Word: richelieu
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...such a force was being created, and on the Continent its principal inventor was the despised and sickly rationalist, Cardinal Richelieu. What Richelieu devised at home was the modern European state. France was his working model, and as its most powerful Minister of government, he developed a strong, centralized, departmental administrative system that, to some extent, endures today. Abroad, his military and diplomatic machinations helped ensure the continued existence of a weakened, fragmented Europe, soon to be dominated by France. The Cardinal also devised, as Historian O'Connell relates in this clear and remarkably sympathetic study, a code...
...Eminence Grise. It is hardly possible to overstate the treacherous confusion that Richelieu's Europe presented to any would-be diplomat. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) turned much of the Continent into a wasteland. Alliances flickered on and off like fireflies. Richelieu did his work, too, in a time of witch burning and archaism. His very closest adviser and friend, a shrewd Capuchin named Père Joseph (for whose shadowy role the title Eminence grise seems to have been invented) was entirely obsessed, for example, with a yearning to renew the crusades against the infidel...
French social order ensured disorder. Soldiering and conspiracy were almost the only trades open to the younger sons of an already partly superfluous nobility, and many of them saw fit to follow both. Friction between Huguenot and Catholic never really ceased. Conspiracies against Louis and Richelieu coagulated regularly around Gaston, Louis' vain and frustrated younger brother, and Marie de Medici, their harridan mother...
...Richelieu foiled most of his enemies, including his great rival, the Spanish Minister, Olivares. After Richelieu had outmaneuvered him, Olivares blandly offered his angry king, Philip IV, a choice 17th century sophistry: "God wants us to make peace, for He is depriving us visibly and absolutely of all means of war." The great Cardinal outwitted himself, however, when he subsidized the warmaking of the fanatic Swedish Protestant, Gustavus Adolphus. Richelieu counted on Gustavus to harry the Austrian Hapsburgs, which he did. But the Cardinal was unable to keep Gustavus leashed, and until the Swede's death...
Migraine and Piety. To contemporaries-and to later observers, Richelieu himself was equally hard to comprehend. A crossbreed of the middle-class and the impoverished country gentry, he had social ambitions and possessed extraordinary charm. Yet he was without humor. He could play the guitar. He kept 14 cats. He suffered the torments of migraine, piles and piety-O'Connell at least grants him piety, though he often has been considered a great hypocrite. He was certainly a ruthless schemer all his life. After receiving a bishopric through family connections, at the age of 21, he used his clerical...