Cardinal Richelieu is popularly considered the classic eminence grise, as indispensable to Louis XIII as Potemkin was to Catherine the Great or Olivares to Philip IV of Spain. His cunning and diplomatic skill are legendary, but he has not usually been considered a devout prince of the church; the red hat is conventionally seen as camouflage for secular ambition, and many critics have accused him of womanising, coldblooded cruelty and even cynical atheism. Anthony Levi, an ex-Jesuit, sets out to change such perceptions in a singular piece of revisionism that connects Richelieu more with the Catholic revival and the Counter-Reformation than intrigue and realpolitik.
Richelieu's rise was rapid, though Levi does not sketch the how and why of this very effectively, and he was effectively Louis XIII's chief minister by 1624 when he was 39. The cardinal's aims were threefold: to destroy the power of the Huguenots; to extirpate the influence of France's feudal aristocracy, les grands, and to make France once again a first-class world power. He succeeded in all three: the triumphant siege of La Rochelle in 1628 effectively gelded the Huguenots; the many failed rebellions and subsequent executions of the feudal aristocrats - Marillac, Montmorency, Bouteille, Cinq-Mars - achieved the second aim; and France's entry into the Thirty Years War on the side of Sweden and against Spain achieved the third objective, though the crowning glory of French arms, Conde's victory over the Spanish tercios at Rocroi, happened in 1643, the year after Richelieu's death.
This is above all a Catholic biography of Richelieu, paying a lot of attention to the cultural and religious milieu in which the cardinal operated, emphasising the way his life witnessed the transition from the optimism of Francis de Sales to the gloom of Jansenism. Paradoxically, though, Levi stresses that Richelieu's over-riding aim was the glory of France. Even as he sought the Pope's dispensation from the need to recite the breviary daily, he was fighting papal armies. Religion and politics were kept strictly apart: what he owed to the Pope as cardinal had nothing to do with what he owed the king as first minister. The many executions of aristocratic rebels were partly about "credibility": Richelieu had to make it clear that everything - aristocratic codes, feudal notions of honour, even Catholicism itself - was secondary to raison d'etat.
Richelieu's skill was never more evident than in the tightrope act he performed to stay in power and remain the confidant of the homosexual, prickly and cross-grained Louis XIII, especially as both the king's mother, Marie de Medici, and his wife, Anne of Austria, hated the cardinal and intrigued against him constantly. That fact alone made the rumours that he was Anne of Austria's lover absurd; that honour was reserved for Mazarin, whom Richelieu had groomed as his successor, and who really was a womaniser in a red hat. Indeed, as Levi convincingly argues, Mazarin was almost certainly the father of Louis XIV, since Louis XIII never consummated his marriage. This book has faults - its exposition of the Thirty Years War is notably weak, it is too dependent on secondary sources, and Richelieu, who is never directly quoted, rarely comes fully to life. But it is concise, lucid, entertaining and continually absorbing in its portrait of an allegedly devout mystery wrapped in an enigma.
Frank McLynn is an author and critic