French identity
Richelieu and the French Monarchy by C.V. Wedgwood is well written and interesting. I had to look up a lot of the places and events referenced, though; it doesn't explain all the background for someone who isn't already familiar with Europe during the Thirty Years War, first half of the 1600s. Wikipedia is great for filling in the overarching historical picture.
I recognized characters from _The Three Musketeers_ and found it funny that all the main characters are there in some form; Buckingham really did make a pass at the Queen--- Mother---Louis's mother, not his young wife. There was a lady-in-waiting and a young buck similar to D'Artagnan. Milady de Winter is not mentioned, but Richelieu is known to have had agents all over Europe, spies, diplomats, assassins.
This historian, however, does not consider Richelieu the only spider in this web. The Queen Mother gets short shrift, as do the king's various favorites. The next king is only born because Louis the XIII happened to get stuck in a storm near his wife's castle, at a time when he's between girlfriends.
I marvel at how corrupt and yet solid France was at the time. The peasants were gaining ground, little by little; the middle classes were becoming a larger and larger proportion of the French people. The whole idea of a French nation was being birthed in large part because Richelieu worked towards it and cut off those nobility whose allegiances bled over to other rulers in feudal fashion. Well, if you marry the heiresses of other places and inherit their lands, then your allegiance isn't going to be all within the area you got from your own father, is it? The French 'king' had subjects whose lands and controlled territories were larger and richer than his, plus they had connections to the Hapsburgs on every side. The territory we now call France was surrounded by Hapsburg-controlled lands.
I'm not sure why France became the place-name and French the language of these specific acres. It could have been called Burgundy. The Franks had their ups and downs; other tribes lost cohesion before them, the Celts for example.
I understand better, from reading Richelieu's challenges and actions, why the French border with Germany has wobbled so severely. It was never all one or all the other, and indeed can't be, if people are to trade and get supplies they need to live. The borders with Spain and Italy are largely geographic, less questioned. People didn't walk across the Pyrenees or the Alps every day for lunch.
The Holy Roman Empire wasn’t. Wasn’t holy. Wasn’t Roman. Wasn’t an empire. The Germans weren’t any kind of united at the time of Richelieu; several of those little fiefdoms could have become dominant. Prussia was one of the weaker brothers. In fact, they could have become some Greater Austria or Bohemia instead of Germany.
Richelieu put down separatist Huguenots within the area he wanted to keep part of France, while allying with Calvinists and Dutch Protestants and even (heaven forbid) the English, to weaken the Hapsburgs. All this, while infuriating Catholics who felt he didn't go far enough!
Towards the end of the book, the historian points out that Richelieu set up and encouraged organizations to strengthen a sense of French identity, language, and art. He brought an 8 man chamber music group with him, even on military campaign, to play for him every day. He collected art and even some of his political opponents gave him art as gifts. In a world where England's wild child, the U.S. of A., has effectively won the world culture, French tastes are still distinct and valued all over, at least in part due to the organizations he set up.
