The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 55, May, 1862

Nor did the great minister grow indolent as he grew old. The Duke of Epernon, who seems to have had more direct power of the old feudal sort than any other man in France, and who had been so turbulent under the Regency,—him Richelieu humbled completely. The Duke of La Valette disobeyed orders in the army, and he was executed as a common soldier would have been for the same offence. The Count of Soissons tried to see if he could not revive the good old turbulent times, and raised a rebel army; but Richelieu hunted him down like a wild beast. Then certain Court nobles,—pets of the King,—Cinq-Mars and De Thou, wove a new plot, and, to strengthen it, made a secret treaty with Spain; but the Cardinal, though dying, obtained a copy of the treaty, through his agent, and the traitors expiated their treason with their blood.

But this was not all. The Parliament of Paris,—a court of justice,—filled with the idea that law is not a means, but an end, tried to interpose forms between the Master of France and the vermin he was exterminating. That Parisian court might, years before, have done something. They might have insisted that petty quibbles set forth by the lawyers of Paris should not defeat the eternal laws of retribution set forth by the Lawgiver of the Universe. That they had not done, and the time for legal forms had gone by. The Paris Parliament would not see this, and Richelieu crushed the Parliament. Then the Court of Aids refused to grant supplies, and he crushed that court. In all this the nation braced him. Woe to the courts of a nation, when they have forced the great body of plain men to regard legality as injustice!—woe to the councils of a nation, when they have forced the great body of plain men to regard legislation as traffic!—woe, thrice repeated, to gentlemen of the small pettifogger sort, when they have brought such times, and God has brought a man to fit them!

There was now in France no man who could stand against the statesman's purpose.

And so, having hewn, through all that anarchy and bigotry and selfishness, a way for the people, he called them to the work. In 1626 he summoned an assembly to carry out reforms. It was essentially a people's assembly. That anarchical States-General, domineered by great nobles, he would not call; but he called an Assembly of Notables. In this was not one prince or duke, and two-thirds of the members came directly from the people. Into this body he thrust some of his own energy. Measures were taken for the creation of a navy. An idea was now carried into effect which many suppose to have sprung from the French Revolution; for the army was made more effective by opening its high grades to the commons.[3 - See the ordonnances in Thierry, Histoire du Tiers Etat.] A reform was also made in taxation, and shrewd measures were taken to spread commerce and industry by calling the nobility into them.

Thus did France, under his guidance, secure order and progress. Calmly he destroyed all useless feudal castles which had so long overawed the people and defied the monarchy. He abolished also the military titles of Grand Admiral and High Constable, which had hitherto given the army and navy into the hands of leading noble families. He destroyed some troublesome remnants of feudal courts, and created royal courts: in one year that of Poitiers alone punished for exactions and violence against the people more than two hundred nobles. Greatest step of all, he deposed the hereditary noble governors, and placed in their stead governors taken from the people,—Intendants,—responsible to the central authority alone.[4 - For the best sketch of this see Caillet, L'Administration sous Richelieu.]

We are brought now to the third great object of Richelieu's policy. He saw from the beginning that Austria and her satellite Spain must be humbled, if France was to take her rightful place in Europe.

Hardly, then, had he entered the council, when he negotiated a marriage of the King's sister with the son of James I. of England; next he signed an alliance with Holland; next he sent ten thousand soldiers to drive the troops of the Pope and Spain out of the Valtelline district of the Alps, and thus secured an alliance with the Swiss. We are to note here the fact which Buckle wields so well, that, though Richelieu was a Cardinal of the Roman Church, all these alliances were with Protestant powers against Catholic.[5 - History of Civilisation in England, Vol. I. Chap. VIII.] Austria and Spain intrigued against him,—sowing money in the mountain-districts of South France which brought forth those crops of armed men who defended La Rochelle. But he beat them at their own game. He set loose Count Mansfyld, who revived the Thirty Tears' War by raising a rebellion in Bohemia; and when one great man, Wallenstein, stood between Austria and ruin, Richelieu sent his monkish diplomatist, Father Joseph, to the German Assembly of Electors, and persuaded them to dismiss Wallenstein and to disgrace him.

But the great Frenchman's master-stroke was his treaty with Gustavus Adolphus. With that keen glance of his, he saw and knew Gustavus while yet the world knew him not,—while he was battling afar off in the wilds of Poland. Richelieu's plan was formed at once. He brought about a treaty between Gustavus and Poland; then he filled Gustavus's mind with pictures of the wrongs inflicted by Austria on German Protestants, hinted to him probably of a new realm, filled his treasury, and finally hurled against Austria the man who destroyed Tilly, who conquered Wallenstein, who annihilated Austrian supremacy at the Battle of Lüizen, who, though in his grave, wrenched Protestant rights from Austria at the Treaty of Westphalia, who pierced the Austrian monarchy with the most terrible sorrows it ever saw before the time of Napoleon.

To the main objects of Richelieu's policy already given might be added two subordinate objects.

The first of these was a healthful extension of French territory. In this Richelieu planned better than the first Napoleon; for, while he did much to carry France out to her natural boundaries, he kept her always within them. On the South he added Roussillon, on the East, Alsace, on the Northeast, Artois.

The second subordinate object of his policy sometimes flashed forth brilliantly. He was determined that England should never again interfere on French soil. We have seen him driving the English from La Rochelle and from the Isle of Rhé; but he went farther. In 1628, on making some proposals to England, he was repulsed with English haughtiness. "They shall know," said the Cardinal, "that they cannot despise me." Straightway one sees protests and revolts of the Presbyterians of Scotland, and Richelieu's agents in the thickest of them.

And now what was Richelieu's statesmanship in its sum?

I. In the Political Progress of France, his work has already been sketched as building monarchy and breaking anarchy.

Therefore have men said that he swept away old French liberties. What old liberties? Richelieu but tore away the decaying, poisonous husks and rinds which hindered French liberties from their chance at life and growth.

Therefore, also, have men said that Richelieu built up absolutism. The charge is true and welcome. For, evidently, absolutism was the only force, in that age, which could destroy the serf-mastering caste. Many a Polish patriot, as he to-day wanders through the Polish villages, groans that absolutism was not built to crush that serf-owning aristocracy which has been the real architect of Poland's ruin. Any one who reads to much purpose in De Mably, or Guizot, or Henri Martin, knows that this part of Richelieu's statesmanship was but a masterful continuation of all great French statesmanship since the twelfth-century league of king and commons against nobles, and that Richelieu stood in the heirship of all great French statesmen since Suger. That part of Richelieu's work, then, was evidently bedded in the great line of Divine Purpose running through that age and through all ages.

II. In the Internal Development of France, Richelieu proved himself a true builder. The founding of the French Academy and of the Jardin des Plantes, the building of the College of Plessis, and the rebuilding of the College of the Sorbonne, are among the monuments of this part of his statesmanship. His, also, is much of that praise usually lavished on Louis XIV. for the career opened in the seventeenth century to science, literature, and art. He was also a reformer, and his zeal was proved, when, in the fiercest of the La Rochelle struggle, he found time to institute great reforms not only in the army and navy, but even in the monasteries.

III. On the General Progress of Europe, his work must be judged as mainly for good. Austria was the chief barrier to European progress, and that barrier he broke. But a far greater impulse to the general progress of Europe was given by the idea of Toleration which he thrust into the methods of European statesmen. He, first of all statesmen in France, saw, that, in French policy, to use his own words, "A Protestant Frenchman is better than a Catholic Spaniard"; and he, first of all statesmen in Europe, saw, that, in European policy, patriotism, must outweigh bigotry.

IV. His Faults in Method were many. His under-estimate of the sacredness of human life was one; but that was the fault of his age. His frequent working by intrigue was another; but that also was a vile method accepted by his age. The fair questions, then, are,—Did he not commit the fewest and smallest wrongs possible in beating back those many and great wrongs? Wrong has often a quick, spasmodic force; but was there not in his arm a steady growing force, which could only be a force of right?

V. His Faults in Policy crystallized about one: for, while he subdued the serf-mastering nobility, he struck no final blow at the serf-system itself.

Our running readers of French history need here a word of caution. They follow De Tocqueville, and De Tocqueville follows Biot in speaking of the serf-system as abolished in most of France hundreds of years before this. But Biot and De Tocqueville take for granted a knowledge in their readers that the essential vileness of the system, and even many of its most shocking outward features, remained.

Richelieu might have crushed the serf-system, really, as easily as Louis X. and Philip the Long had crushed it nominally. This Richelieu did not.

And the consequences of this great man's great fault were terrible. Hardly was he in his grave, when the nobles perverted the effort of the Paris Parliament for advance in liberty, and took the lead in the fearful revolts and massacres of the Fronde. Then came Richelieu's pupil, Mazarin, who tricked the nobles into order, and Mazarin's pupil, Louis XIV., who bribed them into order. But a nobility borne on high by the labor of a servile class must despise labor; so there came those weary years of indolent gambling and debauchery and "serf-eating" at Versailles.

Then came Louis XV., who was too feeble to maintain even the poor decent restraints imposed by Louis XIV.; so the serf-mastering caste became active in a new way, and their leaders in vileness unutterable became at last Fronsac and De Sade.

Then came "the deluge." The spirit of the serf-mastering caste, as left by Richelieu, was a main cause of the miseries which brought on the French Revolution. When the Third Estate brought up their "portfolio of grievances," for one complaint against the exactions of the monarchy there were fifty complaints against the exactions of the nobility.

Then came the failure of the Revolution in its direct purpose; and of this failure the serf-mastering caste was a main cause. For this caste, hardened by ages of domineering over a servile class, despite fourth of August renunciations, would not, could not, accept a position compatible with freedom and order: so earnest men were maddened, and sought to tear out this cancerous mass, with all its burning roots.

But for Richelieu's great fault there is an excuse. His mind was saturated with ideas of the impossibility of inducing freed peasants to work,—the impossibility of making them citizens,—the impossibility, in short, of making them men. To his view was not unrolled the rich newer world-history, to show that a working class is most dangerous when restricted,—that oppression is more dangerous to the oppressor than to the oppressed,—that, if man will hew out paths to liberty, God will hew out paths to prosperity. But Richelieu's fault teaches the world not less than his virtues.

At last, on the third of December, 1642, the great statesman lay upon his death-bed. The death-hour is a great revealer of motives, and as with weaker men, so with Richelieu. Light then shot over the secret of his whole life's plan and work.

He was told that he must die: he received the words with calmness. As the Host, which he believed the veritable body of the Crucified, was brought him, he said, "Behold my Judge before whom I must shortly appear! I pray Him to condemn me, if I have ever had any other motive than the cause of religion and my country." The confessor asked him if he pardoned his enemies: he answered, "I have none but those of the State."

So passed from earth this strong man. Keen he was in sight, steady in aim, strong in act. A true man,—not "non-committal," but wedded to a great policy in the sight of all men: seen by earnest men of all times to have marshalled against riot and bigotry and unreason divine forces and purposes; seen by earnest men of these times to have taught the true method of grasping desperate revolt, and of strangling that worst foe of liberty and order in every age,—a serf-owning aristocracy.

UNDER THE SNOW

The spring had tripped and lost her flowers,
The summer sauntered through the glades,
The wounded feet of autumn hours
Left ruddy footprints on the blades.

And all the glories of the woods
Had flung their shadowy silence down,—
When, wilder than the storm it broods,
She fled before the winter's frown.

For her sweet spring had lost its flowers,
She fell, and passion's tongues of flame
Ran reddening through the blushing bowers,
Now haggard as her naked shame.

One secret thought her soul had screened,
When prying matrons sought her wrong,
And Blame stalked on, a mouthing fiend,
And mocked her as she fled along.

And now she bore its weight aloof,
To hide it where one ghastly birch
Held up the rafters of the roof,
And grim old pine-trees formed a church.

'Twas there her spring-time vows were sworn,
And there upon its frozen sod,
While wintry midnight reigned forlorn,
She knelt, and held her hands to God.

The cautious creatures of the air
Looked out from many a secret place,
To see the embers of despair
Flush the gray ashes of her face.

And where the last week's snow had caught
The gray beard of a cypress limb,
She heard the music of a thought
More sweet than her own childhood's hymn.