loader image

Center for International Relations
and Sustainable Development

Raison d’Etat: Richelieu’s Grand Strategy During the Thirty Years’ War

On a cold winter day in 1793, a crowd of French revolutionaries burst into the chapel of the Sorbonne. Streaming toward a large sarcophagus in the center of the apse, the mob laid into the cool marble with their rifle butts, hammering away at the central figure’s aquiline features. Howling vandals d…