« Qui a la force a souvent la raison, en matière d’État. Elliott, an eminent scholar of early modern Spain, has shown the extent to which Richelieu’s Spanish counterpart and longstanding nemesis, the Count-Duke of Olivares, was aware of the inherent vulnerabilities that came with Spain’s sprawling empire.72 Elliott notes that Richelieu’s fears of encirclement were paralleled by Olivares’ “obsession with the French threat to the network of international communications on which Spanish power depended. He was a spokesman for power politics, the idea of raison d’état , and the right of rulers to the unquestioning obedience of their subjects. In the event, history smiled on the cardinal, who won his strategic wager. Joseph Bergin and Laurence Brockliss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 45–71. L’édit de grâce (ou paix) d’Alès, accordé aux rebelles (28 juin 1629), laisse aux protestants la liberté de leur culte et confirme l’édit de Nantes (de 1598), mais leur ôte tous les privilèges militaires et politiques. 1 (January 1990): 39–58, https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021050011263X. All of this, of course, came at a heavy price, a price disproportionately borne by France’s peasantry that suffered year after year of famine and privation. For a more granular overview of the military costs and tactics of the conflict see Thomas F. Arnold, “Gonzaga Fortifications and the Mantuan Succession Crisis of 1613-1631,” Mediterranean Studies, no. These developments almost fatally impeded the Spanish war effort. Philip II’s Spain, which had an interest in keeping France in a state of civil strife, had been especially meddlesome, supporting and subsidizing the uprising of the Catholic League during the succession crisis that followed Henri III’s death in 1589.25 In short, France in the late 16th century was much like Syria today: a nation crisscrossed with foreign soldiers, mercenaries, and proxies, and a spectacle of almost unremitting misery and desolation, with some modern estimates putting the numbers of casualties at well over a million out of a population about 16 times that size.26, The reign of Henri IV, from 1589 to 1610, brought a measure of stability to domestic affairs, with the king proving as skilled at fostering unity as he had been at waging war. Exhausted and emaciated, he had finally succumbed to one of his many afflictions a few months prior, on a wintry day in December 1642. On a cold winter day in 1793, a crowd of French revolutionaries burst into the chapel of the Sorbonne. Richelieu was only five at the time and for much of the remainder of his youth his mother struggled with mounting debts and exacting circumstances. Author’s translation from the French. A.J. Provided France could continue to buy time and bleed the Habsburgs via a league of well-funded and militarily capable proxies, Richelieu was convinced that France’s demographic and economic resources would allow it to eventually gain the upper hand in its protracted competition with Spain. 0000026019 00000 n In a country still reeling from decades of civil strife, many wanted to focus on domestic recovery and reducing the burden of taxation that helped finance France’s foreign military ventures and proxies — even if it came at the cost of appeasing Spain. See, Sturdy, Richelieu and Mazarin; Geoffrey Treasure, Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in France (New York: Routledge, 1997), 233–61; and Charles Derek Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe: Cardinal Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643-48 (Selingsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1999). As the cardinal’s network of spies at the Spanish court began to apprise him of Madrid’s plans for a series of preemptive military strikes, this buildup accelerated and France fielded an army of unprecedented size on the eve of war. See also the seminal work, Richard Rosecrance and Arthur A. Stein, eds., The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 9 As one well-known scholar of the period has noted, “the strengthening of the state within its borders he [Richelieu] believed necessary not only to discipline the French and channel their energies into the most profitable pursuits, but also to provide the indispensable material support of hostilities against the Habsburgs.” See William Farr Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 302. As contemporary scholars in the field of security studies have noted, regimes facing significant internal threats frequently adopt sub-optimal organizational practices, basing their promotion patterns on political loyalty rather than on combat prowess. It was succeeded by the Peace of Alais, which erased most of the Huguenots’ past political privileges, while continuing, by and large, to accord them freedom of worship. France’s subsidization of Spain’s many foes had bled Madrid dry, its alliance with Portugal had fractured the Iberian Peninsula, and Richelieu’s careful nurturing of his cherished fleet meant that France was now a maritime power to be reckoned with. For an excellent study of the importance of leaders’ individual threat perceptions and personalized belief systems more broadly, see Elizabeth Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). /L 87729 After all, the French were war-weary and Richelieu was deeply unpopular, was riddled with various ailments from crippling migraines to weeping abscesses, and had an occasionally fraught relationship with his royal patron. /H [ 691 544 ] Among a certain constituency of French elites — the politiques or bons français — France’s inability to overcome its communal tensions had only redounded to the advantage of its European competitors, who had capitalized on those divisions. 141 Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares, 482, 490–92. As David Parrott notes, the popular perception that Richelieu’s intendants were “seventeenth-century equivalents of the bolshevik commissars within the Red Army,” is in need of revision.156 Indeed, the relationships between field generals and royal intendants were often overshadowed or subsumed within complex pre-existing networks of clientele, and in some cases these culturally entrenched alternative power structures severely diluted the intendant’s authority.157 The general-intendant relationship was thus most often characterized by careful negotiation, as royal agents walked an administrative tightrope, making their best efforts to enact centralized directives — which were often somewhat overambitious or outdated — all while remaining mindful of local conditions, power dynamics, and logistical constraints. 17 On France’s wars of religion and their effects on the French economy and society, see Nicolas Le Roux, Les Guerres de Religion 1559-1629 (Paris: Editions Belin, 2011). 219 See, David Saunders, “Hegemon History: Pufendorf’s Shifting Perspectives on France and French Power,” in War, the State and International Law in Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. This raises an important question, notes one historian: [A]t what point, theoretically speaking, does an ascending hegemon cross the threshold from being a Westphalian guarantor of a general peace in Christendom to become something else, a predatory monarchia universalis or,  perhaps, a would-be “imperial power”?221. 37 (1967): 21­–43, https://www.jstor.org/stable/650021. ), 665–66. 2 (1992): 249–69, https://www.jstor.org/stable/270987. He appreciated its age-old emphasis on courage and personal sacrifice, but also criticized its tendency toward erratic emotionalism, along with its vainglorious and self-destructive tendencies.91 In his later correspondence with French nobles deployed to the front, it is telling that he sometimes advised his soldier-aristocrats to rein in their natural hotheadedness and to behave with “prudence.”92 More than anything, the cardinal-minister wished to redirect the famed furia francese and thirst for glory of the nobility so that it served the broader geopolitical ambitions of the French crown rather than merely the competitive impulses of a narrow and fractious social stratum. 158 Perhaps the best overview of these challenges is provided in Guy Rowlands, “Moving Mars: The Logistical Geography of Louis XIV’s France,” French History 25, no. Quoted in Guy Thuillier, “Maximes d’Etat du Cardinal de Richelieu," La Revue Administrative 9, no. 80 See, for example, the Discours des Princes et Etats de la Chrétienté plus Considérables à la France, Selon les Diverses Qualités et Conditions, authored by an anonymous member of Richelieu’s entourage, and which — in its intellectual subtlety and granular knowledge of the European security environment — seems, according to Meinecke, to almost be describing “the action of a delicate piece of clockwork, and, on the basis of the nature, the strength and relative positioning of its springs, to demonstrate the inevitability and certain quality of its oscillations.” Meinecke, Machiavellianism, 159. See, Michel Cassan, La Grande Peur de 1610: Les Français et l’Assassinat de Henri IV (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2010). 78 James, The Navy and Government in Early Modern France, 243. Œuvrant à la réconciliation entre la reine mère et Louis XIII, Richelieu obtient la barrette de Cardinal en 1622. For a recent discussion of the abiding importance of reputation in international politics, see Alex Weisiger and Keren Yarhi-Milo, “Revisiting Reputation: How Past Actions Matter in International Politics,” International Organization 69, no. 127 Jérémie Ferrier, "Le Catholique d’Etat ou Discours Politique des Alliances du Roi Très Chrétien Contre les Calomnies des Ennemis de son Etat," in Recueil de Diverses Pièces Pour Servir à l’Histoire, ed. If they are not moderate, even though they might be useful to the public, they would still be unjust.” Richelieu, Testament Politique, 253–54. The signing of the Edict of Nantes, in 1598, ushered in a period of almost unprecedented religious toleration and a fragile peace returned to the realm. And at times, the canny clergyman managed to have it both ways, by preemptively absorbing promising commanders within his own networks of clientage, thus ensuring their future loyalty. pp. Richelieu consistently emphasized the importance of prevailing, first and foremost, in the diplomatic arena — at the lavish royal courts and stuffy religious conclaves where the fate of European politics was truly decided. XIII. The Emergence of U.S. Military Cyber Expertise, 1967–2018, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/cardinal-richelieu-hero-or-villain, https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2018.1428797, https://doi.org/10.1177/002234336400100204, https://warontherocks.com/2019/03/polybius-applied-history-and-grand-strategy-in-an-interstitial-age/, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00013753, https://doi.org/10.1017/S026021050011263X, https://doi.org/10.1080/14678800200590618, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-states-are-turning-proxy-war-29677, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818314000393, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157180506777834407, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k747876.image, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050700026991, https://doi.org/10.1162/01622880151091916, https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2017.1342760, https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/avoiding-a-strategy-of-bluff-the-crisis-of-american-military-primacy, https://warontherocks.com/2016/10/the-world-has-passed-the-old-grand-strategies-by/. Pope Urban VIII’s frantic diplomatic efforts were to no avail, however. N.Faret (Paris: 1627). Slowly but surely, Tacitus came to be viewed less as a diagnostician of the decay of civil liberties under the Roman Principate, and more as the father of prudence, and the “patron of state vigilance.” For one such example of Tacitist writing in 17th-century France, see Rodolphe Le Maistre, who famously described Tacitus as the “oracle of princes” in Le Tibère Français ou les Six Premiers Livres des Annales de Cornelius Tacitus (Paris: Robert Estienne, 1616). stream /O 54 As one analyst notes, the play lays out a vision for a future European defense system that would ensure peace — “but always with France in the driver’s seat.”56 One segment, in which Françion describes his willingness to sacrifice his own ambitions to shield Europe from Ibère’s predations, is particularly noteworthy: The innocent and the weak will find in me the source of their support, I was born the tutor of all young princes, My strength is what maintains the trembling provinces. Europe winds up asking Françion to be her protector and begs him to shield her from the lust-filled Spaniard’s unwanted attentions. Richelieu et Marillag: Deux Politiques,” Revue Historique 179, no. 137 John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 41. The posthumous publication of the cardinal’s recollections and ruminations was intended to serve a didactic purpose, by highlighting the differences between the more enlightened attitudes toward religious tolerance and foreign policy that had prevailed under his tenure, and the rank chauvinism that had come to characterize the rule of Louis XIV.218 Foreign commentators expressed their concern and bewilderment over France’s sudden strategic metamorphosis, and the same accusations that Richelieu and the politiques had once levied at Madrid — of its pretensions of hegemony and universal monarchy — were now directed toward Versailles.219 John Lynn notes that France’s increased disdain for its allies was closely tied to its own ascendancy on the continent, which led Louis XIV to see France as “powerful enough to fight alone if it had to,” which, in turn, made him “unwilling to accommodate the interests and outlooks of others.”220. Few political theorists have generated quite as much heated controversy as Niccolò Machiavelli.40 The Machiavellian assertion of a clear and necessary distinction between private morality and state behavior was viewed as a moral affront — or at least a severe intellectual challenge — by many early modern Christian thinkers. On other occasions, however, Richelieu could demonstrate a measure of tolerance and foresight, forgiving a proficient general’s past transgressions in favor of advancing the war effort. 120 This point is made in Mongredien, La Journée des Dupes, 34. IX (Paris: Honore Champion, 1929), 20–22. Renowned for his fierce intellect, mastery of the dark arts of propaganda, and unshakeable belief in the centralizing virtues of the French monarchy, Richelieu’s actions as chief minister have been debated by generations of historians, political philosophers, novelists, and biographers.3, Richelieu is best known for three things: his unabashed authoritarianism, his efforts to stiffen the sinews of the French state, and his decision to position France as a counterweight to Habsburg hegemony through a network of alliances with Protestant powers. >> 2 (1934): 216–29, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40946190. See, Maxime Préaud, “L’Imprimerie Royale and Cardinal Richelieu,” in Richelieu: Art and Power, 201. For fear of otherwise being powerless in my own defense, At last war is needed, and I am drawn into it. See, J.H.M. 2 (Summer 1984): 131–68, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2541435. These experts could then work to weaponize the rapidly evolving field of international jurisprudence — not only to lend credence to France’s territorial pretensions but also to justify French military actions in the eyes of international public opinion.132 This aspect of Richelieu’s diplomacy was to become abundantly evident in May 1635, when France finally formally declared war on Spain. La raison d'État désigne d'abord un certain courant de réflexion politique qu'on date classiquement de Machiavel , qu'on désigne aussi par des expressions telles que celles de gouvernementalité par opposition à l'étude de la souveraineté, et qui offre des préceptes au Prince afin de gouverner le mieux possible son État, dans l'objectif de conquête et d'exercice du pouvoir. The monarchy’s eventual victory over the Huguenot rebels and their great power sponsor precipitated the collapse of Protestant opposition to royal rule and considerably burnished young Louis XIII’s martial credentials in the eyes of fellow European leaders. In 1642, only a few weeks before Richelieu’s death, a heroic comedy, entitled Europe, was performed at the royal court. Interestingly, Richelieu was a strong proponent of this relatively enlightened approach. The cardinal could be an exacting taskmaster, demanding a continuous flow of reports from his spies and diplomats and on occasion asking them to fine-tune their behavior in accordance with the personality traits of their foreign interlocutors. 1 (December 2006): 92, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157180506777834407. 93 Richelieu, Testament Politique, 347. This was not only where Madrid chose to concentrate most of its elite units, it was also where the nature of the terrain (as evidenced during the Habsburg advance to Corbie in 1636) made large-scale enemy encroachments both most likely and difficult to counter. Dans son ouvrage intitulé Raison d’État et pensée politique à l’époque de Richelieu, Étienne Thuau fait référence à ce texte9. Pretending to give it up during the negotiations settling the Mantuan succession, Richelieu ordered a task force of French soldiers concealed in the subterranean levels of the castle to rapidly neutralize the Savoyard garrison as soon as imperial forces left the vicinity. And yet, while it is proof of your power, it is also strong proof of your judgment, as it was necessary to focus the attention of your enemies in all places so they could be invincible in none.204. 126 Critiques of the Spanish treatment of native Americans was a leitmotiv in French writings at the time. At the same time, Richelieu worked to accentuate internal frictions within both Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, supporting secessionist movements in Portugal and Catalonia, and quietly stoking the resentment of liberty-starved prince-electors in Germany.79 In this, Richelieu was aided by a formidable coterie of advisers, bureaucratic allies, and diplomatic envoys, who tirelessly crisscrossed the continent and produced exquisitely detailed strategic forecasts. Essays in Honor of Professor Ragnhild Hatton, ed. Le « mémoire » de Riche-lieu sur la législation des libelles apparaît au cours du chapitre V qui est 4 (January 2001): 655–72, http://dx.doi.org/10.3917/dss.014.0655. Olivares, for example, was known to be of a singularly choleric disposition. 116 Ranum, “Richelieu and the Great Nobility.”. 210 (2010): 99–112; Gaston Zeller, “Le Principe d’Equilibre dans la Politique Internationale Avant 1789,” Revue Historique 215, no. For two additional and differing perspectives on French troop numbers, see Sturdy, Richelieu and Mazarin, 58; and Wilson, The Thirty Years War, 557. Andrew W. Marshall et al. Both the chief minister and his most trusted aide, Father Joseph — a  wily Capuchin monk who “combined in his own persons the oddly assorted characters of Metternich and Savonarola” — frequently referred to the advent of a new “Augustan golden age” they hoped would dawn on European affairs following the bloody unrest of the Thirty Years’ War, much as the reign of Augustus had put an end to the chaos of Rome’s civil wars.64 Neo-stoicism relayed a strongly cyclical view of foreign affairs and baroque raison d’état theorists focused intensely on the lessons to be derived from the study of the rise and fall of ancient empires.65 One of the most eloquent articulations of the era’s predilection for applied history was made by the Savoyard Giovanni Botero in his masterpiece Della Ragion di Stato (The Reason of State), when he stated that, while one could learn from both the living or the dead, “a much greater field from which to learn is that offered to us by the dead with the histories written by them.”66.

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