HENRY IV’S death left France with a nine-year-old king, Louis XIII, (1610-1643), whose Italian mother, acting as regent, had small sympathy with her adopted land. Sully she soon dismissed and the court witnessed a greedy scramble for money and preferment between imported favorites and French nobles. In the brief period of four years the financial state of the country was such that it became necessary to summon the States General to see if any way out of the trouble might be found. France’s regeneration under Henry of Navarre had been a growth too rapid to have roots firm enough to withstand rough handling.
The Assembly was to accomplish nothing for it. It was in the autumn of 1614 that the Estates met in a hall in the Hôtel de Bourbon just east of the Louvre. The body was a unit in demanding reform, but unity ceased with that demand. The nobles were indignant at certain encroachments on their aristocratic rights, the queen having given privileges to some middle-class professional people for a financial consideration. The clergy were shocked at the suggestion that they pay taxes—an idea not to be considered, they said, for it would be giving to man what was due to God. The Third Estate had a just grievance in the fact that upon them fell all the expenses of the government, and their representatives, speaking kneeling as was the dispiriting custom, succeeded nevertheless in giving some caustic warnings.
The only result of all this quarreling was that a petition was sent to the king asking him to give his attention to the questions under discussion. The only reply from the Louvre was the information that greeted the deputies when they gathered the next day that the queen wanted their hall of meeting for a ball and that the Assembly was therefore disbanded. It was a hundred and seventy-five years after this brusque treatment before it met again just before the outbreak of the Revolution.
Richelieu, Paris born, Sorbonne educated, and at that time a bishop, was a member of this Assembly of 1614. When he became Marie de Medicis’ adviser, and, diplomatic and inflexible, imposed his will upon the country, the situation cleared. There was need of high-handed action at first. The minister had the greedy Prince of Condé arrested within the palace of the Louvre and sent to the Bastille; a force was sent against other hungry and violent nobles; the king himself, though then but a lad of sixteen, felt the bracing atmosphere of this change and ordered the arrest—possibly the death—of the Italian Concini, who, with his wife, Leonora Galigaï had ruled the nation through the queen. Concini was shot as he was crossing the bridge across the eastern moat of the Louvre, and the king looked on from a window. Leonora was beheaded and burned as a witch on the Grève.
Richelieu, become a cardinal, ruled with wisdom and vigor. He treated high and low with equal impartiality, even causing the execution of some of the greatest nobles in the land for the breaking of the law which forbade dueling. The Place de Grève witnessed the punishment for the sport of the Place Royale. Legalized struggles by the Parliament in the palace on the Cité, underhand plots by men very near the throne—all were met and overthrown by the sagacious premier, and his every act tended to confirm the strength of the crown. He fought sturdily against the Huguenots and conquered them with the fall of La Rochelle, a conquest which the church of Notre Dame-des-Victoires was established to commemorate, the original building serving as the sacristy of the present edifice. He confirmed Henry of Navarre’s Edict of Nantes, however, giving to the Protestants religious liberty and civil rights. Abroad the cardinal’s policies brought territory and prestige to the crown.
Louis lived but a scant half year longer than Richelieu. The king’s whole life was passed under the domination of a determined mother, Marie de Medicis, and a masterful prime minister. It would have required a stronger personality than his to make itself felt, though Rubens has recorded in a series of pictures now in the Louvre the quarrels and reconciliations of the royal family. His only interests were hawking, drilling soldiers, and craftsmanship in leather. He was terribly bored most of the time, apparently without any initiative toward remedying the situation. His court reflected his own disposition and was incredibly dull, though ordered in etiquette and brilliant in garb.
It is to the regent and the cardinal and not to the king that Paris was indebted for the many embellishments of this reign and for any impetus that it gained toward the standards of art and literature which rose to their climax in the next reign.
Henry IV had made Paris so pleasant a place to live in that the city was constantly growing. Rivaling the Marais in popularity a new section became fashionable, the Quarter Saint Honoré on the northwest of the town. By way of protecting this rapidly enlarging district Louis swung the city wall so far west as to include the Tuileries gardens. It was in this newly popular quarter that Richelieu built for himself the Palais Cardinal which he bequeathed to the king and which then took its present name, the Palais Royal. He encountered difficulties in the construction of his new home for his ideas of what he wanted did not harmonize with what he could have. The hôtels of other men were in the way and sometimes even the cardinal’s expressed desire was not enough to make them turn over their property to him. When they were citizens of small account he brought pressure, not always honest, to bear upon them; when they were people of importance he sometimes had to keep his wishes in abeyance. The result was an irregularity of outline that was not beautiful. To secure a symmetrical garden Richelieu did from within what few of the city’s enemies ever have succeeded in doing—he pierced the king’s new wall. After the cardinal’s death the queen-regent, Anne of Austria, moved into the palace, and in its garden Louis XIV grew up, a rather forlorn little figure so uncared for that once he was found after dark asleep under a bush.
Outside of the city wall running along the river bank was the Cours la Reine laid out by