Richelieu, ARMAND JEAN DUPLESSIS, CARDINAL, DUC DE, one of the greatest statesmen of France, was born of a noble but impoverished family at Richelieu, 12 miles SSE. of Chinon, September 5, 1585. He abandoned a military career for the church, in order to keep in the family the bishopric of Luçon, to which he was consecrated at twenty-two. Representative of the Poitou clergy at the States-general in 1614, he attracted the notice of the queen-mother, and rose in 1616 to be secretary at war and foreign affairs; but the downfall of Marshal d'Ancre, the queen-regent's favourite, in April 1617, sent him back to his diocese. At length in August 1620 the queen-mother and the young king were reconciled, mainly through the agency of the celebrated Capuchin Father Joseph—'l'éminence grise' of later days, till his death in 1638 the intimate friend of Richelieu. The latter showed much tact and patient forbearance in his measures; he formed an alliance with the powerful Duc de Luynes, and in 1622 was named cardinal, in 1624 minister of state. This position he retained to the end of his life, in spite of countless court intrigues, and ere long the most powerful open and secret opposition from the queen, Gaston, Duke of Orleans, and a host of minor intriguers, first among whom was the too famous Duchess de Chevreuse. His first important measure was the blow to Spain of an alliance with England, cemented by the betrothal (1625) of the king's sister Henrietta with Charles, then Prince of Wales. In the Valtelline war he cleared the country of the Spanish and papal troops, but was unable to pursue his advantage, and had to submit to the terms of the peace of Monzon (1626). His next task was to destroy the political power of the Huguenot party. After a fifteen months' siege, which he conducted in person, concentrating all his energy upon the task, the great stronghold of La Rochelle was starved into submission, 30th October 1628. He next turned to crush Rohan and the Languedoc rebels, and destroyed the proud walls of Montauban, last refuge of Huguenot independence. Early in 1630 he entered Italy with a splendid army, himself in command, and soon reduced Savoy to submission. Meanwhile he plunged into dark and tortuous intrigues with the Italian princes, the pope, and with the Protestants of the north against the House of Austria. He promised a large subsidy to Gustavus Adolphus, and, through the masterly diplomacy of Father Joseph at the Ratisbon Diet in June 1630, succeeded in persuading Ferdinand to dismiss Wallenstein. The first treaty of Cherasco (April 1631) ended the Italian war, the second gave France the important strategic position of Piñerolo. Just before this final triumph Richelieu had successfully surmounted the greatest danger of his life—a great combination formed for his downfall by the queen-mother, Gaston of Orleans, the House of Guise, Bassompierre, Créqui, and the Marillacs. She tried to bully the king by her violence, but Richelieu followed his master to Versailles, and again had the whole power of the realm placed entirely in his hands. So ended 'the Day of Duples' (11th November 1630). The queen-mother fled to Brussels, Bassompierre went to the Bastille, Gaston fled to Lorraine. The cardinal was now made duke and peer, and governor of Brittany. Further intrigues and attempted rebellions by the emigrant nobles and governors of provinces were crushed with merciless severity—Marillac and Montmorency and other nobles were sent to the block. Meanwhile Gustavus Adolphus had run his brief and brilliant course; and his death at Lützen removed an ally with whom it might have become difficult to reckon. In July 1632 Richelieu had seized the duchy of Lorraine. He continued his intrigues with the Protestants against Ferdinand, subsidising them with his gold, but till 1635 he took no open part in the war. In May of that year, after completing his preparations and concluding a close alliance with Victor Amadeus of Savoy, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, and the Dutch, he declared war on Spain, and at once placed in the field an army of 132,000 men. But his first efforts were singularly unsuccessful, and in 1636 Piccolomini and the Cardinal-Infante, governor of the Netherlands, entered Picardy, crossed the Somme, and threatened Paris itself. But in this hour of peril Richelieu rose to the height of his genius, and awoke a new and irresistible force as he threw himself upon the patriotism of France. With 30,000 foot and 12,000 horse he swept the enemy out of Picardy, while his ally Bernhard drove them across the Rhine, and in 1638 destroyed the imperial army in the decisive battle of Rheinfelden, a victory which opened to him the gates of the key-fortress of Breisach. The unexpected death of Bernhard threw the fruit of his victories into the hands of Richelieu, whose policy soon bore further fruit in the disorganisation of the power of Spain—revolts in Catalonia, and the loss of Portugal; the victories of Wolfenbüttel (1642) and Kempten (1642) over the Imperialists in Germany; and at length in 1641 in Savoy also in the ascendancy of the French party. Another triumph that same year was the speedy collapse of the Imperialist invasion in the north by the Count of Soissons, who perished in the first battle. The failure to capture Tarragona was the one exception to the complete triumph of the cardinal's latest years.
But the hatred of the great French nobles to his rule had never slumbered, and Richelieu found safety alone in the king's sense of his own helplessness without him. He was firmly convinced that the only safe government for France was a strong absolutism uncontrolled either by the selfish ambition of the nobles or the constitutional legalism represented by the Parlement of Paris. The last conspiracy against him was that of the Grand-équerry, the young Cinq-Mars, whose intrigues with Gaston, the Duke of Bouillon, and the
Spanish court were soon revealed to the cardinal, the centre of a network of espionage which covered the whole of France. When the hour was ripe he placed in the king's hands at Tarascon proofs of the traitorous plot with Spain, and was given full powers as Lieutenant-general of the realm. Cinq-Mars and De Thou were at once arrested, and the wretched coward Gaston of Orleans hastened after his kind to buy his own security by betraying his accomplices. Cinq-Mars and De Thou were executed at Lyons in the autumn of 1642. But the great minister was himself dying in the hour of his greatest triumphs. Death had often drawn near him, but the strong will and fiery soul within his frail and feeble frame had thrust him aside and retained the fleeting life. He faced the inevitable at last with calm tranquillity—when the priest bade him forgive his enemies, he made answer, 'I have never had any other enemies than the state's.' We see the same unhuman impersonality in the identification of himself with the state in his Mémoires—'I have been severe to some in order to be good to all. . . . It is justice that I have loved and not vengeance. . . . I wished to give to Gaul the limits that nature had marked out for her . . . to identify Gaul with France, and wherever the ancient Gaul had been, there to restore the new.' He died 4th December 1642, bequeathing Mazarin to the king as his successor.
Richelieu built up the power of the French crown, he achieved for France a preponderance in Europe, and throughout life he moved onwards to his goal with the strongest tenacity of purpose, unmoved either by fear or pity. He destroyed the local liberties of France, and crushed every element of constitutional government, and his policy overwhelmed the citizens with taxation and made waste places some of her fairest provinces and most thriving towns. Our judgment of him will always differ according as we examine his end or his means—the public or the private man. He never sacrificed to personal ambition the interests of his country as these seemed to himself, but he often forgot in his methods the laws of morality and humanity. There is no need here to discuss the more fundamental question of whether his end was actually identical with the highest good of France—the best defence that even so redoubtable a Chauvinist as Henri Martin can offer is that he merely developed out to the full tendencies long rooted in French soil, and that no other ideal of a policy was then possible for France but a systematised absolutism under a beneficent despot. Nor have we sympathy to spare for the corrupt and selfish nobles whom he crushed with a severity so merciless that he drove twenty-one persons into exile, all of them the greatest names in France, banished sixty-five, several of these ladies, while seventy-three nobles were flung into prison, and forty-three were either beheaded or died in prison.
We know the face of Richelieu best from Philippe de Champagne's picture in the Louvre, in which the energy of the model had passed into the hand of the artist. A pale apparition, the mere ghost of a great man in Michelet's phrase, neither flesh nor blood, but all intellect, as Quinet said of Voltaire, he looks down upon us still with that steady and penetrating eye and that imperious gesture that overawed the king and the proudest peers of France. The weakest point in Richelieu's character was his literary ambition and the extraordinary pains he took to construct a literary reputation. His own plays, for the fate of which he trembled with anxiety, sleep in safe oblivion, but his Mémoires are still read with interest, forming a subtle and elaborate panegyric upon himself, so that Michelet says in his paradoxical manner, yet not without truth, 'If one would not know Richelieu, one should read his Mémoires.' He founded the French Academy. His Correspondence and State Papers, edited by d'Avenel, fill 8 vols. of the Collection de Documents inédits sur l'Histoire de France (1853-77).
See the article FRANCE; Capefigue, Richelieu, Mazarin, et La Fronde (2d ed. 1844), and Le Card. de Richelieu (1865); Dussieux, Le Card. Richelieu (1885); D'Avenel, Richelieu et la Monarchie absolue (3 vols. 1884-89); Hanotaux, Histoire du Card. de Richelieu (1893).