The Age of Reason Begins by Durant Will & Durant Ariel

Author:Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel [Durant, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-06-03T20:00:00+00:00

V. THE CARDINAL SUPREME

With this concentrated power in his hands, he did everything for France, little for the people. He thought of France as a power, not as a sum of living individuals; he did not idealize the common man, and he probably thought it dulce et decorum that such men should die for their country; he would sacrifice them to make the future France secure from Hapsburg encirclement. He labored far into the night at the business of the state, but almost always on foreign policy. He had no time to improve the economy, except to ferret out tax evaders and bring revenue and “intelligence” to Paris with less leakage on the way. In 1627 he organized a public post.

Taxes were still collected by financiers to whom they had been “farmed”; these men had exacted twice, sometimes thrice, the amount they transmitted to the government. The nobility and the clergy were exempt from the major taxes; clever businessmen and the hoards of officials found ways of avoiding or appeasing the collectors; towns paid a small composition to escape the poll tax; the brunt of the burden fell upon the peasantry; Richelieu bled it to destitution to make France the strongest power in Christendom. Like Henry IV, he preferred to conquer enemies with money rather than with blood; many of the treaties with which he waged war included subsidies to allies and douceurs to potential foes. At times, desperate for funds, he advanced his own money to the treasury; once he hired an alchemist to make gold.25 Taxation and the state corvée—unpaid labor on the roads—co-operated with drought, famine, pestilence, and ravages by soldiery to bring peasants near to suicide; several killed their families and themselves; starving mothers killed and ate their infants (1639).26 In 1634, according to a probably exaggerated report, a fourth of the population of Paris begged.27 Periodically and sporadically the poor rose in revolts that were mercilessly suppressed.

Richelieu used the taxes to build armies and a navy; right would not be heard unless it spoke with guns. Having purchased the office of grand admiral, he fulfilled its functions resolutely. He repaired and fortified harbors, established arsenals and provision depots at the ports, built eighty-five ships, founded pilot schools, trained marine regiments. He raised a hundred regiments of infantry, three hundred troops of cavalry; he restored discipline in the army; he failed only in his efforts to banish its prostitutes. With his revitalized armament he faced the chaos of foreign relations bequeathed by the regency of Marie de Médicis, returned to the policy of Henry IV, and directed all his forces to one goal—the liberation of France from the cordon of Hapsburg power in the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and Spain.

Marie had allied France to Spain—i.e., in Richelieu’s view, she had submitted to the enemy; and she had alienated those on whom Henry IV had relied as friends—the English, the Dutch, and the Protestants of Germany. With the quick strategic eye of a general, Richelieu saw in the

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