[Sidenote: § 6. The French Government and the Huguenots.] James first applied to France. He saw truly that the moment the struggle in Germany developed into a European war the key to success would lie in the hands of the French government. In that great country, then as now, ideas of the most opposite character were striving for the mastery. Old thoughts which had been abandoned in England in the sixteenth century were at issue with new thoughts which would hardly be adopted in England before the eighteenth. In France as well as in England and Germany, the question of the day was how religious toleration could be granted without breaking up the national unity. In England that unity was so strong that no party in the state could yet be brought to acknowledge that toleration should be granted at all. But for that very reason the question was on the fair way to a better settlement than it could have in France or Germany. When the nation was once brought face to face with the difficulty, men would ask, not whether one religion should be established in Northumberland and another in Cornwall, but what amount of religious liberty was good for men as men all over England. In Germany it could not be so. There the only question was where the geographical frontier was to be drawn between two religions. Neither those who wished to increase the power of the princes, nor those who wished to increase the power of the Emperor, were able to rise above the idea of a local and geographical division. And to some extent France was in the same condition. The Edict of Nantes had recognised some hundreds of the country houses of the aristocracy, and certain cities and towns, as places where the reformed religious doctrines might be preached without interference. But in France the ideal of national unity, though far weaker than it was in England, was far stronger than it was in Germany. In order to give security to the Protestant, or Huguenot towns as they were called in France, they had been allowed the right of garrisoning themselves, and of excluding the royal troops. They had thus maintained themselves as petty republics in the heart of France, practically independent of the royal authority. SECTION V.--_Rise of Richelieu._ [Sidenote: § 1. Lewis XIII.] Such a state of things could not last. The idea involved in the exaltation of the monarchy was the unity of the nation. The idea involved in the maintenance of these guarantees was its disintegration. Ever since the young king, Lewis XIII., had been old enough to take an active part in affairs he had been striving to establish his authority from one end of the kingdom to the other. [Sidenote: § 2. His ideas.]