Chief Minister of France, the Real Operator of Centralization Under Louis XIII
Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) was chief minister to King Louis XIII of France, effectively running the French state for nearly twenty years, greatly weakening the local nobility and the Protestant Huguenots’ separatist forces and strengthening central power, laying a solid administrative and fiscal foundation for the absolutist height of the later Louis XIV. In foreign policy, to check the expansion of the Habsburgs, he was willing, as a Catholic nation, to secretly support the Protestant camp in the Thirty Years’ War — a realpolitik of "national interest over religious stance" controversial at the time yet an important mark of the rationalization of modern statecraft.
To weaken the Huguenot Protestants’ military separatism within France, Richelieu directed in person a siege of over a year of the important Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, at last forcing its surrender and greatly reducing the independent armed power of the Protestant nobility — one of the most emblematic military actions in his drive to centralize power.
During the Thirty Years’ War, Richelieu, though a Catholic cardinal, out of the national interest of checking Habsburg expansion, secretly funded and finally openly sent troops to support the Protestant camp against the Holy Roman Empire and Spain — a decision that stirred no small controversy at the time, but is seen by later ages as an early model of the modern diplomacy of "reason of state" transcending religious stance.
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