Richelieu the builder: intendants, mercantilism and the Académie française

Beyond the struggle against the Protestants, the nobility and the Habsburgs recounted in the eight sections of this chapter, Richelieu carried out a body of work that was less spectacular but just as lasting: the generalisation of intendants across the provinces, an interventionist economic policy inspired by mercantilism, and the founding of cultural institutions destined to endure for centuries.

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👤 The intendants, the State’s armed instrument in the provinces

Inherited from temporary commissions employed as early as the sixteenth century, intendants became widespread and permanent from the 1630s onward, at Richelieu’s instigation, extending to almost every province of the kingdom. Appointed by the king, in practice chosen by the cardinal from men of the noblesse de robe, often commoners rather than the great sword nobility, revocable at any moment and placed under the direct control of the Council, these commissioners combined a threefold competence: justice, with oversight of the courts and an extraordinary jurisdiction reserved for political affairs; finance, with the collection of taxes and the auditing of accounts; and policing, finally, with the maintenance of public order and the provisioning of towns. Their decisions, immediately enforceable and reporting directly to central power, made them the preferred instrument of a centralisation that correspondingly eroded the traditional autonomy of provincial governors, local lords and the parlements.

This administrative centralisation went hand in hand with a reassertion of control over the parlements themselves, whose right of remonstrance — the power to delay the registration of royal edicts — was methodically curtailed through recourse to lits de justice, where the king came in person to impose registration, and through the occasional exile of the most recalcitrant magistrates. This whole body of administrative work, continued and expanded under Louis XIV, was to provide the French monarchy with the institutional skeleton of its absolutism.

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⚓ An economic policy in the service of war

Convinced, as his well-known formula put it, that “finance is the sinew of the State,” Richelieu sought to develop the kingdom’s economy along mercantilist lines: reducing imports through the development of privileged royal manufactories — the Gobelins for tapestry, the Savonnerie for carpets, founded in 1627 —, encouraging colonial trade through the creation of companies such as the Compagnie de la Nouvelle-France in 1627 or the Compagnie des Îles d’Amérique in 1635, and developing the navy, whose war fleet grew from about twenty to about sixty ships of the line. The Briare Canal, completed in 1642 to link the Loire to the Seine, was among these efforts, limited but real, to improve the kingdom’s commercial infrastructure.

This policy nonetheless remained subordinate to the immense needs of war: the taille, the principal direct tax, doubled between 1630 and 1640, while the sale of offices multiplied to finance the war effort, fuelling a debt and a popular discontent that were to weigh heavily on the coming regency. A chambre de justice was instituted as early as 1625 to prosecute dishonest financiers, without managing to durably curb the corruption that plagued tax collection.

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📚 The Académie française and cultural patronage

On 29 January 1635, letters patent gave official status to an informal circle of men of letters that had been meeting since the early 1620s: thus was born the Académie française, whose organisation Richelieu entrusted to Valentin Conrart and which brought together forty members, soon nicknamed the “Immortals,” tasked with “giving fixed rules to our language.” From this work was to come, long after its founder’s death, the first dictionary of the French language, published in 1694; in the meantime, the institution exercised a normative influence over emerging literature, as shown by its “Sentiments sur le Cid,” published in 1637 to pass judgment on the hit play by Pierre Corneille, whom Richelieu had nonetheless protected early in his career.

The cardinal’s patronage also took shape in stone: between 1633 and 1639, the architect Jacques Lemercier built for him, in Paris, the Palais-Cardinal, bequeathed by will to the crown and known since then as the Palais-Royal, while Richelieu also had the buildings and chapel of the Sorbonne rebuilt, where he was to be buried. Institutions and buildings, most of them still in use to this day, thus rank among the most lasting legacies of a ministry otherwise marked by war and repression.

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🧠 Key takeaways

• From the 1630s onward, Richelieu generalised the intendants, royal commissioners often of common birth, endowed with a threefold competence in justice, finance and policing, while curtailing the parlements’ right of remonstrance through lits de justice
• His mercantilist policy developed royal manufactories, colonial trading companies (Nouvelle-France 1627, Îles d’Amérique 1635) and the war navy, but remained subordinate to financing the war, with the taille doubling between 1630 and 1640
• On 29 January 1635, he founded the Académie française, tasked with fixing the French language, and had the Palais-Cardinal (1633-1639) built by Jacques Lemercier, since become the Palais-Royal