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 an individual’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 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 center, 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 vigor. 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 believing that Richelieu 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, Ferdinand II’s military successes and his Edict of Restitution of 1629 (by which all Catholic land seized by Protestants since 1552 was to be returned to the Catholic church) 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 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who was then engaged in the conquest of Pomerania. The subsidies liberated Gustavus 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, he believed.

Richelieu 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 action can be attributed 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.