RETZ, Cardinal de. - Jean-François Paul de Gondi, b. at Montmirail on Sept. 20, 1613, d. in Paris on Aug. 24, 1679; the Duchy of R. (or Rais) had been conferred in 1581 by Henry III on the Marshal of France Albert de Gondi, his great-grandfather. Antoine, Albert's father, of noble Florentine stock, had come to France in the retinue of Catherine de' Medici.
From his youth he displayed uncommon intelligence: the Histoire de la conjuration du comte de Fiesque, compiled from that of Agostino Mascardi (1590-1640) and published in 1631, attests to his taste for psychological analysis and at the same time for intrigue. Viewed with suspicion by Richelieu, he resigned himself to the ecclesiastical state, taking his doctorate at the Sorbonne, and in 1643 he was consecrated titular archbishop of Corinth and assigned as coadjutor to his uncle, archbishop of Paris. He worked to win over the people of the capital and to make himself the champion of the ecclesiastical privileges in the face of the Court. He thus found himself involved in the intrigues and in the open revolt (1648) of the parliamentary Fronde.
After Mazarin's return, thanks to the general amnesty in the spring of 1649, he allied himself with Condé, who had fallen into disgrace and been arrested together with the members of his family, and, still relying on the Parliament, he succeeded in having him set free and in driving Mazarin out once again (Febr. 1651). The Queen nevertheless succeeded in detaching him from the Condé and in obtaining his help to have Louis XIV declared of age (1651); in return she warmly supported his appointment as cardinal. Mazarin's return to France at the end of the year threw him once again onto the now unpopular side of the Fronde. Once this was over, he returned to his intrigues, but public opinion did not react at all to his arrest and internment in the castle of Vincennes (Dec. 19, 1652); in the face of the Court's inflexibility, the remonstrances of the clergy were useless.
Thus ended his last ambitious project of a bourgeois and popular "third party" between those of royal absolutism and of the landed nobility. Meanwhile, his uncle having died (March 21, 1654), R. found himself by right titular archbishop of Paris. Mazarin induced him to resign with the promise of freedom; but the Pope refused to accept a resignation given by a prelate who was not free; the cardinal de R., transferred in the meantime from Vincennes to Nantes, nevertheless succeeded in freeing himself by a daring escape (Aug. 8, 1654). Mazarin's implacable enmity excluded him from the amnesty that accompanied the Peace of the Pyrenees. He lived in Spain, in Rome (where in the Conclave of 1655 he succeeded in making Cardinal Chigi, Alexander VII, triumph over the Mazarinian candidate), in Germany, in Holland, in Belgium and in the England of Charles II, until, thanks to the good offices of the Palatine princess Anna Gonzaga, and after an explicit renunciation of the diocese, he was able to return to his Lorraine domain of Commercy.
Readmitted to the Court, he was again entrusted with important official missions, on the occasion of the Conclaves of 1667 and 1676; but his last years were filled above all by literary and philosophical interests, awakened in him with particular vividness by contact with Cartesianism and with Madame de Sévigné, and by the drafting of his very extensive Memoirs, an admirable outlet, not devoid of cynicism, for all his posthumous rancors, testimony to an exceptional psychological penetration, served by an art of narration and of caricature of the first order and by an unsuspected conceptual finesse that contributed not a little to the work's eighteenth-century success, published for the first time in 1717 at Nancy.
Bibliography8 works
Enzo Bottasso