A Political and Social History of Modern Europe Part 22

The cardinal did not confine his attention to n.o.blemen at court. As early as 1626 he published an edict ordering the immediate demolition of all fortified castles not needed for defense against foreign invasion. In carrying this edict into force, Richelieu found warm supporters in peasantry and townsfolk who had long suffered from the exactions and depredations of their n.o.ble but warlike neighbors. The ruins of many a _chateau_ throughout modern France bear eloquent witness to the cardinal's activity.

[Sidenote: Centralization of Administration]

[Sidenote: The Intendants]

Another enduring monument to Richelieu was the centralization of French administration. The great minister was tired of the proud, independent bearing of the n.o.ble governors. Without getting rid of them altogether, he checked these proud officials by transferring most of their powers to a new kind of royal officer, the intendant. Appointed by the crown usually from among the intelligent, loyal middle cla.s.s, each intendant had charge of a certain district, supervising therein the a.s.sessment and collection of royal taxes, the organization of local police or militia, the enforcement of order, and the conduct of courts. These intendants, with their wide powers of taxation, police, and justice, were later dubbed, from their approximate number, the "thirty tyrants"

of France. But they owed their positions solely to the favor of the crown; they were drawn from a cla.s.s whose economic interests were long and well served by the royal power; and their loyalty to the king, therefore, could be depended upon. The intendants constantly made reports to, and received orders from, the central government at Paris.

They were so many eyes, all over the kingdom, for an ever-watchful Richelieu. And in measure as the power of the _bourgeois_ intendants increased, that of the n.o.ble governors diminished, until, by the eighteenth century, the offices of the latter had become largely honorary though still richly remunerative. To keep the n.o.bles amused and in money, and thereby out of mischief and politics, became, from Richelieu's time, a maxim of the royal policy in France.

[Side Note: Richelieu's Significance]

Such, in brief, was the work of this grim figure that moved across the stage at a critical period in French history. Richelieu, more than any other man, was responsible for the a.s.surance of absolutism in his country at the very time when England, by means of revolution and bloodshed, was establis.h.i.+ng parliamentary government; and, as we shall soon see, his foreign policy covered France with European glory and prestige.

In person, Richelieu was frail and sickly, yet when clothed in his cardinal's red robes he appeared distinguished and commanding. His pale, drawn face displayed a firm determination and an inflexible will.

Unscrupulous, exacting, and without pity, he preserved to the end a proud faith in his moral strength and in his loyalty to country and to king.

Richelieu died in 1642, and the very next year the monarch whom he had served so gloriously followed him to the grave, leaving the crown to a boy of five years--Louis XIV.

[Side Note: Minority of Louis XIV]

[Sidenote: Cardinal Mazarin]

The minority of Louis XIV might have been disastrous to France and to the royal power, had not the strong policies of Richelieu been exemplified and enforced by another remarkable minister and cardinal, Mazarin. Mazarin (1602-1661) was an Italian, born near Naples, educated for an ecclesiastical career at Rome and in Spain. In the discharge of several delicate diplomatic missions for the pope, he had acted as nuncio at Paris, where he so ingratiated himself in Richelieu's favor that he was invited to enter the service of the king of France, and in 1639 he became a naturalized Frenchman.

Despite his foreign birth and the fact that he never spoke French without a bad accent, he rose rapidly in public service. He was named cardinal and was recognized as Richelieu's disciple and imitator. From the death of the greater cardinal in 1642 to his own death in 1661, Mazarin actually governed France.

[Sidenote: Unrest of the n.o.bles]

Against the Habsburgs, Mazarin continued the great war which Richelieu had begun and brought it to a successful conclusion. In domestic affairs, he encountered greater troubles. The n.o.bles had naturally taken umbrage at the vigorous policies of Richelieu, from which Mazarin seemed to have no thought of departing. They were strengthened, moreover, by a good deal of popular dislike of Mazarin's foreign birth, his avarice, his unscrupulous plundering of the revenues of the realm for the benefit of his own family, and his tricky double-dealing ways.

[Sidenote: The Fronde]

The result was the Fronde, [Footnote: Probably so called from the name of a street game played by Parisian children and often stopped by policemen.] the last attempt prior to the French Revolution to cast off royal absolutism in France. It was a vague popular protest coupled with a selfish reaction on the part of the influential n.o.bles: the pretext was Mazarin's interference with the parlement of Paris.

[Sidenote: The Parlements]

The parlements were judicial bodies [Footnote: There were thirteen in the seventeenth century.] which tried important cases and heard appeals from lower courts. That of Paris, being the most eminent, had, in course of time, secured to itself the right of registering royal decrees--that is, of receiving the king's edicts in formal fas.h.i.+on and entering them upon the statute books so that the law of the land might be known generally. From making such a claim, it was only a step for the parlement of Paris to refuse to register certain new edicts on the ground that the king was not well informed or that they were in conflict with older and more binding enactments. If these claims were substantiated, the royal will would be subjected to revision by the parlement of Paris. To prevent their substantiation, both Louis XIII and Louis XIV held "beds of justice"--that is, appeared in person before the parlement, and from their seat of cus.h.i.+ons and pillows declared their will regarding the new edict and directed that it be promulgated. There were amusing scenes when the boy-king, at the direction of Mazarin, gave orders in his shrill treble to the learned lawyers and grave old judges.

Egged on by seeming popular sympathy and no doubt by the contemporaneous political revolution in England, the parlement of Paris at length defied the prime minister. It proclaimed its immunity from royal control; declared the illegality of any public tax which it had not freely and expressly authorized; ordered the abolition of the office of intendant; and protested against arbitrary arrest or imprisonment. To these demands, the people of Paris gave support-- barricades were erected in the streets, and Mazarin, whose loyal army was still fighting in the Germanies, was obliged temporarily to recognize the new order. Within six months, however, sufficient troops had been collected to enable him to overawe Paris and to annul his concessions.

[Sidenote: Suppression of the Fronde]

[Sidenote: Triumph of Absolutism in France]

Subsequent uprisings, engineered by prominent n.o.blemen, were often more humorous than harmful. To be sure, no less a commander than the great Conde, one of the chief heroes of the Thirty Years' War, took arms against the Cardinalists, as Mazarin's party was called, but so slight was the aid which he received from the French people that he was speedily driven from his country and joined the Spanish army. The upshot of the Fronde was (1) the n.o.bility were more discredited than ever; (2) the parlement was forbidden to devote attention to political or financial affairs; (3) Paris was disarmed and lost the right of electing its own munic.i.p.al officers; (4) the royal authority was even stronger than under Richelieu because an unsuccessful attempt had been made to weaken it. Henry IV, Richelieu, and Mazarin had made straight the way for the despotism of Louis XIV.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN BOURBONS AND HABSBURGS THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

[Sidenote: Dynastic Character of Wars in the Seventeenth Century.]

Every European country, except England, was marked in the seventeenth century by a continued growth of monarchical power. The kings were busily engaged in strengthening their hold upon their respective states and in reaching out for additional lands and wealth. International wars, therefore, a.s.sumed the character of struggles for dynastic aggrandizement. How might this or that royal family obtain wider territories and richer towns? There was certainly sufficient national life in western Europe to make the common people proud of their nationality; hence the kings could normally count upon popular support.

But wars were undertaken upon the continent of Europe in the seventeenth century not primarily for national or patriotic motives, but for the exaltation of a particular royal family. Citizens of border provinces were treated like so many cattle or so much soil that might be conveniently bartered among the kings of France, Spain, or Sweden.

[Sidenote: Habsburg Dominions in 1600.]

This idea had been quite evident in the increase of the Habsburg power during the sixteenth century. In an earlier chapter we have noticed how that family had acquired one district after another until their property included: (1) Under the Spanish branch--Spain, the Two Sicilies, Milan, Franche Comte, the Belgian Netherlands, Portugal, and a huge colonial empire; (2) Under the Austrian branch--Austria and its dependencies, Hungary, Bohemia, and the t.i.tle of Holy Roman Emperor.

Despite the herculean labors of Philip II, France remained outside Habsburg influence, a big gap in what would otherwise have been a series of connected territories.

[Sidenote: Ambition of the Bourbons.]

In measure as the French kings--the Bourbons--strengthened their position in their own country, they looked abroad not merely to ward off foreign attacks but to add land at their neighbors' expense.

Richelieu understood that his two policies went hand in glove--to make the Bourbons predominant in Europe was but a corollary to making the royal power supreme in France.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War.]

The chief warfare of the seventeenth century centers, therefore, in the long, terrible conflict between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons. Of this struggle, the so-called Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) may be treated as the first stage. Let us endeavor to obtain a clear idea of the interests involved.

When Richelieu became the chief minister of Louis XIII (1624), he found the Habsburgs in serious trouble and he resolved to take advantage of the situation to enhance the prestige of the Bourbons. The Austrian Habsburgs were facing a vast civil and religious war in the Germanies, and the Spanish Habsburgs were dispatching aid to their hard-pressed kinsmen.

The war, which proved momentous both to the Habsburgs and to their enemies, resulted from a variety of reasons--religious, economic, and political.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Ecclesiastical Causes]

The peace of Augsburg (1555) had been expected to settle the religious question in the Germanies. But in practice it had failed to fix two important matters. In the first place, the provision forbidding further secularization of church property ("Ecclesiastical Reservation") was not carried out, nor could it be while human nature and human temptation remained. Every Catholic ecclesiastic who became Protestant would naturally endeavor to take his church lands with him. Then, in the second place, the peace had recognized only Catholics and Lutherans: meanwhile the Calvinists had increased their numbers, especially in southern and central Germany and in Bohemia, and demanded equal rights. In order to extort concessions from the emperor, a union of Protestant princes was formed, containing among its members the zealous young Calvinist prince of the Palatinate, Frederick, commonly called the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. The Catholics were in an equally belligerent frame of mind. Not only were they determined to prevent further secularization of church property, but, emboldened by the progress of the Catholic Reformation in the Germanies during the second half of the sixteenth century, they were now anxious to revise the earlier religious settlement in their own interest and to regain, if possible, the lands that had been lost by the Church to the Protestants. The Catholics relied for political and military support upon the Catholic Habsburg emperor and upon Maximilian, duke of Bavaria and head of the Catholic League of Princes. Religiously, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German Protestants.

[Sidenote: The Thirty Years' War: Political Causes]

But a hardly less important cause of the Thirty Years' War lay in the politics of the Holy Roman Empire. The German princes had greatly increased their territories and their wealth during the Protestant Revolution. They aspired, each and all, to complete sovereignty. They would rid themselves of the outworn bonds of a medieval empire and a.s.sume their proper place among the independent and autocratic rulers of Europe. On his side, the emperor was insistent upon strengthening his position and securing a united powerful Germany under his personal control. Politically, the enemies of the Habsburgs were the German princes.

With the princes was almost invariably allied any European monarch who had anything to gain from dividing Germany or weakening Habsburg influence. In case of a civil war, the Habsburgs might reasonably expect to find enemies in Denmark, Sweden, and France.

[Sidenote: Four Periods in the Thirty Years' War]

The war naturally divides itself into four periods: (1) The Bohemian Revolt; (2) The Danish Period; (3) The Swedish Period; (4) The French or International Period.

[Sidenote: 1. The Bohemian Revolt]

The signal for the outbreak of hostilities in the Germanics was given by a rebellion in Bohemia against the Habsburgs. Following the death of Rudolph II (1576-1612), a narrow-minded, art-loving, and unbalanced recluse, his childless brother Matthias (1612-1619) had desired to secure the succession of a cousin, Ferdinand II (1619-1637), who, although a man of blameless life and resolute character, was known to be devoted to the cause of absolutism and fanatically loyal to the Catholic Church. Little opposition to this settlement was encountered in the various Habsburg Bohemian dominions, except in Bohemia. In that country, however, the n.o.bles, many of whom were Calvinists, dreaded the prospective accession of Ferdinand, who would be likely to deprive them of their special privileges and to impede, if not to forbid, the exercise of the Protestant religion in their territories. Already there had been encroachments on their religious liberty.

One day in 1618, a group of Bohemian n.o.blemen broke into the room where the imperial envoys were stopping and hurled them out of a window into a castle moat some sixty feet below. This so-called "defenestration" of Ferdinand's representatives was followed by the proclamation of the dethronement of the Habsburgs in Bohemia and the election to the kings.h.i.+p of Frederick, the Calvinistic Elector Palatine. Frederick was crowned at Prague and prepared to defend his new lands. Ferdinand II, raising a large army in his other possessions, and receiving a.s.sistance from Maximilian of Bavaria and the Catholic League as well as from Tuscany and the Spanish Habsburgs, intrusted the allied forces to an able veteran general, Count Tilly (1559-1632). King Frederick had expected support from his father-in-law, James I of England, and from the Lutheran princes of northern Germany, but in both respects he was disappointed. What with parliamentary quarrels at home and a curiously mistaken foreign policy of a Spanish alliance, James confined his a.s.sistance to pompous advice and long words. Then, too, most of the Lutheran princes, led by the tactful John George, elector of Saxony, hoped by remaining neutral to obtain special concessions from the emperor.

Within a very brief period, Tilly subdued Bohemia, drove out Frederick, and reestablished the Habsburg power. Many rebellious n.o.bles lost their property and lives, and the practice of the Protestant religion was again forbidden in Bohemia. Nor was that all. The victorious imperialists drove the fugitive Frederick, now derisively dubbed the "winter king," out of his original wealthy possessions on the Rhine, into miserable exile, an outcast without land or money. The conquered Palatinate was turned over to Maximilian of Bavaria, who was further rewarded for his services by being recognized as an elector of the Holy Roman Empire in place of the deposed Frederick.

The first period of the war was thus favorable to the Habsburg and Catholic causes. Between 1618 and 1620, revolt had been suppressed in Bohemia and an influential Rhenish electorate had been transferred from Calvinist to Catholic hands.

Now, however, the northern Protestant princes took alarm. If they had viewed with composure the failure of Frederick's foolhardy efforts in Bohemia, they beheld with downright dismay the expansion of Bavaria and the destruction of a balance of power long maintained between Catholic and Protestant Germany. And so long as the ill-disciplined remnants of Frederick's armies were behaving like highwaymen, pillaging and burning throughout the Germanics, the emperor declined to consider the grant of any concessions.

[Sidenote: 2. Danish Intervention. Christian IV]

At this critical juncture, while the Protestant princes were wavering between obedience and rebellion, Christian IV of Denmark intervened and precipitated the second period of the war. Christian IV (1588-1648) was impulsive and ambitious: as duke of Holstein he was a member of the Holy Roman Empire and opposed to Habsburg domination; as king of Denmark and Norway he was anxious to extend his influence over the North Sea ports; and as a Lutheran, he sought to champion the rights of his German co-religionists and to help them retain the rich lands which they had appropriated from the Catholic Church. In 1625, therefore, Christian invaded Germany, supported by liberal grants of money from England and by the troops of many of the German princes, both Calvinist and Lutheran.