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Кардинал Ришелье и становление Франции
Подробная и вместе с тем увлекательная книга посвящена знаменитому кардиналу Ришелье, религиозному и политическому деятелю, фактическому главе Франции в период правления короля Людовика XIII. Наделенный железной волей и холодным острым умом, Ришелье сначала завоевал доверие королевы- матери Марии Медичи, затем в 1622 году стал кардиналом, а к 1624 году- первым министром короля Людовика XIII. Все свои усилия он направил на воспитание единой французской нации и на стяжание власти и богатства для себя самого.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 21, 2014
More like 3.5, lacks information and proper analysis of France's foreign policy during the 30 Years' War (but thats where Kissinger comes in). All in all, not a bad read.
May 26, 2022
Nicely compact read
August 1, 2017
Extremely thorough, except, oddly enough, for when it came to Richelieu's network of contacts and informers, which is pretty much the main thing I thought he was known for. I do wish the author had at least attempted to look into how he set up and maintained this network, but all he does is allude to random people in it informing him about pretty much everything going on in the country. Also, some awkward sentence structure (mostly due to long sentences), but otherwise a very thorough look into Richelieu's life.
June 11, 2017
Thorough. When reading this, it would be helpful to know some French, since not all terms in French are given a translation. The sentence structure is often long, with many clauses and commas, making it a challenge to read easily, but the author seems to want to pack in as much detail as possible. The political and religious history is so intertwined, and so complex with many regional leaders throughout Europe, it is hard to keep track of everybody. Each of what we now call a country had to be consolidated from smaller geographic entities earlier in history, and the process of doing so would not always follow a straight line but be two-steps-foreward, one-step-back. This focus is on what is now France, but the countries of England (let alone UK), Germany, Italy, India, and Spain also are consolidations of previously smaller regional political entities. Sometimes the smaller units retained some power when the larger country was formed (like in the USA), and sometimes the smaller political entity was abolished in revenge or power play. We now know a difference between political leadership and religious leadership, but this Cardinal played a key step in living with the distinction, although he himself was a leader in both realms.
March 17, 2021
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this biography. Richelieu is very much set in his cultural context and his faith is taken seriously. I hadn't realised that he had written a couple of pastoral/theological books as well as governing France. The book's main thesis is in the subtitle and is clearly brought out in the text.
This is clearly written, with a useful index for when I got confused by all the names. The maps could have been clearer but, on the whole, given my lack of background knowledge, it was a good read.
This is clearly written, with a useful index for when I got confused by all the names. The maps could have been clearer but, on the whole, given my lack of background knowledge, it was a good read.
May 30, 2017
Do you remember A. Diumas Three musketeers? And great cardinal Richelieu? In many adaptations this man was shown as power hungry monster and worst enemy of France and king. I was still interesting in real man from that lovely book. A. Levi book is a bit dry, but very informative and it feels that author did his research. Highly recommended.
May 5, 2016
Levi’s biography of Richelieu is in places dense, and the narrative thread is not always completely clear. However, as a “life and times” the book is a well-informed and intelligent appraisal of the religious, cultural, and political context in which Richelieu lived, as well as a thoughtful account of his subject’s character.
Near the start of the book, Levi notes “the development of arrangements to use what were once ecclesiastical revenues to finance the enlarged secular administrations of post-Renaissance Europe, and of the theological and canonical arguments adduced to justify them.” Richelieu believed that a king’s rule is divinely-ordained, and that in cases of conflict with Rome over temporal matters, his first loyalty had to be to his king. As first minster, Richelieu was quite willing to make alliances with Protestant powers if and when they served France’s interests. Levi argues that Richelieu’s achievement was to give France a national identity; this was grounded not only in geographical consolidation, but also through the arts and the creation of the Académie Française.
The achievement was tenuous, though: when Louis XIII was in his late thirties it still looked likely that the crown would pass to his brother Gaston, in which case France would have probably come under Hapsburg domination. The birth of the future Louis XIV changed all that, although Levi succeeds (in a lengthy discursion from the main subject) in putting a huge question-mark over the child's paternity; Louis XIII's sexuality seems to have been for the most part (although not exclusively) homo-masochist. The most likely candidate as Louis XIV's real biological father, suggests Levi, was a naturalized Italian migrant who was Richelieu's protégé: Cardinal Mazarin.
Richelieu has been attacked for his splendid living – however, Levi explains that Richelieu was personally austere and that such criticism is anachronistic: the culture of gloire, in Richelieu’s day, was associated with virtue and heroic ideals. For context, Levi points out the often-overlooked optimism of Descartes’ project, derived from Guillaume du Vair. This was in contrast to the vision of Pierre de Bérulle, who also had a sense of heroism, but as manifested through heroic religious devotionism and the annihilation of human nature. Richelieu was originally attracted to this teaching, but came to see it as dangerous and broke from it.
Levi (again, somewhat discursively) gives some background to the religious disputes of the day: Bérulle worked with Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran (who had spent time sharing lodgings with Cornelius Jansen); the two men also emphasised the reality of witchcraft and possession, and Levi notes there were 600 burnings in Bayonne, where Saint-Cyran was based. Saint-Cyran imposed “himself and his spirituality on two rich and fashionable Paris convents”, ousting the superior of Port-Royal, Sebastién Zamet: “Incense, flowers, perfume, breeding, good manners, dowries and clean linen played an excessive, and characteristically baroque part in the spirituality of his convents. Mèré Angélique [Arnauld] took Saint-Cyran’s spiritual doctrine of self-abasement to the opposite extreme, to the point of cultivating bodily vermin.” Saint-Cyran also objected to Richelieu’s Protestant alliances; Richelieu, advised by the Capuchin Père Joseph, had him locked up.
Another interesting ecclesiastical element concerns Louise de la Fayette, whom Louis wanted as a mistress but who entered a convent in the Rue Antoine. This did not remove her from political life: Louis paid her frequent visits, and she worked with Louis’s confessor, Père Caussin, to further Spanish interests in France by playing on the king’s religious scruples. Caussin convinced the king that salvation was dependent on acts devoid of personal or spiritual self-interest; the doctrine emanated from Saint-Cyran via notes added by an Oratorian named Claude Séguenot to a translation of Augustine’s “De Virginitate. This caused Louis anxiety, but Richelieu was able to rebut Caussin’s arguments and to have him exiled from court.
Near the start of the book, Levi notes “the development of arrangements to use what were once ecclesiastical revenues to finance the enlarged secular administrations of post-Renaissance Europe, and of the theological and canonical arguments adduced to justify them.” Richelieu believed that a king’s rule is divinely-ordained, and that in cases of conflict with Rome over temporal matters, his first loyalty had to be to his king. As first minster, Richelieu was quite willing to make alliances with Protestant powers if and when they served France’s interests. Levi argues that Richelieu’s achievement was to give France a national identity; this was grounded not only in geographical consolidation, but also through the arts and the creation of the Académie Française.
The achievement was tenuous, though: when Louis XIII was in his late thirties it still looked likely that the crown would pass to his brother Gaston, in which case France would have probably come under Hapsburg domination. The birth of the future Louis XIV changed all that, although Levi succeeds (in a lengthy discursion from the main subject) in putting a huge question-mark over the child's paternity; Louis XIII's sexuality seems to have been for the most part (although not exclusively) homo-masochist. The most likely candidate as Louis XIV's real biological father, suggests Levi, was a naturalized Italian migrant who was Richelieu's protégé: Cardinal Mazarin.
Richelieu has been attacked for his splendid living – however, Levi explains that Richelieu was personally austere and that such criticism is anachronistic: the culture of gloire, in Richelieu’s day, was associated with virtue and heroic ideals. For context, Levi points out the often-overlooked optimism of Descartes’ project, derived from Guillaume du Vair. This was in contrast to the vision of Pierre de Bérulle, who also had a sense of heroism, but as manifested through heroic religious devotionism and the annihilation of human nature. Richelieu was originally attracted to this teaching, but came to see it as dangerous and broke from it.
Levi (again, somewhat discursively) gives some background to the religious disputes of the day: Bérulle worked with Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran (who had spent time sharing lodgings with Cornelius Jansen); the two men also emphasised the reality of witchcraft and possession, and Levi notes there were 600 burnings in Bayonne, where Saint-Cyran was based. Saint-Cyran imposed “himself and his spirituality on two rich and fashionable Paris convents”, ousting the superior of Port-Royal, Sebastién Zamet: “Incense, flowers, perfume, breeding, good manners, dowries and clean linen played an excessive, and characteristically baroque part in the spirituality of his convents. Mèré Angélique [Arnauld] took Saint-Cyran’s spiritual doctrine of self-abasement to the opposite extreme, to the point of cultivating bodily vermin.” Saint-Cyran also objected to Richelieu’s Protestant alliances; Richelieu, advised by the Capuchin Père Joseph, had him locked up.
Another interesting ecclesiastical element concerns Louise de la Fayette, whom Louis wanted as a mistress but who entered a convent in the Rue Antoine. This did not remove her from political life: Louis paid her frequent visits, and she worked with Louis’s confessor, Père Caussin, to further Spanish interests in France by playing on the king’s religious scruples. Caussin convinced the king that salvation was dependent on acts devoid of personal or spiritual self-interest; the doctrine emanated from Saint-Cyran via notes added by an Oratorian named Claude Séguenot to a translation of Augustine’s “De Virginitate. This caused Louis anxiety, but Richelieu was able to rebut Caussin’s arguments and to have him exiled from court.
September 8, 2023
Very dense with information, but I found it lacking in narrative flair and missing discussion of the intrigues in which Richelieu was involved. I also felt it lacked a satisfying description of the broader political climate, domestic and international, in which he lived.
April 25, 2017
A hugely fascinating subject and a wonderfully sympathetic approach to it are marred by this book's disorganisation and lack of clarity. A theme tries to emerge at the beginning and end, but it isn't well-established or fleshed out enough and the author's lapses into a lot of long sections of 'and then this happened' without explaining context or relevance. There's no attempt at a narrative thrust.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews