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Title: Cardinal Richelieu: And the Making of France by Anthony Levi ISBN: 0-7867-0778-X Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub. Date: 30 November, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A good biography.....
Comment: I found Anthony Levi's biography on Cardinal Richelieu to be quite readable and informative. The author definitely appears to know his subject well and the complex personality of Richelieu comes out with clarity and understanding. When you write a biography of man like Richelieu, background materials must be included to revealed the extraordinary period that he lived which made Richelieu, such an extraordinary historical personage. While deeply hated by his own people during his lifetime, it would be no discredit if he would be regarded as a national hero today since without Richelieu, there may not be a France as we know it.
Rating: 1
Summary: Poor history mixed with faux scholasticism
Comment: I'm the person whom Amazon lists above as "people who bought this book also bought Talleyrand (Duffy)".
Levi divides this book into two parts. The first half is history in the "in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue" style that went out years ago. It is a numbing recital of: "in 16xx ABC did this; in 16xx DEF did that; and in 16xx so did GHI". This half of the book is poorly organized. Often Levi is forced to double back 10 to 20 pages in order to pick up something he forgot. Unless you have a good grasp of 17th century France, you will find the wild cascade of unrelated names and places disorienting. Don't waste your time trying to follow the history. Much of it is factually debatable. Levi never even quite seems to figure out when the 30 Years War took place.
In part two Levi takes up the cultural side. This half of the book abandons the "in 1492" approach for some of the worst academic English you are ever going to meet. The man simply cannot construct a pointed English sentence. I quit counting the number of consecutive 50 to 70 WORD sentences. Subjects and verbs seldom seem to meet, much less agree. Only experts at diagramming sentences need apply.
Levi is clearly not in his home area. Bluntly, anyone who can dismiss Corneille, Pascal, and Descartes is simply not well grounded in this period and its follow up. The lengthy discussion of Jansenism puts Levi into a subject area he clearly does not understand. About all you can say he got right for certain is that Richelieu and the Jansenists were not on good terms.
This book is a quandary. In many respects it is a hagiographic gloss of Richelieu. As a piece of popular history it is barely skin deep. Historical accuracy and much of the religious interpretation is questionable. The political analysis is simplistic and incomplete. (Hopefully, you already understand the relations of the Habsburgs, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, and the Pope. Levi spends a lot of time wandering in the wilderness here.) The quality of writing is pretentious in the second half, and questionable throughout. When finished, you will have done little more than confirmed the preconceptions about Richelieu you brought with you, picked up some notions about Louis XIII, and maybe have acquired a smattering of dates.
Rating: 4
Summary: A man of contradiction and contrast
Comment: This is a good work of popular history. As he wrote it, Levi was probably thinking of people like me who know their knowledge of French history in the 17th century is inadequate but don't want to spend months in the library filling in the gaps. The book is full of important figures like Marie de Medici, Anne of Austria, and Gaston of Orleans, but Richelieu and his career are at the center of the whole story. The author is at his best when analyzing Richelieu psychologically and morally, but he seems to value those of his subject's virtues that might place him closer to the Homeric moral universe than to ours. He praises the cardinal for his bravery, tenacity, and ruthlessness rather than looking for signs of compassion, tenderness, or justice. Of course Richelieu was intensely loyal to the king, Louis XIII, but he was equally loyal to his own quest for power, prestige, and possessions, three realms in which he met with overwhelming success. One of the interesting side issues in the book is the king's inability to relate sexually to women and his dalliances with several men, most notably with Cinq-Mars, who betrayed him. Richelieu did his best to protect the king's reputation even in this area. The more important question Levi works with is how Richelieu almost single-handedly changed France from a collection of separate areas, princedoms and duchies, with their various customs, laws, traditions and loyalties, into a modern nation-state under the absolute authority of the monarch. He also did much to promote culture, art, and literature. But he achieved all this at the cost of unendurable suffering among the common people, who were over-taxed, underfed, and who lived in general misery. Naturally, he was generally despised.
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Title: Talleyrand by Duff Cooper ISBN: 0802137679 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: 30 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Louis Xiii, the Just by A. Lloyd Moote ISBN: 0520075463 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: October, 1991 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV by W. H. Lewis ISBN: 0881339210 Publisher: Waveland Press Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.50 |
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Title: Political Testament of Cardinal Richelieu: The Significant Chapters and Supporting Selections by Henry B. Hill ISBN: 0299024245 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Pub. Date: December, 1964 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Gallipoli by Alan Moorehead ISBN: 0060937084 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 03 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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