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THREE FACES OF RICHELIEU: A
HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
JOSEPH BERGIN *

Abstract—This article explores the different views of Richelieu to be found in three different
cultures, those of Spain, Germany and England (to which America is added). It begins with the
perceptions of Richelieu among his contemporaries and how these evolved in subsequent
centuries. The ﬁgure of Richelieu has fascinated biographers, novelists and playwrights,
whose work inﬂuenced wider historical judgements of the Cardinal. In recent times, historians
have sought to overcome the different stereotypes that abounded in previous centuries and,
in German and Anglo-Saxon scholarship, fresh and as yet unreconciled facets of Richelieu and
his historical signiﬁcance continue to emerge, providing the basis for a rather different portrait
of the man.

Historians are just as likely to seek new ways of seeing familiar objects as to go
in search of unfamiliar ones to study. Philippe de Champaigne’s famous threeheaded Richelieu in the National Gallery in London suggests that such curiosity
was already fully at work during the Cardinal’s lifetime, even if the actual
purpose of such triple portraits was to facilitate the making of a bronze bust that
would remain the most enduring image of its subject.1 As is well known,
Richelieu himself was fully alert to the manifold ‘uses of history’, and especially
to the dangers of allowing it to be written by detractors. How this came to be is
a subject in its own right, but here it should suffice to say that it is highly likely
the often bruising pamphleteering campaigns in which he was involved, almost
from the outset of his political career, made him acutely conscious, to say the
least, of the fragility of reputation and the need to defend it at every turn. His
years in office after 1624, with their bitter political conflicts and the propaganda
they generated, ensured that he could never afford to drop his guard. Out of all
this emerged a manifest desire to ‘master’ history, which, among other things,
impelled him to commission a history of his own time—usually but mistakenly
called his ‘Memoirs’—which was written by a team from materials drawn

* Joseph Bergin is Professor of History at Manchester University. He may be contacted at
j.bergin@manchester.ac.uk This is a much revised and expanded version of a paper originally given
at a conference in Luçon, in April 2008, which is due for publication in Recherches Vendéennes in
late 2009.
1 See the magniﬁcently illustrated and documented catalogue Richelieu: Art and Power, ed.
H. T. Goldfarb (Montreal, 2002), esp. 261–6, for a discussion of the London and Strasbourg
portraits, as well as the Bernini bust of the Cardinal.

518

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

primarily from his own papers.2 Once he had disappeared from the scene
altogether, he could no longer directly influence opinion, though his heirs,
especially the duchesse d’Aiguillon, were alert to the need to defend his
reputation, which often became an object of acrimonious discussion within
France itself. Indeed, over the past three centuries or more he has rarely been
absent from debates about the emergence of a modern French state and its key
architects, debates that have elicited sharply contrasting views of his historical
significance.3
How does—and how did—this question of Richelieu and his historical
importance look from beyond the borders of France? To what degree does the
Richelieu familiar to France’s neighbours resemble the Richelieu inherited by
the French themselves? Can they ever be the same? To take an obvious example:
what resonance could French discussions about Richelieu as a creator of the
modern state or as a providential figure have elsewhere? Was not the Richelieu
of France’s neighbours a very different construct, made and re-made by
commentators and historians with different agendas and perhaps a different
approach to constructing historical judgements? And, finally, how much mutual
influence have successive shifts in perceptions of Richelieu inside and outside
the hexagone had on each other over time? Needless to say, a short article can
address only a limited number of these questions. One thing at least should be
clear from the outset: the term ‘abroad’ has to be taken in the plural rather than
the singular, since the three ‘faces’ of Richelieu that will be examined here—
those of Spain, the German world, and England (and, by extension in more
recent times, America)—present some quite remarkable differences which it
would be misleading to conflate into one putatively comprehensive portrait.
Before moving to consider the historiographical fortunes of Richelieu outside
France, it is worth asking two questions which appear relatively simple but
which are essential to any understanding of how a non-French interpreter might
approach the issue of the Cardinal’s significance. First, why or in what ways
might Richelieu be of interest to outsiders? Second, which sources were
available to commentators or historians from other countries attempting to
understand Richelieu? In fact these two questions overlap with each other,
since they assume a constant dialogue between each other, which excludes any
real priority of one over the other. It seems that three Richelieus have historically
aroused the curiosity of foreigners, whether they were his contemporaries or

2 For Richelieu’s involvement in campaigns to destroy the reputation of Louis XIII’s ﬁrst favourite,
Luynes: S. Kettering, Power and Reputation at the Court of Louis XIII (Manchester, 2008), especially ch. 9, ‘The anti-Luynes campaign’; W. F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton,
1972), part 5, ‘Design for immortality’; O. Ranum, Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical
Thought in Seventeenth-Century France (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), ch. 5, ‘Patronage and history from
Richelieu to Colbert’; C. Jouhaud, Les Pouvoirs de la literature (Paris, 2000), ch. 3.
3 The unpublished dissertation of L. Avezou, ‘La légende de Richelieu—fortune posthume d’un
rôle historique, XVIIe-XXe siècles’ (Thèse de doctorat, Paris I–Sorbonne, 2001), examines the French
reputation of Richelieu across the longue durée and offers numerous suggestions for comparative
questions about his reputation.

JOSEPH BERGIN

519

historians in later times. First of all, there is Richelieu the statesman who engaged
France in European power politics during the Thirty Years War, the precursor
who laid the foundations of later French power on a European scale and who,
in certain respects, personified that power during later centuries. Secondly,
there is Richelieu the artisan of absolute monarchy who laid the foundations of
the modern state in its French incarnation. This Richelieu is a political actor
whose frame of reference is essentially internal French politics, in which his
role as chief minister was as controversial as the policies with which he was
associated. Finally, there is an ‘intellectual’ Richelieu who floats above the other
two: as the author of political maxims and ideas, he is a figure whose writings
are capable of arousing the curiosity of those who have no particular interest in
the statesman at work, either inside or outside France.
These three Richelieus are not mututally exclusive, and may easily overlap
with each other. However, seen from abroad, the third Richelieu has long had
the advantage over the other two. Thanks to the publication of the Cardinal’s
own writings, he is the one who has been the most easily accessible to foreign
observers and scholars, who for a very long time had to make do with sources
of this provenance. This is particularly true of the Testament politique, published
for the first time in 1688, and which was accompanied by his other political or
theological works, until the publication in the mid-nineteenth century of the
great Avenel edition of his Lettres, instructions diplomatiques et papiers d’état.
Given their reliance on such sources, foreign commentators often viewed
Richelieu as someone who subscribed to the doctrine of raison d’état and who
was, therefore, a follower of Machiavelli as far as the actual exercise of power
was concerned. To differing degrees, this mundane practical problem of the
means available to foreign scholars seeking to study Richelieu determined for a
long time the approach to, and the images of Richelieu that took shape outside
France. But those images evolved differently from one country and from one
period to the next across Europe. During more recent times, those foreign
images of Richelieu have themselves increasingly reflected ideas and
interpretations emanating from French historiography, thereby ushering in a
new phase in a long-term process.
I

What views of Richelieu have these different influences managed to generate
and where should the search for the first of the three faces of Richelieu begin?
If we take our cue from the impact of the Cardinal’s policies on neighbouring
states, there can be little room for argument. It was Spain that bore the brunt
not merely of those policies, but of the propaganda, some of it historical in
format, that accompanied them. However, it is equally clear that the reputation
of Richelieu in Spain is the most difficult of all to discern, whether it be among
his own contemporaries or among historians of later centuries. The absence of
serious studies of Spanish historiography is particularly unfortunate, and it
means that what follows will be necessarily impressionistic and limited in scope.

520

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

This is all the more regrettable since it seems that Spain retained longer than
other parts of Europe the literary genre of ‘parallel lives’ inherited from earlier
centuries, one which provided a format whose obvious limitations did not
prevent some unorthodox ideas being expressed—ideas that were not always
flattering to the Spanish protagonists being portrayed in them.
Because of the scale of the propaganda pumped out by both sides during the
Franco-Spanish conflicts from the 1620s onwards, Spanish views of Richelieu
were forged relatively early and in the heat of battle. Moreover, it is quite likely
that the declarations, pamphlets and other attacks on Richelieu that were
published against him by his French enemies had some impact on Spanish
thinking, if only because most of the French writers involved were, at one time
or another, in exile in the Spanish Netherlands.4 It was from there that their
numerous denunciations of the Cardinal, depicting him as a tyrant who kept the
king of France and the entire country in a state of enslavement, were diffused
across both France and Europe generally. But as Spain itself had a first minister,
the Count-Duke of Olivares, who seemed at least as powerful as Richelieu and
who kept his king in thrall to him, there were perhaps limits to which this type
of anti-favourite propaganda could be allowed to circulate within Spain itself.5
However, just as Spaniards during the reign of Philip II were known for admiring
his foe, Elizabeth I, it seems that certain Spanish writers delivered encomiums
of Richelieu the better to criticize the regime of Olivares, who in turn responded
to them by attacking the principles and actions of the Cardinal from a moral and
religious standpoint.6 The great writer Quevedo, who was close to Olivares,
published a mordant satire on Richelieu in 1635 entitled Anatomy of the Head
of Cardinal Richelieu, but only a few years later he was imprisoned for his no
less biting comments against Olivares and even, perhaps, for spying for France.7
Saavedra Fajardo, who was one of Spain’s representatives at the negotiations of
Westphalia, published a book in 1640, entitled the Political and Christian
Prince, that was widely read in its time and in which Richelieu is presented as
having been sent by God in order to test Christendom and punish Spain in
particular for its sins.8 While this was hardly a compliment to Richelieu, it really
put the spotlight on the failings of Spaniards and their political leadership.
Olivares’ own major apologia, El Nicandro, composed soon after his disgrace in

4 Their activities were traced by Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, who analysed the attacks of Matthieu de Morgues, Chanteloube and other pamphleteers.
5 J. H. Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares, the Statesman in an Age of Decline (New Haven,
1986).
6 For an example of these exchanges, see the Memoriales y cartas del conde-duque de Olivares,
ed. J. H. Elliott and J. F. de la Peña (Madrid, 1978–80), vol. 2, 268–9.
7 Elliott, The Count-Duke of Olivares, 558; idem, ‘Quevedo and the count-duke of Olivares’, in
idem, Spain and its World 1500-1700 (New Haven and London, 1989), 189–209.
8 S. Fajardo, Idea di un principe politico-cristiano representada en cien empresas, ed. F. J. Díez
de Revenga (Madrid, 1988), 342 (empresa 50). See the comparative study of R. Bireley, The CounterReformation Prince: Antimachiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe
(Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), ch. 8, on Saavedra’s work.

JOSEPH BERGIN

521

1643, compares himself (favourably) to Richelieu and the power and wealth
that he accumulated for himself and his family, while repeating the familiar
claim that Richelieu’s political successes were achieved by unethical methods
which were rendered far worse by his association with heretics.9
In subsequent generations, it was the genre of parallel lives that was most
commonly used within Spain to take the measure of Richelieu, except that the
comparisons rarely involved Olivares. As Guillaume de Valdory remarked in the
early eighteenth century, a comparison between Richelieu and Olivares had
little to attract Spanish writers or historians, for whom Olivares’s reputation was
too intimately bound up with the decline of the monarchy and of Spain’s
previous glory. Instead, their preference was for a comparison between
Richelieu and an earlier Spanish cardinal, Cisneros, the ‘crusading’ minister of
the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabella. This asymmetrical confrontation of
ministerial score-cards from different epochs and contexts probably ensured
that the traditional topoi on the role of morality, luck, pragmatism and prudence
in political action would remain central to the discussion. But whatever
admiration for Richelieu’s political skills and luck was expressed in these works,
he always failed dismally when compared to Cisneros on the question of the
defence of the true religion against heresy. It may be noted here that, given the
French engouement from Henri IV to at least the ministry of Mazarin for virtually
every type of Spanish literary effort, French authors themselves readily engaged
in similar compositions, many with their own political agendas. As a consequence,
praising Richelieu’s skills (prudence, foresight, etc.) could be a way of decrying
Mazarin in mid-century, but by the early eighteenth century it could be used to
contrast (favourably) Richelieu’s dealings with the Huguenots to the brutal and
futile policies of Louis XIV; on the other hand, in the intervening period the not
infrequent praise by French authors of Cisneros’ campaigns against the Muslims
and Jews became a negative judgement of Richelieu and a positive one of Louis
XIV as the restorer of France’s religious unity.10
After the 1720s, however, French writers seem to have abandoned this type
of historical genre to their Spanish counterparts. No French historian of France
or of Richelieu after the abbés Richard and Le Gendre or Guillaume de Valdory
showed any further interest in engaging in such comparisons.11 But, as already
intimated, little is known about the subsequent Spanish historiography of
Richelieu. This is all the more regrettable as the forgotten reputation of Olivares
as a serious reformer brought him back into favour in Bourbon Spain, something
which would have provided a new basis for comparison with Richelieu, by then

9 Memoriales y cartas, documento xx, 223–80, esp. 261–2, 268, for text and analysis. See also
Elliott’s comments on Olivares’ self-defence in Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge, 1984), 154–5,
and in The Count-Duke of Olivares, 656–60.
10 For a study of these questions and the broader intellectual and literary inﬂuence of Spain on
seventeenth-century France generally: J.-F. Schaub, La France espagnole. Racines hispaniques de
l’absolutisme français (Paris, 2003), esp. 275–87.
11 Avezou, ‘La légende de Richelieu’, ii, part 2, ch. 3, ‘L’histoire partagée’.

522

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

acknowledged as a creator of the kind of state that the Bourbons were trying to
import into eighteenth-century Spain. Intriguingly, the continuity of Spanish
historiography is unmistakably echoed by the great novel of 1827, I Promessi
sposi, by the Italian Alessandro Manzoni, in which Manzoni constructs a dialogue
between three characters in Spanish-held northern Italy in 1628, during the
Franco-Spanish conflict over the Mantuan succession. The point of the discussion
was to determine which of the great rivals, Olivares or Richelieu, would triumph
in the impending conflict and for which reasons. One of Manzoni’s characters
vaunts the merits of Olivares and pities the unfortunate Richelieu for having to
face a man who so fully possesses all the political qualities required by the
situation. He finishes by wishing he could return to earth two centuries later in
order to see what posterity had made of the presumption, and therefore, the
reputation of Richelieu.12
This Italian detour shows the durability of an older tradition; so it does not
altogether come as a surprise that at least two parallel lives of Richelieu and
Cisneros—but not Richelieu and Olivares—appeared in Spanish in 1911 and
1944 respectively.13 Neither added anything of worth to the stock of previous
comparisons, any more than mainstream Spanish historical research contributed
to the revaluation of Richelieu which, as we shall see, was beginning to take
shape elsewhere in postwar Europe. In this context, the publication, in 1984, of
the only noteworthy Richelieu–Olivares comparison of the twentieth century is
of particular interest. As with virtually all the previous comparisons since the
eighteenth century, it is owed to the pen of a historian of Spain. But far more to
the point from our present perspective, the comparison in question is the work
of a foreign historian, John Elliott, whose Richelieu and Olivares was quickly
translated into both Spanish and French. But Elliott, whose book begins by
evoking the text of Manzoni quoted above and earlier Spanish judgements of
Richelieu, breaks completely with Spanish literary and biographical tradition
and ignores the conventions and topoi of its moralizing approach; while
devoting due attention to the respective personalities, given the huge burdens
they had to bear as unpopular favourites and/or ministers, Elliott offers a
comparative history of the Richelieu–Olivares conflict which is based on the
most up-to-date international scholarship.14
II

In turning our attention to the Holy Roman Empire and its modern successor,
Germany, we enter a quite different world. It too was much affected by Richelieu
and his policies, but not in the same way as Spain. Richelieu’s policy here was

12

A. Manzoni, I Promessi sposi, in Tutte le opere, ed. M. Martelli (Turin, 1973), vol. 1, 657.
J. Bañares y Magan, Cisneros y Richelieu. Ensayo de un paralelo entre ambos cardenales
y su tiempo (Pontevedra, 1911); N. González Ruiz, Dos cardenales que gobernaron. Cisneros.
Richelieu (Barcelona, 1944).
14 Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares.
13

JOSEPH BERGIN

523

essentially anti-Habsburg rather than anti-German—a concept that would have
made little sense given the political fragmentation of the Empire. Within this
political mosaic, Richelieu, like François I and his successors, sought allies
among the German princes, attempting to use states like Bavaria in order to
checkmate the drive for domination of the Empire by the Habsburgs of Madrid
and Vienna.15 But the peace of Westphalia and especially the policies and
destructive wars of Louis XIV gradually transformed German perceptions of
France, which was increasingly identified, especially during the nineteenth
century, as the hereditary enemy of German unity. During the period that saw
the development of German nationalism, it was inevitable that Richelieu would
take his place in the genealogy of French statesmen regarded as the gravediggers
of the German nation and its aspirations.16
Yet this is far from being the full story of German perceptions of Richelieu,
even during a time of growing mutual hostility. With Leopold von Ranke and his
followers a new school of historiography took shape, initially in Prussia and
then in the newly unified Germany—a school which the whole of Europe,
France included, and even America, would set about imitating and adapting
from the 1870s onwards. It privileged relations between states as the real
driving-force of history, but also paid close attention to the rise of states
themselves and their internal configurations. Ranke famously ‘dared’, as he
himself put it, to publish a full-scale History of France, mainly in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries between 1852 and 1856, and this state-centred
History made generous room for political actors like Richelieu whose activities
were driven by their authors’ superior ‘sense of the state’. Particularly noteworthy
is that Ranke’s unbounded admiration for Richelieu was founded on his belief
that the Cardinal had a better grasp than Olivares or other favourites of the day
of the real political issues at stake for Europe in the Thirty Years War. In that
respect, Ranke could see in Richelieu the rightful successor to the Italian
thinkers of the Renaissance like Machiavelli and Guicciardini, or the Venetian
diplomats with their acute feeling for the interests of state. Such an appreciation
of the Cardinal provided just the kind of impulse needed to study his political
activities in terms of ‘reason of state’ or ‘the will to power’ as a fundamental
principle of foreign policy since the early modern era.17
This makes it easier to understand why, contrary to the Spaniards who
preserved an older literary genre, German historians of the pre- and post-First
World War period could publish substantial ‘modern’ studies which are still
cited, if not always read, by contemporary historians. One or two pertinent
15 R. Babel, ‘Frankreichs Gegner in der politischen Publizistik der ära Richelieu’, in Feinbilder,
die Darstellung des Gegners in der politischen publizistik des Mittelaters und der Neuzeit (Cologne, 1992), 95–116: ‘one searches in vain for a similar critique (of the Spanish Habsburgs) directed against the German branch of the Habsburgs or against the Germans in general’ (110).
16 J. Schillinger, Les Pamphlétaires allemands et la France de Louis XIV (Bern, 1999), analyses this
phenomenon in the anti-Louis XIV pamphlets, while showing its afterlife into the twentieth century.
17 I have used the single-volume edition, with a preface by W. Andreas, Französische Geschichte
(Essen, 1996). See esp. vol. 2, book 10, for Ranke’s narrative and assessment of Richelieu’s ministry.

524

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

examples will have to suffice here. Wilhelm Mommsen, grandson of the only
professional historian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, published in 1922 the
study Richelieu, Alsace and Lorraine, whose subtitle, ‘contribution to the
question of Alsace-Lorraine’, was hardly neutral in these post-Versailles years when
bitter hostility towards the France of Clemenceau did not spare earlier French
statesmen.18 Yet Mommsen’s own analysis provoked controversy, not so much
with French historians but with fellow-German historians of the Ranke school
who objected to Mommsen’s refusal to characterize Richelieu as an anti-German
Rheinpolitiker like Colbert, Louis XIV and the two Napoleons. In 1930, one of
Mommsen’s most vehement nationalist detractors began his critique by promising
to publish a study entitled ‘Richelieu judged by history’, which was evidently not
intended to spare the Cardinal’s reputation. Unfortunately, it never saw the light
of day, as it would surely have shed invaluable light on German historical, and
even political, views of Richelieu on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power.19
Meanwhile, Mommsen had himself kept faith with the Rankean tradition by
publishing a German translation of Richelieu’s Testament politique in a prestigious
series entitled ‘The Classics of Politics’, an edition prefaced by a long presentation
of ‘Richelieu as a statesman’.20 These publications, which can be seen as
representative of German historiography, were themselves epitomized by the
work of Friedrich Meinecke, the most celebrated German historian of his day who
had been the teacher of Mommsen and many other prominent historians. His
best-known book, The Idea of Reason of State in Modern History (1924)—whose
opening sentence reads ‘reason of state is . . . the state’s first law of motion’—
treated a theme close to the heart of German historians and devoted its longest, if
not most incisive chapter to such ideas in the France of Cardinal Richelieu.21
By contrast, there was scarcely any substantial German biography of the
Cardinal that was of comparable quality to the monographs produced by
German historians. That by Karl Federn dated from 1926, but it was relatively
short and certainly far less ambitious than his biography of Mazarin published a
few years earlier. A biography by Willy Andreas, another prominent nationalist
historian of this period, appeared in 1941, but it was no more than a limited
expansion of an essay that he had originally published in 1922, and in any case

18 W. Mommsen, Richelieu, Elsass und Lothringen. Ein Beitrag zur elsass-lothringischen Frage
(Berlin, 1922).
19 K. von Raumer, ‘Richelieu und der Rhein’, Zeitschrift für die Geschichte des Oberrheins, new
series, 43 (1930), 149–64 (with Mommsen’s reply, 483–7). In 1930, von Raumer published a study
of Louis XIV’s 1689 devastation of the Palatinate, a topic that for German nationalists typiﬁed
France’s punitive policies towards Germany, especially in and after 1918.
20 Richelieu, Politisches Testament und kleinere Schiften (Berlin, 1926). The introduction had
previously been published as ‘Richelieu als Staatsmann’, in the Historische Zeitschrift, 127 (1923),
211–42. It is worth comparing Mommsen’s approach with that of the Clausewitzian Hans Rothfels,
‘Richelieus militärisches Testament’, Historische Zeitschrift, 128 (1924), 233–51, who argued tendentiously that ‘for Richelieu military institutions are at the very centre of political life’ (239).
21 F. Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (Berlin, 1924). It was translated into English as Machiavellism. The Doctrine of Reason of State and its Place in Modern
History (London, 1957).

JOSEPH BERGIN

525

it ran to fewer than 100 pages. Yet the only major biography of the Cardinal
published in German during the twentieth century deserves attention for several
reasons. It runs to three volumes, the first of which was published in 1935, and
the two remaining ones after the war.22 All three volumes were translated into
French and English relatively soon after their original publication. The author,
Carl Burckhardt, was Swiss and descended from the Basel family of the great
Renaissance historian Jakob Burckhardt. Before becoming a diplomat and, later,
president of the Red Cross, he had been a university professor in Geneva. The
first volume of his Richelieu trilogy follows the Cardinal’s career down to the
Day of the Dupes and beyond, to 1632. It clearly bears the imprint of the political
climate of the 1920s and 1930s, especially where Burkhardt evokes the place of
the man of passion and genius, strong and authoritarian in stance, in political
life. Such utterances explain how that first volume came to be hailed in the
Historische Zeitschrift’s extended review, which was itself studded with words
like ‘seizure of power’, ‘struggle’, ‘people’ and ‘blood’, as a masterpiece of
German historical insight; and it had the added value of enabling the reviewer
to identify Richelieu’s policies as primarily anti-German.23 Burkhardt himself
realized in due course the problematic character of this first volume, as a result
of which the two postwar volumes, despite their focus on Richelieu’s antiHabsburg policies, were characterized by a very different tone and approach.24
It would be manifestly unfair to present a Swiss biographer as representative
of German interwar historiography, even though there are clear common
features. Yet as far as the continuity of historiographical traditions is concerned,
it is worth noting that virtually the only foreign historians to participate in the
scholarly debates that followed the publication in 1947 of Louis André’s
controversial new edition of Richelieu’s Testament politique were German or
Swiss—all the more so given that not one of them, apart from the francophone
Swiss Rémy Pithon, was a specialist of French history. Clearly, for these Germanspeaking historians, the Testament politique was a document that belonged to
general history, and especially to the history of European political thought, and
it was for this reason that, like Meinecke and his predecessors before them, they
energetically entered the debate about the work’s authenticity and significance.
One of them, Rudolf von Albertini, published a lively and well-balanced analysis
of French political thought in the age of Richelieu in 1951, only subsequently to
turn towards other subjects and never again to write on France or Richelieu.25

22 K. Federn, Richelieu (Vienna, 1926); W. Andreas, Richelieu (Leipzig, 1941); C. J. Burckardt,
Richelieu, 3 vols (Munich 1935–67).
23 Historische Zeitschrift, 156 (1937), 546–56, review by K. von Raumer, who had been one of
Wilhelm Mommsen’s sternest critics in the 1920s as a result of Mommsen’s refusal to see Richelieu
as an anti-German ﬁgure (see n. 20 above).
24 Review of the three-volume English translation of Burkhardt by O. Ranum in the Cath Hist R,
60 (1974), 279–81.
25 R. von Albertini, Das politische Denken in Frankreich zur Zeit Richelieus (Marburg, 1951).
The German-language contributions (by K. von Raumer, S. Skalweit, E. Hassinger, J. Engel and others) to the Political Testament debate were scattered through several journals and festschriften.

526

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

It is, therefore, all the more surprising that when this particular debate was
closing in the late 1950s a new generation of German historians was beginning
to conduct research that would prove altogether more innovative and enriching
for our understanding of Richelieu. They would benefit in no small measure
from an institutional innovation, the creation in 1958 of the German Historical
Centre (later Institute) in Paris, which enabled German historians to set foot
within the French academic and historiographical landscape, while preserving
their own preferred approaches to historical study. Thanks to this novel
institutional structure, which remains almost unique in France, they could now
engage in far more systematic research than their predecessors, since the
archives and the key sources were now fully available to them. It is thus hardly
surprising that the only ‘national’ section of the new edition of the Richelieu
state papers to have been completed is that dealing with the Holy Roman
Empire. For the past two, and now three generations, these German historians
of early modern France have never been especially numerous, and few of them
have shown much interest, in print at least, in Richelieu as a French political
figure, or in the history of his ministry generally. The older German ‘couple’ of
Richelieu and reason of state is no longer their prime concern, but it has not
disappeared entirely, since it continues to stimulate reflection on the real
objectives and methods of the foreign policy conducted by Richelieu.
This shift in the German historiography of Richelieu was first signalled in
1963, when Fritz Dickmann, a historian of the treaty of Westphalia and not of
France, published a pioneering article, ‘Richelieu’s legal thought and power
politics’. In it, Dickmann insists on the central role of right, and its theological
and moral foundations, in Richelieu’s thinking, which in Dickman’s view makes
him anything but a disciple of Machiavelli. What is especially important to note
is that Dickmann produces this displacement of perspective in the course of an
analysis of the preliminaries to the treaty of Westphalia. His objective was to
test the principles of foreign policy ascribed to Richelieu by a painstaking
analysis of his instructions to French diplomats from the outset of the negotiations
at Westphalia. By comparing the successive versions of these instructions and
the memoranda attached to them, Dickman sought to get inside the real thinking
of the Cardinal on these matters. It was no accident that the subtitle of this
groundbreaking contribution was ‘a study based on recently discovered
documents’.26
Regardless of the solidity of the conclusions that may be drawn from it, this
method of examining Richelieu’s political ideas through the prism of his
diplomatic instructions and related documents was a real innovation. It had
unexpected benefits, not least because it enabled historians to establish more
firmly than previously the connection between the Richelieu who sought to
consolidate France’s external power and Richelieu the author of political ideas.

26 F. Dickmann, ‘Rechtsgedanke und Machtpolitik bei Richelieu. Studien an neuendeckten
Quellen’, Historische Zeitschrift, 196 (1963), 265–319.

JOSEPH BERGIN

527

It is no exaggeration to say that the research done by German historians since
1963 has largely followed and expanded on the perspectives opened up by
Dickmann, who was more interested in the practice of diplomacy than in the
history of ideas per se. His successors have refined his approach by conducting
numerous case studies, each of which is based on first-hand sources, whose
accessibility dispenses German historians from dependence on the previously
dominant treatises, pamphlets or other pièces de circonstance in print. Yet this
research remains less well known than it should be outside Germany, France
included, for despite the numerous personal and institutional ties that now exist
among French and German historians, the language barrier remains a serious
problem, and translations of major works remain stubbornly few.27 The result is
that some important contributions towards a new view of Richelieu still wait to
be fully absorbed. They can be presented under four headings:
- Richelieu’s external policy was not a systematic effort to secularize
relations between states (a view that is not conﬁned to German
scholarship);
- Richelieu did not think in terms of massive territorial gains, and
even less of France’s ‘natural’ frontiers. He sought to obtain and
keep passages between France and its neighbours, and did so in an
essentially defensive perspective;
- every conquest or territorial acquisition should be justiﬁed by historical
rights belonging to the French monarchy;
- Richelieu sought after a durable, general peace in Europe, one
founded on a system of collective security rather than on classic
alliances.
This last theme, the search for a system of collective security, which is not
altogether detached from the fears and aspirations of our own time, has remained
one of the main threads of German research on Richelieu for the past half
century, from Hermann Weber to Klaus Malettke. The latter has characterized
the Cardinal’s foreign policy in terms which show clearly the itinerary taken by
German historiography since the polemics over Rheinpolitik in the 1920s:
The idea of a system of collective security as pursued by Richelieu
contains the essential components of a modern system of collective
security—it is universal, for according to the Cardinal, all the states
of Christendom should participate in its negotiation and then
become members of the system itself; it has a guarantee grounded in
international law; it involves a ban on the use of force in pursuing
individual objectives and a mechanism designed to deal with those

27 The fullest bibliography of these works (down to 2000) is in K. Malettke, Les Relations entre
la France et le Saint-Empire au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 2001), pp. 678–723.

528

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

who would violate peace, beginning with negotiations and then, if
necessary, with resort to the use of military force in order to
terminate conﬂicts.28
Such a conclusion would not be out of place in contemporary debates about
peace and how to deal with international conflicts, and makes it easier to
understand why a German commentator hazarded the opinion that Richelieu
was the first European.
It may seem excessive to spend so much time on a historiography which still
remains difficult for non-German readers at every level to familiarize themselves
with. But the objective here is not to show what German scholarship has
contributed to an established common stock of knowledge, but rather to draw
attention to the originality of an approach that has succeeded in presenting a
highly unfamiliar face of Richelieu.
III

The final ‘face’ of Richelieu to be considered here is markedly different again,
which reflects the peculiar trajectory of the Anglo-Saxon image of him over the
centuries, and the at times unexpected sources of the profile that he acquired
since his death. Politics did play its part in all this, albeit in distinctive ways. Of
all of France’s neighbours, England was the one which was least affected by the
Cardinal’s foreign policy, while also being the one which, especially in the
1640s and again after 1688, most firmly rejected the French model of absolute
monarchy that he personified. But Richelieu and his ministry did not pass
unnoticed in England, not least because England, too, experienced royal
favourites, from Buckingham to Strafford, and had Stuart kings with perceived
absolutist leanings. For these and perhaps other reasons, Richelieu did not leave
England indifferent, as is evident from the fact that some of the most widely
read early French accounts of his life, those of Vialart, Silhon and Déageant,
were translated as early as the 1640s and opened the way to a better grasp of
the Cardinal-Minister’s politics. And although English curiosity about Richelieu
seems to have ebbed and flowed thereafter, that did not prevent him from
becoming at least as well known there as elsewhere in Europe at different
historical junctures.
Of course, the problem is to identify which type of familiarity and which
Richelieu we have in mind. The fact that the Cardinal figures several times in
the 1970s television series Monty Python may seem a far-fetched indicator, but

28 K. Malettke, ‘French foreign policy and the European states system in the era of Richelieu and
Mazarin’, in The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, Episode or Model in Modern
History?, ed. P. Krüger and P. W. Schroeder (Münster, 2002), 42–3. Many of Malettke’s publications
are brought together in two volumes, Frankreich, Deutschland und Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Marburg, 1994) and Les Relations entre la France et le Saint-Empire au XVIIe siècle. The
third chapter of the latter volume, entitled ‘Richelieu et le Saint-Empire’, provides a convenient
synthesis of German research in this ﬁeld during the previous half-century.

JOSEPH BERGIN

529

it can be argued that it was no accident. In some ways, it was nothing more than
an updating of a much older presence of Richelieu in the English theatre. Of
course, Richelieu as a figure in the theatre is not an English peculiarity. On the
contrary, as it is clear that from the 1820s onwards, the main sources of this
theatrical version of the Cardinal were themselves French. Alfred de Vigny’s
Cinq Mars was the most obvious of these sources, but we should not
underestimate the impact of the works of Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas
across the Channel. At any rate, successful English playwrights, who are now
wholly forgotten, revised and recast these French plays with great success for
English audiences. It was through them that at least the English theatre-going
public—and beyond that England’s educated elites generally—became familiar
with Richelieu between approximately 1840 and the First World War. The
image of Richelieu conveyed by these works was not a flattering one, since the
English playwrights mostly accentuated the negative elements of the Cardinal’s
personality and behaviour that were abundantly present in de Vigny and his
contemporaries. It was a black legend in its own right.29
By comparison, it remains difficult to establish by which other means—or
media—the political and historical role played by Richelieu was, or could have
been, conveyed to the Victorians and their successors. Certainly, the works of
England’s early modern historians did not attract much attention by comparison
with those of Germany’s Wissenschaft—or rather ‘the great hive of German
workers’, as Stubbs put it—which many Victorian scholars admired so much.30
Nor did the presence of the famous triple portrait by Philippe de Champaigne
in the National Gallery after 1869 do much to galvanize English interest in
Richelieu and his achievements. In the absence of substantial works of historical
research, there were at least a few biographies of the Cardinal, but they were all
relatively undistinguished. In 1930, Hilaire Belloc, a widely read English Catholic
writer and man of letters, published a biography of Richelieu. It was one of a
stream of biographies from Belloc’s prolific pen, and its author’s reputation
enabled it to attract considerable attention. Belloc accused the Cardinal of being
in some respects the precursor of Bismarck, seeing in him a political figure who
was concerned only with the power of the state. According to Belloc, Richelieu
eliminated the religious principles of Catholicism from politics and in so doing
opened the way to their replacement by those of nationalism. Such an overtly
polemical tone was not usually adopted by English historians, and not only by
Richelieu biographers. Yet Belloc may have put his finger on something. The
historian Robert Knecht recounts how whenever he asked senior school pupils
in England during the 1950s and 1960s to name the European statesmen who
were familiar to them, they invariably singled out Bismarck and Richelieu,

29 R. Knecht, ‘The reputation of Richelieu’, in Seventeenth-Century Fr Stud, 15 (1993), 5–24,
esp. 17ff; idem, ‘Cardinal Richelieu, hero or villain?’, History Today (2003), 10–17.
30 D. R. Kelly, Fortunes of History. Historical Enquiry from Herder to Huizinga (New Haven,
2003), esp. ch. 9; M. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of
Modernism, 1870–1970 (Cambridge, 2005).

530

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

and in that order. The combination is a curious one, to say the least, and it is
unlikely that Belloc invented his comparison ex nihilo.31
Yet when, in 1965, the American historian William Church reviewed the
most important works published on Richelieu since the war, he included only
one book and five articles published in English. And in this modest trawl, to
which we shall return presently, only one item, an article, had been written by
an English historian. All the other English-language items were the work of
American historians.32 Clearly, English familiarity with Richelieu had inspired
hardly any scholarly work worthy of serious mention, whereas American
historians, who had probably not had to contend with English views, theatrical
or other, of Richelieu were already hard at work. In reality, at the time when
Church was conducting this historiographical stock-taking, things were on the
point of changing. From that point of view, Anglo-American historians resemble
in some ways, as we have seen, their German counterparts of the 1950s. Church
himself is a good example of this, for in 1972 he published a heavyweight study
on the familiar theme of Richelieu and reason of state, in which he adopted a
position that is already familiar from the German historiography of Richelieu,
and in which he insists on the importance of religious themes in the Cardinal’s
thinking and politics.33 But Church did not create a school in his image within
the Anglo-American world, and that was not merely because he died a few years
after the publication of his book.
Among Anglo-American historians of the postwar period who were drawn to
Richelieu, it was not political philosophy or the practice of reason of state that
grabbed their attention. Indeed, once these historians, too, began to beat a track
to the French archives, it was questions of internal politics in the broad sense,
and in particular its practice rather than its supposed principles, which interested
them most. Leaving to one side the largely theoretical debates on the question
of absolutism, they attempted to study and understand the methods and the
means of action available to the monarchy for the governance of such a huge
and internally disparate country. Such an approach seemed all the more normal
to them because their own political culture did not possess the notion of an
abstract state which is itself the primary actor in the political process. This
difference in the political cultures of France and the Anglo-American world was
an important critical stimulus to their efforts to decipher the political world in
which Richelieu operated. It is fair to say that the first step in that direction was
taken by Orest Ranum in 1963—the same year as Fritz Dickmann’s pioneering
essay—in his study of the ‘creatures’ of Richelieu, a book rapidly translated into
French. This study brought Richelieu down from the heights of his habitual
31 Personal testimony of Robert Knecht. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader for French
History, who noted that Marc Fumaroli has recently described Richelieu as ‘the Bismarck of the
Counter-Reformation’ (in Goldfarb, Richelieu, Art and Power, 25), a view which assumes that
Richelieu, like Bismarck, was committed to a secular ideology of raison d’état.
32 W. F. Church, ‘Publications on Cardinal Richelieu since 1945, a bibliographical study’, Jl Mod
Hist, 37 (1965), 421–44.
33 Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (see n. 3 above).

JOSEPH BERGIN

531

Mount Olympus and reinserted him into the world of actual politics; it showed
how he finally succeeded, but only in the 1630s, in creating around himself a
solid team of ministers comprised of clients of his, men who owed him
everything, and who understood that together they needed to maintain good
relations between the king and his ministers, which to the very end remained
the primary objective of Richelieu’s career.34 It also followed from Ranum’s
study that if Richelieu described himself as a ‘creature’ of Louis XIII, then the
entire political landscape of his day was one in which ties of patronage and
clientage were at work everywhere, from top to bottom, and that such ties
were the real glue of the political system. This type of political analysis which,
according to Ranum himself, endeavoured to extend to France in the age of
Richelieu the methods used by the English historian of antiquity, Ronald Syme,
to explain the Augustan political revolution in ancient Rome, and by Lewis
Namier to understand the workings of parliament under George III, was to be
in due course extended far beyond the council, court and capital by a generation
of younger historians, whose methods and findings were presented in an
authoritative work of Sharon Kettering, Brokers, Patrons and Clients in
Seventeenth-Century France, a title which would have scarcely been imaginable
only a decade or so earlier.35
In fact, this approach was one that suited American historians, since their
political culture, and also their sociology and political science, were accustomed
to seeing politics as an interminable process of negotiation and compromise
between interest groups, with the profits and losses that it produced. It was
primarily institutions and political actors in groups rather than as individuals
that Anglo-American historians sought to explore. Doubtless, in some respects
their own history predisposed them to pay more attention to some questions
rather than others—for example, to political and/or representative assemblies,
such as the Estates General or the provincial estates, in those provinces where
they still existed before the Fronde. Another, more recent outcome was the
publication of detailed studies on key components of the power of the French
monarchy during Richelieu’s ministry, particularly on both the army and the
navy. Both sets of studies showed how the structural weaknesses of these
institutions were major obstacles to the success of the Cardinal’s foreign and
indeed domestic policies. Richelieu may have had a freer hand in maritime
affairs and possessed greater personal authority there, at least as measured by
the office he held, but the creation of a French royal navy remained an enormous
challenge that faced a huge raft of obstacles. Alan James, the historian of the
navy under Richelieu, rejected the temptation to see in Richelieu the man who
was determined to start from scratch and create a wholly modern navy; on the
contrary, he would press into service the classic techniques of his age and
would himself take the place of the ‘feudal’ elements that were opposed to the

34
35

O. A. Ranum, Richelieu and the Councillors of Louis XIII (Oxford, 1963).
S. Kettering, Patrons, Brokers and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford, 1986).

532

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

necessary modernization of this particular arm of the state. James concludes
that Richelieu ‘had no comprehensive programme for reform, nor was he a
prophet for the potential of sea power’.36 As for the far more vital military
operations on land, David Parrott’s wide-ranging study, Richelieu’s Army,
radically challenged the traditional ‘state-building’ views of the Cardinal’s
ministry and the recent ‘military revolution’ thesis into which they seemed to
fit so easily, given that both portrayed Richelieu as originating the kind of
military might that would be fully revealed under Louis XIV. Parrott painted
quite a different picture, one that extends far beyond the narrow sphere of
military activity itself. In his account, Richelieu tried hard and long, but
unsuccessfully, to keep France out of the Thirty Years War; and when he was
ultimately forced into it, neither the military nor the administrative apparatus
was efficient enough to deliver anything like the success that he envisaged.
Parrott emphasized the degree of improvisation that was necessary in order to
put armies into the field and maintain them in existence after 1635, and argued
that political priorities made the French unwilling to contemplate viable
alternatives like ‘military entrepreneurship’. Richelieu, in this account, just
about managed to maintain adequate control of the army, not via the creation of
new ‘modern’ command structures, but via the cultivation of relations of
patronage and clientage within the army high command, even where the results
of such practices was often military failure.37
No less essential for the policy of confrontation with the Habsburgs was the
state of the royal finances and their ramifications throughout the provinces and
localities of France. This subject was extensively studied by Richard Bonney in
his books on the provincial intendants and the royal finances, both of which
underlined the unplanned, ad hoc changes which occurred during the Richelieu
ministry. In contrast to Françoise Bayard, whose book Le Monde des financiers
au XVIIe siècle (1988) presented a social-structural study of financiers, their
world and their activities, Bonney provided a fine-grained chronological history
of the finances, and of their impact on politics at the highest level and on the
conduct of the war itself.38 On the other hand, for all the relatively broad scope
of their sense of the political, it is surprising that virtually no Anglo-American
historians undertook serious research into the revolts, both noble and popular,
against the policies of Richelieu and Mazarin which attracted so many historians
within France from the 1950s onwards.39 Likewise, the intellectual, religious
and spiritual life of France in this period—and that of Richelieu himself, for that

36 A. James, Navy and Government in Early Modern France 1572–1661 (Woodbridge, Suffolk,
2004), p. 167.
37 D. Parrott, Richelieu’s Army. War, Government and Society in France 1624–1642 (Cambridge,
2001).
38 R. Bonney, Political Change in France under Richelieu and Mazarin 1624–1661 (Oxford,
1978); idem, The King’s Debts. Politics and Finance in France 1589–1661 (Oxford, 1981);
F. Bayard, Le Monde des ﬁnanciers aux XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1988).
39 The most important exception is W. Beik, Urban Protest in Seventeenth-Century France
(Cambridge, 1997).

JOSEPH BERGIN

533

matter—remains a domain which, with a few exceptions, is little visited by
Anglo-American historians.40
These examples should suffice to show how Anglo-American historians
brought to the study of France in the age of Richelieu methods and intuitions
which enabled them to examine more precisely the actual role of the Cardinal
within the French state that was evolving between Henri IV and Louis XIV. If it
is unnecessary to itemize further the works produced by them, some attempt
needs to be made to establish how far they contributed towards a more detailed
and sharper picture of the Cardinal’s own activities, before and during his
ministry. Biographies of Richelieu in English remain rather few, and some of
them—from Elizabeth Marvick’s The Young Richelieu: The Psychoanalytic
Basis of Leadership to Anthony Levi’s Richelieu and the Making of France—
carry titles that suggest that the last thing they wish to offer is mere biography.
Robert Knecht’s Richelieu appeared in a collection entitled ‘Profiles in
Power’which was in no way intended as a refuge for biographers.41 But if there
is a field in which the biographical approach can still produce significant results,
it is the rather crucial one of the relations between king and minister during
Louis XIII’s reign. For far too long, biographies of Richelieu left very little room
for the person and activities of the king, thereby reinforcing, wittingly or
unwittingly, the view of Richelieu as an all-powerful minister who had nothing
to fear from his sovereign. As we have already seen, this approach was by no
means confined to French writers. The recent scholarly edition of the Journal
of Jean Héroard, physician-in-ordinary to the young Louis XIII, provided the
impetus for a number of biographies of Louis XIII, both in French and in English.
Two American biographies of the king had appeared only a few years prior to
the Héroard Journal, and both of them made far more use of psychology, and
even psychoanalysis, than their French counterparts. In his study, entitled
simply Louis XIII, the Just, Lloyd Moote concluded—and his conclusion has
been further reinforced since his study was published in 1989—that Louis was
a demanding and difficult master, and a king who was extremely conscious of
his royal duty and who played a full part in politics during the so-called Richelieu
years; there could be no question of an all-powerful minister doing simply as he
pleased.42 Elizabeth Marvick also drew heavily on Héroard’s Journal for her
biography of the young Louis XIII of 1986, in which she conducts a Freudian
analysis in order to understand the consequences for the rest of the king’s reign
of the socialization, with its many unresolved conflicts, of the infant and
adolescent Louis XIII.43
40 These ﬁelds have long been dominated either by French scholars or, as in the case of intellectual history, by literary scholars, French and non-French. The chapters and especially the endnotes
of A. Levi, Cardinal Richelieu and the Making of France (London, 2000) make this abundantly
clear.
41 Levi, Cardinal Richelieu and the Making of France; E. W. Marvick, The Young Richelieu, a
Psychoanalytic Approach to Leadership (Chicago, 1980); R. Knecht, Richelieu (London, 1991).
42 A. L. Moote, Louis XIII, the Just (Los Angeles, 1989).
43 E. W. Marvick, Louis XIII, the Making of a King (New Haven, 1986).

534

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

By contrast, the overtly biographical approach to Richelieu himself in English
has not, it would seem, delivered equally valuable insights. Before writing her
biography of the young Louis XIII, Elizabeth Marvick had tried her hand at a
‘young’ Richelieu (down to 1614) in order to uncover the ‘psychoanalytical
foundations’ of the leadership roles that he would assume in adult life, first in
the Church and then in governing the kingdom. Although Marvick approaches
the evidence, both manuscript and printed, for Richelieu’s early life with
considerable scrupulousness in order to measure the impact of those years on
his character, it remains the case that the young Richelieu did not have a
Héroard to record his motions, bodily and otherwise or, more critically, the
environment in which he was socialized. Consequently, our knowledge of his
early life up to his entry into the French episcopate remains extremely vague
and too replete with clichés of different types, thus rendering it impossible for
a psychoanalytic biography to transform the image we have of the future
Cardinal-Minister. Marvick’s Richelieu thus remains far more theoretical and
hypothetical than her Louis XIII. During the 1980s a more unusual approach to
Richelieu was made possible by the use of notarial archives, whose records
had rarely figured in any study of Richelieu, biographical or otherwise. In a
first book, the present author portrayed a largely unknown Richelieu as he
built up a massive fortune, the growth of which was connected to the different
stages of his career, from bishop to cardinal and minister. A minister’s fortune
was always presented en bloc by its beneficairy and his defenders as the result
of royal liberality in return for devoted service and was invariably attacked by
critics as a monument to greed and excessive power, but a fine-grained history
of the making of such a fortune shows how deliberate and long term many of
the individual decisions relating to its internal constitution turned out to be.
Here we find ourselves rethinking the boundaries between the private and the
public in ways that are radically different from our own. This study was also in
some ways an application of the argument proposed as early as 1963 by Orest
Ranum that Richelieu was not the sworn enemy of the French nobility, and
that entering the highest ranks of the aristocracy was one of his deepest
ambitions.44 It was followed a few years later by a second book which set
about revisiting the myths and legend of the young genius who outshone his
contemporaries and who manifestly deserved the high office that he duly
obtained in the 1620s. This study set aside the recourse to superior gifts,
intellectual or psychological, and attempted to understand how someone from
Richelieu’s background might attempt to make a major career in early Bourbon
politics: in its tracking of Richelieu down to 1624, it proposed a different
framework of analysis by putting him firmly back into the contexts into which
he ‘naturally’ fitted—family, church and court.45
44 J. Bergin, Cardinal Richelieu, Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (London and New Haven,
1985); O. Ranum, ‘Richelieu and the great nobility: some aspects of early modern political motives’,
Fr Hist Stud, 3 (1963), 184–204.
45 J. Bergin, The Rise of Richelieu (London and New Haven, 1991).

JOSEPH BERGIN

535

The Richelieu who emerges from Anglo-American scholarship was someone
seeking to make a career for himself in a quite particular political context, in
which he could certainly not count upon his intellectual worth or his putative
genius in order to become, and even less so to remain, the principal minister of
Louis XIII. In this perspective, Richelieu the political figure and the minister
appears as far less modern than was previously thought, and was little concerned
in practice about pursuing the kinds of institutional reforms that for a long time
endeared him to French historians fixated on the rise of the state. To consolidate
his position as minister, but also to achieve his no less vital ambition to place the
Richelieu family among the great nobility once he had himself disappeared, the
Cardinal used all the most classic methods available to him—matrimonial
alliances, the colossal accumulation of property, titles (no fewer than three
duchies), government offices, and so on. By contrast, the Richelieu who was
credited with modernizing the way France was governed is scarcely anywhere
to be found—the monarchy that he and Mazarin passed on to Louis XIV and his
successors was shaped more by the imperatives of war than by the programmes
of reformers of the realm. And needless to say, the man of destiny who, for
numerous French political figures and historians like Gabriel Hanotaux, author
of the most exhaustive Richelieu biography ever written, was identified with an
abstract concept of the state, simply never had any place in the thinking of
Anglo-American historians.
IV

The comparative aperçu of the historiographical ‘career’ of Richelieu proposed
in this article allows us to suggest that the current views of him and his historical
role continue to exhibit the distinctive influences of the historiographical
cultures in which they have incubated. There is every reason to think that the
contrasting interpretations of him that are now current will continue to evolve
in years to come, perhaps in unexpected directions. This is all the more likely
because, as a reading of the best recent works on him make clear, the previously
separate historiographies are increasingly being cross-fertilized by each other
and thus converging to provide a more composite portrait. There are numerous
reasons for this beyond the greater internationalization of scholarship and
research agendas. One major shift that facilitated greater rapprochement has
not been directly discussed here, namely the decline in the influence of the
Annales school within the French historiographical landscape, but also
internationally. For several decades the Annales had resolutely turned their
back on every form of political, diplomatic and military history—in short, the
history of the state—regarding them as insignificant by comparison with
demographic, social and economic history. By contrast, the worlds of AngloAmerican and German-speaking scholarship never experienced such an
extended caesura. Crucially, as they continued to practise political history, they
also sought to enrich it by borrowing and applying concepts and analyses from
the social sciences, all of which enabled them to envisage history, even political

536

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

history, as much more than a chronicle of kings and wars. As far as the portrait
of Richelieu is concerned, the Anglo-American contribution to this ‘new’
political history complemented in significant ways that of its German
counterparts, without a clear division of labour in the archives having been
envisaged at any point.46 Now that it is far easier than in the past to bring
together the perspectives on Richelieu that have emerged within foreign
scholarship in recent generations and to compare them with those of a new
generation of French historians not considered in this article, the challenge will
be to ‘imagine’ a new Richelieu who will increasingly be a synthesis of different
historical traditions. What kind of portrait will emerge from this labour? How
similar or compatible will these different faces of Richelieu prove to be in the
future?

46 For an early, though limited, attempt to bring together some of these themes, see J. Bergin and
L. Brockliss (eds), Richelieu and his Age (Oxford 1992), which contains the only essay in English
from the pen of Hermann Weber, ‘Une bonne paix: Richelieu’s foreign policy and the peace of
Christendom’, 45–69.

