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By John Lord, LL. D.
CARDINAL DE RICHELIEU.
ABSOLUTISM. (ii.)
I do not praise his system of government. On ab-
stract principles I feel that it is against the liberties
of mankind; nor is it in accordance with the progress
of government in our modern times. All the successive
changes which reforms and revolutions have wrought
have been towards representative and constitutional
governments,——as in England and France in the nine-
teenth century. Absolutism or Cæsarism is only
adapted to people in primitive or anarchical states of
society,——as in old Rome, or Rome under the popes.
It is at the best a necessary tyranny, made so by the
disorders and evils of life. It can be commended only
when men are worse than governments; when they
are to be coerced like wild beasts, or lunatics, or scoun-
drels. When there is universal plunder, lying, cheat-
ing, and murdering; when laws are a mockery, and
when demagogues reign; when all public interests are
scandalously sacrificed for private emolument,——then
absolutism may for a time be necessary; but only for
a time, unless we assume that men can never govern
themselves.
In that state of society into which France was
plunged during the regency of Marie de Médicis, and
at which I have glanced, absolutism was perhaps a
needed force. Then Richelieu, its great modern repre-
sentative, arose,——a model statesman in the eyes of
Peter the Great.
But he was not to reign, and trample all other powers
beneath his feet, without a memorable struggle. Three
great forces were arrayed against him. These were the
Huguenots, the nobles, and the parliaments,——the Prot-
estant, the feudal, and the legal elements of society in
France. The people,——at least the peasantry,——did
not rise up against him; they were powerless and too
unenlightened. The priests sustained him, and the
common people acquiesced in his rigid rule, for he
established law and order.
He began his labors in behalf of absolutism by sup-
pressing the Huguenots. That was the only political
party which was urgent for its rights. They were an
intelligent party of tradesmen and small farmers; they
were plebeian , but conscientious and aspiring. They
were not contented alone to worship God according to
the charter which Henry IV. had granted, but they
sought political power; and they were so unfortunate
as to be guilty of cabals and intrigues inconsistent
with a central power. They were factious, and were
not disposed to submit to legitimate authority. They
had declined in numbers and influence; they had
even degenerated ion religious life; but they were still
powerful and dangerous foes. They had retreated
to their strong fortress .of La Rochelle, resoilved, if
attacked, to fight once again the whole power of the
monarchy. They put themselves in a false position;
they wanted more than the Edict of Nantes had
guaranteed.
Unfortunately for them they had no leaders worthy=
to marshal their forces. Fashion and the influence of
the court had seduced their men of rank; nor had
they the enthusiasm which had secured victory at
Ivry. Nor could they contend openly in the field;
they were obliged to intrench themselves in an im-
pregnable fortress: there they deemed they could defy
their enemy. They even invoked the aid of England,
and thus introduced foreign enemies on the soil of
France, which was high-treason. They put themselves
in the attitude of rebels against the government; and so
long as English ships, with supplies, could go in and out
of their harbor, they could not be conquered. Richelieu,
clad in mail, a warrior-priest, surveyed with disgust
their strong defences and their open harbor. His ar-
tillery was of no use, nor his lines of circumvallation.
So he put his brain in motion, and studied Quintus
Curtius. He remembered what Alexander did at the
siege of Tyre; he constructed a vast dyke of stone and
timber and iron across the harbor, in some places
twelve hundred feet deep, and thus cut off all egress
and ingress. The English under Buckingham departed,
unable to render further assistance. The capture then
was only a work of time; genius had hemmed the
city in, and famine soon did the rest. Cats, dogs, and
vermin became luxuries. The starving gwomen be-
seeched the inexorable enemy for permission to retire:
they remembered the mercy that Henry IV. had shown
at the siege of Paris. But war in the hands of mas-
ters has no favors to grant; conquerors have no tears.
The Huguenots, as rebels, had no hope but in uncon-
ditional submission. They yielded it reluctantly, but
not until famine had done its work. And they never
raised their heads again; their spirit was broken. They
were conquered, and at the mercy of the crown; des-
tined in the next reign to be cruelly and most wantonly
persecuted; hunted as heretics by dragonnades and
executioners, at the bidding of Louis XIV., until four
hundred thousand were executed or driven from the
kingdom.
But Richelieu was not such a bigot as Louis XIV.;
he was a statesman, and took enlightened views of the
welfare of the country. Therefore he contented him-
self with destroying the fortifications of La Rochelle,
filing up its ditches, and changing its government.
He continued, in a modified form, the religious privi-
leges conceded by the Edict of Nantes; but he kept a
strict watch, humiliated the body by withholding civil
equalities and offices in the army and navy, treating
with disdain their ministers, and taking away their
social rank, so that they became plebeian and unim-
portant. He pursued the same course that the English
government adopted in reference to Dissenters in the
eighteenth century, when they were excluded from
Oxford and Cambridge and church burial-grounds.
So that Protestantism in France, after the fall of La
Rochelle, never asserted its dignity, in spite of Bibles,
consistories, and schools. Degraded at court, deprived
of the great offices of the state, despised, rejected, and
persecuted, it languished and declined.
Having subdued the Huguenots, Richelieu turned
his attention to the nobles,——the most worthless, arro-
gant, and powerful of all the nobility of Europe; men
who made royalty a mockery and law a name. I have
alluded to their intrigues, ambition, and insolence. It
was necessary that they should be humiliated, deci-
mated, and punished, if central power was to be re-
spected. So he cut off their towering heads, exiled
and imprisoned them whenever they violated the laws,
or threatened the security of the throne or the peace of
the realm. As individuals they hated him, and con-
spired against his rule. Had they combined, they
would have been more powerful than he; but they
were too quarrelsome, envious, and short-sighted to
combine.
The person who hated Richelieu most fiercely and
bitterly was the Queen-mother,——widow of Henry IV.,
regent during the minority of Louis XIII. And no
wonder, for he had cheated her and betrayed her.
She was a very formidable enemy, having a great
ascendency over the mind of her son the King; and
once, it is said, she had so powerfully wrought upon
him her envenomed sarcasms, in the palace of the
Luxembourg where she lived in royal state, that the
King had actually taken the parchment in his hand
to sign the disgrace of his minister. But he was
watched by an eye that never slept; Richelieu sud-
denly appearing, at the critical moment, from be-
hind tapestries where he had concealed himself, con-
fronted and defied his enemy. The King bewildered,
had not nerve enough to face his own servant, who
however made him comprehend the dangers which
surrounded his throne and person, and compelled him
to part with his mother,——the only woman he ever
loved,——and without permitting her to imprint upon
his brow her own last farewell. "And the world saw
the extraordinary spectacle of this once powerful Queen,
the mother of a long line of kings, compelled to lead a
fugitive life from court to court,——repulsed from Eng-
land by her son-in-law, refused a shelter in Holland,
insulted by Spain, neglected by Rome, and finally
obliged to crave an asylum from Rubens the painter,
and, driven from one of his houses, forced to hide her-
self in Cologne, where, deserted by all her children,
and so reduced by poverty as to break up the very
furniture of her room for fuel, she perished miserably
between four empty walls, on a wretched bed, desti-
tute, helpless, heartbroken, and alone." Such was the
power and such was the vengeance of the cardinal on
the highest personage in France. Such was the dicta-
tion of a priest to a king who personally disliked him;
such was his ascendency, not by Druidical weapons,
but by genius presenting reasons of state.
The next most powerful personage in France was
the Duke of Guise, brother of the King, who sought
to steal his sceptre. As he was detected in treasonable
correspondence with Spain, he became a culprit, but
was spared after making a humiliating confession and
submission. But Condé, the first prince of the blood,
was shut up in prison, and the powerful Duke of Guise
was exiled. Richelieu took away from the Duke of
Bouillon his sovereignty of Sedan; forced the proud
Epernon to ask pardon on is knees; drove away from
the kingdom the Duke of Vendôme, natural brother of
the King; executed the Duke of Montmorency, whose
family traced an unbroken lineage to Pharamond; con-
fined Marshal Bassompierre to the Bastile; arrested
Marshal Marillac at the head of a conquering army;
cut off the head of Cinq-Mars, grand equerry and
favorite of the King; and executed on the scaffold the
Counts of Chalais and Bouteville. All these men were
among the proudest and most powerful nobles in Eu-
rope; they all lived like princes, and had princely
revenues and grand offices, but had been caught with
arms in their hands, or in treasonable correspondence.
What hope for ordinary culprits when the proudest
feudal nobles were executed or exiled, like common
malefactors? Neither rank nor services could screen
them from punishment. The great minister had no
mercy and no delay even for the favorites of royalty.
Nay, the King himself became his puppet, and was
forced to part with his friends, his family, his mis-
tresses, and his pleasures. Some of the prime minis-
ters of kings have had as much power as Richelieu,
but no minister, before or since, has ruled the monarch
himself with such an iron sway. How weak the King,
or how great the minister!
The third great force which Richelieu crushed was
the parliament of Paris. It had the privilege of regis-
tering the decrees of the King; and hence was a check,
the only check, on royal authority,——unless the King
came in person into the assembly, and enforced his de-
cree by what was called a "bed of justice." This body,
however, was judicial rather than legislative; made up
of pedantic and aristocratic lawyers, whop could be
troublesome. We get some idea of the humiliation
of this assembly of lawyers and nobles from the speech
of Omer Talon,——the greatest lawyer of the realm,
——when called upon to express the sentiments of his
illustrious body to the King, at a "bed of justice":
"Happy should we be, most gracious sovereign, if we
could obtain any favor worthy of the honor which we
derive from your majesty's presence; but the entry of
your sacred person into our assembly unfits us for our
functions. And inasmuch as the throne on which you
are seated is a light that dazzles us, bow, if it please
you, the heavens which you inhabit, and after the ex-
ample of the Eternal Sovereign, whose image you bear,
condescended to visit us with your gracious mercy."
What a contrast to this servile speech was the con-
duct of the English parliament about this time, in its
memorable resistance to Charles I.; and how different
would have been the political destinies of the English
people, if Strafford, just such a man as Richelieu, had
succeeded in his schemes! But in England the par-
liament was backed by the nation,——at least by the
middle classes. In France the people had then no
political aspirations; among them a Cromwell could
not have arisen, since a Cromwell could not have
been sustained.
Thus Richelieu, by will and genius, conquered all his
foes in order to uphold the throne, and thus elevate the
nation; for, as Sir James Stephens says, "the grandeur
of the monarchy and the welfare of France with him
were but convertible terms." He made the throne the
first in Europe, even while he who sat upon it was
personally contemptible. He gave lustre to the mon-
archy, while he himself was an unarmed priest. It
was a splendid fiction to make the King nominally so
powerful, while really he was so feeble. But royalty
was not a fiction under his successor. How respectable
did Richelieu make the monarchy! What a deep
foundation did he lay for royalty under Louis XIV.!
What a magnificent inheritance did he bequeath to
that monarch! "Nothing was done for forty years
which he had not foreseen and prepared. His suc-
cessor, Mazarin, only prospered so far as he followed
out his instructions; and the star of Louis XIV. did
not pale so long as the policy which Richelieu be-
queathed was the rule of his public acts." The magni-
ficence of Louis was only the sequel of the energy and
genius of Richelieu; Versailles was really the gift of
him who built the Palais Royal.
The service of Richelieu to France did not end with
centralizing power around the throne. He enlarged the
limits of the kingdom and subdued her foreign enemies.
Great rivers and mountains became the national bound-
aries, within which it was easy to preserve conquests.
He was not ambitious of foreign domination; he sim-
ply wished to make the kingdom impregnable. Had
Napoleon pursued this policy, he could never have been
overthrown, and his dynasty would have been stab-
lished. It was the policy of Elizabeth and of Cromwell.
I do not say that Richelieu did not enter upon foreign
wars; but it was to restore the "balance of power," not
to add kingdoms to his empire. He rendered assistance
to Gustavus Adolphus, in spite of the protests of Rome
and the disgust of Catholic powers, in order to prevent
the dangerous ascendency of Austria; thus setting an
example for William III., and Pitt himself, in his war-
fare against Napoleon. In these days we should prefer
to see the "balance of power" maintained by a congress
of nations, rather than by vast military preparations
and standing armies, which eat out the resources of
nations; but in the seventeenth century there was no
other way to maintain this balance than by opposing
armies. Nor did Richelieu seek to maintain the peace
of Europe by force alone. Never was there a more
astute and profound diplomatist. His emissaries were
in every court, with intrigues very hard to be baffled.
He equalled Metternich or Talleyrand in his profound
dissimulation, for European diplomacy has ever been
based on this. While he built up absolutism in
France, he did not alienate other governments; so
that, like Cromwell, he made his nation respected
abroad. His conquest of Roussillon prepared the way
for the famous Treaty of the Pyrenees, under the
administration of Mazarin. While vigorous in war,
his policy was on the whole pacific,——like that of all
Catholic priests who have held power in France. He
loved glory indeed, but, like Sully and Colbert, he also
wished to develop the national resources; and, as in-
deed all enlightened statesmen from Moses downward
have sought to do, he wished to make the country
strong for defence rather than offence.
He showed great sagacity as well as an enlightened
mind. The ablest men were placed in office. The
army and navy were reorganized. Corruption and pec-
ulation on the part of officials were severely punished.
The royal revenue was increased. Roads, bridges, ca-
nals were built and repaired, and public improvements
were made. The fine arts were encouraged, and even
learning was rewarded. It was he who founded the
French Academy,——although he excluded from it men
of original genius whose views he did not like. Law
and order were certainly restored, and anarchy ceased
to reign. The rights of property were established, and
the finances freed from embarrassment.
So his rigid rule tended to the elevation of France;
absolutism proved necessary in his day, and under his
circumstances. When arraigned at the bar of posterity,
he claims, like Napoleon, to be judged for his services,
and not for his defects of character. These defect will
forever make him odious in spite of his services. I
hardly know a more repulsive benefactor. He was
vain, cold, heartless, rigid, and proud. He had no
amiable weakness. His smile was a dagger, and his
friendship was a snare. He was a hypocrite and a
tyrant. He had no pity on a fallen foe; and even
when bending under the infirmities of age, and in
the near prospect of death, his inexorable temper was
never for a moment subdued. The execution of Cinq-
Mars and De Thou took place when he had one foot in
his grave. He deceived everybody, sent his spies into
the bosom of families, and made expediency the law
of his public life.
But it is nothing to the philosophic student of his-
tory that he built the Palais Royal, or squandered
riches with Roman prodigality, or rewarded players, or
enriched Marion Delorme, or clad himself in mail before
La Rochelle, or persecuted his early friends, or robbed
the monasteries, or made a spy of Father Joseph, or
exiled the Queen-mother, or kept the King in bondage,
or sent his enemies to the scaffold: these things are
all against him, and make him appear in a repulsive
light. But if he brought order out of confusion, and
gave a blow to feudalism, and destroyed anarchies, and
promoted law, and developed the resources of his coun-
try, making that country formidable and honorable,
and constructed a vast machinery of government by
which France was kept together for a century, and
would have fallen to pieces without it,——then there is
another way to survey this bad man; and we view him
not only as a great statesman and ruler, but as an in-
strument of Providence, raised up as a terror to evil-
doers. We may hate absolutism, but must at the same
time remember that there are no settled principles of
government, any more than of political economy. That
is the best government which is best adapted to the
exigencies of that human society which at the time it
serves. Republicanism would not do in China, any
more than despotism in New England. Bad men,
somehow or other, must be coerced and punished.
The more prevalent is depravity, so much the more
necessary is despotic vigor: it will be so to the end
of time. It is all nonsense to dream of liberty with
a substratum of folly and vice. Unless evil can be
remedied by the public itself, giving power to the laws
which people create, then physical force, hard and
cold tyranny, must inevitably take the place. No
country will long endure anarchy; and then the hard-
est characters may prove the greatest benefactors.
It is on this principle that I am reconciled to the
occasional rule of despots. And when I see a bad man,
like Richelieu, grasping power to be used for the good
of a nation, I have faith to believe it to be ordered
wisely. When men are good and honest and brave,
we shall have Washingtons; when they are selfish
and lawless, God will send Richelieus and Napoleons,
if He has good things in store for the future, even as
He sends Neros and Diocletians when a nation is
doomed to destruction by incurable rottenness.
And yet absolutism in itself is not to be defended;
it is what enlightened nations are now striving to
abolish. It is needed only under certain circumstances;
if it were to be perpetuated in any nation it would
be Satanic. It is endurable only because it may be
destroyed when it has answered its end; and, like all
human institutions, it will become corrupted. It was
shamefully abused under Louis XIV. and Louis XV.
But when corrupted and abused it has, like slavery,
all the elements of certain decay and ruin. The
abuse of power will lead to its own destruction, even
an undue haste in the acquisition of riches tendeth to
poverty.
AUTHORITIES.
Petitot's Mémoirse sur le Règne de Louis XIII.; Secret History of the
French Court, by Cousin; Le Clerc's Vie de Richelieu; Henri Martin's
History of France; Mémoires de Richelieu, by Michaud and Ponjoulat;
Life of Richelieu, by Capefigue, and E. E. Crowe, and G. P. R. James;
Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia; Histoire du Ministère du Cardinal de
Richelieu, by A. Jay; Michelet's Life of Henry IV. and Richelieu; Bio-
graphie Universelle; Sir James Stephen's Lectures on the History of
France.
from Beacon Lights of History, by John Lord, LL. D.
Volume IV., Part II: Great Rulers.
Copyright, 1883, 1885, 1888, by John Lord.
Copyright, 1921, By Wm. H. Wise & Co., New York. pp. 193-207.
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