“At Martignes, a community which has suffered great losses in the persons of its inhabitants,—esteemed the best and most courageous seamen on the Mediterranean,—many of them have been made slaves by the corsairs of Algiers and Tunis, who practise their piracies more than ever, in the sight of the forts and fortresses of that province.”
The reader can imagine the contempt of these Barbary pirates for the forts on the coast, when he knows that the seashore was in such a deplorable state of defence that M. de Séguiran says, in another passage of his report to Cardinal Richelieu:
“The next day, January 24th, at seven o’clock in the morning, we went to the fortified castle named Cassis, belonging to the Lord Bishop of Marseilles, where we found that the entire garrison consisted of a porter only, a servant of the said bishop, who showed us the place, and where there were only two small pieces of ordnance, one of which had been emptied.”
Later, the Archbishop of Bordeaux made the same remark in reference to one of the strongest positions of Toulon.
“The first and most important of these forts,” says the warrior prelate in his report, “is an old tower where there are two batteries, in which fifty cannon and two hundred soldiers could be placed; there are good cannon within, but all are dismounted, and no ammunition, except what was sent by order of your Eminence [Cardinal Richelieu] fifteen days ago. The commandant is a simple, good man, who has for garrison only his wife and her servant, and, according to what he says, he has not received a farthing in twenty years.”
Such was the state of things a few years before Cardinal Richelieu was invested by Louis XIII. with the office of grand master in chief and general superintendent of the navigation and commerce of France.
In studying attentively the aim, the progress, the methods, and results of the government of Richelieu,—in comparing, in a word, the point of departure of his administration with the imperious conclusion of absolute centralisation toward which it always tended, and which he attained so victoriously,—one is especially impressed by the character of the navy, by the incredible confusion and multiplicity of powers or rival rights which covered the seashore of the kingdom with their inextricable network.
When the cardinal was entrusted with the maritime interests of France, he could count but little upon the support of a weak, timid, restless, and capricious king; besides, he felt that France was secretly agitated by profound political and religious discords. Alone, opposing the exorbitant pretensions represented by the most powerful houses of France,—haughty and jealous guardians of the last traditions of feudal independence,—it was essential that the will of Richelieu should be indomitable, even obstinate, in order to crush beneath the level of administrative unity interests so numerous, so tenacious, and so rebellious! Such was, however, the work of this great minister.
There is no doubt that the ardent and sacred love of the general good, the noble, instinctive perception of the needs and progress of humanity,—those pure and serene aspirations of a DeWitt or a Franklin,—would not have sufficed the cardinal in undertaking and sustaining so fierce a struggle; perhaps, too, it was essential that he should feel himself animated by an unbridled, insatiable ambition, in order to cope with so many formidable antagonisms, to despise so many outcries, to prevent or punish so many dangerous revolts by prison, exile, or the scaffold, and at last achieve the end of gathering in his dying and sovereign hand all the resources of the state.
It was by this means—we think so, at least—that the genius of Richelieu, exalted by an unconquerable personality, succeeded in consummating this admirable centralisation of conflicting powers,—the constant aim and glorious end of his administration.