Richelieu

OXFORD UNIV. PRESS

THE story of Richelieu’s rise to power affords an impressive and useful study of nationalist-imperialist technique, especially useful at the present time. If the reader goes through Mr. Burkhardt’s book carefully and thoughtfully it will enable him to take a much calmer view of the disturbances and dislocations now going on in the public affairs of both hemispheres; he will see them as merely so many incidents — shocking, certainly, and distressing, but inevitable — in a great historical movement which it is quite out of anyone’s power to stop or even seriously to check or deflect. He need read only the introduction to observe the exact parallel between Richelieu’s circumstances and activities in France of the seventeenth century and Bismarck’s in Germany of the nineteenth. Richelieu’s immediate purpose was to produce in Europe a strong and united France in order to balance the power ot a dominant, imperialist, and aggressive Spain; but the actual outcome of his efforts, naturally, was the mere replacement of Spain by a dominant, imperialist, and aggressive France—the France of Louis XIV. All this was in the regular pattern of such enterprises, as the reader will see; it has not varied materially from the days of Shalmaneser II to those of Edward VII. Richelieu’s technique was also in the regular diplomatic pattern of trickery, mendacity, double-crossing, and all-round scoundrelism which has prevailed continuously in every political capital from Sar gon’s Agade to Roosevelt’s Washington. In showing the regularity of these patterns Mr. Burkhardt’s fine scholarship and his scholarly spirit, which is even finer, have produced something which is steadying as well as instructive. Particularly for the reader who is in a state of mind over this or that irruption of the imperialistnationalist spirit at the present time, it starts an echo of Emerson’s great saying, ‘Why so hot, little man?’ Moreover, Mr. Burkhardt’s translators have carpeted his way to the reader by rendering him in an excellent and attractive English style which makes the solid value of his work most easily accessible.