Who Was Cardinal Richelieu?

And why the Red Eminence of France was such an important figure of European history

The Red Eminence of France. Source: Philippe de Champaigne, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to the popularity of Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu is today one of the most famous figures in European history.

The books were already popular in the 19th century, but the story became even better known thanks to the coming of the cinema and the countless adaptations of Dumas’s works.

I alone, and I am still only in my 20s, had seen more than a dozen screen adaptations of Dumas’s novels, and the Cardinal was an important character in all of these, the main antagonist of the story.

Needless to say, as popular as Dumas’s novels were, the picture he paints of early 17th-century France is not necessarily one that historians would describe as very accurate.

Nor are the screen adaptations fully in line with the original stories, as both the Cardinal and his main henchman Rochefort, are depicted as more villainous than they were in the books.

For instance, at the end of the first book, D’Artagnan ended up in the employ of the Cardinal and became friends with Rochefort. A bit different from the movies right?

So who was the real Cardinal Richelieu? Was he the Machiavelian villain of Dumas’s novel? Or was he a great statesman whose policies…