Books: The Cardinal’s Virtues

RICHELIEU by D. P. O’Connell. 436 pages. World. $10.

It was the worst of times: the first half of the 17th century. Spain rotted. The German principalities writhed. Sweden, France, Spain and even Switzerland were seething with religious mania. The European peasantry was regularly picked over by tax collectors and aimless bands of soldiers detached from all allegiance. Trade patterns kept collapsing. The gaudy corpse of feudalism weighted the Continent, but there was nothing, apparently, strong enough to winch it out of sight.

Yet such a force was being created, and on the Continent its principal inventor was the despised and sickly rationalist, Cardinal Richelieu. What Richelieu devised at home was the modern European state. France was his working model, and as its most powerful Minister of government, he developed a strong, centralized, departmental administrative system that, to some extent, endures today. Abroad, his military and diplomatic machinations helped ensure the continued existence of a weakened, fragmented Europe, soon to be dominated by France. The Cardinal also devised, as Historian O’Connell relates in this clear and remarkably sympathetic study, a code of royal morality to stiffen Louis XIII’s spine and soothe his own (in O’Connell’s view) active conscience. To protect his subjects, Richelieu lectured Louis, a sovereign must first protect the state. When the state is threatened, the first consideration is not to ensure justice but to remove the threat. Sadly, the headsman could not eliminate the doubts of rivals and traitors; happily, he could turn them into abstractions.

L’Eminence Grise. It is hardly possible to overstate the treacherous confusion that Richelieu’s Europe presented to any would-be diplomat. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) turned much of the Continent into a wasteland. Alliances flickered on and off like fireflies. Richelieu did his work, too, in a time of witch burning and archaism. His very closest adviser and friend, a shrewd Capuchin named Père Joseph (for whose shadowy role the title Eminence grise seems to have been invented) was entirely obsessed, for example, with a yearning to renew the crusades against the infidel.

French social order ensured disorder. Soldiering and conspiracy were almost the only trades open to the younger sons of an already partly superfluous nobility, and many of them saw fit to follow both. Friction between Huguenot and Catholic never really ceased. Conspiracies against Louis and Richelieu coagulated regularly around Gaston, Louis’ vain and frustrated younger brother, and Marie de Medici, their harridan mother.

Richelieu foiled most of his enemies, including his great rival, the Spanish Minister, Olivares. After Richelieu had outmaneuvered him, Olivares blandly offered his angry king, Philip IV, a choice 17th century sophistry: “God wants us to make peace, for He is depriving us visibly and absolutely of all means of war.” The great Cardinal outwitted himself, however, when he subsidized the warmaking of the fanatic Swedish Protestant, Gustavus Adolphus. Richelieu counted on Gustavus to harry the Austrian Hapsburgs, which he did. But the Cardinal was unable to keep Gustavus leashed, and until the Swede’s death in 1632 at the battle of Lützen, he was a growing threat to France. The passionate Gustavus, as O’Connell observes, was unable to tell the difference between religion and politics; and the cerebral Richelieu, who was accustomed to making the distinction, failed to understand that trait in Gustavus.

Migraine and Piety. To contemporaries—and to later observers, Richelieu himself was equally hard to comprehend. A crossbreed of the middle-class and the impoverished country gentry, he had social ambitions and possessed extraordinary charm. Yet he was without humor. He could play the guitar. He kept 14 cats. He suffered the torments of migraine, piles and piety—O’Connell at least grants him piety, though he often has been considered a great hypocrite. He was certainly a ruthless schemer all his life. After receiving a bishopric through family connections, at the age of 21, he used his clerical rank and tiny diocese as a steppingstone to power. He maneuvered for years to become First Minister of France, and in his early days was even party to Marie de Medici in her conspiracies against Louis XIII, who at that time seemed hostile as well as inadequate as a potential ruler of France.

“He fears hell,” a fellow cleric once summed up Richelieu, “he loves theology, he does not entirely lack interest in the things of God, but in the final analysis his kingdom is of this world.” The judgment is thoughtful, and O’Connell, an Australian professor of international law, endorses it. He sees Richelieu as a remarkable pragmatist who “combined in a completely unique fashion an iron resolution and a gift for seeing both sides of a question.”

The iron churchman died in 1642, at the age of 57. He reminded Louis XIII, who visited his deathbed, that he was leaving France “in the highest degree of glory and of reputation which it has ever had, and all your enemies beaten and humiliated.” Then he asked the King to appoint the Italian papal diplomat Mazarin his successor as First Minister. Louis, O’Connell believes, probably never liked Richelieu. Almost no one did. But the King fed the dying Cardinal two egg yolks with his own hand. A few hours after the Cardinal’s death, Louis told Mazarin of his appointment.