Cardinal Richelieu

Today Cardinal Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu is arguably the most well-known French government official of the 17th century, in no small part due to Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 novel The Three Musketeers—and the many film adaptations that have been made of it. In his novel Dumas cast Richelieu as a powerful and ruthless villain ruling France from behind the throne by manipulating King Louis XIII. It is this image that lives on in the popular imagination today, but in the century and a half since Dumas wrote his novel historians have constructed a variety of alternative interpretations of the cardinal minister. With just a few earlier exceptions, modern scholarship on Richelieu only began in the 1870s when Martial Avenel collected and published an eight-volume edition of the cardinal’s papers. Late-19th and early-20th-century scholarly consensus viewed Richelieu as a “great man” who, during his period as first minister between 1624 and 1642, transformed a kingdom on the verge of collapse after decades of civil and religious war into a unified nation and leading power on the European stage. Scholars credited him with laying the foundations for absolute rule, taming the political threat posed by the great nobles and Huguenot minority at home, and intervening decisively in the Thirty Years’ War abroad. To many, Richelieu seemed a modern man ahead of his time. He was a churchman with a secular outlook informed by the concepts of reason of state and balance of power, so central to 19th-century political thinking. Following French defeat in the early 1870s at the hands of Chancellor Bismarck—the figure who had politically united Germany and transformed this new state into a major European power in the 19th century—some identified Richelieu as France’s 17th-century equivalent of the German chancellor. To a certain extent this heroic image of Richelieu still persists alongside Dumas’s scheming minister, but during the 20th century scholars came to moderate or challenge much of this interpretation. Some have noted the constraints on Richelieu’s scope for action and the limitations of French administrative structures charged with effecting change from the center. Others have emphasized Richelieu’s reliance on compromise and concessions to govern the kingdom. Finally, several scholars have brought Louis XIII out of the shadow of his first minister, presenting their government as a more equal partnership than in the past and identifying the king as the ultimate arbiter of royal policy. Today Richelieu, his government, and his legacy remain topics of scholarly debate as the great man identified by earlier historians is examined and re-examined with reference to the complex environment in which he operated.

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