Like the contemporaries of the Capuchin Père Joseph (François Le Clerc du Tremblay), historians have struggled to identify precisely his position and power within the political establishment of Louis xiii, and especially to assess his influence on the king's chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. While this biography confirms the significance of Joseph's career at the heart of French government, it makes crucial qualifications to historiography that has too readily accepted contemporary allusions to his dark power and shadowy influence. Occasionally, Pierre races from one event to the next, such as the Camus affair, and the Loudun and Illuminés investigations, without really succeeding in pinpointing or detailing Joseph's input; this is hardly helpful in chasing the shadows. However, he convincingly analyses the changing nature of the friar's relationship with Richelieu, whom he first met in 1611. After a disagreement in 1630, when Joseph's negotiations at Ratisbon threatened to scupper the cardinal's strategy of a bi-confessional coalition to offset Spanish power, Joseph became more committed to this policy and was recompensed with an enhanced position as a political counsellor, rather than a mere diplomatic agent. The most rewarding element of this biography is undoubtedly Pierre's decision to ascribe due weight to the young friar's life before he entered the Capuchin order in 1599 and certainly well before Richelieu's entry to the royal council in 1624, the dates that have most commonly formed the starting points of previous studies. In so doing, he is able to demonstrate a continuity of spiritual and political principles that governed Joseph's involvement in religious reform, missions to Huguenot regions, endorsement of royal religion, and emphasis on French international leadership in Europe and near Asia. The mystical-political discourse that was evident in his published and private writings arose from the combined influences of patrimonial divisions that split the Du Tremblay family. It also owed a significant debt to Joseph's embracing of Pseudo-Dionysian theological trends of hierarchy and order, and his exposure to youthful socio-cultural traumas, for example his struggle to recover the family fortune after his father's death, and the aborted proposal to marry a member of the robe. If so, then the ‘mystical invasion’ in which Joseph played a role and the broader invigoration of the Catholic reform movement were not simply the consequences of his (and others) anguished reflections on the League's defeat, as often suggested; rather, they represented a constructive response to reunify Catholic families and a Church that had become dislocated through the vagaries of sectarian division and war. In this light, Joseph's model of practical spirituality both produced and justified his constant reiteration of the need for religious unity in France and beyond, his desire that the French king head an international holy alliance constructed according to the rules of a terrestrial hierarchy, and his view that his secular work formed a key element of his apostolate.