Most of us know at least a little bit about Cardinal Richelieu, if only from The Three Musketeers, but few have heard of his less successful Spanish counterpart, Olivares. Joseph Fouché compares and contrasts Richelieu and Olivares:
- Richelieu (1585) and Olivares (1587) were born within two years of each other.
- They died within three years of each other (Richelieu 1642, Olivares 1645).
- They became first minister to their respective kings within three years of each other (Olivares 1621, Richelieu 1624).
- They left office within a year of each other (Richelieu by death in 1642, Olivares by dismissal in 1643).
- Both relied on the tenuous health and often more tenuous support of young, occasionally resentful monarchs for their political (and physical) survival.
- Both were deeply unpopular with the people they governed over, from noble to commoner.
- Both sought to reform their kingdoms but existing power structures and the demands of war frustrated their efforts.
- Both initiated long wars that severely strained their governments, societies, and economies.
- Both were devout Catholics who sometimes found themselves allied with Protestant heretics.
- Both were hard workers.
Richelieu and Olivares both sought to adopt Dutch innovations:
As part of a Europe-wide trend, Richelieu and Olivares sought to adopt Dutch innovations. Both set up versions of the VOC. Both tried to encourage their aristocracies to become more commercially minded and work. Both expanded their navies and merchant marines. Both pursued colonial ventures and tried to increase trade.
Both only went skin deep.
They both overlooked the subtle factors undergirding Dutch success, the most important of which was the Dutch’s power to harness late medieval institutions like Estates. An earlier pan-European phenomena, Estates represented the estates of the realm. Originating in the late Middle Ages, Estates started as a way for feudal overlords to consult (and propagandize) their vassals and subjects. However, after the estates were brought together in Estates, the discovery of their collective power led many Estates to challenge the power of their overlords and win a substantial share of the judicial, legislative, and financial power of their realms before the late fifteenth century.
The Dutch themselves rebelled against Phillip II to preserve the power they exercised through their medieval institutions. The revolt came after Phillip II tried to centralize what was formerly local power by transferring it to his personal appointees. The Dutch Republic’s successful defense of its old order during the Eighty Years’ War gave the men who held the money the power and the interest to vote on whether or not to tax and borrow from themselves. This control over government funding by the Dutch moneyed class guaranteed that the Republic would never arbitrarily confiscate property or default on its debt since the moneyed classes were the state.
In other parts of Europe, developments went in the opposite direction. During the 17th century, Estates after Estates was weakened, suppressed, and bypassed in favor of centralized control by the ruler. In some cases, like the Netherlands, Poland-Lithuania, England, and Scotland, Estates held on and won supreme authority. In many more cases, aspiring divine monarchs defeated their Estates.
This newfangled absolutism was the hip new thing. With cutting edge thinkers like Bodin, Hobbes, Filmer, and Bossuet, absolutism was the future. Unfortunately, there were holdouts on the march to progress. In England and Scotland, the efforts of progressive monarchs like James I and VI, Charles I and I, Charles II and II, or James II and VII were thwarted. History actually turned-tail and went backwards when the Dutch conquered England in 1688 under the leadership of James II and VII’s nephew and son-in-law Willem III and II and III and forced England, her colonies, Ireland, and Scotland to become permanent members of the reactionary Bataviasphere.
Richelieu and Olivares, on the other hand, were both men of the future. Both were pioneers of absolutism. Ironically, Richelieu started out as a representative in the French version of Estates, the Estates-General. But the 1614 session of the Estates-General was the last such assembly called until 1789. Richelieu was the major reasons it remained unsummoned for another 175 years. He set out and largely succeeded in making the king the absolute power in France in fact as well as theory
Richelieu’s task, however, was easy. While French administrative practices remained in flux after the Wars of Religion, giving Richelieu the freedom to innovate, Olivares faced a well-established, elaborate, and sclerotic central bureaucracy. On top of this, Phillip IV was not the king of Spain. While Louis XIII was the king of a unitary kingdom of France, Phillip IV was king of Castile, Aragon, Valencia, Portugal, Naples, and various other dominions that were loosely lumped together as Spain. Each of these dominions had its own institutions, laws, liberties, and politics and jealously guarded them.
With the king’s support, Olivares attempted to overcome both. He used ad-hoc juntas packed with his own creatures to bypass the established court bureaucracy, but to little effect. He continuously tried to bypass the Estates of Phillip IV’s various dominions, especially when Olivares was trying to collect more taxes. Though Castile was the heart of Phillip IV’s power, even the Castillian Cortes resisted his efforts. Olivares’ fared even worse with the other realms’ Estates. The Corteses of Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal and the Corts of Catalonia and Valencia each contributed less to overall Spanish efforts than Castile. Olivares made several attempts to remedy this imbalance, the most ambitious effort was the “Union of Arms” that would have distributed the cost of raising and supporting troops among each realm based on their size and population. This plan failed but Olivares persisted in his efforts as Spanish finances deteriorated.
His efforts failed. As a result of Olivares’ depredations, Catalonia, Naples, Andalusia, and Portugal revolted in the 1640s and for a time it seemed like Spain itself would fragment. While the worst case didn’t happen and the Catalan, Neapolitan, and Andalusian revolts failed, Portugal was able to regain its independence and take its wealth and its colonies with it. Something resembling Olivares’ vision of a more unified and absolutist Spain eventually did come to Spain but, ironically, it had to wait until Louis XIII’s great-grandson Phillip V brought Richelieu’s vision to Spain as its first Bourbon king.
Whether Richelieu or Olivares could have creatively engaged their Estates is impossible to say. It would have meant ceding more power to their nobility and gentry than either man demonstrated comfort with. Even then it’s less than sure whether or not an empowered French or Spanish Estates would have cooperated with Richelieu’s or Olivares’ ambitious agendas. What we do know is that Richelieu and Olivares didn’t engage their Estates and that they paid the consequences. The lack of sustained financial buy in by French and Spanish moneyed classes led to chronic funding crises for France and Spain well into the twentieth century.
The crisis of Estates led to the naive efficiencies of absolutism triumphing on the Continent. It was only on the fringes of the European world that late medieval institutions like Estates survived. There, when even an outlier like England showed signs of absolutist ambitions, its colonies followed the earlier Dutch example and rebelled to preserve their archaic institutions and keep them under local control.
It’s ironic that the American Revolution occurred just as the last traces of the traditional Estates disappeared from continental Europe. In 1787, Prussians annihilated the old Dutch Republic. In 1791, Russia, Austria, and Prussia destroyed the Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the final partition of Poland. In France, an attempt to employ the old Estates-General ended up suborned by the sinister new religion of Jacobinism. In the name of a reality free but philosophically pure revolutionary faith, French armies swept away what remained of the old medieval institutions on the Continent along with old medieval republics like Venice and Genoa. This clear cutting destroyed the evolved diversity of Europe’s social ecology. The way was clear for the future subjection of continental Europe to idealized monocultures of the mind. The United States was left as the last besieged outpost of medieval European experience.