THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES

by Bobbitt, Philip

  “Everything was calm everywhere [when I ascended the throne],” Louis XIV later recalled ruefully; “peace was established with my neighbors, probably for as long as I myself might wish… my age and the pleasure of being at the head of my armies perhaps made me desire rather more external activity.”44

  At some point Mazarin and his kingly protégé conceived the plan of uniting the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties through marriage and eventually bringing Spain within French control. Toward this end Mazarin began negotiations with Philip IV for the marriage of his daughter, Maria Theresa, to Louis. These negotiations were accelerated by French strength in the field and a show of French interest in the young princess of Savoy. When Louis was reconciled to the prince of Conde, his principal rival, who had attempted to seize power in 1650, the king made a tour through the south of the country to Bayonne, where his marriage with the Spanish infanta took place. He then made a triumphal entry to Paris with his bride. When Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, died in 1661, Louis did not replace him, choosing instead to be his own prime minister. Louis was twenty-three. All the elements of the kingly state—political unity, absolutism, centralized administration, dynastic legitimacy, secularism—were in place.

  Louis abolished or ignored all rival authorities and councils. The local authorities, the nobility, the Church, and town government were all placed directly in relationship to the Crown, and all were made responsible to his will. The bureaucratic structure of the kingly state created by Richelieu had been perfected by Mazarin, who sought and promoted the talented managers necessary to run it—Fouquet, Colbert, le Tellier. There were more men of remarkable ability, promoted on merit, who were wholly dependent on the king for their status and authority. Speaking of the most celebrated of this cadre, Mazarin is said to have declared upon his deathbed, to Louis, “Sire, I owe everything to you, but I pay my debt in giving you Colbert.”

  Colbert, who succeeded the masterful Fouquet, was from 1661 to 1672 supreme in virtually every domestic department. He increased methods of indirect taxation, thus capturing some of the hitherto exempt classes; gave incentives to trade and manufactures; invited foreign talent to settle in France; produced road and canal projects by the score; created a fleet that was, in size at least, the equal of any in Europe; financed the fortifications with which Vauban, the great siege architect, overcame the very tactics he had taught the rest of Europe and secured Calais, Dunkirk, Brest, and a whole line of interior fortresses; and most significantly, produced a revenue surplus each year with which Louis could pursue his foreign policy. This permitted France to enlarge the standing army first established in 1640. Louis's domination of Europe was largely based on the fact that by 1666 he was able to maintain a force of almost 100,000 men, which he would soon triple. This, however, would have been fruitless without the centralized civilian structure put into place during this period by Louis's ministers.

  Bankruptcy, indiscipline, corruption: these were the characteristics of French armies, as of most others, before… 1661. Yet by 1680 the French forces were nearly 300,000 strong and the wonder of Europe… Basically [this] was the work of two outstanding and tireless bureaucrats, le Tellier… and his son… Louvois. [Their] most important innovation… was the creation of a civil bureaucracy to administer the army.45

  All French soldiers, of whatever rank, were subject to civilian control in every aspect of defense preparation: procurement, weapons manufacture, the hiring and fitting out of privateers, no less than logistics.

  When Philip IV of Spain died in 1665, Louis laid claim to various lands in the southern Netherlands, relying on his wife's dynastic rights.* The War of Devolution (1667 – 1668) ensued when he invaded these territories. The Spanish could not mount a serious resistance, but the French invasion prompted the Dutch and the English, then in the midst of a trade war, to conclude a peace at once and to enter into an alliance in order to prevent Louis from seizing the entire southern Netherlands. At Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668 Louis agreed to a settlement, gaining a number of fortified cities in Flanders. This was merely a prelude.

  For the next four years, Louis planned his campaign against the Dutch. In 1667 Colbert had imposed discriminatory tariffs against Dutch products; in 1671 these were sharply increased. French diplomacy deftly detached the British (in the secret Treaty of Dover) and the Swedes from Dutch alliances. Then, in 1672 Louis struck on land while the English fleet attacked the Dutch at sea. This invasion brought William III to power in Holland, a man who embodied the ideals of the territorial state to the same degree that Louis XIV represented the kingly state. It is an irony that is not uncommon in strategic affairs that the very success of Louis's forces so terrified the Dutch that they turned to their most intransigent and dynamic leader. He, by playing on the fears of other states that Louis would upset the balance of power in Europe—fears that were excited by Louis's successes in the field—was able to organize a general coalition against the French. In 1673 the Spanish joined the Dutch; the next year a number of German states joined the alliance. In 1674 the English parliament forced Charles II to withdraw from the war, and in 1677 William married Charles's niece, Mary, the daughter of his brother and heir.

  Louis redoubled his efforts. At the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, he took back Franche-Comté and made further gains in the southern Netherlands and Alsace. Along these lines, Louis—with the guidance of Vauban—built the “iron barrier” of fortifications that presaged the Maginot Line of a later century. Louis was determined to press on to the Rhine. Of the cities that he then seized in 1681 the most important was Strasbourg, which was followed by the siege of Luxembourg. When the English threatened a general European war, Louis raised the siege in return for an agreement that for thirty years he would remain in possession of the territory he had claimed. This was the Truce of Ratisbon, which ratified all of Louis's gains since 1678.

  Louis chose this time to revoke the Edict of Nantes and renew the persecution of Protestants. Although this might seem reckless, perhaps explained only by the deepest religious convictions, in fact neither conclusion is warranted. It was Louis, after all, who, when the emperor and pope appealed to him for help in driving the Turks from Vienna in 1683, replied laconically that “crusades [are] no longer in fashion.”46 Moreover, Pope Innocent XI condemned the revocation of the Edict and correctly saw that Louis intended to use this step as a means of ultimately asserting his supremacy over the French Church. This was precisely Louis's objective, and it is doubtless also true that he correctly read the mood of his people, who had collaborated in many ways since the death of Mazarin in petty and malicious attacks on Protestants.* Thus Louis managed to succeed in further centralizing in his person the aspirations, and the prejudices, of his subjects.

  This step had the unintended effect, however, of destroying his closest ally, James II, who had been trying to maintain a kingly state in Britain. James had attempted to intercede with the pope, soliciting his support for the Revocation, a move that scarcely endeared James to his own subjects, some 300,000 of whom were non-Anglican Protestants.47

  In 1686 the League of Augsburg was formed to maintain the agreements of Westphalia, which, it was felt, were jeopardized by Louis's ambitions. The emperor, the kings of Spain and Sweden, the Dutch, Bavaria, and the Rhine provinces all joined, as did the pope the following year. Louis replied by demanding that the League adopt the Truce of Ratisbon as the permanent peace settlement, and James was unwise enough to support this claim. Along with other factors (including James's scarcely concealed Catholicism), this provoked leading English figures to invite William III to replace James, and thus Louis's chief opponent, and the chief protagonist of the territorial state, came to power in London.

  The resulting War of the League of Augsburg, begun when Louis responded to the developments against him by invading the Rhineland and burning Heidelberg, was the greatest international conflict since the Thirty Years' War. For the first time Louis faced armies that were a match for his own. By 1697 both sides w
ere exhausted and agreed to the Peace of Ryswick. Louis was obliged to surrender some of the towns he had seized before the war, including Luxembourg, and to recognize William III as king of England, but he retained Strasbourg and Franche-Comté. Ryswick was a victory for the territorial states, and for the constitutional geography of a multipolar Europe in which small states held the balance of power. For that reason, every diplomat of the period must have realized that when the issue arose of the succession to the Spanish throne—for which Louis had so long prepared himself—Ryswick would be challenged.

  The War of the Spanish Succession arose owing to an essential shortcoming in the system of kingly states, its dependence on dynastic legitimacy and on the will of a single person. As it happened, “[o]n no other occasion in the history of modern Europe have so many questions of vital concern to its peoples depended on the death or survival of one man.”48

  That man was the Spanish king, Carlos II, the last descendant of the male line of the great emperor Charles V. He had long been an invalid, and had not produced an heir. The prospect of his death, which appeared imminent over an unexpectedly long reign, excited and alarmed the dynasties of Europe because of the possibility that either Bourbon France or the Habsburg empire would attempt to amalgamate with what was still the richest and by far the most populous collection of human beings owing allegiance to a single European sovereign, the kingly state of Spain—encompassing the Iberian peninsula (minus Portugal), Belgium, a huge overseas colonial empire, and various parts of Italy, including Milan. The pieces that Louis had carefully assembled—his Spanish wife, a dowry controversy, a secret partition agreement with the Austrian Habsburg king Leopold I that provided for a division of the Spanish empire between them if Charles should die without an heir—now all seemed to fall into place.

  There remained two formidable obstacles. Spain's partners in the Peace of Ryswick would not tolerate the blow to the balance of power that would occur from uniting Spanish overseas possessions with either France or the Empire. It is a matter of some dispute whether the occupation of the Americas had continued to be nearly as enriching to Spain as it proved at first; compared to the ever-escalating expense of garrisoning a continent and the costly maintenance of long lines of threatened communications across the Atlantic, this may not actually have been so. But in light of the greatly increased costs of maintaining competitive military forces on the continent of Europe, no territorial state could risk diverting this treasure, however costly it had become to extract, to a hegemonical kingly state so plainly on the march.

  Shortly after Ryswick, England, Holland, and France had attempted to settle the question of Spanish succession. It is interesting to observe the two sets of negotiating states in these treaties: the territorial states, personified by William III, carefully trying to maintain a balance of power; the kingly states, represented by Louis, keeping intact those dynastic inheritances that might, in the fullness of time, augment the kingly state. William's vision of the European community would eventually triumph at Utrecht when the epochal war waged by Louis finally ended.

  Lossky portrays the two men with great insight, and accomplishes also a vivid portrayal of a Europe constituted by Westphalia, compared with that which would emerge at Utrecht.

  Louis' aim was quite simple: to increase the grandeur of his State and of his House, so that his own preeminence as “the greatest king in Christendom” would be beyond dispute. He believed that each country had its own “true maxims of state,” rooted in the natural order, whose ultimate author was God. Good statesmanship consisted in following these maxims… Only an absolute monarch stood a chance of following the true maxims consistently. Wherever kingly power was limited, it was virtually certain that private interest would becloud the real interest of the State…. There was more room for change in [William's] world than in Louis'… [William came to see] the struggle on [a] plane that helped him attain to that comprehensive view of the war, and eventually of all Europe, which made him natural leader of the coalition. He ceased to belong to any one country. He sacrificed Dutch interests to English, English to Dutch; when necessary, he was ready to sacrifice the interests of both to those of the coalition; and towards the end he preferred the welfare of all Europe to the smooth running of the coalition.

  The correspondence of William and his narrow circle of friends frequently contains expressions like “the general interest of Europe” and “the public good.” These are no mere phrases: often the writer is aware of a conflict between “public good” and State interests, and he invariably sides with the former. Louis, probably, would have resolved such a conflict the other way around, had he been aware of its existence anywhere except in the imagination of misguided men.49

  The Spanish and King Carlos II objected to the arrangement negotiated by William and Louis in the Partition Treaty, however, as did the Emperor Leopold. When Carlos died in November 1700, it was discovered that he had left the entire of his dominions to Louis's grandson. Carlos evidently believed that France, as Europe's strongest military force, was most able to prevent a future dismemberment of the Spanish monarchy. And there was this codicil: if Louis chose to honor the Partition Treaty instead and to reject the bequest, all the Spanish holdings were to go to Leopold's younger son, whose family, conveniently, was not a party to the Partition Treaty.

  When the Spanish king died and Louis was informed of the will, he called his councillors together and solicited their views. The memoirs of the foreign minister, Torcy, who was present, recount the debate:

  It was easier to foresee than to prevent the consequences of the decision in question. [In signing the Partition Treaty with the British and Dutch, the king] had engaged himself to reject every disposition whatever made by the King of Spain in favor of a prince of the line of France…. [T]he consequence of such a violation was inevitable war. [But if Louis rejected the will, the whole of Spain's dominion would go to the Habsburgs, a union that, when last held by Charles V, was deemed] heretofore so fatal to France [that war here too was inevitable].50

  It was absurd that France should make war on Spain because its late king had tried to give his dominions to a French prince. Furthermore, Louis was well aware that he would fight such a war to enforce the Partition Treaty without allies. Only weeks before Carlos's death, William III had written to the Dutch Grand Pensionary that it “would be quite against my intention to be at present involved in a war for a treaty which I concluded only with a view to prevent [a war].”51 Finally the prospect of the union of the two kingdoms was too tempting for a man of Louis's nature to reject. On Tuesday, November 16, 1700, Louis exuberantly introduced his grandson to the court as Philip V of Spain. The Spanish ambassador exclaimed, “There are no more Pyrenees. They have vanished and we are but one nation.”

  The wrath of the disappointed emperor was not in itself a reason to rouse the territorial states to defy Carlos's will. They declined to insist, with Leopold, that the Partition Treaty be enforced. Then Louis went too far: he declared that his grandson could not renounce his rights to the French throne. Anticipating the reaction, Louis quickly invested the Spanish fortresses of Luxembourg, Namur, and Mons on the Dutch border; and he transferred to France commercial advantages formerly granted by Spain to England. The French ambassador to Madrid became a kind of proconsul through whom Louis effectively administered Spain. A council of four was set up to reform Spanish finances and administration along French lines.

  Thus began the War of the Spanish Succession. Initially, Louis decided to carry the front to Vienna, an audacious plan that miscarried with the vic-tory at Blenheim of the virtuoso partnership of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Prince Eugene of Savoy. In 1706, an Anglo-Portuguese army seized Madrid. This was followed by further defeats for the French at the hands of Marlborough and Eugene: Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and finally Malplaquet (1709), all enormous battles with tens of thousands of casualties. France was invaded, and the hard winter of 1709 starved countless peasants to death. Lo
uis sued for terms. The allies, however, now insisted that Louis send French troops to drive Philip, Louis's own grandson, from the peninsula. This the French king refused to do. Philip was able, in part owing to the success of French reforms, to garner widespread popular support in Spain and in 1710 twice won victories. When the unexpected death of Leopold's successor brought his son to the imperial throne, the entire picture changed. Now the territorial states faced the prospect of a new Habsburg ruler reassembling the dynastic properties of Charles V. When Louis agreed to promise that the Spanish and French crowns would never be united, the territorial powers were willing to accept the obvious preference of the Spanish for Philip V. Only the Austrians wished to continue the struggle, and, after long negotiations, the war was ended by the treaties of Utrecht in 1713 and Rastadt in the following year.

  For our present study, the importance of the Treaty of Utrecht cannot be overstated. By its terms it is the first European treaty that explicitly establishes a balance of power as the objective of the treaty regime. The letters patent that accompanied Article VI of the treaty between England, France, and the king of Spain whose dynastic rights were being set aside acknowledged the “Maxim of securing for ever the universal Good and Quiet of Europe, by an equal weight of Power, so that many being united in one, the Ballance of the Equality desired, might not turn to the Advantage of one, and the Danger and Hazard of the Rest.”

  This treaty permitted adjustments at the margin, but not the wholesale annexation of a national state; inhabitants now cared whether they were French, German, or Austrian.52 More importantly, securing the territorial state system had now become an important diplomatic objective; after Utrecht, the recognition of any state required its assurance to an international society that the system generally was not thereby jeopardized. That meant that “hereditary right and the endorsement of the constituent local authorities were no longer sufficient by themselves to secure sovereignty over a territory.”53