Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

During the reign of Henri II, France exerted influence on Germany through Luxembourg and her long northeastern border. Henri’s reign featured an oddly positive relationship between France and her Rhenish neighbors given Louis XII’s brutal subjugation of the area. Despite the collapse of the the French-created Confederacy of the Rhine (constructed as a dumping ground for Huguenots and originally including Mayence, Francfort, Baden and the Palatinate), or perhaps because of France’s acquiescence to such a collapse, French traders were able to encounter mostly good feeling over the 1630s and 40s and pro-French groups soon dominated the politics of each of the three major Rhenish states.

It is important to note here that each of the major states along the southern Rhine had an electoral form of government at this point. The Confederacy was an electoral monarchy, Francfort a republican city-state, and Mayence an elected Bishopric. Through her influence in both secular and religious politics, France was able to place Francophile rulers at the heads of each of these states, with anti-french sentiment being mostly an aspect of the smaller states along the Rhine, such as Durlach, Hagenau, or Weisbladen. French influence along the southern Rhine was so strong that even Dusseldorf and Hesse jockeyed for position in the Louvre through the 1630s, and French coin (and the threat of French arms) protected all those Rhenish states who wished to remain independent from Hapsburg or Prusso-Saxon influence.


The loss of Luxembourg and Lorraine destroyed this. Firstly, it gave German Huguenots a rival power to orient themselves towards, and secondly, the revelation of France’s utter weakness in the face of a pair of relatively minor states took away any influence that France had in what had been the heart of her empire. And so over the 1650s and 1660s the Rhenish states drifted, with the northern states mostly moving towards Holland and the southern states allying with the increasingly powerful Saxony.

The Grand Duchy of Saxony had grown out of the Fourty Years War from a weak collection of bishoprics, city states, and counties into one of the most powerful states in Europe. This can be attributed to her odd combination of a Constitutional monarchy with a highly experienced and massive army. In order to ease the strain presented by a country populated by no less than ten different strains of Christianity, Johan IV Duke of Saxony allowed for the indirect election of his ministers by the rulers of each areas of his realm, allowing for a more diverse cabinet than Europe had ever seen. Beyond this, he reformed his military, creating an army of conscripts drilled relentlessly by mercenaries. In 1664, though Saxon was a small state, she possessed an army of 80,000, as large as any European army outside of Sweden.


This served her well when Austria turned her attention north. During the war of Bavarian Succession, Saxony held her own and fought Austria to a standstill, despite her long border with Bohemia and despite the harsh defeats that Prussia endured. Austria’s sudden transformation into a belligerent German power and the seeming frailty of French arms led to Saxony moving into the spotlight as the protector of independent German states. She also emerged as the defender of Reformed Christians all of Europe over. As the only major power to have embraced the Reformist faith, Saxony was becoming increasingly popular among Reform christians in England and along the Rhine.

This created a great deal of pressure in the one German state still definitively in France’s orbit. The rhenish coalition, a combination of the catholic Margraviate of Baden and Bishopric of Speyer and the Protestant Palatinate, had been electing the Francophile Wittelsbachs for the last fifty years, but the imminent death of Charles Louis, who was without heir, was prompting an election which could possibly lead to the pro-Saxon Philip-William Neuberg ascending to the Ducal throne. This horrified both the heavily pro-French army and the country’s Catholic population, as well as a sizeable group in the capital who saw that being a buffer for France was less of a threat than being Saxony’s forward position for a war with whomever. This was directly opposed by the Reformed christians who had been badly treated under the Confederacy and who wished for an alliance with their coreligionists and particularly despised their place within French suzerainty. Thus, when the army announced that it would full-heartedly support Louis de la Tour d’Auvergne, a Huguenot officer living in France, as duke, revolts broke out along the Palatinate. These revolters soon called for the support of Saxony, while the Rhenish army called for their allies in France.

And thus the War of the Rhine had begun.

volksmarschall said:

Good for Saxony becoming a great power. And poor Germany, always the cite of constant warfare from 1500-1945...

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Yeah it makes you kinda understand the level of trauma that the Reich had at the possibility of military weakness






The War of the Rhine came at a perfect time for Colbert and Louis XIII. The first generation of new officers had just graduated from the Army Academy, and furthermore the 1660s brought an influx of Italian refugees which would include such great generals as Eugene de Savoie and the Seigneur de Sforza. Together this allowed for a massive expansion of France’s army, but with things relatively peaceful on France’s borders there was no seeming reason for such an expansion. The War of the Rhine gave a perfect justification for an expansion of the French army and of all industries connected to it. Regimental headquarters popped up all over France as a full 60,000 men were recruited, bonuses to officers were expanded, and most key of all French ironworking manufactories were expanded threefold. The two iron manufactories of France had historically produced expensive and poor quality metal, and the expansion of newer facilities (using the Chinese technique of cement steelmaking) in Auvergne and Bourbon meant that France could finally stop importing cannon from Switzerland and the Rhine.


Thus, at the beginning of the war France had only 40,000 men to Wallenstein’s 50,000 and less cannon and thus had to stay on the defensive. Turenne and de Tellier led two armies of 10,000 located in Mayence and Baden respectively, while Louis himself led a reserve of 20,000 in Beasancon. Against them was a single, 50,000 man army, battle hardened against the Prussians and led by one of the Augustus von Wettin, the heir-elect of the Saxon parliament and one of the greatest generals of Saxony’s history(1). But over the two short years of the war, France’s whole military expanded twofold, and the armies assigned to the Rhine were increased to 120,000.




What is most striking about the War of the Rhine was not the rapid increase in French military spending, but rather how restrained both of the belligerents were. This can be explained by the fear that both the French and the Saxons felt towards the renewed Habsburg dynasty. The Imperial Crusade of the 1660s may have resulted in a loss by the Habsburgs, but it led to a large expansion in the Iberian navy and a reformation of the Austrian army.


It also closed the ranks between the German and Spanish empires, ending the familial conflict which had characterized Habsburg relations through the 17th century. In 1668, the German Emperor Ferdinand II supported his cousin Juan IV’s claim to an imperial title in exchange for a renewed alliance, thus putting the Iberian Empire on the same level as the Holy Roman Empire and making the Habsburgs, along with their Medici allies, once again the greatest military power on the continent. The Holy Coalition retained its ascendency up until the War of Dutch Succession , and their threatening presence on both the Saxon and the French border limited any war that the two powers could fight. And so for the first four months of the war, the army of Augustus camped not thirty kilometers from its French foes, with orders to maintain defensive positions, raid enemy supply lines, and wait for reinforcements.




These orders conflicted deeply with the new generation of French officers. Most of the youngest generation of aristocrats had joined the army in search of glory, like the generations of officers before them. But the battlefield was no longer the site of personal glory but national interests, and Louis XIII’s newly expanded army was one of the first armies to (at least theoretically) work by that principle. However, this ideal had not yet been fully incorporated into the army’s self image, and many of the officers (specifically the cavalry officers) were discontented by the bureaucratized army they encountered, and were chomping at the bit for a real war.


But the orders from above were immutable: the army was to hold until the first wave of reinforcements was ready. And so, for four months, the armies of Turenne and Louvois the younger sat, in Pfalz and Baden, waiting for their enemy to cross the Rhine. But on the fourth month, a raiding company led by d’Artagnan the younger (the son of the famous Henrian colonel and the soon to be famous writer) sighted a supply depot in the village of Sinsheim guarded by a company of pikemen. D’Artagnan, desperate to fill his recently deceased father’s shadow, called for reinforcements to attack the depot. Little did he know that his activities had been seen by the infantry commander, who had similarly called in reinforcements.


The Battle of Sinsheim was a total embarrassment to the French army. The Saxon army, which was both more experienced and better drilled, responded far faster to the escalating conflict in the outskirts of Mannheim, and Louis did not have enough control over his troops to enforce a withdrawal. By the end of the day, Louvois had engaged his whole army in Sinsheim, while Augustus was moving his army into position for a full encirclement.




The Battle of Sinsheim was a rarity of the age of modern militaries--because it occurred in such an uncontrolled fashion there was no opportunity for Louvois to declare a withdrawal before it was far too late. In the chaos of the battle of Sinsheim, only 2,000 men were able to withdraw in order, Louvois, the leading light of the newest generation of officers, lost his life, and the young D’Artagnan was grievously injured leading a rearguard action. D’Artagnan would never overcome the shame of the Battle of Sinsheim, at least not to Louis XIII. But this is not the last we will see of him.


The loss of two French brigades in a town relatively close to the Confederate border led von Wettin to cautiously advance along the Necker river towards Strassbourg, while radical Huguenots rose up along the Confederacy of the Rhine. Soon, Saarbrucken and Landau were both under siege by pro-Saxon rebels, and the Rhenish army had to withdraw and combine with Louis’ army. And so the first year of the War of the Rhine ended, with the Confederacy in revolt, Wettin’s army wintering not thirty kilometers from Louis’, and France stuck in the midst of another losing war.






1-Saxony has one of the oddest forms of succession in Europe; her king was selected by the parliament from the ranks of the army. This occurred because Wallenstein was without heir and in order to ensure that Saxony remain militarily strong. Because of this Saxony had one of the strongest and best organized armies until 1734, by which time the army had become a machine for furthering the Wettin dynasty’s domestic aims. The corruption of the Saxon army led to their precipitous downfall in the later 18th century.

volksmarschall said:

Napoleon makes an early entrance into your AAR!

Quite the chaotic battle too it seems...giving the Saxons much optimism and hope I think.

It would appear as if I wrote the wrong site, cite, in my last post!

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Right? I can't wait until I hit the later 17th century; then I'll have far more battle paintings to work from

...by the spring, Louis’ army numbered 80,000 men, 170 cannons (mostly provided by Swiss mercenaries, it wouldn’t be until 1685 that France had an arms industry sizeable enough to be wholly relied on), and 27,000 horse. But he faced an enemy that had been maintaining its siege throughout the winter, and the most disciplined army in Europe led by the best general of Europe.




Louis knew that overly aggressive action on his part would both endanger the new army he had raised, and risk the intervention of the Habsburgs, which would be ruinous. Thus he tempted Augustus into an overextension, by maintaining his men in his positions while engaging in skirmishes with the Reformist rebels which allowed the Confederate cities to resupply. The only major battle of this period of the war was the battle of Offenburg in February 1655, when Turenne fought off an advance brigade of Saxons and opened up Baden to French operations. By the late spring, the Saxon army had advanced into the northern Confederacy and was besieging Saarbrucken. It was at that point when Louis’ plan came into effect; the truce proposal he sent to Regensburg became a public document in May of 1665.


While Louis XIII was never as good a tactician as the greatest of his period (his style was by and large a flexible implementation of post-Louis XII strategy, based around defensive strategies, the cooperation between two or three large armies, and decisive battles), he was one of the few generals of his time to have a great deal of experience in civil wars, and was a master at integrating diplomatic and military strategies. His proposal at Regensburg was the greatest example of this; pre-empting Habsburg intervention, Louis proposed a truce which gave autonomy to the Reformist parts of the Confederacy while acknowledging the Confederacy as a Catholic state with the ability to fight ‘rebellious elements’ within its own borders.




This proposal was shocking for several reasons. Firstly, the Imperial Diet had been a wholly insignificant body since the beginning of the Forty Years War and especially since the War of Silesia (during which Bavaria became a mere puppet state). That Louis sent his proposal to Regensburg instead of Vienna was a jab at the Emperor and a way of making sure that every German prince knew of this proposal.


The Proposed Truce of Regensburg was also a landmark document in that it enlarged the weakened statutes of the Treaty of Mayence, which was built around the idea of sovereign statehood within the Empire. Since that treaty, the emergence of Reformism as a political force and the attempts by the Habsburgs to integrate all of Catholic Germany into its borders had brought inter-sectarian violence back into Germany, as larger religious conflicts made the concept of a tolerant state sovereign from larger political concerns impossible. But while the proposal gained the acceptance of most independent princes (such as the princes of Wurtemburg or Hessen), it also was widely accepted in the courts of Catholic Germany, who feared that the association of Catholicism with an increasingly belligerent emperor was weakening their cause in the Empire. In a single stroke, France reestablished itself as the defender of independent Germans everywhere, and established both the Saxons and the Austrians as belligerent states wanting to weaken the sovereignty of the German prince.


It was in this context two major events happened: first, the French livre collapsed, and secondly, the Battle of Saarbrucken occurred. The livre’s collapse does not concern us, it has happened many times in the last century and the collapse of the olive oil trade mainly concerned those who already had their gold in other, more secure locations. Regardless, the impending bankruptcy of a French state made the embarkment of a sustained campaign impossible. This was lucky, because the Battle of Saarbrucken decided the campaign.




Finally fighting against a skilled opponent, Louis was no longer able to use his usual trick of shielding his advance with advance cavalry. The Saxon army had a highly advanced reconnaissance force, which meant that any battle Louis would embark on would be a bloody one. Furthermore, the political situation in Germany, given that France was positioning itself as a defender of sovereign German interests and given the sheer number of states along the Rhine meant the ‘deep pursuit’ tactic, a standby of Louisan strategy and of French warfare (wherein a decisive battle was followed by a period of pursuit by heavy and light cavalry, leading to greater losses by the enemy [editors note: and a far greater number of decorated cavalry units, hence why the French cavalry was the most developed military branch until the Revolution]) was not possible. Louis would have to face the Saxons in a set piece battle, against the greatest infantry army in Europe.


It was decided that Louis would lead a combined army of Rhenish and French troops in a second wave, protecting the Rhenish troops and providing the Rhenish army with some much needed morale. This led to a problem--the mass of the French army were newly trained conscripts who might fall apart upon sustained contact with the Saxons. Thus, Turenne was given command over the 30,000 man Royal Army, while Louis commanded the 60,000 man force of Rhenish and French soldiers.


The battle commenced in the early afternoon of August 23rd, 1665. Wettin, who knew of the incoming attack, had established a reserve of 50,000 men who could fight any attackers without disengaging from the ongoing assault on the breaches in the Saarbrucken wall. But Turenne did not engage in his typical offensive tactics; rather he maintained his position at the hills of Wendel, attacking the sieging army from afar with his cannon with the aim of getting the enemy to disengage from attacking the city and move to attack him


What Turenne saw instead was a massive cloud of dust to the north, as the whole Saxon reserve marched in lock-step to meet with the Royal Army. The French army had never adopted a single drill order, and the sight of twenty eight thousand men lined up in infantry battalions marching in step was like “watching the devil’s own legions parading out of hell”. Even under fire from Turenne’s cannon, the Saxon army went into formation before marching forward.




The Battle of Wendel, which spanned for three days, was the bloodiest battle in French history to this point. The Royal Army nearly broke several times in the first day, as they fought alone against the far better trained Saxons, and in that day alone they lost 16,000 men. The next day, Louis and his Rhenish allies arrived, and John George committed even more men to the battle, and in that day alone, 40,000 men died on the fields of the Saar. John George’s ability to easily wheel his troops to meet flank attacks made a mockery of four consecutive French charges, each of which ended with a greater toll. But on the morning of the third day, the Saxons were beginning their withdrawal, and when the French gave chase, they met not one but three rear guard battalions. In the end, the French army lost 40,000 men retaking Saarbrucken. But the battle did what Louis aimed for--it shed enough blood and made the Saxons look weak enough that the Emperor soon began threatening to intervene to protect Imperial subjects. The Treaty of Mannheim was signed, a treaty which matched many of the elements of the Truce of Regensburg.




What did the War of the Rhine show? Firstly, that the French military was woefully underprepared for modern wars. The pike-and-shot method which Louis still organized his troops around had fallen to the wayside against the strength of free shooting infantry armed primarily with muskets. Furthermore, France’s lack of a clear drilling order made giving orders nearly impossible and made the French army far slower to react. These issues were most strongly felt in the ranks of the French Royal Army, whose ranks were greatly thinned in confrontation with the Saxons. The precedent set by putting the French Royal Army under another man’s command led to a culture of independence in the Royalistes which remains to this day, and soon after the battle Turenne hired a group of Prussian drilling experts who turned the French Royal Army into the most German force west of the Rhine.


But still, the war was far from an embarassment. It would be hard to see at the time, but the War of the Rhine was an important turning point in French history. After sixty years of ignoring her neighbors and allowing her enemies to consolidate their gains, France was yet again willing to defend her allies, and yet again willing to go on the offensive.


Up next, the Olive Oil Bust and the Travels of D’Artagnan!

DensleyBlair said:

All caught up! The War of the Rhine has certainly provided a great deal of interesting reading. France's position in Europe seems to have definitely shifted, as you mention in the last paragraph. I'm wondering how the country will react to its new, more active role in affairs.

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In order to do that, she'll have to get out of the quagmire the war put her in!

volksmarschall said:

Oh war, the true game of kings...

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In that it's an activity where thousands die so that four people can take the credit, yes






“Of all the effects of the War of the Rhine”, writes de Tocqueville in his chapter on the early Enlightenment, “the greatest and least anticipated was the explosion of the young d’Artagnan onto the cultural scene, as the tragic Prometheus of his age”. And while de Tocqueville’s unabashedly positive take on the man whose name would become synonymous with Enlightenment was shortly thereafter challenged(1), d’Artagnan maintains his place as ‘the man who began the Enlightenment’.


At first d’Artagnan does not seem like the founder of a great movement. His personality was oft darkened, he cavorted with heathens and heretics at a time when religious tensions were still high, and he remained astutely anti-establishment through his early years, his tone swung between smugness and whining, and compared to his contemporaries his writing was plain and unadorned. Oddest of all, though, was that d’Artagnan discovered many elements of ‘modernity’ in a search for the past.


First, it is important to note that d’Artagnan was dissatisfied with every aspect of French society. But this dissatisfaction did not arise from modern questions of autonomy, agency, or survivability. No, d’Artagnan was deeply concerned with the aesthetics of his age. His politics were a dual sided nostalgia--nostalgia for the days of what he calls “the Christian Republic” of Medieval times, and of “the Pagan republic” of Greece. These were times when men lived free for discussion, free to cross borders without national or religious rivalries, and free to be men. The strongest influence in d’Artagnan’s thought came from the Frondeur propaganda of his childhood, with themes of the nobility as the national cuckold to the King, who infantilized and feminized his subjects. What d’Artagnan added to this was unique to himself; a proto-liberal sensibility based around his particular conception of ‘freedom’. The King infantalizes and feminizes his subjects, yes, but he limits them through his absolutism.




”The era we live in is an era of dead heroes, of heroes unborn. No longer do we see the men forged in the commonwealth of a united Christianity, fighting crusades on behalf of the whole of the public. We see weakened men, childish men, incapable of making the decisions we once could.”


These lines were written shortly before the War of the Rhine, when a romantic and idealistic d’Artagnan joined the French army in one last attempt to see the heroism he was told had been lost in his age. His experience of the newly bureaucratized French army was greatly disappointing; his journal laments the death of individual combat, of individual decisions: “I am an officer of the realm but I am treated as a child by men below my rank, ordered about as if I were a mere schoolboy” (note that he was 20 at the time). Shortly after the battle of Sinsheim, d’Artagnan disbanded from the French military, and avoided a court martial by moving to Geneva. In Switzerland, d’Artagnan’s writing became more earnestly political, and his dissatisfaction became more pointed. In his first article, “On the Status of Kings”,


“We are not allowed to converse as we could in the days of the Ancients, thus we are not able to discuss as we could in the days of the Ancients. Where there was once a republic of men, we now live in the midst of a republic of despots, who take us into their bosom, who make children of us. We live in an age where the lines of a map and the lines of a book dictate the lives that we lead. The heroism of the old age is gone, replaced by the cold machinery of conflict.” (2)


Shortly after the Status of Kings, Switzerland erupted into what would be its final religious civil war, which was extended when the Habsburgs and Bourbons began using Protestants and Catholics as political proxies. Leaving Geneva in 1667, d’Artagnan traveled Europe for nine years searching for the kind of unlimited polity which would meet his romantic vision of the times of the Ancients.




He first traveled to Rome, where he discovered the Eternal City had become far too contemporary for his tastes. The new capital of the Kingdom of Italy, Rome had been thoroughly transformed in the nearly twenty years of Medici rule from the center of Catholic universalism to the center of Italian Absolutism. As a Frenchman, d’Artagnan was attacked and threatened by Italian soldiers, and challenged to several duels (challenges which were withdrawn when d’Artagnan demanded duel by jousting). D’Artagnan soon left Rome, traveling across the Habsburg empire, where he remained similarly disappointed. Religious zealotry was on the march in Iberia through the 1670s, and the centralization of power in the Imperial Estate of Las Rozas (located a few kilometers away from Madrid--the Iberians pioneered the separation of the state from the potentially rebellious capital, a process which would occur in France, Prussia, and Austria) led to similar problems of proto-nationalistic chauvinism that d’Artagnan encountered in Italy.


It was only in 1673, when d’Artagnan crossed the Hungarian border that d’Artagnan found what he sought, though not in a way he could ever imagine...


1-de Boheme spilt a massive amount of ink attacking de Tocqueville’s elite-centered history, writing an extensive attack on the d’Artagnan cult and its willingness to “ignore the deaths of ten thousand unnamed men so long as one more actor joins their play”. Recent academics have called d’Artagnan’s position further into question, with Frank Westinghouse arguing in The Ottomans and the Enlightenment that “d’Artagnan only described what had already been seen by the eyes of hundreds of merchants, and had he not already been a controversial figure it is doubtful that he would have achieved such renown


2-I originally meant for d’Artagnan to be an overly flowery idiot who simply happens upon a couple of major finds. I soon realized that I was growing to like the guy, and that I wasn’t good enough at philosophy to purposefully write bad philosophy (I’m also getting into the same issue with de Tocqueville, who’s meant to be overly flowery. It’s freaking hard to write poorly is what I'm getting at)

volksmarschall said:

The Kingdom of Italy!

Sounds like d'Artagnan is going to have to leave "Europe" in order to find a place suitable to his tastes...

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Yes indeed, and in doing so he's going to become one of the great trend setters of his time (bringing, for instance, coffee into popular usage)

Next up, events in Quebec!

General_Hoth said:

Vive le Québec libre?

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Non, servage dans un joyau Quebecois

Also I want you guys to know that I picked up a hella sick book on the French early industrial Revolution called The Path Not Taken, which deals with the French method of industrialization from the edicts of Turgot to the legislation of Year II to the laws of Napoleon and the restored Bourbons. It's insanely good (so good that I read the first two chapters the day I got it, sneaking away from the way too packed bar I was at with coworkers to grab a cigarette and read it) and I couldn't recommend it more (as of now)

Well I'm only up to Turgot's Edicts, which was the largest (failed) attempt to reform the French economy before the Revolution. It replaced the Corvee (a tax taken in labor) with a purely monetary tax in an attempt to monetize the countryside, and attempted to reform the corporations to both be more open and slightly less powerful (more like unions and less like guilds). There were other elements--the corporations were made far weaker by the Edicts--but the law was very unpopular among the parliaments and among the masters of the guilds, and Turgot was dismissed a month after the law was passed.

Something I really like is that the book acknowledges how porous and decentralized French governance was during the Ancien Regime, which is one of those weird facts which is well known in the historical community but is rarely mentioned in political economy or in more general histories. Jeff Horn also talks (in the introduction) about the immense stresses placed on the Assembly and the Directory and how that, more than the failings of individual personalities of those groups, led to the Terror which is SUPER RARE in English language histories of the French Revolution

My brief reading of Civilization and Capitalism does compare with my brief reading of the Path Not Taken, yes =p

Yeah, there's an issue in less specific histories of the Enlightenment that writers either taken these monarchs at their word regarding their capabilities, or judge them as backward because their countries do not come up to the absolutist ideal they've built for themselves (at least regarding the Enlightenment, I do agree that the feudal remnants of Austria was one of its major setbacks and that the creation in Germany of a modern state parallel to its feudal state was the major reasons it was able to advance at the level it did), with the assumption that even though the subject of study doesn't come up to the Absolutist ideal, [Prussia/France/etc] must. This tendency in history to take aristocrats at their word is strange and kind of troubling. I'm actually halfway in to writing the introduction of LoF2 from the perspective of Franceau Robb as to why that's the case, why we hold on to the possibility of Absolutism.