e balance of trade.. Sully was also able to organize a country wide highway system and had even hoped to secure an international organization for the maintenance of peace. In 1628, Cardinal Richelieu became the first minister of the French crown under Louis XIII. Richelieu set in place the cornerstone of French absolutism along with merchantilism, its economic counterpart whose seeds were sown under Sully, with his work serving as the basis for France’s cultural hegemony in the later seventeenth century. Cardinal Richelieu’s constructive genius was best reflected in the administrative system he established using merchantile principles. Richelieu divided France into thirty-two generalities, in which he placed royal intendents who had the responsibility of keeping each generalities own justice, police, and finances. The intendents also recruited men for the army, supervised the collection of taxes and regulated economic activities-commerce, guilds, trade, marketplaces-within their districts. As the power of the intendents grew, so did the power and of the centralization of the state, a policy continued by Richelieu’s successor Mazarin. As for Richelieu’s foreign policy based upon merchantilism aimed at the destruction of the Hapsburg territorial fence that surrounded France, he would permit no trade or domestic relations to tie them. Consequently, Richelieu supported the Hapsburg’s enemies, and in 1631, Richelieu even signed a treaty with the Lutheran king Gustavus Adolphus, which promised French support against the Catholic Hapsburgs in the Swedish phase of the Thirty Years’ War. French influence became an important factor in the political future of the German Empire, based upon the merchantile theory that for a nation to prosper others must decline. Under the reign of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptist Colbert was named controller general of finances for France. Colbert eventually came to manage the ent...
