4.7  Richelieu Builds the Power of the French Crown

Cardinal Richelieu

        Young King Louis XIII was fortunate to have found in Jean Armand de Plessis, the Cardinal Richelieu, a remarkably able chief minister.  Appointed in 1624, Richelieu would serve his king beyond Louis’ wildest dreams.  Although a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, Richelieu’s first loyalty was to France and its king.  He would use his talents, abilities, and energy in the service of two major goals: to make the crown sovereign in France and to make France the dominant power in Europe. He invented the phrase raison d’état   (“reason of state” - an expression that has been used ever since to identify policy motivated by a nation’s interests) to justify his policies.  All that he did was for raison d’état.   For raison d’état he implemented policies intended to further the work of Henry IV to build royal absolutism and centralize royal government.  For raison d’état he revoked portions of the Edict of Nantes.  For raison d’état he denied the nobility its traditional military rights.  For raison d’état he brought the middle class into royal government.  For raison d’état he supported the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War. Before looking at Richelieu, it is necessary to consider briefly what happened in the years prior to the Cardinal’s administration.

            Louis XIII succeeded to the French throne on the death of his father Henry IV in 1610.  He was then eight years old.  Henry’s will named Louis’ mother, Queen Marie de Medici, as regent for the young king. As regent, Marie ruled in the king’s name relying heavily on Italian favorites rather than those, such as Sully, who had so ably served her husband.  Sully was dismissed and replaced by Cocino Concini as the queen’s principal minister.  In exercising foreign policy, Marie and Concini sought to pacify Spain.  A marriage alliance was arranged in 1615 whereby Louis would be married to Princess Anne of Austria (yes, that was her title!), the daughter of the Spanish King Philip III, and his sister, Elizabeth, was betrothed to Spain’s crown prince. Louis had no interest in Anne, and, as the years went by, all France began to wonder if there would ever be an heir to the throne.  It was not until 1638, more than 20 years after their marriage, that Anne gave birth to her first child, a son. 

             Henry IV had laid the foundations for a strong monarchy, but there were those within France, namely the nobility, that believed the monarchy should act more in partnership with traditional political forces.  In 1614 the nobles convinced Marie to call for a meeting of the Estates-General[1] hoping to use the body as a forum through which to undo some of Henry’s reforms.  Traditionally, the two privileged estates, the clergy and nobility, had been easily able to dominate such assemblies, but the middle class representatives of the third estate (commoners) proved resistant to the nobles’ ambitions and the Estates-General was dissolved in 1615.  In 1615 a faction of nobles assassinated Concini, possibly with Louis’ sanction. Louis proclaimed his majority, dismissed his mother as regent, fired her ministers, and ordered her into exile.  He then undertook to rule on his own naming his own ministers, but found himself confused and frustrated with their conflicting views on what was right for France. 

            In 1618 the conflict that would become known as the Thirty Years War broke out.  Religious as well as political in its causes, the war did not immediately involve France; but, as the war expanded, its religious impact was felt throughout the continent.  On this background, Catholics and Huguenots in several parts of France rioted attacking and looting each other’s churches.  Fighting broke out between Huguenot and royal armies.   It seemed as if France were about to slip back into chaos.  Louis reconciled with his mother, who recommended that he bring into his government a young Catholic bishop who had briefly served in her council.  Louis agreed and secured for him appointment as a cardinal of the Church.  Thus it was that Richelieu came into Louis’ service. 

            As mentioned above, Richelieu’s primary domestic goal was to make the crown sovereign in France.  In order to be sovereign, it must be absolute in its power.  There were two obstacles to that absolutism: the Huguenots and the nobility.  Richelieu first set out to destroy the political independence of the Huguenots.  Ever since Henry IV had issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, the Huguenots had enjoyed the right of self-government and of self-defense in some one hundred cities where Calvinists were the majority of the population.  Henry had granted these political and military rights as a guarantee of royal good faith assuring that Huguenots’ newly-won right to freedom of religion would be protected.  Richelieu saw them as a major obstacle to increasing royal power.  With the right to govern themselves and maintain their own armies, the Huguenots were, in effect, a state within a state. The king could not be sovereign if a sizable portion of his population was not directly under his government. 

            With Louis XIII’s approval, Richelieu, in 1627, revoked the political and military provisions of the Edict of Nantes.  Alarmed that the king’s government had broken faith with them, the Huguenots rebelled.  If the crown could deprive them of these rights, could it not at sometime in the future revoke the entire Edict and deny them their religious freedom?  Royal armies laid siege to the city of La Rochelle, the major center of Huguenot resistance.  Because La Rochelle was a seaport with an excellent natural harbor, the Huguenots had easy access to outside sources of foodstuffs and supplies.  Both England and Spain saw it to their advantage to aid the French rebels, and, as the crown had no navy, friendly shipping could easily provision the city right under the eyes of a French army powerless to prevent it.  To demonstrate his determination to win, Richelieu personally assumed supervision of the siege.  To end La Rochelle’s access to the open sea, he ordered construction of two huge jetties (sea walls) to block the harbor.  Thousands of peasants were conscripted to quarry stone and transport it to La Rochelle. It was a remarkable engineering effort that took nearly two years to accomplish.  Slowly the walls took shape as if two great arms reaching out from the shore to a small island in the center of the entrance to the harbor.  Even before construction was completed, it was evident to the English and Spanish that continued assistance was pointless.  With foreign assistance ended, La Rochelle was doomed. Cut off from outside access by both land and sea and faced with starvation, the city’s defenders surrendered.  In 1629 the Peace of Alais ended the rebellion. 

            Richelieu was magnanimous in victory.  He sought only to bring the Huguenots under direct royal control, not alienate them. Having succeeded in defeating their rebellion, he extended royal pardon and clemency to their leaders.  As a Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, he could easily have revoked the Edict of Nantes in full, justifying it on the grounds that the Calvinists had shown themselves to be traitors when they rebelled against the king.  This was not, he reasoned, for the good of the state.  After all, the Huguenots were largely of the middle class, and the crown needed the good will and wealth of the middle class.  They would be valuable allies in his next steps towards royal sovereignty.  Religious toleration would remain French law.

            With the Huguenots secure under royal government, Richelieu then turned his attention to the nobility.  For centuries the hereditary nobility had exercised extensive autonomy under the traditions of feudalism.  The nobles saw themselves as the natural rulers of France.  They owned the vast estates on which most of the French population lived. They amassed huge family fortunes through their control of most of the landed wealth of the kingdom. They held judicial authority over the peasants who lived on their lands. They held special privileges, including exemption from royal taxation. They had their own private armies and fortified castles.  In times of great crisis it was they who were assembled and consulted by the king. They were the king’s allies, obligated to support him by ancient feudal contract which also bound the king to support and protect them.  They saw themselves as legal equals with the king, who, it could be argued, was the one among them to whom hereditary fate had granted the right to hold the crown.  After all, was not Louis XIII merely a member of the Bourbon family whose father had the fortune to be married to the sister of the last Valois king?   To Richelieu their status and thinking was threatening to the future well-being of France.  They were too unreliable, too inclined to take the law into their own hands when things did not go their way.  They were too inclined to take up arms to resolve their disputes, rather than submit their quarrels to the justice of the crown.  As with the Huguenots, the nobles must be brought more fully under the power of the crown.  In 1626 Richelieu had issued a royal order abolishing the nobles’ rights to have private armies and fortified castles.  And, to demonstrate that the nobility would be personally brought under royal control, he forbade nobles to wear swords and to duel.

            The result of this policy was predictable.  In a defiant challenge to Richelieu’s authority, two young members of the nobility staged a duel in the courtyard under the windows of his office at the Palais Royale in Paris.  He ordered the two men arrested and immediately put to death.  A rebellion by the nobility (1630 - 1632) was easily suppressed as the rebel aristocrats had neither broad support nor an effective strategy of resistance.  On defeating them, Richelieu was not as generous as he was to the Huguenots.  He ordered the rebel leaders executed as traitors.  But, as the internal peace of France under a sovereign crown was his goal, he did not take advantage of the opportunity to further weaken the aristocracy. The nobility would be allowed to retain their tax exemption and their traditional manorial rights over their peasant tenants.  And, in another concession, he ruled that nobles would be allowed to wear swords as long as they did not use them!  Smarting under their defeat and humiliated by this presumptuous Cardinal who defied the law (as they saw it), they swore their allegiance to the king and looked forward to a future opportunity to reassert their traditional rights.

            If the crown were indeed to be sovereign, Richelieu believed its government must be loyal and efficient.  It must exercise royal authority uniformly throughout all parts of France without prejudice to certain regions or persons.  Above all, it must be made up of men who owed their positions to the crown and were accountable to the crown.  And, they must be men who shared the same vision for France as did the crown - internal peace and economic prosperity.  To this end he sought to bring the middle class into government service as intendants. 

            The position of intendant had originated in the 1200s as the royal officer responsible for exercising the king’s law in the provinces.  Over time the office had lost significance and had become a means whereby nobility had furthered their fortunes.  Richelieu “reinvented” the intendancy and appointed to it men from the middle class.  In each of France’s thirty some provinces a royal intendant and his staff would exercise the crown’s law.  Appointed by and responsible to the king, the intendants were responsible for the exercise of royal justice, supervision of royal tax collection, and the administration of royal policies and programs.  Through the intendancies, the royal government of France would take a major step towards the centralization of power.

            Why the middle class?  As the business class engaged in banking, commerce, and manufacturing, the middle class favored a strong monarchy.  Petty disputes between nobles often erupted into localized warfare that disrupted trade and hurt business. Nobles charged tolls and collected special fees, hindering the movement of merchants’ goods being transported across their estates and making trade overly expensive. A sovereign crown could reduce or eliminate these obstacles to business expansion.  A prosperous middle class was a sovereign monarchy’s natural ally. The wealth derived through increasing trade and manufacturing could be taxed.  Tax revenues could be used to generate even more wealth through policies and programs that subsidized new industries, built roads and canals, and sought a favorable balance of trade. All of this was in the economic interest of the middle class. It would support strong monarchy because strong monarchy meant increased opportunities for business.  Richelieu recognized the value of this relationship and made it an integral part of his policy.  A prosperous and orderly France was for the good of the state. It could only come about through a sovereign monarchy.

            Richelieu continued the mercantilist policies inaugurated by Henry IV.  The siege of La Rochelle made it very clear to the Cardinal that France needed a navy.  To this end it was essential to encourage and subsidize those industries engaged in shipbuilding and naval armaments.  He was not, however, a committed mercantilist as his interests were primarily political, not economic. Nonetheless, France did continue to prosper from its achievement of domestic peace.  Overseas colonization continued as France sought new sources of wealth from abroad, and France achieved a favorable balance of trade. In a slight to the hereditary nobility, Richelieu sold new aristocratic titles at exorbitant prices to those who wanted to be nobility.

            Essential to any nation’s wellbeing was peace.  War was expensive and wasteful of a nation’s resources.  Henry IV and Richelieu both sought the benefits of keeping France out of foreign wars.  This was difficult for the Cardinal and would prove impossible.  In 1618 war broke out between rebellious German states and the Holy Roman Emperor.  As such a war involved the power of the Hapsburgs, other nations quickly took up sides and arms and soon a major international conflict tore at the heart of the Continent. It would become known as the Thirty Years War and would be the most devastating war in human history before the twentieth century.  It became a war of two major alliances divided along religious lines - Catholic versus Protestant.  The combined power of the Catholic Hapsburgs (Austria and Spain) and their German allies was ranged against the Protestant German states supported by the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.  Richelieu saw French involvement in this war as dangerous to his political ends at home, and he kept France neutral as long as he could.  It was, however, to France’s advantage to keep the war going as long as possible before France was pulled into it.  Richelieu, therefore, extended French diplomatic and financial support to the Protestant alliance.  Whatever weakened the Hapsburgs was to France’s advantage. When Sweden was defeated in 1635, the Protestant alliance lost its last major military power: Hapsburg victory seemed inevitable.  In that year, the Roman Catholic Cardinal committed a largely Roman Catholic France to war on the side of the Protestant alliance!  Richelieu reasoned that France was economically and politically ready to begin to play a deciding role in international affairs.  With France’s entry into the Thirty Years War, Richelieu took a significant step to achieving the second of his goals – making France the dominant power in Europe.

Richelieu in popular culture:The 19th century French novelist Alexandre Dumas made Richelieu the conniving villain of his 1844 novel The Three Musketeers. Instead of building royal power, Dumas has the Cardinal plotting to usurp that power for himself and his English ally the Duke of Buckingham. An earlier play, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy (1839), by the British poet and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton, has the Cardinal uttering "The pen is mightier than the sword." The play was adapted into the 1935 film Cardinal Richelieu. Over the last century Richelieu, both sinister and comedic, "survives" in multiple Three Musketeers movies made across the globe.