The first ten years of Richelieu's ministry (1624–34) was one of the most important periods of change in the evolution of the French monarchy. Richelieu did not directly attack Brittany's privileges – he did not try to introduce élections into Brittany when he created them in all the other pays d'Etats between 1628 and 1632 and he did not send an intendant to Brittany in 1634 – but the province's relationship with the Crown did change fundamentally in the late 1620s and early 1630s. Brittany was not likely to be the site of a conflict between the intendant and the governor, because Richelieu himself was the governor, and the introduction of élections was impossible because Brittany, alone among the pays d'Etats, did not have a bureau des finances. These particularities do much to explain Brittany's exemption from some of the attacks on privilege so common in the late 1620s, yet a true understanding of the relationship between the Crown and the province can come only by examining the interplay of forces at the Estates.

Brittany stood on the front line in the key military problem of the 1620s: the royal assault on La Rochelle. The Estates asked the king to arm ships against the Rochelais and then granted him 500,000 livres for that purpose in 1621.