The judgments that struck down Marshal de Marillac, the Duke of Montmorency, Cinq-Mars, and François-Auguste de Thou were delivered at intervals between 1632 and 1642. Champagnac unites them under the sign of Richelieu’s private vengeance; yet the episodes he recounts reveal disparate charges, distinct jurisdictions, and evidentiary material that the chronicle does not scrutinize with uniform precision. It is therefore essential to distinguish between the recorded facts, the author’s personal strictures, and the designs he imputes to the Cardinal-Duke.
Marshal de Marillac held command over an army in Piedmont and was invested by the Crown with plenary authority to make war or conclude peace. The chronicle paints him as a declared adversary of Richelieu and records that Louis XIII, yielding to the entreaties of the Queen Mother, had pledged to dismiss his chief minister. Following the "Day of the Dupes"—the phrase bestowed upon that sudden reversal of the royal favor—an usher dispatched by the King commanded Marillac’s arrest in the very midst of his troops. The order was served upon him shortly after he had received word of the minister’s impending disgrace; he was taken into custody by Marshals de La Force and de Schomberg.
Richelieu, Champagnac asserts, was resolved to bring the general to the scaffold. As it proved impossible to charge him with high treason, the accusation was directed toward extortion, peculation, and exactions alleged to have been committed in the discharge of his military functions. Rather than standing trial before the assembled chambers of the Parlement of Paris, Marillac was made to appear before specially designated commissioners. The initial judges deemed that he ought to be permitted to enter upon his defense. The chronicler relates that this ruling was quashed and that another extraordinary commission, composed of magistrates hostile to the Marshal, was constituted; the proceedings were thereupon resumed at Rueil, in Richelieu’s country residence.
Inquisitors delved into Marillac’s past administration. The chronicle, echoing an observation of Voltaire, relates that they confronted him with abuses and illicit profits supposedly reaped by himself or his household during the construction of the citadel of Verdun. The Marshal maintained that these grievances concerned mere bundles of hay, straw, stone, and lime, protesting against the relentless severity brought to bear upon him. The verdict pronounced him guilty of peculation, extortion, and unlawful levies; it further ordered the distraint of one hundred thousand crowns from his estate to make restitution for what he was said to have wrung from the public. Marillac contested the charges, declaring that all his worldly goods fell far short of the sum demanded.
His kinsmen sued for his pardon before the King. The narrative states that Richelieu, discomfited by their presence, caused them to be dismissed. On May 10, 1632, Marillac was led to the Place de Grève, his hands bound behind his back. A knight of the watch expressed his sorrow at seeing him reduced to such an extremity; the Marshal replied, according to Champagnac, that his pity ought rather to rest upon the King. He was beheaded. The chronicle adds that several friends had offered to deliver him from his confinement, but that he had declined, a refusal attributed to his reliance upon his own innocence, though no independent testimony is adduced to substantiate the claim.
The second condemnation of that fateful year was that of the Duke of Montmorency, Marshal and Governor of Languedoc. He entered into a league with Gaston, Duke of Orléans, the King’s brother, and levied troops against the royal armies. Near Castelnaudary, perceiving Gaston’s vacillation, he threw himself against the King’s battalions. He breached their ranks, sustained numerous wounds, and was captured. The chronicle affirms that Gaston and his retinue did not stir to his assistance, presenting the Duke’s abandonment through a lens decidedly unfavorable to the King’s brother.
His trial was conducted by the Parlement of Toulouse. High-ranking nobles pleaded with the King to mitigate his punishment; Champagnac writes that the monarch answered that a sovereign could not entertain the private sentiments of an individual, subsequently commanding Marshal de Matignon to see Montmorency put to death. Another anecdote, presented as uncertain by the text itself, holds that there was found upon the prisoner a bracelet bearing the miniature portrait of Queen Anne of Austria. The narrative does not treat this trinket as judicial proof. Montmorency was decapitated in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville in Toulouse on October 30, 1632, at thirty-eight years of age. The chronicle regards this as a political execution and pays homage to his valor, yet leaves us without the procedural records necessary to weigh the legal proofs of his rebellion.
Ten years later, the prosecution of Cinq-Mars and his companion de Thou once more brought the apparatus of state justice before the reader. Richelieu had himself placed Henri d’Effiat, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, at Louis XIII’s side as royal favorite, procuring for him multiple dignities, including that of Grand Equerry of France at the age of nineteen. The source relates that Cinq-Mars came to despise the Cardinal who had elevated him, while simultaneously chafing under the King; it attributes to Richelieu humiliating rebukes that purportedly fed the youth’s resentment. This motive remains the chronicler’s surmise rather than the recorded finding of an inquest.
Cinq-Mars entered into an understanding with the Count of Soissons, the Duke of Bouillon, and Gaston of Orléans. He likewise concluded, according to the chronicle, a secret treaty with the Count-Duke of Olivares, intended to allow a Spanish army to penetrate into France and sow discord. At the hour this intrigue was brought to light, Cinq-Mars attended the King at Narbonne; Richelieu lay stricken with illness at Tarascon, yet his authority remained absolute. A copy of the treaty fell into the hands of the Cardinal, who warned his royal master. Cinq-Mars was arrested at Narbonne and conducted to Lyons. The trial, the chronicler tells us, demanded fresh proofs; Gaston of Orléans disclosed the facts to secure his own pardon. The Duke of Bouillon was likewise taken into custody while commanding the army at Casale, but was spared—the chronicle attributing his survival to the strategic importance of his principality of Sedan.
Cinq-Mars was condemned and beheaded at Lyons on September 12, 1642, at the age of twenty-two. Champagnac attributes to Louis XIII a cynical remark concerning his former favorite, reportedly uttered at the presumed moment of the execution. This phrase, which cannot be verified here, serves the chronicler’s purpose in illustrating the King’s cold detachment; it must not be confounded with the official records of the trial.
François-Auguste de Thou, son of the celebrated historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, had been closely attached to Cinq-Mars. He was suspected of having possessed knowledge of the conspirators’ designs without having denounced them. He maintained before his judges that he had held no proof against Gaston, the Duke of Bouillon, or Cinq-Mars, and that to accuse them without foundation would have exposed him to conviction for slander. The chronicle cites Voltaire’s version, according to which de Thou had in truth endeavored to dissuade Cinq-Mars from his enterprise, urging him to renounce the treaty. It further adduces a confrontation wherein Cinq-Mars supposedly corroborated his friend’s warnings. In Champagnac’s narrative, this testimony serves to argue de Thou’s innocence; it fails, however, to furnish us with the commission’s complete decree or the documentary exhibits of the trial.
The source recounts that upon learning of his friend’s sentence, Cinq-Mars cast himself weeping at his feet; de Thou raised him up, exhorting him to meet his death with fortitude. He was executed alongside him at thirty-five years of age. If the condemnation of Cinq-Mars rested, as the account states, upon the copy of a treaty concluded with Spain and the disclosures of Gaston of Orléans, that of de Thou punished mere silence. Champagnac styles this justice the arbitrary decree of commissioners rather than a true judicial finding, contrasting it with the conduct of magistrates such as Molé and Bellièvre, who were said to have resisted the court’s encroachments in other state trials.
What unites these causes within Champagnac’s pages is not an identity of charges, but the overarching presence of sovereign authority in the courtroom: an extraordinary commission selected by the first minister, a provincial parlement, the self-serving confessions of a prince of the blood, or the stoic silence of a friend. The reader must take care to separate the legal verdict from the political passions that surrounded it. The executions are matters of historical record; the unbending thirst for vengeance that the author assigns to them remains his own construction.