From D’Avaux to Dévot: Politics and Religion in the Thirty Years War

Abstract

This article attempts to reformulate the classic question of whether the Thirty Years War was political or religious by examining the career of the Count d’Avaux, one of Cardinal Richelieu’s principal agents in Germany and, in the time of Mazarin, one of France’s plenipotentiaries at the Congress of Westphalia. All three men made a distinction between a political and religious war, but where they differed, and where D’Avaux was closer to Richelieu than to Mazarin, was in the relative weight each gave to considerations of legality, necessity, and conscience.