Mohit Agrawal (1.15)
The Western Heritage, 8th edition, by Kagan, Ozment, and Turner
Chapter 13- Paths to Constitutionalism and Absolutism: England and France in the
17th Century
Introduction
• During the 17th century, England and France moved in different political directions.
• England developed into a parliamentary monarchy with a policy of limited religious toleration.
The House of Lords and the House of Commons (elected by the people) shared power with the
monarch.
• France developed an absolutist, centralized form of government dominated by a monarchy.
• Absolutism: Used to describe the government of Ancien Regime states, especially France,
Russia, Spain and Prussia. The term indicates that the only legitimate source of power in such
states was the monarch. In particular the rules of such states tried to deprive the aristocracy and
the church of the ability to compete with the monarch. This ideal was rarely achieved. The
term does not mean that the monarch had immediate and direct control of everyday life. For
that, see totalitarianism.
• Liberalism: Classical liberalism is a political and economic philosophy, originally founded on
the Enlightenment tradition that tries to circumscribe the limits of political power and to define
and support individual rights.
• These terms, though useful, conceal considerable complexity.
o In England, the monarch controlled the army, foreign policy, and much patronage.
o In France, laws, traditions, and local institutions limited the monarch's power.
Two Models of European Political Development
• The nature, and cost, of warfare increased throughout the 1500s.
• Monarchs needed new money sources to fight these wars.
• English monarchs, in pursuit of adequate income, threatened the local interests of the wealthy.
• These politically active groups effectively resisted the monarchs' attempted intrusions.
• Parlements: local French councils of nobles that served to check the king’s power in the
region. The Parlement of Paris was powerful enough to annul royal laws.
• Louis XIV made the French nobility dependent on his goodwill and patronage.
• He helped them pursue local interests.
• But Louis's dominance was not complete. Parlements still had much power.
• A strong Protestant religious movement known as Puritanism arose in England and actively
opposed the Stuart monarchy.
• Louis XIV, in contrast, crushed the Protestant communities in France. He was also supported
by the Church.
• Although the English parliament was not strong going into the 1600s, it still had a long
precedent of power and effectively organized the nobility.
o The English also had a strong sense of liberty and the rule of law.
• France lacked a similarly strong tradition of broad liberties, representation, and bargaining
between the monarchy and other national institutions.
• Because of the weakness of the Estates General, whatever political forces might have wished
to oppose or limit the monarchy lacked an institutional based from which to operate.
• The two countries also had leaders of very different personalities.
o In France, Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin were expert statesmen.
o Mazarin raised Louis XIV to be hard working.
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o The Stuarts were lazy, acted on whim, and did not keep their word.
o They rarely granted compromise and had faulty judgment.
o They probably, at times, also had Catholic sympathies in a now Protestant nation.
• In both England and France, the nobility and large landowners stood at the top of the social
hierarchy and sought to protect their interests.
• Parliamentary government in England was the result of the landed to protect their concerns and
limit the power of the monarchy.
• The French nobility, in contrast, concluded that the best way to secure its own interests was to
support the monarchy.
• Louis rewarded them with patronage and tax exemptions.
• At the onset of the 1600s, the countries were switched: England with a strong monarchy and
France with a weak one.
o French nobles even kept militias that threatened the monarchy.
• The situations would swap over 100 yeas.
Constitutional Crisis and Settlement in Stuart England
• James I
• James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots, became James I of England in 1603
without incident.
• He replaced a very popular queen and was an outsider.
• He inherited a large royal debt and a fiercely divided church.
• His book, A Trew Law of Free Monarchies, advocated divine right of monarchs and
absolutism.
• James hoped to call Parliament infrequently.
o It could only grant certain types of revenue to the king, and not others.
o These revenues, moreover, had been falling and were not that important.
• James, for money, instituted customs duties called impositions.
o Parliament bickered with James over this because they thought they controlled the
money. But no confrontation developed.
• Puritans hoped that James, due to his Protestant upbringing and Scottish Presbyterian
experience, would remove ornate (Catholic) religious ceremonies and deconstruct the
Episcopalian system.
• The Puritans submitted the Millenary Petition to James in 1604.
• He rebuffed them and firmly in the Hampton Court conference and declared his intention to
maintain and even enhance the Anglican episcopacy.
• James made the only possible decision. To have accommodated the Puritans would have
worsened the already existing strife within the Church of England.
• The only outcome of the Hampton Court conference was a committee which eventually
retranslated the Great Bible into the King James Bible.
• The Puritans also wanted Sunday to be a no-work no-play day.
• In 1618, James issued the Book of Sports which allowed people to recreate on Sundays. He
thought that these strictures prevented many Roman Catholics from becoming Anglicans.
• The clergy refused to read it and James had to rescind the book.
o The Puritans didn't win outright, but they did win in church and public opinion.
• James also published Counterblast to Tobacco.
o When he couldn't stamp out smoking with a high tax, he lowered the tax and created a
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royal monopoly. This greatly helped government finances.
• It was during James's reign that some religious dissenters began to leave England.
• In 1620, Puritan separatists founded Plymouth Colony.
• Later in the 1620s, a large, better financed group of Puritans left England to found the
Massachusetts Bay Colony.
• Although James inherited problems, he also created some for himself.
o His court became a center of scandal and corruption.
o He governed by favorites.
o Buckingham sold patronage, a move that angered the nobility because it cheapened
their rank.
o Never before had a single person, the Duke of Buckingham, so controlled access to the
monarch.
• James's foreign policy also roused opposition.
o He pursued peace, because with peace he needed less money, and with less money, he
didn't have to call Parliament.
o In 1604, his peace with Spain, though much needed, made him look pro-Catholic.
o James also tried to reduce the severity of laws against Catholics, angering the country.
o He also hesitated to help the Protestants in the 30 Year's war. Smart move, but it
angered his citizenry.
o He also tried to marry his son to the Spanish Infanta, the baby girl of the Spanish king.
o All these things made him look pro-Catholic.
o In 1624, Parliament pressured James and his son Charles to declare war on Spain.
Charles I
• Even though Parliament started the war, they wouldn't pay for it because of the power of
Buckingham.
• He levied more tariffs and duties.
• His “forced loan” was a tax that would theoretically be paid back.
• The government also quartered troops in people's homes.
• Not only did this anger the people, it angered nobles would had previously controlled their own
districts.
• In 1628, Parliament pushed the Petition of Right before granting new funds to Charles.
o This declaration of constitutional freedom required no forced loans or taxation without
consent of Parliament, no imprisonment without due cause, and no quartering.
o Though Charles agreed, would he follow his word?
Years of Personal Rule
• Buckingham was assassinated later in 1628.
• In 1629, parliament declared “popery”--to much centralized church power—and levying of
taxes without approval to be treason.
o Charles quickly dissolved the body.
• Charles made peace with France in 1629 and Spain in 1630.
• Charles wife was also French-Catholic.
• Charles supported the Arminians, a group opposed to the Puritans who favored elaborate highchurch practices and a centralized church bureaucracy.
o These again made the Stuarts look like Catholic wannabes.
• Thomas Wentworth, the king's chief minister, had a policy of thorough, which was basically
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strict efficiency and administrative centralization that would allow Charles to avoid calling
Parliament.
• Charles's ministers exploited every legal fundraising device.
o This included making everyone pay ship money—normally for naval defense—no
matter where they lived.
o Charles won a court case, but it was close and made the nobles (Parliament) hate him.
• Charles patronized some of the greatest artists of the day.
• He sold titles, cheapening their value and angering the nobility.
• The real fear of nobles, however, was that the monarch might actually succeed in governing
without ever again calling Parliament into session.
• It would have happened too, except for the war with the Scots.
• In 1637, William Laud (chief religious advisor and archbishop of Canterbury) and Charles
tried to push Anglicanism onto the Scots.
• The Scots rebelled, and without enough money for war, Charles called parliament into session.
• Parliament refused to consider funds for war until the king agreed to redress a long list of
grievances.
• The Short Parliament was quickly dissolved.
• When later England lost a battle, Parliament was again convened (this time the Long
Parliament).
The Long Parliament
• The long parliament met from 1640 to 1660.
• Parliament members were unified against the monarchy. They didn't like his financial policies
and distrusted the queen. They thought he was too pro-Catholic.
• Parliament impeached Stafford (the new chief minister) and Archbishop Laud. They were both
later executed.
• It also abolished the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission, royal
instruments of political and religious thorough, respectively.
• Ship money was abolished.
• Parliament also resolved (not required) that no more than three years should elapse between its
meetings and that it could not be dissolved without its own consent.
• There were some divisions, however. Parliament was divided over the direction of religious
reform.
o Moderate Puritans (Presbyterians) and Extreme Puritans (Independents) wanted to
remove the Book of Common Prayer.
• Moderates wanted a Calvinist like church, with local congregations subject to higher
representative governing bodies (presbyteries).
• Independents wanted congregationalism, in which each local congregation was independent.
• Many conservatives, meanwhile, wanted to keep the English church in its current form.
o Their numbers fell after 1642 however, as many left Parliament at the outbreak of civil
war and joined the king.
• In 1641, rebellion erupted in Ireland and Parliament balked at giving more money.
o Pym, the leader in Parliament against the king, wanted parliament to take control of the
army.
o Even the majority of parliament members didn't want to go that far.
Eruption of Civil War
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• Charles saw divisions in Parliament as a way to reassert his own power.
• In 1641, Parliament presented the king with the “Grand Remonstrance”, a list of 200
grievances.
• In 1642, Charles tried to arrest Pym and other radicals but they got away.
• The king then withdrew from London and started to raise an independent army.
• Parliament passed the Militia Ordinance and did the same.
• The English civil war was from 1642-1646.
• Two main issues:
o Would an absolute monarch or a parliamentary government rule England?
o Would English religion be controlled by the king's bishop and conform to high
Anglican practice or adopt a decentralized, Presbyterian system?
• The royalist supporters were known as Cavaliers and were located in the northwestern half of
England.
• The Roundheads supported the parliament and were in the southeast.
• The chief factor dividing the two camps (besides geography) was religious sentiment.
Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan Republic
• Two factors led to Parliament's victory.
o Parliament allied with Scotland in 1643 with the Solemn League and Covenant
agreement, which pushed for independence of the Scottish church.
o The reorganization of the parliamentary army under Oliver Cromwell was the second
factor. Cromwell was a country squire of iron spirit. He was an Independent. He and
his followers were tolerant of any (Protestant) form of religious service.
• Many feared Parliamentary tyranny as well as monarch tyranny.
o John Milton defended the freedom of the press eloquently when Parliament passed
strict censure laws in 1644.
• The (parliamentarian) allies won the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, the largest engagement
of the war.
• Cromwell's reorganized forces, the New Model Army, fighting with disciplined fanaticism,
won a decisive victory over the king at Naseby in 1645.
• As a last ditch effort, Charles tried to divide Parliament on religious lines, and tried to get the
Moderates (and Scots) to come to his side.
• But Cromwell foiled the plot. The king had been defeated.
• Now Parliament duked it out inside its chambers (and behind closed doors) to see what the
future of England should look like.
• In 1648, the Presbyterians were barred from entering Parliament. This gave the radicals
control of the Parliament. The radical Independents then, in the so-called Rump Parliament:
o Had Charles executed as a public criminal in 1649 (though many saw him as a martyr)
o abolished the monarchy
o abolished the House of Lords
o and abolished the Anglican church.
• A civil war had become a revolution. Between 1649 and 1660, England was officially a
Puritan republic.
• Cromwell conquered Ireland and Scotland at his time (funny...Scots conquered by their allies)
and created Great Britain.
• Parliament thought that Cromwell was too powerful with his 50,000 man army and entertained
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notions to disband it.
• Cromwell then disbanded Parliament and ruled as Lord Protector, aka head of a military
dictatorship.
• The military dictatorship, however, was no more effective than the monarchy and became just
as harsh and hated.
• Cromwell's budget, and therefore taxes, were 3x Charles's.
• Chaos reigned in many places, and commerce suffered throughout England.
• Cromwell became increasingly intolerant of Anglicans (and what about Catholics?) and
instituted harsh Puritan rules of morality.
• Political liberty vanished in the name of religious liberty.
• Cromwell had to design a political structure to replace the monarchy and Parliament. Nothing
really worked.
• After his death in 1658, his army asked Charles II (Charles I's son) to come back.
• The monarchy was restored in 1660.
Charles II and the Restoration of the Monarchy
• A man of considerable charm and political skill, Charles set a refreshing new tone after 11
years of somber Puritanism.
• His restoration returned England to the SQ of 1642, with Parliament not required to meet and
Anglicism the official religion.
• Charles though was (this time not suspected but definitely) pro-Catholic and thus wanted
religious toleration, as long as citizens remained loyal to the throne.
• But in Parliament, even royalists didn't believe that stability could be attained that way.
• Between 1661 and 1665, through the Clarendon Code, Parliament passed strict laws against
everyone (Catholic and Protestant) who wasn't an Anglican.
• In 1651, England had passed the Navigation Acts that required all trade to be done on English
ships or on ships registered in the country of whose cargo they carried
o This was meant to hurt the Dutch dominance in trade and shipping
• A series of naval wars between England and Holland ensued in the 1660s.
• Charles also tried to tighten his grip on new colonies in the New World, which were mostly
settled by Separatists and Independents who hated him.
• But of course Charles needed more money than Parliament allowed.
• Thus, he signed a secret treaty in 1670 with Louis XIV called the Treaty of Dover in which
France gave Charles a subsidy in expectation of his public conversion to Catholicism.
o Of course, the public (but maybe private) conversion never happened
• In 1672, to appease Louis and his own beliefs, Charles issued the Declaration of Indulgence
that suspended all laws against religious sects and promoted tolerance.
o Parliament refused to give Charles more money until he withdrew the measure.
o Parliament also passed the Test Act, which required all government and military
officials to swear an oath against transubstantiation, which of course no loyal Catholic
could do.
• In 1678, anti-Catholicism came to head in the Popish Plot.
o James, the duke of York and heir to the throne, converted to Catholicism.
o Titus Oates, a notorious liar, made up a plot in which the Catholic queen had plotted to
kill Charles and install James as king.
o Several people were executed in the affair.
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o The newly organized opposition in Parliament (the Whig party) almost got a measure
passed to prevent James from succession.
• Charles then tried doubly hard to repress Parliament between 1681-1685.
o He relied on customs duties to avoid calling the body.
o He also got money from France.
o He suppressed his opposition.
o This included executing several Whig leaders, driving others into exile, and bullying
local leaders into electing royalists.
• Charles II died in 1685 after converting on his deathbed to Catholicism.
• James II inherited a court and Parliament filled with friends.
James II and Renewed Fears of a Catholic England
• James II ruled from 1685-1688.
• He did not know how to make the most of a good thing.
• Even though nobody asked him to comply himself to the Test Act, he alienated Parliament by
insisting on its removal.
• Parliament balked and James dissolved it.
• He appointed many Catholics to high positions in the government and military.
• In 1687, he re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence.
• In 1688, he imprisoned Anglican leaders who would not publicize these new tolerance efforts.
• Each of these actions represented a direct royal attack on the local power and authority of the
landed and the church. James was attacking English liberty and challenging social privilege
and influence.
• This is because under this guise of tolerance, James was actually seeking to subject all English
institutions to the power of the monarchy.
• This absolutism was despised by even the Tories (royal conservatives in Parliament).
• They feared that Catholicism would be forced upon them, like in France in 1685 by Louis.
• James also had a son in 1688. This would mean that the royals in England (for the foreseeable
future) would be Catholics.
• This shattered the hopes that his daughter, Mary, who had been earlier born Protestant, would
get the throne.
• Upon the birth of the son, Parliament united and asked Mary and her husband William III of
Orange (leader of the Netherlands) to invade and depose of James.
The “Glorious Revolution”
• William of Orange arrived in 1688 and faced no opposition from the public.
• James fled to France. In 1690, he tried to get the throne back but was humiliated in Ireland.
• Parliament declared William and Mary joint monarchs in 1689.
• They, in turn, recognized a Bill of Rights that limited the power of the monarchy and
guaranteed basic rights to the landed.
• Henceforth, England's monarchs would be subject to law and would rule by the consent of
Parliament, which was (now required) to be called into session every three years.
• The Bill of Rights also prohibited Catholics from occupying the English throne.
• The Toleration Act of 1689 permitted all Protestant worship but outlawed Catholicism and
anti-Trinitarians.
• Mary died in 1694, and William in 1702. Another Stuart, Queen Anne, died in 1714. Both
Mary and Anne were childless, and this precipitated a later succession crisis (for Charles “III”
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could reclaim the crown).
• The Act of Settlement in 1701 provided that that if no Protestant in the Stuart line was
available for the throne, then the Protestant House of Hanover would take over.
• In 1714, King George I of Hanover took over.
• The Glorious Revolution established a framework of government by and for the governed that
seemed to bear out John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, in which the king and the
people have a bilateral contract.
• The Glorious Revolution established in England a permanent check on monarchical power by
the classes represented in Parliament.
Rise of Absolute Monarchy in France
• religious and social (among nobles) discontent was smothered by Louis XIV
• Louis was an aggressive ruler who sought glory (gloire) in foreign wars.
• He subjected his citizens to “one king, one law, one faith.”
• A historically simple and incorrect view of Louis's reign is that is was a time when the rising
monarchy exerted direct control of the nation at all times.
• Instead, the ascendancy of the monarchy was long planned and executed. However,
centralization bred discontent, especially among nobles.
• Louis smartly worked through the problems.
• Louis worked within existing social institutions to strengthen the monarchy while assuring
nobles and other wealthy groups of their social standing and importance.
• The two groups worked in a partnership, though Louis had more power.
• Just as the emergence of a strong parliament was not inevitable in England, neither was the
emergence of an absolute monarchy in France.
Henry IV and Sully
• Henry IV sought to curtail the privileges of the French nobility.
• He targeted provincial governors and the parlements, especially Paris's.
• During Louis XIII's reign, intendants subjected the privileged classes to stricter supervision,
and somewhat successfully implemented the king's will.
• The intendants were designed to reduce abuse of royal offices that nobles had bought.
• Henry and his finance minister, the duke of Sully, established government monopolies in many
areas.
• This was the start of the mercantilism that Louis XIV pursued.
• Henry also had many canals made, to improve trade.
• The corvee, a tax on labor, paid for a permanent group of workers who improved roads and
buildings.
• Sully tried to expand trade across Europe in a common market.
Louis XIII and Richelieu
• Henry was assassinated in 1610, and Sully retired soon after.
• Louis XIII was only 9 at the time.
• Marie de Medicis, the queen mother and consort, sought security by signing a mutual defense
pact with Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1611.
• The treaty also arranged several royal marriages between the countries.
• She also promoted Cardinal Richelieu in an attempt to better secure the monarchy.
• Richelieu sought to make France the supreme European power.
• Although devoutly Catholic, Richelieu pursued an anti-Hapsburg policy (though he kept the
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treaty with Spain) by countering Spanish influence in Europe.
• He thus would lend support to Protestants, especially Gustavus Adolpus, who was his
counterweight to the Hapsburgs of the HRE.
• His genius can be seen in the land gains France got out of the Treaty of Westphalia.
• At home, Richelieu pursued centralizing policies utterly without qualm.
• Richelieu, given a free hand by Louis, stepped up the campaign against the privileged classes.
• Disobedient nobles were imprisoned and even executed.
• Richelieu started the campaign against the Huguenots that would end with Louis XIV's
revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
• Royal armies took over Huguenot cities in 1629.
• The 1629 Peace of Alais limited the Edict of Nantes by refusing fortified cities and
independent courts to Huguenots.
• Richelieu employed state art and the printing press to indoctrinate the French people in raison
d'etat (“reason of state”).
Young Louis XIV and Mazarin
• Although Richelieu helped strengthen the monarchy, his immediate legacy was discontent
among the privileged.
• The crown's steady multiplication of royal offices, it replacement of local authorities by “state”
agents, and its reduction of local sources of patronage undermined the traditional position of
the privileged groups in French society.
• When Louis XIII died in 1643, Louis XIV was only five years old.
• The queen mother and consort, Anne of Austria, made Cardinal Mazarin the chief minister.
• Mazarin continued Richelieu's determined policy of centralization.
• Between 1649 and 1652, in a series of widespread rebellions known as the Fronde (after the
slingshots used by street boys), segments of the nobility and townspeople sought to reverse the
centralization.
• The Parlement of Paris initiated the revolt and the nobility soon followed.
• Urging them were the wives of nobles and princes who were imprisoned.
• Mazarin released the prisoners in 1651; he and Louis then fled France.
• In 1652, after Paris descended into anarchy, the French people welcomed back the king.
• A strong king was preferable to many regional powers with competing and irreconcilable
claims.
• The Fronde taught the monarchy to proceed carefully with centralization.
The Years of Louis XIV's Personal Rule
• On the death of Mazarin in 1661, Louis assumed personal control.
• He appointed no single chief minister.
• One result was to make revolt more difficult; nobles would have to publicly stand up against
the king, not just the chief minister.
• Mazarin prepared Louis XIV well to rule France.
• Louis wrote that the Fronde caused him to loathe “kings of straw” and he assured that he never
would become one.
• First, Louis and his advisors became masters of propaganda and the creation of a political
image.
• Louis never missed an opportunity to impress the French people with his grandeur, like
dressing like a Roman emperor when the dauphin (the French heir to the throne) was born.
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• Second, Louis made sure the French nobles and other major social groups would benefit from
the growth of his own authority.
• Though Louis limited the influence of noble institutions on the monarchy, he never tried to
abolish those institutions or limit their authority at the local level.
• Ex: He usually conferred with regional parlements before making rulings that affected their
regions.
• The only exception was the Parlement of Paris, which he stripped of much power in 1673. The
tradition had been that all new laws had to be registered with them.
• Louis set out to anchor his rule in the principle of the divine right of kings, to domesticate the
French nobility by binding them to the court rituals of Versailles, and to crush religious dissent.
King by Divine Right
• Building on tradition reverence, Louis XIV defended absolute royal authority on the grounds
of divine right.
• The political theorist Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet was an ardent champion of the
traditional rights of the king in matters of church affairs.
• Bossuet defended the divine right of kings with examples from the Old Testament.
• Bossuet argued that none save God could judge the king.
• Therefore, the king was answerable to God only and no earthly thing.
• Louis was famous for the quote “L'etat, c'est moi.” (The state, I am.)
Versailles
• Constructed by Louis starting in 1660, Versailles was the seat of government away from Paris,
from which he could direct his country.
• The palace became Louis's residence in 1682.
• It was a true temple to royalty, architecturally designed and artistically decorated to proclaim
the glory of the Sun King.
• Although Versailles consumed over half of Louis annual revenues, it paid significant political
dividend.
• Because Louis ruled personally, he was the chief source of favors and patronage in France.
• Louis encouraged nobles to approach him directly, but through elaborate court etiquette.
• They competed over opportunities to attend to him, like at rising or going to bed.
• Like his father, Louis was married to the Spanish Infanta, and after her death married the pious
Madame de Maintenon.
• During his first marriage he was quite the womanizer.
• Court life was a carefully planned and successfully executed effort to domesticate and
trivialize the nobility.
• This kept them occupied and currying favor with the king, and not planning revolts.
• Dress codes and high stakes gambling contributed to indebtedness and dependency on the king
(who made every attempt of loaning money).
• These nobles had no real power. Business was conducted through powerful councils that were
headed by non-noble people Louis named. They were smart but had no power bases from
which to threaten him.
• Thus, the nobles depended totally upon Louis for any power.
• Some nobles stayed at their local estates, of course, and many others were too poor to go to
court. But the rich and the powerful were there, and Louis could control them.
Suppression of the Jansenists
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Louis believed that political unity and stability required religious conformity.
Because of their power, Jesuits had been banned from France by Catherine de Medicis.
Henry IV lifted the ban, with certain conditions to control Jesuit power.
The Jesuits were not, however, easily harnessed.
They rapidly monopolized the education of the upper classes, and their devout students
promoted religious reform throughout France.
• Jansenism arose in the 1630s as part of the opposition among some Catholics to the theology
and political influence of the Jesuits.
• They adhered strictly to the teachings of St. Augustine (like many Protestants) and not the
Council of Trent.
• They especially opposed the idea of free will and said that original sin meant that only divine
grace could save people.
• Cornelius Jansen was a Flemish theologian and the bishop of Ypres.
• The powerful Parisian family of the Arnaulds joined the Jansenist ranks in the 1640s.
• They believed, as did many others, that Jesuits had assassinated Henry IV.
• The Jesuits attacked the Jansenists as “Crypto-Calvinists.”
• In 1653, Pope Innocent X declared the Jansenists theological propositions heretical.
• Jansenist books:
o Cornelius Jansen, 1640: Augustinus. The basis of Jansenism.
o Antoine Arnauld, 1643: On Frequent Communion. Attacks Jesuit confessional
practices.
o Blaise Pascal, 1656: Provincial Letters. Pascal tried to reconcile religion and the new
Enlightenment. He objected to Jesuit moral theology not only as being lax and shallow,
but also because it failed to do full justice to the religious experience.
• In 1660, Louis enforced the papal bull that banned Jansenism.
• Many went underground, and in 1710 Louis did a more thorough purge.
• Jansenism had offered the prospect of Catholicism broad enough to appeal to France's
Protestant Huguenots. By suppressing it, Louis also eliminated the best home for religious
unity.
Government Geared for Warfare
• France had a largely subsistence economy, and its cities enjoyed only limited commercial
prosperity.
• But by the 1660s, France was superior in Europe in administrative bureaucracy, armed forces,
and national unity.
• Louis could afford to maintain a large army, and his chief military and foreign policy goal was
to achieve secure international boundaries for France, especially from the north.
• Louis saw himself as a warrior king and on more than one occasion personally accompanied
his armies to battle.
• Many of France's neighbors formed alliances against him.
Colbert and the French Economy
• Jean-Baptiste Colbert was the finance minister and Louis’s most brilliant advisor.
• Colbert worked to centralize the French economy.
• Colbert regulated trade with tariffs, created new national industries, created efficient factories,
simplified the bureaucracy, abolished unnecessary positions, reduced the number of taxexempt nobles, and increased the taille tax on the poor.
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• This kind of close government control of the economy is known as mercantilism.
• It aim was to maximize exports and reserves of bullion.
• His personal micromanaging, however, may have led to the failure of the French colonies in
the New World.
Louvois and the French Military
• The marquis of Louvois created Louis’s 250,000-strong army.
• Louvois was Louis’s minister of war and a brilliant military tactician.
• Before Louvois, the French army had been an amalgam of local recruits and mercenaries,
uncoordinated groups whose loyalty could not always be counted upon.
• Without regular pay, the troops lived by pillage.
• Louvois instituted salaries and discipline, making the army a respectable profession.
• He introduced a system of promotion by merit.
• Because it was well-disciplined, the army had public support. It no longer threatened the
people it was supposed to protect.
• This provides an excellent example of the kinds of benefits many saw in the growing authority
of the monarchy.
Louis's Early Wars
The War of Devolution
• Louis first great foreign adventure, from 1667-8.
• It was fought over Louis's claim, through his wife, to the Spanish Belgian provinces.
• According to the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), Marie renounced her claim to the Spanish
throne contingent on a 500,000 crown dowry.
• When Philip IV of Spain died in 1665, he explicitly denied Marie any inheritance.
• Louis hoped to turn the (otherwise useless to him) marriage into territorial gain.
• He wanted a part of that inheritance.
• Louis's legal argument was that in certain areas of the Spanish inheritance, such as Flanders,
property devolved to children of the first marriage, aka Marie, and not Charles II.
• Louis sent his armies into Flanders and the France-Comte in 1667.
• In response, England, Sweden, and the Netherlands formed the Triple Alliance against him.
• Louis agreed to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chappele, which gave him a few towns of the Spanish
Belgium.
Invasion of the Netherlands
• In 1670, with the Treaty of Dover, the French and English became allies against the Dutch.
• This crumbled the Triple Alliance.
• Louis invaded the Netherlands in 1672, who he blamed for stopping his earlier war.
• He was incensed by the Dutch who took credit for his defeat. A cartoon depicted the sun
(Louis) being eclipsed by a great moon of Dutch cheese.
• Louis's invasion brought down Dutch statesmen Jan and Cornelius De Witt.
• They were replaced with William, Prince of Orange.
• Orange united the HRE, Spain, Lorraine, and Brandenburg in an alliance against the “Christian
Turks.” (France)
• In the war, Admiral Duquesne established clear French domination of the Mediterranean.
• The Peace of Nijmwegen (1678-9) gave Louis some land, including the Franche-Comte. But
the Netherlands were left standing.
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes
Mohit Agrawal (13.15)
• After the Edict of Nantes, relations between Catholics and Huguenots were still hostile.
• The Huguenot population was declining in the 1660s.
• After the Peace of Nijmwegen, Louis launched a methodical campaign against the Huguenots
in a determined effort to unity France religiously.
• He banned Huguenots from government offices and any good job.
• He used tax policy to encourage them to convert.
• He also quartered troops in their towns and homes.
• In 1685, Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes.
• Protestants were forced to flee. Many became galley slaves for merchants or the navy.
• The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was a major blunder. Protestant countries saw Louis as a
new Philip II, intent on a Catholic reconquest of Europe and who needed to be resisted at all
costs.
• 250,000 Huguenots emigrated and strengthened Protestant nations, especially the Netherlands.
• Others became guerrilla fighters at home.
• Louis, to his death, considered the revocation to be his most pious act, one that placed God in
his debt.
Louis's Later Wars
The League of Augsburg and the Nine Years' War
• In 1681, Louis's army took the city of Strasbourg, prompting new alliances against him.
• The League of Augsburg, created in 1686 to counter France's push into Germany, included
England, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Bavaria, Saxony, the palatinate, and Austria.
• In 1688, Louis invaded the palatinate on a flimsy argument that his sister-in-law should ascend
the throne.
• Upon hearing of the destruction of her homeland, the sister-in-law pleaded with Louis to spare
some of it. He used her as a tool. He had all taxes collected in her name.
• A long, extraordinarily destructive war resulted. Between 1688 and 1697, the League and
France battled in the Nine Years' War.
• Simultaneously, England and France struggled for control of North America in the King
William's War.
• The Nine Years' War ended in stalemate.
• The Peace of Ryswick, 1697, was a triumph of William III of England and Emperor Leopold.
• It secured Holland (yet again) and thwarted Louis's expansion into Germany.
War of the Spanish Succession: Treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt
• On November 1, 1700, Charles II of Spain finally died. He was known as “the sufferer” and
“the bewitched” because of his genetic deformities and lingering illnesses.
• Charles was most likely a case of extreme Hapsburg inbreeding. His mother was the niece of
his father, and the uncle-niece pairing went back 12 times in his heritage. He was descended
from Mad Juana 14 different ways. He bordered on the mentally retarded, had a disfigured
face, and could barely talk because his tongue was super-fat. He was impotent and died
childless.
• Both Louis and Austrian emperor Leopold had married daughters of Philip IV's first marriage.
They both had claims to the Spanish throne.
• Louis's wife was the older of the two, but she had renounced her claim to the throne with the
Treaty of the Pyrenees.
• While Louis feared the union of the two Hapsburg inheritances, the rest of Europe feared a
Mohit Agrawal (14.15)
dual France-Spain.
• As a result, before Charles's death, negotiations began in Europe to partition his inheritance in
a way that would preserve the existing balance of power.
• Charles, however, upset these negotiations when, upon his death, he signed his lands to Philip
of Anjou, Louis's grandson.
• Louis saw God's hand in Charles's will and took full advantage of the opportunity it provided.
He brushed aside the negotiations.
• Philip of Anjou moved to Madrid and became Philip V of Spain.
• Louis then sent troops to Flanders, ostensibly to remove Dutch troops from Spanish land.
• Philip opened up Spanish colonies to French ships.
• In 1701, England, Holland, and the HRE formed the Grand Alliance against Louis.
• They wanted Flanders as a neutral barrier and wanted the emperor to get his fair share of the
Spanish succession.
• Louis increased the stakes when he recognized the son of James II as the true king of England.
If Louis won, England would have a Catholic monarchy.
• In 1701, the thirteen year War of the Spanish Succession began, and once again total war
enveloped Western Europe.
• France, for the first time, went to war with inadequate finances, a poorly equipped army, and
mediocre generals.
• The English used advanced weaponry and superior tactics.
• John Churchill, the duke of Marlborough, bested Louis's soldiers in every major engagement.
• In 1708-9, famine, revolts, and uncollectible taxes tore France apart internally. Despair
pervaded the French court. How could God forsake Louis, who had done so much for Him?
• Louis would have made peace in 1709, but the terms—including removing Philip from the
Spanish throne—were too much.
• France signed an armistice with England at Utrecht in 1713.
• France concluded hostilities with the Netherlands in the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714.
• This agreement confirmed Philip V as king of Spain, but gave Gibraltar and Minorca to
England (giving it powerful Mediterranean lands).
• It also transferred the Spanish Belgium to the Austrians (Hapsburgs), as well as all Italian
lands.
• Louis also approved George of Hanover to become the next king of England.
• Spanish power declined in the wake of the war, though it had been declining for at least 50
years earlier due to a misuse of state resources and incompetent kings. Philip's wife used his
position to get her son's noble positions in Italy. This was a misdirection of state resources.
• Only until Charles III in 1759 did Spain have a good, efficient leader. But it was too late.
• Politically, the 18th century would belong to England, as the 17th had to France and the 16th to
Spain.
• Louis's territory wouldn't come around until Napoleon.
Louis XIV's Legacy
• Louis left France a mixed legacy.
• His wars brought death and destruction and sapped the nation's resources.
• The love of war that he instilled in the French nobility and monarchy would causes a drain on
resources that never would be fixed.
• Louis's policies of centralization would later make it difficult for France to develop effective
Mohit Agrawal (15.15)
institution of representation and self-government.
• Louis's role was not so absolute as to exert oppressive control over the daily lives of his
subjects. He had no police state.
• His absolutism functioned in foreign affairs, religion, and in economic affairs.