There arose in France a prelate of the grim and bloody kind, who became the king’s minister, and directed the slaughtering of the Huguenots, and chopped off the heads of the rebellious nobles; he even forced the church to submit itself, and made his king the absolute ruler of France, so that a year after Richelieu’s death it was possible for the king’s son to ascend the throne, and to say, “I am the State,” and have no one dispute him through his reign of seventy-two years. One of the engines of repression that Richelieu devised was the French Academy, to take charge of the language and art of the monarchy, and impose law and order by chopping off the literary heads of all rebels. This Academy became the ruling authority in cultured France, and has filled that rôle for three hundred years. Not merely has it served the ruling classes by maintaining tradition and discrediting every innovation in French letters; it has issued formal pronouncements against unorthodox social and political books--for example, Rousseau’s “Social Contract.” A list of the French men of letters who have been excluded from the “immortals” includes Descartes, Pascal, Molière, Saint-Simon, LeSage, Rousseau, Beaumarchais, Diderot, Compte, Proudhon, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Goncourt, Maupassant, Jaurès, Barbusse, Rolland. The polite literature which reigned in Richelieu’s time was known as “précieuse,” and occupied itself in the making up of elaborate long similes, extending sometimes through several pages. It was foppish and fantastic to the point of imbecility; and the makers of it were the darlings of Richelieu’s Academy. There came up from the provinces a young lawyer by the name of Pierre Corneille, who began to write successful comedies, and received the high honor of being picked by Richelieu as one of five men to write dramas under his august direction. But Corneille, a man of genius, could not long submit himself to the head-chopping cardinal. He went his own way, and incurred the raging enmity of both Richelieu and his Academy.