Cardinal Richelieu and the Making of France [antikvár]

Foreword This biography was originally conceived not only on accovint of the fasdnatlon of Its enigmatic subject's complex personality, but also as an appropriate way of probing both the strong resurgence and the incipient collapse of the euphoric moral and religious values of early seventeenth-century France. Richelieu's career itself reciprocally illuminated and was illuminated by the new values which were at first embraced, and then began to be rejected by French society. Richelieu had a prodigious capacity for mastering detail, and for combining the widest vision of strategic political objectives with detailed attention to the minutiae not only of military organisation and political tactics, but also of ecclesiastical proprieties and relatively trivial personal and domestic concerns. Immensely intelligent, he was given to meticulous observance of the formalities, and was obsessively fastidious in his personal arrangements. He had great charm, delicate sensibilities, and came to care even for the choice of patterns into which the starched napkins were folded for his table. He was a sharp pastoral theologian, a devout bishop, a pragmatic, cunning and devious constitutional innovator, a dedicated patriot, a skilled military strategist, and a chief minister of immense vision. He inaugurated the unifying domestic reforms which created for France its own cultural identity. Main-line biographers and historians, while reflecting the individual preoccupations of their own periods, have invariably concentrated on Richelieu's political activity, and on the creation of his centralising political machinery. The need for a new biography