly succumbed to the
unaccustomed authority that radiated from the episcopal palace.
Richelieu was the first bishop in France to implement in his diocese
the reforms decreed by the Council of Trent, and he was also the first
theologian to write in French and to establish the conventions of
vernacular theological exposition. He was a hard-working,
conscience-stricken man, combatting forces dedicated to divisive
political and social ends—a man obsessed with order as a superior moral
end.
Rise to power.
The France on which the Bishop of Luçon pondered gave every indication
of falling again into the disorder of the Wars of Religion. The
assassination of Henry IV in 1610 released separative forces that were
endemic in the administrative system. The government of the queen
mother, Marie de Médicis, as regent for Louis XIII, was corrupt, and the
magnates of the realm, motivated by personal self-interest, struggled to
control it. Their disobedience was accompanied by predatory expeditions
of armed men and complex negotiations with the court, and on one of
these occasions the Bishop of Luçon found himself an intermediary, which
led to his being elected one of the representatives of the clergy of
Poitou to the States General of 1614. He put all his energy into
persuading the assembly of his talents and the court of his support for
royal authority. In a clash between the clergy and the Third Estate (the
middle classes, artisans, and peasants) on the subject of the
relationship between the crown and the papacy he played a conciliatory
role, and he was prominent in moves of the clergy to persuade the Third
Estate that the decrees of the Council of Trent should be promulgated.
Some months later he was appointed chaplain to the new queen, Anne of
Austria, which held the promise of eventual entry into the royal
council, which, Richelieu had argued at the States General, should
accord first place to prelates of distinction. Clever negotiations with
another disobedient faction led to his appointment as a secretary of
state in 1616.
Up to this time Richelieu had had no insight into international
relations, and the regard for Spain with which he was credited was
probably genuine because he had had no occasion to question Spain’s
ambitions. His year of office, however, coincided with war between Spain
(ruled by a Habsburg dynasty) and Venice, which invoked its alliance
with France. The resultant involvement persuaded Richelieu of the
vulnerability of France to Habsburg political and economic encirclement,
the domestic ramifications of various European movements in the
religious controversy between Catholics and Protestants, and the
dependence of the small states in France’s borderlands upon an
equilibrium of power between France and Spain.
Richelieu’s tenure of office was terminated in April 1617 when a
palace revolution overthrew the regency of Marie de Médicis. Richelieu
was banished to Luçon and then exiled to the papal city of Avignon,
where he sought distraction from his melancholy in writing. A rebellion
of the princes, gravitating this time to Marie de Médicis as the focus
of opposition to the royal council, led in 1619 to the King recalling
Richelieu to his mother’s entourage on the assumption that he would
exercise a moderating influence. The ascendency that he gained over her,
however, did not lead to her submission. There followed four years of
intricate negotiation and even overt hostilities during which the King’s
nomination of Richelieu for a cardinal’s hat became one of the issues
involved in a settlement. A revolt of the Huguenots and the death of the
King’s favourite brought about Marie de Médicis’ recall to the council
and Richelieu’s promotion.
First minister of France.
In 1624 another crisis, over the Valtellina in northern Italy, led to a
ministerial reconstruction and to the Cardinal’s appointment as
secretary of state for commerce and marine and chief of the royal
council. Four years later the title of first minister was to be created
for this office. The controversy occurred when the Protestant Swiss
canton of Grisons invoked a treaty of protection with France against
Spanish ambitions in the Valtellina valley. The struggle had
ramifications throughout Europe as the Protestants made common cause
with Grisons and the Catholics with the Habsburgs. Richelieu recognized
that vacillation would threaten domestic stability, and so he struck,
expelling the papal troops. It was an action that gained for Richelieu
an instant reputation for decision and ruthlessness. It also
disillusioned those who had seen in him a defender of Catholic interests
and of a Franco-Spanish alliance.
From his first days in office Richelieu was the object of
conspiracies to remove him, and the success of his security organization
in ferreting out the disaffected and his manipulation of state trials
made him misunderstood, feared, and detested. Yet according to the
standards of the age, his administration of justice did not depart from
the moral principles that he believed to underlie all government.
The goals that Richelieu set himself were to counter Habsburg
hegemony in Europe, which threatened France’s independence of action,
and “to make the king absolute in his kingdom in order to establish
therein order,” but at no time was Richelieu powerful enough to achieve
his domestic ends by overt measures. A respecter of law and history, he
accepted the necessity of working with the traditional framework of
administration. His sense of the feasible and his gift for seeing both
sides of a question resulted in a pragmatism in practice that often
contradicted his proclaimed theories, and he confused his critics by
unexpected compromise and moderation.
Richelieu’s great intellectual capacity enabled him to penetrate to
the essence of events, and his tremendous willpower drove him to
incessant work. In his theory of politics he shared the rationalism of
contemporary philosophers, believing in “the light of natural reason.”
While he did not doubt the capacity of the mind to know what is
naturally enjoined, he participated in the prevailing pessimism about
man’s will to act accordingly. A twofold view of moral causes, the
natural and the divine, provided a philosophical axiom for state
supervision of conduct in both the secular and the spiritual spheres.
Sin and civil disobedience were, to Richelieu, but two aspects of
disorder.
The gravest divisive factor in French society was religion. To
Richelieu the Huguenots constituted a state within a state, with the
civil government of major cities in their hands and considerable
military force at their disposal. Yet Richelieu was prepared to tolerate
this religious dissent so long as it did not amount to a political
challenge. In this attempt to preserve social harmony at the expense of
confessional difference he failed at first, for the Huguenot community
was foolishly drawn into the intrigues of the Protestant magnates, who
instigated England to war with France. Richelieu laid siege in 1628 to
La Rochelle, the Huguenot centre, but it took a year to reduce the city,
during which time Spain took advantage of the distraction to extend its
hegemony in northern Italy at the expense of France’s allies. While
promising Richelieu help to combat the Protestants, Spain in fact
subsidized their leaders in order to keep the French government
preoccupied, and seized the strategic fortress of Casale in northern
Italy. Again Richelieu acted with surprising vigour. The moment La
Rochelle fell, he led the army in winter over the Alps and checked the
Spanish design. This reverse was countered by the Habsburgs with the
introduction of imperial garrisons into parts of the duchy of Lorraine,
which were claimed as fiefs of France. There followed intricate
diplomatic maneuvers, culminating in Richelieu’s dramatic refusal to
ratify the peace Treaty of Regensburg in 1630, and the Habsburgs’ appeal
to Pope Urban VIII to excommunicate Louis XIII for this supposed breach
of faith.
This was Richelieu’s moment of greatest political insecurity. His
relationship with the king was distant, and Catholic zealots provoked
Marie de Médicis into a state of hysteria concerning the man who she
believed had deprived her of influence. On Richelieu’s return from Italy
in 1630, she tried to influence her son to dismiss his minister. The
king, however, perceived that the issue was his own independence or his
mother’s domination and that there was no one but Richelieu who could
relieve him of the responsibility of decisions at a moment of
bewildering complications. After a day of suspense, he supported the
cardinal and thereafter did not waver in his support. Marie de Médicis
and the king’s brother Gaston fled to the Spanish Netherlands, there to
constitute a focus of sedition that Richelieu countered by a fatal
involvement with the enemies of the Habsburgs. The central objective of
his foreign policy was to restore the equilibrium in the empire that
Habsburg victories had disturbed. Although Bavaria was disposed to seek
French protection, the emperor’s military successes and the Edict of
Restitution occasioned a new mutual antagonism of Catholics and
Protestants, which made neutrality of the Catholic League an
impossibility.
Richelieu’s German policy fell into ruins as a result of his grant of
subsidies to Gustav II Adolf of Sweden, who was then engaged in the
conquest of Pomerania. The subsidies liberated Gustav Adolf from
constraint, and he fell on southern Germany, became embroiled with the
armies of the Catholic League, and so consolidated the imperial and
Catholic causes. The war spilled over the Rhine, and France’s client
states were by degrees drawn into the Habsburg orbit. The seizure by
Spain in 1635 of the archbishop of Trier, who was under French
protection, led to France’s alignment with the Protestant powers in the
Thirty Years’ War.
This involvement on behalf of the Protestants was regarded by many
Catholics in his own time and later as a betrayal of the church by one
of its princes, and Richelieu has been criticized for intensifying a war
whose horrors have rarely been equaled. That Richelieu was drawn
unwillingly by events into the vortex is clear, just as it is clear that
the cost paid in social suffering and economic decline, leading to more
frequent agrarian revolts, was high. Almost as soon as war broke out
with Spain in 1635, Richelieu initiated secret peace negotiations and
renewed them repeatedly. His justification for war was the same as that
for rigorous domestic discipline: only the statesman, furnished with all
available information and equipped for judicious appraisal of events, is
competent to judge policy.
In economic matters Richelieu was an amateur. He committed war
expenditure with little regard for the difficulties of raising revenue,
and he was given to economic improvisation that was often unsound, but
he eschewed doctrinaire views and retained flexibility of mind. Whereas
he was early influenced by the theories of the economist Antoine de
Montchrestien, who argued for economic self-sufficiency so as to
conserve specie, he was later persuaded that the drain of specie could
be compensated for by trade. He promoted products and industries that
could give France an export advantage and discouraged imports of luxury
goods. Glassmaking, tapestry and silk, sugar, and the extractive
industries attracted his interest. He planned canal systems and promoted
overseas trading companies, in which he was a shareholder and which
began the process of French colonization in Canada and the West Indies,
and he gained economic footholds in Morocco and Persia.
His vast horizon reflected in part his concern with the French
religious missions, which spread in Africa, the Middle East, and America
and which extended French influence and created a vast intelligence
network that fostered his political and economic designs. He laid the
foundations for the French navy by buying ships from the Dutch, and,
though he failed to have much influence on seapower, he developed
shipping connections with the Baltic. The legal reforms of his period
were spasmodic and often frustrated by the Parlement, and how much of
their content is due to him is questionable. The Code Michaud of
1629—which regulated industry and trade, companies, public offices, the
church, and the army and standardized weights and measures—was
promulgated under his authority, although he may not have been its
architect.
Later years in the church.
In his last years Richelieu found himself involved in religious
conflict, in opposition to the pope, and in a struggle with the French
church over the allocation of revenues to the financing of the war. His
relationship with Urban VIII became strained over diplomatic grievances,
church administration, and his own ambitions to extend French political
influence by acquiring benefices for himself in the Holy Roman Empire.
In spite of these conflicts, Richelieu remained orthodox in his views on
the relationship between church and state and resisted the Gallican
challenge to the absolutism of papal authority.
The theocratic concept of the state that resulted from his notion of
kingship caused Richelieu to regard heresy as political dissidence, and
he harried the apparently unorthodox, such as the first Jansenists, on
the ground that they disturbed the spiritual and secular orders, just as
he harried the recalcitrant nobles and stamped out dueling. Although
there were canonical irregularities in his life, notably in the matter
of pluralism (the multiplication of ecclesiastical benefices), there is
no evidence of a serious departure from the principles or practices of
the church. His accumulation of wealth was excessive even by the
standards of the age, but it was largely dedicated to public service and
to patronage of the arts and of the University of Paris. Richelieu was a
playwright and musician of some talent, and his establishment of the
French Academy is one of his best-remembered achievements.
His last months were agitated by the most dangerous of all the
conspiracies against his life, that of the youthful royal favourite Cinq-Mars,
who was exposed by Richelieu’s secret service and died on the block. The
cardinal’s health, bad for some years, had deteriorated, and it was
virtually from his deathbed that he was compelled to dictate to the king
five propositions respecting royal behaviour toward ministers that he
considered essential for proper government. He died in 1642 and was
buried in the chapel of the Sorbonne, which he had financed.
Assessment.
Both as statesman and churchman, Richelieu was the acknowledged
architect of France’s greatness in the 17th century and a contributor to
the secularization of international politics during the Thirty Years’
War. While in detail he was only moderately successful, Richelieu in
substance attained his goals of orderly government under the royal
authority and the defeat of Habsburg hegemony. Whether the centrifugal
forces in Germany that he promoted—and which the Peace of Westphalia
institutionalized—were advantageous to Europe in the long run is
questionable, but the political fragmentation of the empire and the
military eclipse of Spain made possible the grandeur of France that
Richelieu foresaw and his successors realized. This mystical aspect of
his designs is difficult to articulate but is essential to his
greatness. The conspiracies that erupted under his successor, Cardinal
Mazarin, failed as much because Richelieu had wrought a fundamental
psychological change in favour of the moral ascendency of the crown as
because, by the destruction of castles and city walls and the
centralization of military authority, he had eliminated the power base
of both aristocratic and religious dissent.
Daniel Patrick O’Connell
Encyclopaedia Britannica
