Cardinal Richelieu

Armand Jean du Plessis, better known as Cardinal Richelieu, was a Catholic bishop who served as Louis XIII's chief minister from 1624 until his death in 1642. He strengthened royal authority over the nobles and the Huguenots at home and, abroad, set France against the Habsburgs, even when that meant backing Protestant powers. His methods were often harsh, and he died deeply unpopular, but his work prepared the ground for the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV.

Richelieu was born in Paris on 9 September 1585 into minor nobility from Poitou. His father died when he was five, during the Wars of Religion. The family controlled the bishopric of Luçon, a royal reward, and when his elder brother chose to become a monk instead, Armand abandoned training as a soldier for the Church. Henry IV nominated him in 1606, a papal dispensation overcame his youth, and he was consecrated in April 1607. At Luçon he was the first French bishop to put the reforms of the Council of Trent into practice.

As a clerical delegate to the Estates-General of 1614 he caught the court's attention. He rose through the circle of the queen mother, Marie de' Medici, and her favourite Concino Concini, becoming secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1616. When Concini was killed in April 1617 Richelieu fell with his patrons and was later banished to Avignon. He made his way back by negotiating between Marie and her son, became a cardinal in September 1622, joined the royal council in April 1624 and replaced La Vieuville as the king's principal minister that August.

Richelieu aimed to concentrate power in the crown. In 1626 he abolished the office of Constable of France and ordered fortified castles not needed for frontier defence to be demolished, earning the hatred of much of the nobility. He personally directed the siege of the Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, which held out for over a year before surrendering in 1628. The Peace of Alais in 1629 let Protestants keep their freedom of worship but stripped them of political and military privileges. In November 1630, on the so-called Day of the Dupes, Marie de' Medici seemed to have secured his dismissal, but he won the king back and she went into exile. Rebels such as the Duke of Montmorency in 1632 and the marquis de Cinq-Mars in 1642 were executed.

In the Thirty Years' War Richelieu treated the Habsburgs of Spain and Austria as the main threat to France, whatever their shared Catholic faith. He subsidised the Dutch Republic and, in the Treaty of Bärwalde of 1631, Sweden, then invading the empire. Many Catholics denounced him for it. To pay for war he raised the salt tax and the land tax, which fell hardest on the poor, and sent royal intendants to collect them; peasant revolts between 1636 and 1639 were put down brutally. The war was still undecided when he died.

Richelieu built the Palais-Cardinal in Paris, later the Palais-Royal, rebuilt the Sorbonne and its chapel, gathered a great library and art collection, and supported writers such as Pierre Corneille. In 1635 he gave the Académie française its official charter. He also founded a trading company to settle New France, which had perhaps a hundred permanent European settlers when he took office.

Long in poor health, Richelieu died in Paris on 4 December 1642, aged 57, having fostered the career of his successor, Jules Mazarin. Bonfires celebrated his death in many provinces. He censored the press and ran a wide network of spies, and he is remembered both as a founder of the centralised French state and of the principle of "reason of state", and as the sinister cardinal of later fiction.

Our 1650 map shows the Kingdom of France soon after the war ended in 1648, facing the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy that his policy had set out to contain.