Éminence grise
Based on Wikipedia: Éminence grise
The Gray Cardinal
In seventeenth-century France, courtiers descending the grand staircase of the Palais-Royal would stop mid-step and bow deeply as a modest friar in gray robes passed by, his nose buried in a book. He wore no silk. He carried no sword. He held no official title. Yet everyone knew that crossing this man meant crossing the most powerful government in Europe.
His name was François Leclerc du Tremblay, and he was the original éminence grise—the "gray eminence."
The term has since become shorthand for a particular kind of power: the advisor who shapes history from the shadows, the decision-maker who wields authority without ever appearing on the organizational chart. Understanding how this concept emerged, and how it has manifested across four centuries of politics, reveals something fundamental about how power actually works—which is to say, almost never the way it appears to work.
The Color of Power
To grasp why Leclerc was called a "gray eminence," you need to understand the visual language of power in Catholic Europe.
Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church wear brilliant scarlet red. The color announces their rank immediately. When addressing a cardinal, one uses the honorific "Your Eminence" or "His Eminence"—a title that signals proximity to the Pope himself.
Leclerc was not a cardinal. He was a Capuchin friar, a member of a Franciscan order known for their commitment to poverty and simplicity. The Capuchins wore rough gray robes, so humble that English speakers called them "Grayfriars." You can still find this nickname fossilized in the names of medieval European monasteries.
Yet everyone around Leclerc addressed him as "Eminence" anyway.
Why? Because he was the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu, and Richelieu was the de facto ruler of France. King Louis XIII sat on the throne, but Richelieu ran the country. And behind Richelieu, whispering counsel and executing schemes, stood this gray-robed monk.
The contrast was stark and deliberate. Red eminence, official and visible. Gray eminence, unofficial and hidden. Same power, different packaging.
A Portrait in Deference
In 1873, the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme captured this dynamic in a single image. His painting "L'Éminence grise" shows Leclerc descending the grand staircase of what was then called the Palais-Cardinal—built for Richelieu in the 1630s and later renamed the Palais-Royal.
The composition tells you everything.
Leclerc walks down the center of the stairs, utterly absorbed in a book. He doesn't look up. He doesn't acknowledge anyone. Around him, a crowd of elaborately dressed aristocrats bow so deeply they practically fold in half. These are powerful men—nobles, generals, ambassadors—reduced to supplicants before a monk who won't even meet their eyes.
The painting won the Medal of Honor at the 1874 Paris Salon, the highest recognition in the French art world. Audiences understood immediately what Gérôme was depicting: the reality of power versus its appearance.
Alexandre Dumas also understood. In "The Three Musketeers," he included Leclerc as the character Father Joseph—described as a powerful associate of Richelieu and, crucially, one to be feared. The novelist Aldous Huxley later wrote a full biography of Leclerc, fascinated by this man who achieved so much while officially being no one.
The Opposite of Official
What makes an éminence grise different from other powerful figures?
Consider the opposite. An official leader holds a title, appears on documents, gives public speeches, and bears public responsibility. When things go wrong, they face criticism. When things go right, they receive credit. Their power is visible, accountable, and constrained by the expectations attached to their position.
The gray eminence operates differently. They have no official title—or their title vastly understates their actual influence. They work through others rather than commanding directly. They avoid public attention, preferring to shape decisions from private conversations and back rooms. And critically, they maintain plausible deniability. If a policy fails, the gray eminence was never officially responsible for it.
This is not the same as being a mere advisor. Advisors offer counsel; leaders decide. The gray eminence both advises and decides, but only one of these activities is visible.
It's also not quite the same as being the "power behind the throne," though the concepts overlap. That phrase typically implies a single dominant relationship—a puppet master controlling a figurehead. The éminence grise can be more subtle: genuinely collaborative with the official leader, yet still exercising disproportionate influence through that collaboration.
Women in Gray
Some of history's most consequential gray eminences were women, though not by choice.
In Imperial China, women were largely barred from ruling in their own right. The Mandate of Heaven, the philosophical concept that legitimized Chinese emperors, was understood to pass through male succession. Yet Chinese history is filled with women who effectively ruled the empire while men sat on the throne.
Empress Jia Nanfeng, who lived in the third century, manipulated her intellectually disabled husband, Emperor Hui of Jin, and orchestrated court politics for over a decade. Her machinations eventually helped trigger the catastrophic War of the Eight Princes, which killed hundreds of thousands and weakened the Jin dynasty beyond recovery.
Empress Dowager Cixi dominated Chinese politics for nearly half a century, from 1861 until her death in 1908. She ruled through a succession of puppet emperors—first her son, then her nephew—while officially holding only the ceremonial position of regent or dowager empress. When her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor, attempted reforms she opposed, she placed him under house arrest and resumed direct control of the government. The man on the throne was emperor in name; Cixi was empress in everything but.
These women became gray eminences because official power was denied to them. Their unofficial power was often more absolute than any legitimate authority could have been.
The Astrologer Who Was More
Sometimes the gray eminence hides behind an innocuous job title.
John Dee served as court astrologer to Elizabeth I of England—an official position that sounds, to modern ears, somewhere between eccentric and laughable. But Dee was no mere fortune-teller. He was one of the most learned men in Europe: mathematician, geographer, navigator, and intelligence operative.
Dee helped plan England's colonial expansion, advised on naval strategy, and is believed to have operated as a spy for the Crown. He signed his confidential correspondence with a symbol that later inspired Ian Fleming: the number "007," with the two zeros representing eyes and the seven representing a lucky number in occult traditions.
His official role allowed him access to the queen while providing cover for his actual activities. Who suspects the astrologer of running intelligence operations?
The Succession Struggle
Leon Trotsky, the brilliant orator and military commander who helped lead the Russian Revolution, made a fatal error: he underestimated Joseph Stalin.
When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, most observers expected Trotsky to succeed him. He was famous, charismatic, and had built the Red Army from nothing. Stalin, by contrast, held the unglamorous position of General Secretary of the Communist Party—essentially a chief administrator, responsible for appointments and paperwork.
Trotsky dismissed Stalin as a gray eminence, meaning it as an insult. The revolutionary hero couldn't believe that a bureaucrat could outmaneuver him.
But Stalin had spent years quietly placing his supporters in key positions throughout the party apparatus. He controlled who got jobs, who got promoted, who got sent to remote postings in Siberia. When the succession struggle began, Stalin's people were everywhere. Trotsky, for all his fame, found himself outvoted at every turn.
By 1927, Trotsky was expelled from the party. By 1929, he was expelled from the Soviet Union. In 1940, one of Stalin's agents buried an ice axe in his skull.
The gray eminence had become the absolute ruler. Being underestimated had been his greatest weapon.
The Brown Eminence
Hitler's regime had its own variation on the theme: Martin Bormann, nicknamed the "Brown Eminence" after the brown uniforms worn by Nazi Party members.
Bormann served as Hitler's private secretary, a position that sounded clerical but was anything but. He controlled access to Hitler. He decided which documents reached the Führer's desk and which disappeared into filing cabinets. In the chaos of the Nazi hierarchy—where Hitler deliberately encouraged competing power centers to keep subordinates fighting each other rather than challenging him—Bormann's control of information flow made him indispensable.
By the war's end, Bormann was arguably the second most powerful figure in Germany, yet he remained almost unknown to the public. He gave no speeches. He appeared in no propaganda films. He simply sat in the anteroom, deciding who got in and who didn't.
The Ideologue's Invisible Hand
The Soviet Union after Stalin produced another distinctive gray eminence: Mikhail Suslov.
On paper, Suslov was the Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—technically the number two position, but one that carried little public profile compared to the General Secretary. In practice, he served as the party's chief ideologist, the guardian of doctrinal purity who decided what was and wasn't acceptable Marxist-Leninist thought.
This role gave Suslov enormous power. In a system that officially based all decisions on ideological correctness, the person who defined ideological correctness shaped everything. Suslov survived and thrived through the Stalin era, the Khrushchev era, and most of the Brezhnev era, influencing Soviet policy across three decades while rarely making headlines.
During the Brezhnev period, observers argued about who really held power. Some pointed to Suslov. Others suggested Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, the secret police and intelligence agency. Still others nominated Defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, or Konstantin Chernenko, Brezhnev's closest personal aide.
The proliferation of candidates tells us something important: in opaque systems, multiple gray eminences can coexist, each wielding power in their own domain while the nominal leader provides a unified public face.
The Architect of Europe
Not all gray eminences serve autocrats. Some shape democracies.
Jean Monnet never held elected office in France. He never served as prime minister, president, or foreign minister. Yet he is often credited as the architect of the European Union.
Monnet was a cognac salesman who became a diplomat, an international civil servant, and eventually a visionary. After World War II, he recognized that lasting peace in Europe required economic integration that would make war between France and Germany impossible. He drafted what became known as the Schuman Declaration, the 1950 proposal for pooling French and German coal and steel production under supranational authority.
The declaration bore the name of Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister who presented it. But Monnet wrote it. And Monnet spent the following decades building the institutions that eventually became the European Union, always working through others, always letting politicians take the credit while he shaped the policy.
He was the gray eminence of European integration—powerful not through any office but through ideas, relationships, and persistence.
The Philosopher and the Prime Minister
Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian-British economist and philosopher, never worked in Margaret Thatcher's government. He held no official position. He made no policy.
Yet Thatcher reportedly once slammed his book "The Constitution of Liberty" on a table during a policy meeting and declared, "This is what we believe." Hayek's ideas about free markets, limited government, and the dangers of central planning permeated her administration's thinking.
This is a different kind of gray eminence—influence through intellectual authority rather than personal proximity. Hayek shaped policy without attending meetings, won battles without being in the room. He operated through ideas that others implemented.
The term fits loosely here. Hayek wasn't covert; his views were publicly known. But he exercised power vastly disproportionate to his official role, which was essentially that of a retired academic. The prime minister implemented his vision while he remained in the background.
The Spin Doctors
Modern democracies have developed their own variations on the gray eminence, often centered on communications and political strategy.
When Tony Blair governed Britain from 1997 to 2007, multiple figures were identified as his gray eminences. Alastair Campbell, his communications director, shaped how the government presented itself to the public with an aggressive media management style that critics called manipulative and supporters called effective. Anji Hunter, Blair's director of government relations and long-time friend, served as a personal gatekeeper who decided who had access to the prime minister.
But perhaps the most prominent was Peter Mandelson, nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness" for his mastery of political maneuvering. Mandelson had helped transform the Labour Party from a perpetual opposition force into an election-winning machine. Even when he held no official position—and he was twice forced to resign from Cabinet over scandals—he remained influential in Labour politics, advising Blair's successor Gordon Brown despite their famous rivalry.
These figures operated within a democratic system with formal accountability, yet they exercised influence that went far beyond their official job descriptions.
The Vice President's Vice President
When George W. Bush became president of the United States in 2001, observers immediately noticed something unusual about his vice president.
Dick Cheney had been White House Chief of Staff under Gerald Ford, a congressman from Wyoming, Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush, and CEO of the energy company Halliburton. He was the most experienced person in the room for virtually any national security or foreign policy discussion.
The vice presidency is traditionally a ceremonial position. The Constitution gives the vice president only two jobs: presiding over the Senate and becoming president if the president dies. Most vice presidents fade into obscurity, attending funerals and ribbon-cuttings.
Cheney transformed the office. He built a parallel policy operation within the vice president's residence, complete with his own national security staff. He attended meetings across the government. He shaped policy on terrorism, Iraq, and executive power to a degree unprecedented for a vice president.
Critics described him as an éminence grise—a gray eminence who manipulated a less experienced president. Supporters argued he was simply an unusually capable official serving at the president's pleasure. The truth was probably somewhere in between: a vice president who filled a vacuum of experience and whose influence derived from knowledge, relationships, and proximity rather than formal authority.
The Hidden Hand in Seoul
In 2016, South Korea was rocked by a scandal that revealed something extraordinary: an unelected woman with no government position had been helping run the country.
Choi Soon-sil was a longtime friend of President Park Geun-hye. Investigations revealed that Choi had edited presidential speeches, influenced government appointments, and shaped major policy decisions—all without any official role or security clearance. She used her access to extract millions of dollars from major Korean corporations in exchange for favorable government treatment.
The scandal led to massive street protests, Park's impeachment and imprisonment, and a fundamental rethinking of how Korean democracy should protect itself against unofficial influence. Choi was the éminence grise as cautionary tale: proof that informal power could corrupt a democracy as thoroughly as any dictator.
The Theorist Behind Three Emperors
Wang Huning holds an official position: he is a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, the seven-person body that rules China. But his influence extends far beyond that title.
Wang is sometimes called the éminence grise of three Chinese paramount leaders: Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Originally an academic political theorist, he was recruited into government and has spent decades shaping Chinese political thought and policy from behind the scenes.
He is credited with developing the theoretical frameworks that justify each leader's policies—"Three Represents" under Jiang, "Scientific Development" under Hu, and "Xi Jinping Thought" under Xi. In a system where ideological justification matters enormously, the person who provides that justification wields tremendous power.
Wang rarely speaks publicly. He gives almost no interviews. His influence comes from ideas that others articulate and implement. In this sense, he resembles Suslov in the Soviet Union: the theorist whose fingerprints are everywhere but whose face is rarely seen.
The Surgeon of the Kremlin
Vladislav Surkov served as Vladimir Putin's chief political strategist for over a decade, earning nicknames like "the Kremlin's gray cardinal" and "Putin's Rasputin."
Surkov is credited with inventing "managed democracy"—the system by which Russia maintains the forms of democratic competition while ensuring that outcomes are never in doubt. He created artificial opposition parties, orchestrated youth movements, and pioneered techniques of political theater that blurred the line between reality and performance.
He also wrote novels under a pseudonym, composed experimental rock music, and cultivated an image as a postmodern artist-politician. His approach to power was deliberately confusing: opponents could never be sure what was real strategy and what was performance.
Surkov was eventually sidelined in the 2020s, reportedly disagreeing with Putin's increasingly aggressive foreign policy. Even gray eminences can fall from favor when their patron no longer needs their particular skills.
The Chairman Without the Office
Jarosław Kaczyński presents a peculiar case: a man who could have been prime minister but often chose not to be.
As chairman of Poland's Law and Justice party, Kaczyński is entitled by convention to serve as prime minister when his party governs. He did so briefly from 2006 to 2007. But when Law and Justice returned to power in 2015, Kaczyński declined the position. Instead, he handpicked others to serve as prime minister while he remained party chairman—and, effectively, the real decision-maker.
He met with foreign leaders like Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy as if he were head of government, even when his only formal position was deputy prime minister or, sometimes, nothing at all. The actual prime minister was treated as a subordinate executing Kaczyński's vision.
This represents a choice to be a gray eminence. Kaczyński could have had the official title. He preferred to exercise power without the constraints and scrutiny that the highest office brings. Whether this was tactical wisdom or psychological quirk, the result was a democracy led by someone who officially led nothing.
The Transition That Wasn't
When Nursultan Nazarbayev stepped down as president of Kazakhstan in 2019 after nearly thirty years in power, he appeared to be arranging an orderly transition to his chosen successor, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.
Appeared.
Nazarbayev retained the chairmanship of the country's Security Council and continued to lead the ruling Nur Otan party. These positions gave him ongoing control over security services and political appointments. For three years, Tokayev was president in name while Nazarbayev remained the gray eminence who actually ran the country.
Then came the January 2022 protests. What began as demonstrations over fuel prices escalated into the worst violence Kazakhstan had seen since independence. Tokayev called in Russian troops to restore order—and then moved against his predecessor. He stripped Nazarbayev of his Security Council role and removed his allies from key positions.
The gray eminence had been outmaneuvered. The protégé had become the patron. It was a reminder that even the most careful arrangements for unofficial power can collapse when circumstances change.
The Green Cardinal
In Ukrainian politics, Andriy Yermak has earned comparisons to Leclerc's original gray eminence—the cardinal in everything but color.
Yermak serves as head of Volodymyr Zelenskyy's presidential office, an administrative position that has grown into something far more consequential since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. He handles negotiations with foreign powers, coordinates domestic policy, and serves as a key conduit between Zelenskyy and both Ukrainian power structures and international partners.
The publication Politico dubbed him Kyiv's "Green Cardinal"—green for Zelenskyy's Servant of the People party, cardinal for his resemblance to Leclerc. Critics argue he exercises too much unchecked power. Supporters say wartime requires concentrating authority in capable hands.
The debate echoes questions that have surrounded gray eminences for four centuries: Is unofficial power dangerous? Or is it simply a realistic acknowledgment that formal titles never tell the whole story?
The Latest Iteration
In December 2024, Elon Musk assumed an unusual role in the second Trump administration. He was named senior advisor to the president and became the de facto head of something called the Department of Government Efficiency—an entity that was not actually a government department at all but rather an advisory board styled with governmental branding.
Commentators immediately reached for the term éminence grise. Here was the world's richest person, holding no Cabinet position requiring Senate confirmation, yet apparently wielding tremendous influence over government personnel and spending decisions. He conducted interviews in the West Wing, posted extensively on social media about government operations, and met with foreign officials.
The arrangement later fell apart in what was described as a public falling-out with Trump. But for a time, it represented perhaps the most visible gray eminence in American history—which is itself almost a contradiction in terms. The traditional gray eminence operates in shadows. Musk operated on the platform he owns, in public, constantly.
Perhaps this is what the gray eminence becomes in an age of social media: not hidden but hypervisible, not whispering counsel but broadcasting it, yet still exercising power without holding office.
The Persistence of Shadows
Four hundred years after Leclerc descended those stairs in his gray robes, the concept he embodied remains remarkably durable.
Every political system develops gaps between formal authority and actual power. Constitutions create offices; human relationships determine who really decides things. Organizations publish hierarchy charts; informal networks of trust and influence shape outcomes. This is not a bug in human governance. It may be a feature—a way for systems to adapt to circumstances faster than formal structures can change.
The gray eminence fills these gaps. They emerge wherever official structures prove inadequate to the real distribution of knowledge, relationships, and capability. A president needs someone's expertise; that person gains influence beyond their title. A prime minister trusts an old friend more than cabinet colleagues; the friend shapes policy. A ruler cannot make decisions without a theorist's framework; the theorist becomes indispensable.
Understanding this dynamic helps explain why formal reforms often fail to change how power actually operates. You can reorganize government, rewrite constitutions, hold new elections. But until you change the underlying patterns of trust and expertise and access, you may simply be rearranging titles while the same gray eminences continue to shape decisions from behind the scenes.
Leclerc never became a cardinal. He never needed to. The power was real whether or not the robes were red.