Richelieu, like all men who count in history, had a very simple plan, if it may be called a plan at all. He was determined to aggrandize the material power of the nation. He had, as have also all great men in history, not a simple but a highly complex and subtle appreciation of the medium in which he lived. To him is due that of the national soul,) which in France is only satisfied by unity and rapid cen tralized measures. He made short work of the Huguenot pretension to maintain within the state a body of rich men defying the authority of the state. He took, after a most gallant and savage Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle, in spite of the active aid of foreign enemies, whom the Huguenots had at once summoned to their aid, and by the Peace of Alais in 1629 he destroyed their conspiracy. He left them, however, complete liberty of con science, a stroke of statesmanship as wise as it seemed (at that moment) enormous and para doxical. At that moment and for long years afterward it was death to, say mass in England and no Englishman could have understood the ideas of toleration at all. Neither did any Frenchman understand it as an idea, and Richelieu probably thought it illogical himself, but he forced it on the French in spite of civil war, as a measure of statesmanship.
He was not content to destroy the root of rebellion; he was also determined to destroy what was left of the ambition of the squires, apart from any religious or philosophical atti tude their class might have adopted. He took the occasion of an excess in The practice of duelling to execute more than one great Catholic noble who persisted in flouting his decree against that habit; in a word, before the outbreak of the civil war in England, he had made of France one united country in which the power of government was observed by all, and in which all tendencies to oligarchy had been utterly destroyed.
Abroad his policy was naturally the very opposite. As he had desired to strengthen France, so he desired to weaken her rivals. With this object he ardently supported all tendencies to division beyond her frontiers, and notably the claim of the German Protestants against what had a hundred years ago been the common civilization of Europe. There had broken out in Germany in 1618 the war known as the Thirty Years' War (q.v.) in which the small Protestant parcels, notably those whose conversion to Christianity was recent and whose foothold in European civilization was still in secure, had determined to break off from that tradition by the sword. Their cause was hope less in Germany itself, but Richelieu threw the whole weight of French influence upon their side. In about 1635 the empire and the old
traditions of unity were completely successful, and in the same year France declared war against the empire. The Spaniards invaded and were with difficulty but in the next few years the French armies occupied the Rous sillon (which is now the Department of the Pyrenees Orientales), and when Richelieu died in 1642 and, some months after him, the Icing, Louis XIII, a definite French success was ap proaching. The young, brave, eccentric and somewhat taciturn princeof the blood, Conde, then Duke of En ien, delivered the fortress of Rocroy on 19 May 1643, and five years later in company with the great Turenne, he accom plished for his country after the most striking military successes, the Peace of Westphalia, by which, in 1648, the Protestant principalities,— and notably, the sandy wastes whence has sprung the kingdom of Prussia,— were created independent units, and the power of the Aus trian Empire and of the old traditional central authority in Germany finally wiped out.
The centre of the 17th century, like the close of the 16th and like the year 1515, is a date upon which all historical students should re pose. Another stage in the great quarrel was accomplished and the schism of Western Chris tendom was signed and sealed. Within a few months Charles I was to lose his head and the English were to lose forever the conception of monarchy and; perhaps forever, the sentiment of civic equality. Germany, though destined per haps ultimately to be reunited, was for 300 years left torn between the okl Roman civiliza tion and the barbarism of the north. France, the agent of this vast Protestant establishment, had, so far as domestic politics were con cerned, welded her unity, re-established her own traditions and crystallized into the highly def inite modern form, which she not only pre serves to this day, but seems destined to pre serve indefinitely. There was not yet a code of laws, the old gimcrack pretensions of' the nobility were still strong, but the whole spirit of the people and of their literature had be come again egalitarian and Roman, and the destiny of the next century and a half might be predicted from the Peace of Westphalia.
Meanwhile Louis XIII was dead, a little child six years old, another Louis, his son, was upon the throne. The regency was again in the hands of a woman and when great develop ment before mentioned was in process, the goy:. ernment was in the hands of Anne of Austria, the queen, and of her favorite, an Italian of great subtlety and low birth, known to the French as Mazarin (q.v.).