Richelieu - A Prelate's Progress

On February 2nd, 1615, the deputies to the last Estates-General in French history before the Revolution, filed into the hotel de Bourbon in Paris. The pre-Lenten social season at court was already in full swing, and the venue had been hastily prepared for the deputies, since it was about to host a ballet presented by Louis XIII's sister, Madame Elisabeth. Marie de Medici, the king's mother and regent of France, and her ministers were by now anxious to cut short the Estates in order to deal with political trouble brewing elsewhere. As so often happened during ancien regime events of even the most solemn kind, many of the unfortunate deputies had to jostle to find seats in the hall where the closing addresses to the throne were to be delivered.

The first deputy to speak on behalf of this assembly was, appropriately enough, a bishop representing the First Estate. But, where the corresponding address at the opening of the Estates four months earlier had been given by the Archbishop of Lyon, primate of the Gauls, it was now the turn of the bishop of an undistinguished, Huguenot-ridden diocese in western France.