Richelieu and the Nation State

Richelieu and His Age, by Carl J. Burckhardt (Harcourt, three volumes) I: His Rise to Power (413 pp., $9.95); II: Assertion of Power and Cold War (472 pp., $12.95); III: Power Politics and the Cardinal’s Death (488 pp., $12.95)

We are apt to think of men in the seventeenth century as being rather like us—situated on this side of the presumed great separation we call the Renaissance, being motivated by economic and political desires that we can understand, living in a world of nation states not unlike our own world. Granted that Einsteinian relativity has replaced Newtonian gravity in the scientific mind, our imaginations are back with Newton and the apple; and, after all, was not Newton a seventeenth-century man? And Galileo and Kepler and Leibniz and Napier with his logarithms and Harvey with his circulation of the blood and Pepys with his circulation through London and William of Orange with his Glorious Revolution—were they not all seventeenth-century men and rather like us, or we like them?

JL

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Jared C. Lobdell

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Richelieu and His Age, by Carl J. Burckhardt (Harcourt, three volumes) I: His Rise to Power (413 pp., $9.95); II: Assertion of Power and Cold War (472 pp., $12.95); III: Power Politics and the Cardinal’s Death (488 pp., $12.95)

We are apt to think of men in the seventeenth century as being rather like us—situated on this side of the presumed great separation we call the Renaissance, being motivated by economic and political desires that we can understand, living in a world of nation states not unlike our own world. Granted that Einsteinian relativity has replaced Newtonian gravity in the scientific mind, our imaginations are back with Newton and the apple; and, after all, was not Newton a seventeenth-century man? And Galileo and Kepler and Leibniz and Napier with his logarithms and Harvey with his circulation of the blood and Pepys with his circulation through London and William of Orange with his Glorious Revolution—were they not all seventeenth-century men and rather like us, or we like them?