Weimar; by that of Rivoli he united against Spain the dukes of Modena, Parma and Mantua; he signed an open alliance with The French Thirty Years’ War. the league of Heilbronn, the United Provinces and Sweden; and after these alliances military operations began, Marshal de la Force occupying the duchy of Lorraine. Richelieu attempted to operate simultaneously in the Netherlands by joining hands with the Dutch, and on the Rhine by uniting with the Swedes; but the bad organization of the French armies, the double invasion of the Spaniards as far as Corbie and the imperial forces as far as the gates of Saint-Jean-de-Losne (1636), and the death of his allies, the dukes of Hesse-Cassel, Savoy and Mantua at first frustrated his efforts. A decided success was, however, achieved between 1638 and 1640, thanks to Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and afterwards to Guébriant, and to the parallel action of the Swedish generals, Banér, Wrangel and Torstensson. Richelieu obtained Alsace, Breisach and the forest-towns on the Rhine; while in the north, thanks to the Dutch and owing to the conquest of Artois, marshals de la Meilleraye, de Châtillon and de Brézé forced the barrier of the Netherlands. Turin, the capital of Piedmont, was taken by Henri de Lorraine, comte d’Harcourt; the alliance with rebellious Portugal facilitated the occupation of Roussillon and almost the whole of Catalonia, and Spain was reduced to defending herself; while the embarrassments of the Habsburgs at Madrid made those of Vienna more tractable. The diet of Regensburg, under the mediation of Maximilian of Bavaria, decided in favour of peace with France, and on the 25th of December 1641 the preliminary settlement at Hamburg fixed the opening of negotiations to take place at Münster and Osnabrück. Richelieu’s death (December 4, 1642) prevented him from seeing the triumph of his policy, but it can be judged by its results; in 1624 the kingdom had in the east only the frontier of the Meuse to defend it from invasion; in 1642 the whole of Alsace, except Strassburg, was occupied and the Rhine guarded by the army of Guébriant. Six months later, on the 14th of May 1643, Louis XIII. rejoined his minister in his true kingdom, the land of shades.
But thanks to Mazarin, who completed his work, France gathered in the harvest sown by Richelieu. At the outset no one believed that the new cardinal would have any success. Every one expected from Anne of Austria a change in the government which appeared to be Mazarin, 1643–1661. justified by the persecutions of Richelieu and the disdainful unscrupulousness of Louis XIII. On the 16th of May the queen took the little four-year-old Louis XIV. to the parlement of Paris which, proud of playing a part in politics, hastened, contrary to Louis XIII.’s last will, to acknowledge the command of the little king, and to give his mother “free, absolute and entire authority.” The great nobles were already looking upon themselves as established in power, when they learnt with amazement that the regent had appointed as her chief adviser, not Gaston of Orleans, but Mazarin. The political revenge which in their eyes was owing to them as a body, the queen claimed for herself alone, and she made it a romantic one. This Spaniard of waning charms, who had been neglected by her husband and insulted by Richelieu, now gave her indolent and full-blown person, together with absolute power, into the hands of the Sicilian. Whilst others were triumphing openly, Mazarin, in the shadow and silence of the interregnum, had kept watch upon the heart of the queen; and when the old party of Marie de’ Medici and Anne of Austria wished to come back into power, to impose a general peace, and to substitute for the Protestant alliances an understanding with Spain, the arrest of François de Vendôme, duke of Beaufort, and the exile of other important nobles proved to the great families that their hour had gone by (September 1643).
Mazarin justified Richelieu’s confidence and the favour of Anne of Austria. It was upon his foreign policy that he relied to maintain his authority within the kingdom. Thanks to him, the duke of Enghien (Louis de Bourbon, afterwards prince of Condé), appointed commander-in-chief at the age of twenty-two, Treaties of Westphalia. caused the downfall of the renowned Spanish infantry at Rocroi; and he discovered Turenne, whose prudence tempered Condé’s overbold ideas. It was he too who by renewing the traditional alliances and resuming against Bavaria, Ferdinand III.’s most powerful ally, the plan of common action with Sweden which Richelieu had sketched out, pursued it year after year: in 1644 at Freiburg im Breisgau, despite the death of Guébriant at Rottweil; in 1645 at Nördlingen, despite the defeat of Marienthal; and in 1646 in Bavaria, despite the rebellion of the Weimar cavalry; to see it finally triumph at Zusmarshausen in May 1648. With Turenne dominating the Eiser and the Inn, Condé victorious at Lens, and the Swedes before the gates of Prague, the emperor, left without a single ally, finally authorized his plenipotentiaries to sign on the 24th of October 1648 the peace about which negotiations had been going on for seven years. Mazarin had stood his ground notwithstanding the treachery of the duke of Bavaria, the defection of the United Provinces, the resistance of the Germans, and the general confusion which was already pervading the internal affairs of the kingdom.
The dream of the Habsburgs was shattered. They had wished to set up a centralized empire, Catholic and German; but the treaties of Westphalia kept Germany in its passive and fragmentary condition; while the Catholic and Protestant princes obtained formal recognition of their territorial independence and their religious equality. Thus disappeared the two principles which justified the Empire’s existence; the universal sovereignty to which it laid claim was limited simply to a German monarchy much crippled in its powers; and the enfranchisement of the Lutherans and Calvinists from papal jurisdiction cut the last tie which bound the Empire to Rome. The victors’ material benefits were no less substantial: the congress of Münster ratified the final cession of the Three Bishoprics and the conquest of Alsace, and Breisach and Philippsburg completed these acquisitions. The Spaniards had no longer any hope of adding Luxemburg to their Franche-Comté; while the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, taken in the rear by Sweden (now mistress of the Baltic and the North Sea), cut off for good from the United Provinces and the Swiss cantons, and enfeebled by the recognized right of intervention in German affairs on the part of Sweden and France, was now nothing but a meaningless name.
Mazarin had not been so fortunate in Italy, where in 1642 the Spanish remained masters. Venice, the duchy of Milan and the duke of Modena were on his side; the pope and the grand-duke of Tuscany were trembling, but the romantic expedition of the duke of Guise to Naples, and the outbreak of the Fronde, saved Spain, who had refused to take part in the treaties of Westphalia and whose ruin Mazarin wished to compass.
It was, however, easier for Mazarin to remodel the map of Europe than to govern France. There he found himself face to face with all the difficulties that Richelieu had neglected to solve, and that were now once more giving trouble. The Lit de Justice of the 18th of May 1643 had proved State of the kingdom. authority to remain still so personal an affair that the person of the king, insignificant though that was, continued to be regarded as its absolute depositary. Thus regular obedience to an abstract principle was under Mazarin as incomprehensible to the idle and selfish nobility as it had been under Richelieu. The parlement still kept up the same extra-judicial pretensions; but beyond its judicial functions it acted merely as a kind of town-crier to the monarchy, charged with making known the king’s edicts. Yet through its right of remonstrance it was the only body that could legally and publicly intervene in politics; a large and independent body, moreover, which had its own demands to make upon the monarchy and its ministers. Richelieu, by setting his special agents above the legal but complicated machinery of financial administration, had so corrupted it as to necessitate radical reform; all the more so because financial charges had been increased to a point far beyond what the nation could bear. With four armies to keep up, the insurrection in Portugal to maintain, and pensions to serve the needs of the allies, the burden had become a crushing one.
