Armand Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, better known as Cardinal Richelieu, epitomizes political realism. With his principle that reason of state precedes any other consideration, he stands alongside the Florentine statesman Niccolò Machiavelli as an archetype of Renaissance realpolitik. The fact that Richelieu chose a devout young niece who seems to have embodied the very opposite of those precepts to protect his legacy as legal executor of his will poses a conundrum. It also prompts us to consider a neglected figure whose story reveals much about the role women played in French politics and religion.
Bronwen McShea explores these themes in La Duchesse, her engaging biography of Marie de Vignerot, duchesse d’Aiguillon. As an active patroness, Marie shaped the Catholic Church in France and overseas. She also had an important role in the court during the turbulent years before Louis XIV reconstituted the ancien régime by curbing the nobility and other groups. McShea cuts deftly through stereotypes to present a complex figure in a seventeenth-century France very different from that of the following centuries. Richelieu’s enemies cast Marie as an ambitious and sexually depraved woman in their attacks on the cardinal. Writers after the French Revolution echoed those slanders. Alexandre Dumas found the stories too good not to use in his unfinished novel from the 1860s The Count of Moret, and efforts to salvage Marie’s reputation in the Victorian age fell flat. Moreover, as McShea notes, the material with which to reconstruct her life is scattered in various archives and historical studies of events in which she played a part. Telling Marie’s story meant first assembling those pieces of the puzzle.
Marie shaped the Catholic Church in France and overseas
Born in 1604, the eldest child of René de Vignerot (who served in Henry IV’s court) and Richelieu’s sister Françoise du Plessis (herself a prominent figure of the day), Marie spent her early years at her father’s estate in the Loire Valley. She grew up in a pious environment with an education beyond that of most elite women until her mother’s death upended the eleven-year-old child’s world. Richelieu planned her future with an eye to securing his family’s political interests through marriages and government appointments. A week after she arrived in Paris for the first time in 1620, Marie married an older nobleman, Antoine de Beauvoir du Roure, in a lavish celebration that included presentation before the king and queen. Her husband’s death two years later ended a political marriage that had never been affectionate, but despite later close relationships she never remarried.
Indeed, the widowed Marie explored a religious vocation at a Carmelite convent. Following the Divine Office, she grew in piety through prayer and devotion. Although she wanted to take vows as a cloistered nun, Marie returned to society at Richelieu’s behest, eventually landing a position in the queen mother’s household. He became the effective prime minister at a moment when France was embroiled in war abroad and intensive political rivalry at home. The Thirty Years War (1618–48) pitted the realm against the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs while French Protestants known as Huguenots rebelled against the crown. Louis XIII’s weakness encouraged conspiracies at court that included members of the royal family. Richelieu needed all the help he could get in the volatile situation. Marie—loyal, intelligent, and enjoying contacts among royal and aristocratic women—served as his lieutenant.
McShea shows through Marie how elite women operated in a male-dominated world. Wives, like Marie’s mother, often managed business affairs and secured political interests in their husbands’ absence. Marie de Medici and Anne of Austria governed France as queens regent before their sons came of age. Women of the day exercised authority more commonly than we assume. Marie advocated for Richelieu’s positions through backstairs channels and kept him informed of developments. Wealth and connections made her a valuable patron to religious orders and their initiatives; she could remove impediments to their work as well as finance it. McShea notes Marie’s patronage of literary figures, including Blaise Pascal, and her involvement with intellectual salons in Paris. These roles made her more than Cardinal Richelieu’s niece, even as that relationship prompted Louis XIII to raise her as a peer of France with the title of duchesse d’Aiguillon in 1638.
As Richelieu’s closest relative, Marie became accustomed to the darker side of political life and, in helping to pursue his aims and deflect rivals, gained power usually held by noblemen. McShea explores a neglected side of the cardinal in detailing his efforts to improve seminary education and morals among clergy. The program became an important part of Marie’s apprenticeship as a patron, but that stage closed with Richelieu’s death on December 4, 1642. His illness distressed her so much that Richelieu begged her to leave so she would not see him die. Before then, he had left her private instructions as executor of his estate and declared she was the person in the world he most loved. Richelieu had been like a father to her. His death, McShea writes, left no man but the king as “master of her destiny.”
The cardinal put Marie in control of the wealth he left other heirs, along with his political papers. Men in the family would now defer to her. Despite challenges from male relatives backed by political rivals like the Prince de Condé, law courts upheld the will. Marie inherited Richelieu’s Parisian residence (the Petit Luxembourg) and his château at Rueil along with money and a large income from tax farms. Her overseeing of his elaborate funeral bolstered her standing as the functional head of the family.
His death, McShea writes, left no man but the king as “master of her destiny.”
When Louis XIII’s death in 1643 left his widow Anne of Austria queen regnant for their son until 1651, Marie helped her get through the turbulent years. Other members of the royal family sought to extend their power, and an aristocratic revolt known as the Fronde soon challenged the king’s authority. It involved a struggle by local interests and the city of Paris against centralizing royal control. Marie put her considerable influence behind Anne’s efforts to establish peace by hosting rival parties at Rueil to negotiate terms. The struggle continued into Louis XIV’s personal rule, but the duchesse aided him by promoting her uncle’s program to strengthen royal government and enhance the sovereign’s power.
She also expanded her religious patronage to finance and guide projects in France and overseas. McShea stresses how Marie, denied the chance to take vows as a nun, pursued her religious vocation in the world. As a lay patron of Saint-Sulpice, an important Parisian church outside its bishop’s jurisdiction, she encouraged reform of the French clergy and more reverent worship with music and benedictory services venerating the sacrament. Innovations there set a model followed elsewhere. The efforts of the Lazarist priests led by Vincent de Paul were another important cause with their preaching and charity. Marie thought ambitiously and encouraged the cautious father to expand his order’s efforts. Lazarists operated in North Africa, where their work ransoming slaves also extended French influence in the Mediterranean.
Early involvement with French missionaries in Canada drew Marie into broader efforts. She convinced the pope to establish missionary dioceses, sending French bishops she helped select to operate in Siam and Vietnam. They opened seminaries to train local clergy. Other initiatives reached Madagascar. Marie’s advice and connections went beyond financial backing as she worked out and pushed along these enterprises, which gave consolation in her later years.
Healthy most of her life, Marie died in 1675 from breast cancer. The illness gave her time to settle her affairs and prepare for judgment with prayer. Buried in the Carmelite crypt near her former spiritual advisor, Marie struck observers as a femme forte who combined femininity with the masculine virtues associated with public life. Despite her prominence, however, Richelieu’s protégée has been long forgotten; the new royal culture Louis XIV established around Versailles at his height cast Marie into its shade. Bronwen McShea has dispelled these shadows with a vivid biography that brings Marie’s accomplishments into focus within the context of their time.
