Louis XIII, the Just

Introduction: Interpreting Louis XIII

Introduction: Interpreting Louis XIII A perplexed historian once wrote: "Louis XIII was one of those persons whom we do not know how to judge; it is not possible to make pronouncements about him if one wishes to be scrupulously accurate and fair."1 What perplexed that scholar makes this seventeenth -century Bourbon king of France an engrossing challenge for a historical biographer. For Louis XIII was driven by the contrary impulses of personal insecurity and determination to rule; and by an exalted sense of royal authority that was undermined by unkingly tendencies to be taciturn, morose, suspicious of others, and backbiting . He was known to his age by the sobriquet "Louis the Just"; but a few historians have called him sadistic, and even some contemporaries thought him abit cruel. These personal contradictions and paradoxes would be sufficient cause to investigate his life even if his reign had not been important. But his reign was important; and, not surprisingly, it contains paradoxes stemming from his^ baffling personality that beg to be resolved . How do we reconcile Louis's habitual dependence on others with his decisive acts against those persons when they thwarted his authority? Surely this man—who sprang a coup d'etat against his mother that ended in the assassination of her political favorite, then fought two wars against her, and eventually humiliated her into fleeing from his realm—was not a weak monarch. Nor does he appear so dependent on others when we learn that as his reign wore on he dismissed every successive personal favorite who interfered with his I 2 Introduction policies. And could a royal weakling rebuff his mother, wife, and brother in standing by the best minister of his reign? More fundamentally still, how do we explain the fact that a ruler deemed by his contemporaries and historians incapable of holding sophisticated goals presided over basic political changes in his French state? Is it enough simply to assume that these were the doing of the celebrated chief minister of Louis's mature years, Cardinal Richelieu? If one pauses to reflect for a moment, it must seem odd that this monarch so jealous of his authority had little or nothing to do with the great authoritarian acts of his personal rule. So we ask: what role did this bundle of personal and political contradictions play in his own government's severe disciplining of the French nobility and other social and institutional elements of his realm, the destruction of the Protestant "state within the state," and the breaking of the encirclement of Bourbon France by the Austrian and Spanish branches of the rival House of Habsburg? The strangest paradox of all is that Louis XIII has had only one full-dress biography, and few scholarly studies of specific aspects of his life.2 While his reign is one of the best-known periods of French history, he is almost terra incognita in his own land. Indeed, when I began work on his life history I had to introduce him to acquaintances with a witticism: "Louis XIII was best known as the father of Louis XIV"; or, worse still, link him to the work of fiction most critical of him, with the remark "He was the king in TheThree Musketeers." This biography is designed to make Louis XIII sufficiently intelligible that we will no longer have to consider him an enigma, or an anomaly in his own reign. Rather than assuming that there was little connection between his person and his reign, I will pursue the theme of their intimate connection. My thesis is that, far from being the donothing king ridiculed in Alexandre Dumas's Three Musketeers or, as recent serious scholarship has reinterpreted him to be, the shadowy "collaborator" of his great minister Richelieu, Louis XIII was a highly effective monarch. Louis's sternly moralizing but hesitant nature, which earned him the lifelong sobriquet Louis the Just, led him inexorably to a very particular mode of governing that both suited his personality and worked. This same personality, moreover, laybehind the specific policies he formulated and implemented with his ministers, especially Richelieu. Ironically, however, the king's mode of governing made him look personally weak, thereby misleading both his contemporaries and later historians about his real political role. Equally Introduction 3 ironically, his determined stand on principled policies was at the sacrifice of his own feelings, and gradually of his physical and emotional health, making...