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Louis XIII and Richelieu

Alexandre Dumas was cruel with Louis XIII, portraying him as a colourless monarch, a rather ridiculous puppet in the hands of Cardinal de Richelieu. The novelist concealed the difficulties that the young monarch, who was only 23 years of age in 1625 when The Three Musketeers began, was compelled to overcome in order to impose his authority on a rebellious aristocracy and even on his mother, Marie de Médicis. From his childhood, Louis XIII’s enthusiasm for all things military, the extraordinary collection of firearms and the harquebus masterpieces in his armoury, inherited by the musée de l’Armée, are an illustration of his genuinely ”warrior king” character, who spent more time in bivouacs and camps than in his palaces. The novelist was probably more truthful with the figure of Richelieu to whom he provided a world­wide reputation. Dumas often told about a black legend concocted in the seventeenth century by the opponents or the victims of the Cardinal’s politics and willingly recounted by romantic writers, who made him into a «diabolical» and «implacable» minister­prelate, not hesitating to use any means to achieve his enterprises. However, in The Vicomte of Bragelonne, when Anne of Austria referred to the Cardinal as a man who never said «I will do» but «I have done», she paid the finest tribute that any of his enemies could offer him.