The ascendancy of France, 1598-1715

by Henry Offley Wakeman

The well-known portrait of Richelieu in the gallery of the Louvre shows us the features of a man who under the outside of an aristocratic calm conceals a highly nervous and anxious temperament. There is not a trace of brutality, not a suggestion of coarseness, in the finely moulded features. At the first glance there seems almost a want of power in the delicate oval of the pale and attenuated face. Here is no Henry VIII. to trample on the laws alike of God and man in order to satisfy the demands of an imperious will, and rivet the chains of slavery on a panic-stricken people. Here is no Cromwell to march ruthlessly to his goal, over the constitution of his country, through the blood of his king, in the fervid enthusiasm of a divine mission. Here surely is no Napoleon to treat in callous selfishness human life and national faith as nothing in comparison to military glory and personal ambition. Yet the charges against Richelieu writ large on the page of history are precisely those which his portrait repudiates. Indiscriminate severity, ruthless barbarity, inordinate ambition, personal tyranny, such are the accusations levelled against him as a statesman and as a man. He is depicted as one who governed, and who preferred to govern, by terrorism and espionage, who struck down remorselessly and indiscriminately all who dared to oppose him, who established the ascendency of a gaoler over the weaker nature of the miserable king, who made France drink deep of the intoxicating potion of military glory in order that she might not feel the ever tightening chains of civil slavery. Even those who applaud his patriotism, and recognise him as the author of the greatness of France admit the charges of ruthlessness and barbarity made against his government by apologising for them.

Principles of his government.

The home policy of Richelieu, less perhaps than that of any other statesman, admits of palliatives and excuses. It is etched sharply on the plate of history in white and black. There are no neutral tints. He took for his motto that of the Romans of old, Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos, and if ever such a principle is admissible in human affairs it was admissible in France in the days of Richelieu. But it is clear the principle must be pronounced justifiable, not merely excusable, before the muse of history can smooth over the harsh black lines of the portrait which she has been accustomed to draw. A statesman may in the course of difficult affairs be betrayed into the commission of a great crime, as was Theodoric in his participation in the murder of Odoacer, and his character may yet stand out from among men noble and true, though his name must go down to posterity linked with a thousand virtues and one crime. But the conduct of a ruler, who deliberately from first to last acts upon an immoral principle of government, and steadily carries it out through his whole career, admits of no palliation. He may blunder perhaps into a noble and patriotic action as did Napoleon in the restoration of Christianity in France, but that cannot affect the general severity of the condemnation. So it is with Richelieu. We cannot pick and choose among his actions, admit that in one execution he was right, in another he was wrong. We cannot plead that a policy of terrorism is criminal, but in his particular case there was much to diminish the guilt. He will have none of such compromises and such excuses. Deliberately, unhesitatingly, in his lifetime he chose a policy stern, terrific, pitiless, and he carried it out relentlessly but not revengefully. Men accuse him of never sparing even the dupe and the fool, they do not accuse him of destroying the innocent. Not like Henry VIII. did he ever put men to death because they might at some future time prove seditious. Not like Charles II. did he permit innocent lives to be sworn away wholesale rather than face the danger of a popular tumult. No, all who suffered under him were legally guilty, but nearly all who were legally guilty suffered. It was a terrible policy—the extermination of the evil-doer, the establishment of the structure of firm government in the blood of its enemies,—but it is the policy which Richelieu adopted and defended in his lifetime, and for which for two centuries and a half he has stood at the bar of public opinion, pleading, as every line in his portrait shows, not palliation, not excuse, but the calm conviction of a man who knows that he is in the right.

Their justification.

There are times in the history of nations as in the history of individual man, when the only possibility of safety and health lies in the rigorous application of the knife. Such a state of disease the body politic had reached in France, as it seemed to Richelieu, in the seventeenth century. The poison of separation and anarchy had been imbedded too deep in the system by the civil wars of the last century, for the ordinary remedies of steady and firm government to have any effect. As long as the Huguenots were forming themselves into a political organisation in rivalry to the government of France, and as long as the nobles were bent upon making all government impossible in order that they might personally profit from the evils of anarchy, there was a cancer eating into the heart of France which made national death inevitable. The only hope of saving life lay in the unsparing excision of the malignant tissue. If only one fibre was left it would soon become a fresh root of the fell disease. For it must be remembered that Richelieu had to deal with a nation which had no power of defending itself against the evils which threatened to destroy it. There was too little cohesion among the various provinces seignories and towns, of which France was made up, to admit of any united action. Excepting so far as the royal authority made itself felt, the administration of the country districts was still feudal, in the hands of the seigneurs and their officers, and that of the towns was aristocratic, in the hands of the richer citizens and their officers. The whole of the local administration was thus absorbed by the aristocracy and the official classes. Intensely jealous both of the king above them and of the people below them, they were still too divided in rank and too narrow in sympathies to take the direction of affairs into their own hands. When they met together as in the States-General of 1614 they disclosed the most deep-seated rivalries. The days of the political triumphs of their natural leaders, the great nobles, had been the darkest and most miserable which France had ever experienced. Incapable of good they were potent only for evil. Their privileges, their authority, their prestige barred the way of the simplest administrative reforms. Equal administration of justice, equal taxation, free circulation of commodities within the country were impossible as long as the seigneurs held their special fiscal and judicial powers in their own districts. From classes whose one idea of government was the maintenance of personal and class privilege nothing could be hoped. They formed an impenetrable barrier of obscurantism in the way of good government. Interested in the maintenance, not in the suppression, of abuse, they kept the people down with one hand in misery and degradation, while with the other they sought to terrify the king into tutelage. Duller eyes than those of Richelieu might easily have seen that with such an enemy there was no middle course possible. Feudalism as a political power must be stamped out or it would kill France.

Limitations of his policy.

If Richelieu had lived three centuries earlier or a century later he might have endeavoured, as Edward I. or Burke would have endeavoured, to plant the roots of his new government deep in the affections of the people by enshrining it in permanent institutions. A wise and thoughtful statesmanship, which, in destroying the power of feudalism utterly, could have replaced it by an alliance of the powers of the Crown and of the people, would have been indeed an unique blessing not only for France but for Europe. Institutions which could have brought into mutual contact the interests of the peasant, the bourgeois, and the roturier, and could have combined them with the interests of the Crown, would soon have given a quick-witted people like the French what they most wanted—political education. An aristocracy as capable and as generous as the French noblesse would not long have sulked like Achilles in his tent, but would soon have been found in its proper place as the leader of the people, claiming the privilege of the post of danger by the right of truest worth. But a policy such as this was possible only for one who combined sympathy for the people with rare political foresight. Richelieu possessed neither, and was born in an age unfavourable to both. A clear sharp eye to the present and immediate future, indomitable courage, quick decision, inflexible will, such were the gifts he brought to the service of France. For her service he used them without a thought for any one else. He gave her national unity. He secured for her religious peace. He centralised all the forces of the nation under the Crown. He made that Crown the chief among the powers of Europe. He planted the seeds of a colonial empire, and nourished the budding germs of artistic and literary excellence. But he effected no financial or judicial reform. He stirred not a finger to relieve the social burdens of the people. He even increased their misery and would not listen to their complaints. Everything for the people and nothing by the people has been taken as the motto of beneficent despotism. Richelieu cannot lay claim even to that. For France collectively he had an intense and vivid love. For her greatness he willingly spent himself. For the French people considered as social units, as individuals, or as classes, he cared not an atom. He struck to the earth the political power of the nobles, because as long as it existed France could neither be great nor united. He never attempted to interfere with one of their social privileges, though it was by those that they made the lives of the bulk of the French peasants hideous and miserable. As a benefactor of the French people he is as infinitely below Sully and Colbert as he is above them in statesmanship. A wretched financier, an incapable administrator, prompt to demand the obedience of the people whom he governed, and careless of their happiness, without one spark of sympathy, without one touch of weakness, Richelieu stands before us as the embodiment of intellect and of will. His business was with la haute politique. That he understood. To that he devoted all his energies. In that he shone supreme. With unerring quickness of intellectual judgment he singled out at once the true obstacles to the greatness of France. He found them in the national disintegration brought about by the civil wars, and largely fostered by the Huguenots, and in the anarchical tendencies of the higher nobility. With true political insight he saw that with a professional army at his back and the sentiments of loyalty and national unity to support him, there was nothing which could stop the ultimate victory of the Crown, save the weakness of the Crown itself. For some years the struggle was intense, but his indomitable will in the end gained the day. When he had once won the confidence of the cautious and suspicious king the contest was practically over, and he was free to turn his attention almost wholly to foreign affairs. By a policy eminently skilful, if morally unjustifiable, he contrived to hide the scars of civil dissension by the lustre of military glory, and to provide a more congenial and patriotic sphere for the energies of a nobility whom he had deprived of political influence, by summoning them to win for France the victories which were to make her king the leader of Europe.

Character of Louis XIII.

The greatness of the reign of Louis XIII. begins with the ministry of Richelieu, and the death of the king followed so close upon the death of the minister that the fame of the master has become wholly overshadowed by the greatness of the servant. When Richelieu was on the stage there was indeed but little room for any one else. Yet it does not appear on closer inspection, that Louis was either the personal or political nonentity which he has often been described. His character was indeed singularly unlike that of his father or his son, and in so many respects different from the ordinary French type, that perhaps French historians have done him but scant justice. His temperament was cold, heavy, and passionless, his mind slow and reserved, but tenacious, and at times obstinate. A man of few friends and no intimates, hardly if at all susceptible to the influence of women, without strong desires or ambitions, without many interests, yet one who kept a shrewd and watchful eye upon the world. Very cautious and patient in making up his mind, suspicious of all but a very few, when his decision was taken he acted firmly, boldly, straightforwardly, and never went back. Strangely enough his real interests were in the more strenuous affairs of out-door life. Like James I. he was passionately fond of hunting, unlike him he was almost more fond of war. No mean soldier himself, he was a very good judge of military capacity in others, and was never so well and never so happy as when on campaign. Many of the officers who did so much to establish the credit of the French armies at the beginning of the next reign, like Fabert, owed their promotion to the skilled eye and firm friendship of Louis XIII. His relations with his mother Marie de Medici and his great minister show him to have been a man of more than ordinary tact. It was by no means easy to keep the peace between the two, when Marie believed herself to have been basely deserted, and Richelieu had not a friend at court save the king himself. It was still less easy to maintain the minister against the incessant and malevolent attacks of his enemies, and yet preserve the independence of action and reserve of judgment necessary to prevent the king from degenerating into the partisan. But in this he succeeded remarkably well. He trusted Richelieu far more sincerely than Richelieu trusted him, and it is interesting to notice in their correspondence at critical moments, that it is the king who becomes more calm, more collected, more dignified, as the intensity of the crisis increases, while Richelieu is torn by doubts and hesitations and seems overwhelmed by anxieties and fear. But in reality Richelieu never had any good reason to doubt the friendship or support of the king. Louis had the gift, rare in men in his position, of knowing when to act and when to remain quiet. He never suffered his minister to forget that he was a minister and not a king. Richelieu never assumed so large a part of the functions of royalty as did Buckingham in England. He was a Wolsey, not a maire du palais. But on the other hand Louis had the sense to see that if a king is fortunate enough to have a Richelieu for his minister he must give him a free hand. He held the scales of justice even between his minister and his court, he suffered no mean motives of jealousy to detract from the fulness of his confidence, and he was content to be classed by posterity among the makers of the French monarchy, because he had had the fortune to be the maker and master of the greatest of French ministers.

Position of the Huguenots, 1622.