Richelieu treated Ferdinand’s faith as a strategic challenge. Though privately religious, he viewed his duties as minister in entirely secular terms. Salvation might be his personal objective, but to Richelieu, the statesman, it was irrelevant. “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter,” he once said. “The state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.”6 In other words, states do not receive credit in any world for doing what is right; they are only rewarded for being strong enough to do what is necessary.
