Word: richelieu
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...into Casablanca with engine trouble. These vessels, which were armed under the armistice clause permitting French defense of the French Empire, had brought about 3,000 more men, all of whom would be a long time forgiving the British for the Battle of Oran. The new battleship Richelieu which the British crippled last July was in drydock at Dakar, but there was nothing wrong with her 15-inch guns...
...fashion of tightly laced waists, which flourished off & on for several hundred years, caused women great harm and discomfort. Despite the gibes of Satirist Montaigne and the objurgations of several French kings and of Cardinal Richelieu, ladies kept trying to cut themselves in two. In the late 18th Century, a lady had to call in both a manservant and a maidservant for the lacing job, and if she was stout the two helpers had to use a wooden crank. Ribs of these unfortunates were often so compressed that they overlapped, bringing on lung trouble, hemorrhages, other internal disorders. Two-thirds...
...situation that faced Richelieu as France's leading statesman might well have made him sicker. It looks contemporary to readers in 1940. "The inner structure of the country was still far from stable. The idea of national unity . . . was at times the concern of the burghers merely and the townsfolk, who formed the main bulwark of the kingdom; the great feudal nobles . . . played at high treason. ... As for the Protestants, they were a still greater danger, a State within the State." Menacing Spain had its fifth columns among Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots conspired with the Protestant Germans...
...wily Cardinal saw that he must ally himself with the German Protestants. Before he could safely ally himself with the German Protestants, he must crush their allies in France, the Huguenots. Hence the first blow against Catholic Spain was the destruction of the French Protestants. Eighteen years later, Richelieu had crippled Spain, tamed the French nobles, made the King supreme in France, France supreme in Europe...
Says realistic Historian Burckhardt: "Like all the great creative forces in history, Richelieu was a great destroyer. He tore down as much as he built up, yet it was not his fault, but that of his successors, that they did not grasp the profound lesson of his work, the lesson that no wall must be removed unless another and better one is erected...