Louis XIII, King of France

Abstract

Louis XIII has received considerably less scholarly attention, especially in English, than either his father, Henri IV, the founder of the Bourbon royal line, or his son Louis XIV, who ruled over France as the “Sun King” at the height of the Ancien Régime. One reason for this relative neglect has been the focus of historians on Louis’s powerful first minister, Cardinal Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, historians typically cast Louis as the dedicated but less-talented partner in Richelieu’s efforts to unite France and make it a leading power in Europe. More recently, some scholars have developed a greater appreciation for Louis, arguing that he was a more effective and powerful ruler than traditionally portrayed, and that Richelieu worked with the king rather than effectively ruling from behind the throne. What is not in dispute is that Louis reigned during an important period in French history. His father had brought an uneasy peace to the kingdom after decades of religious civil war, but his assassination in 1610, when Louis was nine years old, left France with a child king. From 1610 to 1617, Louis’s mother, Marie de Medici, governed as his regent during a period of increasing political disorder and social unrest. Then, in 1617, Louis seized his throne in a dramatic royal coup d’etat signaled by the assassination of his mother’s favorite, Concino Concini, the maréchal d’Ancre. The political life of the kingdom in the 1620s was punctuated by a series of wars with the Protestant minority in France, which concluded with royal victory formalized in the Peace of Alès, and factional struggles at court that only ended with Richelieu’s clear victory over his opponents during the Day of the Dupes in 1630. The final decade of Louis’s rule brought both foreign conflict, as French armies intervened directly in the Thirty Years’ War, and a concerted effort to increase the power of royal government at home, in part to raise the resources for war. Louis’s reign also coincided with an intense period of religious and cultural development in the kingdom, which he contributed to. Louis died in May 1643, just months after the death of Richelieu.