Books: Conquering Cardinal

RICHELIEU—Carl J. Burckhardf—Oxford ($3.75).

French politics were almost as devious and puzzling in 1640 as in 1940. But if the term Labor is substituted for Huguenots, the term Big Business for the big Catholic nobles, U. S. readers will have little trouble understanding the age immediately following the death of Henri IV. Then, as in France before the Nazi invasion, the problem was to save a nation torn between two powerful internal forces whose factional interests meant more to them than France. The man who forced unity upon these conflicting groups and saved France was Armand Jean du Plessis Cardinal Richelieu. His career is the greatest paradox in paradoxical French politics. A prince of the church, Richelieu revived and carried through the domestic and foreign policies of Protestant Henri IV (“Paris is worth a Mass!”). In league with the greatest living Protestant king, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Catholic Richelieu broke the power of the greatest Catholic state in Europe—Habsburg Spain.

How & why the great Cardinal did these things, Carl J. Burckhardt’s book described brilliantly this week. Carl Burckhardt is a Swiss and grandson of Historian Jakob Burckhardt, famed author of Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Before the Nazi Gleichschaltung, Biographer Burckhardt was League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig. To the writing of 17th-Century history he brings an unusual firsthand knowledge of 20th-century practical politics. He also brings a keen grasp of the political mind, a powerful prose style. He uses them for a kind of historical writing in which, instead of reading history, the reader seems to be taking part in politics.

Richelieu was one of the most cunning, adroit, far-seeing and resourceful minds in political history. First test of any great politician is to hoist himself into position where he can control the steering wheel of state at the decisive moments. Half of Richelieu’s political lifetime was spent in getting behind the wheel. He got there first by attaching himself to the fat, sly, greedy, frightened Florentine, Marie de Medici, widow of Henri IV. She reigned for her 15-year-old son, Louis XIII, whom she used to spank publicly to the delight of the tittering court. But at the very moment Richelieu got power, he lost it. Louis XIII decided to do a little spanking of his own, banished Mother Marie to the country, Richelieu to Avignon. The baffled statesman had to begin conspiring all over again. He also read books, carried on theological disputes, prayed, dreamed of a Europe of national states which he would one day create. At last he could stand the peaceful parochial life no longer, thought he was going to die, wrote out his testament. At that moment, the King called him back. Power cured Richelieu at once. He held it 18 years.

The situation that faced Richelieu as France’s leading statesman might well have made him sicker. It looks contemporary to readers in 1940. “The inner structure of the country was still far from stable. The idea of national unity . . . was at times the concern of the burghers merely and the townsfolk, who formed the main bulwark of the kingdom; the great feudal nobles . . . played at high treason. … As for the Protestants, they were a still greater danger, a State within the State.” Menacing Spain had its fifth columns among Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots conspired with the Protestant Germans and with England, the Kremlin of the Reformation.

To defeat Spain, the wily Cardinal saw that he must ally himself with the German Protestants. Before he could safely ally himself with the German Protestants, he must crush their allies in France, the Huguenots. Hence the first blow against Catholic Spain was the destruction of the French Protestants. Eighteen years later, Richelieu had crippled Spain, tamed the French nobles, made the King supreme in France, France supreme in Europe.

Says realistic Historian Burckhardt: “Like all the great creative forces in history, Richelieu was a great destroyer. He tore down as much as he built up, yet it was not his fault, but that of his successors, that they did not grasp the profound lesson of his work, the lesson that no wall must be removed unless another and better one is erected. . . .”