Richelieu Becomes Chief Minister

August 13, 1624

Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Richelieu, thirty-nine years old and implacable, was named to the inner council of Louis XIII. He would spend the next eighteen years breaking the Huguenots, taming the nobility, raising taxes, and dragging reluctant France into the Thirty Years' War on the Protestant side, all in service of a ruthless vision of French greatness.