The New Makers of Modern Strategy, page 39
Sully would be profoundly affected by his close escape from the Saint Bartholomew’s massacre. It inculcated in the young survivor a passion for order, a disdain for fanaticism, and a strong desire to shield France from foreign interference, which he considered had played a leading role in exacerbating his beloved patrie’s internal divisions. If he had his way, Sully later claimed, the continent’s delicate preexisting confessional status would remain frozen in amber, for “it has always been my opinion that the true system of politics, that which may give and preserve tranquility in Europe, depended upon firmly fixing her in this equilibrium.”9
In the years following the massacre, Sully continued his formal education, developing a particular fondness for mathematics. With a mind like a steel trap, the young noble’s love of numbers, geometry, and statistics would serve him well in his future ministerial career. His second great lifelong passion was the study of ancient history. Devouring the morally uplifting works of classical historians, Sully was inspired less by the Neoplatonism of the earlier Renaissance, with its emphasis on mysticism and individual enlightenment, and more by the earthy, civically minded Neostoicism of writers such as Justus Lipsius and Guillaume du Vair.
In the spring of 1576, the sixteen-year-old Sully rode across the country to join the army of fellow Huguenot Henri de Navarre (later crowned as Henri IV) and began a distinguished career as a soldier, fighting under his lord’s banner until his eventual victory in France’s civil wars. As Sully rose through the ranks, he displayed a marked aptitude for military engineering, with a talent for trench warfare, sapping, and mining. Whereas Henri of Navarre was one of the era’s finest cavalry officers, with an almost preternatural predilection for speed and shock tactics, Sully’s punishingly methodical intellect was better suited to the grime and drudgery of siege warfare. He also took a nurturing interest in the development and implementation of new forms of artillery and fortification design. His increasingly technical expertise was to prove invaluable when subduing hostile strongholds or decimating larger enemy formations, such as at the battle of Coutras in 1587, when the mobile artillery train Sully co-commanded inflicted horrific casualties.
Due to his unique background, Sully would also come to play a vital role as an intermediary. In the early, troubled years of Henri IV’s reign, when the new monarch sought to reunify the nobility by offering former League members generous bribes and terms of amnesty, Sully was often the go-between. The austere French Calvinist shrewdly leveraged his sprawling, trans-confessional network of contacts and clients, and personally ensured the rallying of a number of recalcitrant magnates to the Bourbon cause.
Sully was also a useful interlocutor with his fellow Protestants, many of whom had been deeply troubled by Henri IV’s decision to convert to Catholicism in 1593. While some of the Huguenot grandees had desperately exhorted Henri not to abandon their shared faith, Sully, ever the pragmatist, had privately argued in favor of conversion. Indeed, the new ruler’s belated embrace of Catholicism was in many ways what delivered the coup de grâce to the vacillatory opposition of the League, enabling France’s divided Catholic elites to rally around the new Bourbon monarchy. This led to the progressive normalization of Henri IV’s reign, with his formalized coronation taking place in 1594.
During those fraught years, Henri had been obliged, in the name of unity, to parcel out political and financial concessions to his former Catholic opponents. Understandably, these demonstrations of largesse generated mounting disquiet within France’s heavily armed Huguenot minority, and eventually Henri IV found himself obliged to address his erstwhile co-religionaries’ growing list of grievances. Peace was preserved through the issuance of the Edict of Nantes in 1598, a landmark document which accorded Huguenots freedom of worship in approximately two hundred designated towns. Separate articles discreetly provided for the maintenance of protective garrisons in certain key Protestant “security towns,” at royal expense. In subsequent negotiations to secure acceptance of the Edict of Nantes, Sully frequently served as the Protestants’ direct conduit to Henri IV—all while revealing himself to be an intransigent defender of royal authority, with little tolerance for any hint of religiously inspired separatism, whether Catholic or Protestant.
For all of Sully’s diplomatic utility, it was his prodigious organizational talents that cemented his position, first as Henri IV’s financial fixer, and then as his indispensable advisor. Indeed, to this day, Sully is still perceived as one of the Ancien Regime’s most consequential drivers of state centralization and regulation.
During their years of incessant fighting across France, Henri IV had developed a strong respect for his younger subordinate’s proficiency in military finance and resupply, gradually entrusting him with logistical oversight of his campaigns. With the winding down of France’s wars of religion, Sully’s administrative acumen was applied to the civilian domain. Gifted with almost boundless reserves of energy, Sully’s roving intellect only truly found solace in the strict regimentation of every aspect of public and private existence. Upon assuming the reins of power, Henri IV entrusted Sully with the delicate task of salvaging the bankrupt kingdom’s parlous finances. The young man set to the task with gusto, and—through a mixture of sly ingenuity and blunt intimidation—successfully renegotiated the bulk of the king’s outstanding loans. By the mid- to late-1590s, Henri IV evidently felt that internal dynamics were sufficiently stabilized to allow a Huguenot lord access to the highest levels of officialdom. Sully thus began formally attending the meetings of the highest-level royal councils in 1596, before being nominated to the newly important position of superintendent of finance in 1598. Thereafter followed a flurry of new titles and ministerial roles, often in very rapid succession: superintendent of fortifications, Grand Voyer de France (“grand overseer,” responsible for all major public works and infrastructure), grand master of artillery, all in 1599; superintendent of royal construction (Surintendant des Bâtiments) in 1602; and governor of the large, central region of Poitou in 1603.
As superintendent of finance, Sully prosecuted financial maladministration with a joyous zeal, dispatching commissioners across France to conduct detailed censuses of towns and parishes, and establishing an exhaustive inventory of every outstanding municipal debt. With an inordinate love for data and quantitative analysis, Sully drafted personal copies of the royal budget which he then meticulously coded and cross-referenced with the aid of a key comprising over two thousand symbols. He also encouraged a general shift from direct to indirect taxation, and, in 1604, instituted the Paulette, an annual tax on government and judicial office holders. Through the disbursement of this specially levied tax, officeholders acquired the right to transfer their positions to their progeny. This controversial initiative contributed more than any other measure to empower the new hereditary caste of government administrators—or noblesse de robe—that hoary traditionalists such as Sully affected to disdain. It was, however, highly profitable, ensuring a steady, reliable stream of revenue to the Crown. Sully also established a royal contingency fund for military operations, stabilized the notoriously volatile French currency, and left the kingdom with a rare budgetary surplus—all without massively increasing the burden of taxation on the less privileged categories of the population.
An avid aficionado of Xenophon’s theories of household and property management, Sully has traditionally been viewed as one of France’s most ardent champions of agriculture. The Huguenot lord viewed France’s rarefied climate, bountiful resources, and fertile land as key comparative advantages over a more arid Spain, famously extolling the fact that “tillage and pasturage” were the “two breasts of France” and easily equaled in their worth all “the mines and treasures of [Spanish-controlled] Peru.”10 Yet Sully favored the development of France’s industry as well as its agriculture. He did not view the steady growth of European trade interdependence as a negative in and of itself, but rather as a reality to be carefully managed—and perhaps even exploited—by vigilant custodians of “sovereign” economic interests. When in 1603–4 France and Spain became embroiled in a tense trade war, Sully thus played a lead role in negotiating the agreement to arrest the cycle of duties and tariffs. By assuming the new position of Grand Voyer de France, Sully also oversaw a colossal nation-wide program of road, bridge, and canal construction; an effort unprecedented in its scope and scale which also had broader strategic ramifications. Indeed, strengthening the defense of the realm in preparation for a renewed, and more protracted conflict with the Habsburgs was always at the forefront of the veteran’s mind.
As superintendent of fortifications, Sully engaged in a widespread effort to revamp France’s border defenses—especially to the north and east—drawing inspiration from recent Dutch innovations in fortification design. Meanwhile, his headquarters at the Palais de l’Arsenal evolved into a massive armory and munitions depot, as well as a noisome hub of technological experimentation. As grand master of the artillery, Sully—dubbed Le Cannonier by foreign diplomats—labored to modernize and standardize the equipment of this veritable service arm of the French military. Last but not least, one English ambassador later recalled, Sully was “forever hammering for building a navy for the sea,” advocating for France’s transformation into a premier maritime power.11 In Sully’s mind, the primary purpose of an expanded navy was to challenge Spain in the Mediterranean—thereby threatening its communications with its Italian territories. In the event of a renewal of high-intensity warfare, France should also be able to strike Spain at its economic “heart and entrails,” by mounting raids against its transatlantic colonial possessions.
The increasingly charged international environment lent Sully’s initiatives a sense of urgency. In 1598, with the signing of the Treaty of Vervins, France and Spain agreed to a temporary reprieve in armed hostilities. For the next twelve years, and until Henri IV’s assassination in 1610, the Franco-Spanish relationship morphed into a cold war, with long periods of simmering rivalry interspersed by episodes of white-knuckled tension. Philip III of Spain continued to covertly support and shelter rebellious French nobles, and in 1604, Paris was convulsed by a high-profile case of espionage when a clerk was found to have been funneling French cypher codes to the Spanish. Meanwhile, in 1602, Henri received an envoy from the restive Moriscos, the forcibly converted Moors of Granada, and signed a secret agreement of support for their rebellion. He also negotiated a treaty of revitalized cooperation with the Sublime Porte and continued to covertly provide subsidies to the Dutch, thus perpetuating two long-standing traditions in France’s counter-containment strategy. Indeed, under the previous Valois dynasty, in their attempts to cripple or distract their Habsburg foes, French kings had not hesitated to support partners ranging from disgruntled Lutheran German princes to the Ottoman Empire. These alliances with heretics and infidels had been framed at the time as a necessary, albeit temporary, evil. In the volatile aftermath of France’s religious wars, however, Henri IV was obliged to tread far more gingerly than his Valois predecessors, for fear of inciting renewed religious polarization over issues of foreign policy.
Although Sully was eager to preserve the post-Vervins peace, he was also resigned to its impermanence. And like so many political theorists of his era, he occasionally mused that a well-conducted foreign war, however tragic, would have the perverse side-effect of fostering greater internal cohesion, once confiding that, “the true means of setting the realm at rest is by keeping up a foreign war, toward which one can channel, like water in a drain, all the turbulent humors of the kingdom.”12 Spain, after all, still posed a serious threat along France’s borders—with fifty thousand troops ominously poised in the Low Countries and five thousand more in Lombardy. From 1600–1, France, concerned over the security of its alpine perimeter, had waged a brief but successful punitive war against Spain’s troublesome ally, the Duchy of Savoy. In so doing, French forces had wrested control of a large band of territory west of the Rhône overlooking the so-called Spanish road—the slender military corridor connecting Madrid’s Italian possessions with the Spanish Netherlands. These developments, along with France’s growing confidence and vigor following decades of relative infirmity, were a source of mounting anxiety for Philip III and his advisors. In his memoirs, Sully recounted the Spanish ruler’s escalating disquiet over the fact that “the balance had begun to lean too much on the side of France.”13
In 1610, these tensions came to a head over the right of succession to the United Duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg following the death of its Catholic ruler. Wedged between the Netherlands and the lower Rhineland, this congeries of strategically situated territories was claimed by two opposing coalitions: the Catholic League, led by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and supported by Spain; and an Evangelical Union of German Protestant princes backed by France. Plunging into a sudden frenzy of activity, Henri IV declared himself determined to protect the “ancient liberties” of all smaller European states from the threat of Habsburg coercion. French diplomats were dispatched to mobilize financial and military support from overseas, while an army of over fifty thousand men was amassed under Sully’s supervision. Yet just as he was preparing to leave Paris to lead his armies to the front, Henri IV was suddenly stabbed to death by a Catholic fanatic.
The most detailed ad hoc rationalization of Henri IV’s hyperactive foreign policy was provided by his grief-stricken advisor close to thirty years later. Sully famously argued that France’s first Bourbon monarch had been operating under the framework of an intricate “Grand Design” for countering Habsburg domination. Under the aegis of this “vast enterprise,” France would forcibly reengineer the geopolitics of the continent for the collective good. It would stitch together new coalitions; arbitrate festering bilateral disputes; protect the age-old rights of the smaller, more vulnerable stati liberi (“free states”); and ensure that the “house of Austria (Habsburg)” was “divested of the empire and of all the possessions in Germany, Italy and the low countries.” “In a word,” Sully bluntly asserted, it would be reduced “to the sole kingdom of Spain, bounded by the ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenean mountains.”14 Contemporary historians have evinced a certain amount of skepticism regarding the retiree’s grandiose post hoc characterizations of French strategy. Nevertheless, Sully’s Grand Design remains a seminal text in the history of European statecraft.
The Grand Design called for a reorganization of Europe around fifteen political entities—six hereditary kingdoms, five elective states or monarchies, and four republics. While this continental remodeling would require the implementation of vast schemes of territorial readjustment, France, Sully pointedly noted, “would receive nothing for itself, apart from the glory of distributing them with equity.”15 Such a demonstration of selflessness would not only bolster France’s reputation for magnanimity and equanimity as the “sole benefactor and arbitrator of Europe,” it would also prevent it from engaging in ruinous overextension.16
A general council with delegates from across Europe would be charged with mediating disputes between these newly balanced entities, and with levying shared funds and troops in order to pursue that old pan-European dream—the revival of a great crusade against the Turks. Sully’s belief that a general European peace could, regrettably, only be achieved through system-shattering force, differed greatly from the Renaissance’s earlier, more Erasmian visions of international concord. This somber conviction would be shared by the French minister’s two principal successors.
III
Henri IV’s assassination was a traumatic moment in French history. After a decade of relative tranquility, a deep sense of foreboding now rippled through the body politic, with many fearing a return to civil war. Public concerns were exacerbated by the young age of his son, Louis XIII, who was only eight, and by the expectation of a renewal of the instability historically associated with minority rule. These dire projections were not borne out entirely. Many Protestant and Catholic communities preemptively renewed their confessional coexistence pacts, dampening the prospects of any immediate conflagration. Queen Marie de Medici also moved fast to consolidate her authority as regent, immediately confirming the Edict of Nantes and making a point of retaining her late husband’s core group of advisors.
Tensions soon flared, however, between Sully and his colleagues. While the queen politely professed to take the proud Huguenot’s recommendations into consideration, she preferred the advice dispensed by his Catholic colleagues or her Florentine favorites. Marie de Medici’s administration was intent on pursuing a more cautious policy of détente with Spain, and the pugnacious Protestant was increasingly perceived as a diplomatic liability. In February 1611, increasingly isolated and embittered, Sully left Paris. He would spend the final three decades of his life in forced retirement, powerlessly observing the ebb and flow of French grand strategy from his drafty castles along the Loire.
Marie de Medici was both an unpopular foreigner and deeply impressionable—two traits which rendered her overly susceptible to the blandishments of slithery courtiers. Sensing this vulnerability, aristocratic grandees jockeyed for influence, launched sporadic revolts, and blackmailed the Crown into granting them ever more political and monetary concessions. The Huguenots, already troubled by the advent of a new, more ardently pro-Catholic regime and by the resignation of Sully, became increasingly restive. Looking back on these years of collective confusion, backstabbing, and mediocrity, Richelieu would remark that:
