Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

Which ASB? The Anti-Social Behavior Act? Asymbescaline, the drug similar to mescalin?

That does remind me of the joke Johan made about Norwegians--"The Norwegians once put a screen door on a submarine and, well, it sank"

Sorry for the not Germany related entry, I always have a hard time thinking up a new Christian sect (and I also picked up a copy of the Essais recently and I’m really taken by Montiagne, thus producing this entry)


The Middle Regency was marked by cooperation between the two main political players of the time, the Regent de Vigny and the King’s Tutor de Saint-Chaumond. While the authoritarian instincts of Vigny and the (for a lack of a better term) ‘liberal’ instincts of Saint-Chaumond would seem opposed, both men shared a desire to reform society along more ‘modern’ lines, and Vigny tended to accept Saint-Chaumond’s proposals because he saw them as increasing the power of the state and the stability of the realm. The greatest example of Middle-Regency law was the Law of the Sermons, which mandated that Gallic priests preach in the vernacular. This transition made it easier for Catholic priests to convert the areas still populated by Huguenots, but it also marked the beginning of French as the Lingua Franca of Europe.

But a massive scandal in the late 1610s marked the end of Vigny and Saint-Chaumond’s relationship, and the beginning of the end of the Middle Regency period. And while the scandal had its roots in the 1580s, its effects were felt well into the 18^th century—indeed, the Artois Affair is known by many historians as “the day that the Enlightenment was stillborn”.


Michel de Montaigne was a statesman born in the Gascogne region in the 1530s. He made a name for himself as a member of the Bordeaux parliament in the 1560s, and afterwards as a famed translator (his training, which was aimed at making Latin his first language, allowed him to make a living translating both classical and contemporary works written in Latin into French). But his work as a philosopher only started in 1571, when he started a nearly ten year period of solitude and spent time on his Essais. When the 40 Years War started and inter-sectarian conflict in France began, Montaigne was forced out of the Bordeaux parliament, and though he was offered a position as the mayor of Bordeaux when it was ‘liberated’ from the Huguenots, Montaigne turned it down, choosing instead to stay in his manor and write a long series of ‘attempts’ (Essais) at understanding politics, Man, and the universe. His philosophical skepticism, which took the humanist ideals of his childhood and using his new learning to ask questions, can be seen as the bridge between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.


But his work didn’t only focus on the politically neutral arena of thought. After recovering from a debilitating bought of gallstones in the later 1580s, Montaigne was forced to leave his home after fighting between the Huguenots and Catholics intensified at the beginning of the French War of Religion. His skepticism led him to question the necessity of a war between the French sects—he called a war between two factions, neither of which can fully prove their beliefs, a “theatre of the absurd”. Given a patronage by the highly innovative and humanistic Duke of Normandy, Montaigne moved to Artois, and then all around France , starting a massive tome he called L'Histoire de la guerre des religions. This text, which aimed to describe the entirety of the French War of Religion, included semi-narrative segments on the lives of major generals as well as lower-ranked soldiers, chapters written from the perspective of towns obliterated during the war, and a highly critical view of the French kingdom’s policy towards Huguenots.

Although Montaigne died in 1604 with L’Historie uncompleted, his collection of students continued the work well into the 1610s, which is when the Artois Affair occurred. But to appropriately discuss the Artois Affair, I must turn to the identity of the “Artois Clique” as it was called, and the reasons for the rapid expansion of academia in France after the 40 Years War.


The Forty Years War, and du Bosquet’s reforms of the nobility, led to the enragement of the greater noble houses. By providing a noble title to everyone who succeeded in the military during the greatest war of the time, Bosquet in effect expanded the ranks of the nobility by a couple thousand. With their traditional vocation being invaded by the bourgeoisie, the aristocrats started to move in force to the area where they retained a comparative advantage—the academy.

This is not to say that the 17^th century didn’t have its collection of great bourgeoisie thinkers—indeed, there was a massive number of lawyers, jurists, and students of low birth in Paris as well as elsewhere. But the aristocracy was so much more able at placing its sons in the midst of the academy. For one, the nobility was able to hire illustrious tutors for their children—many great philosophers, including Descartes, Montaigne, De Saint-Chaumond, and Pascal all made their living at one point or another by tutoring the children of Dukes or Princes. More importantly, the aristocracy was able to afford a life of ‘thought’, and the new generation of noble intellectuals were far more proliferous than their burgher colleagues.

To the Artois Clique, their work on L’Histoire de la Guerre was both a way to make their names known in a time when they felt the aristocracy was becoming less important, and a way of resisting what they thought was a series of tyrannical acts by Vigny, Louis XII, and “the Attila of our times”, Tillly. The Clique included two Huguenots (one of whom was the nephew of the Huguenot elder of Brugges who was killed by Tilly’s troops at the beginning of the French War of Religion), as well as a series of prominent young scholars from all around France, including the son of the governor of Brittany and Jean de Bourbon, a cousin of the King’s.



News of the Histoire soon reached Paris. Particular chapters, concerning the Battle of Brugge, the Switzerland intervention, and the destruction of the village of Bellegarde, were distributed throughout France and became highly successful—these chapters were into their third publication by 1618 when the news of the book reached de Vigny. Vigny saw the book as an affront to the authority of the French state and his newly made “Louis myth” which commemorated Louis XII as the ideal autocrat and the father of a new France. This idea of Louis XII as the greatest king that Europe had known since Augustus, Henri/Vigny as the heir to that king’s legacy, and the threat of a civil war that could return at any time if the state was impugned, were the force under which gave Vigny the authority to enact reform after reform.

This alternate narrative which was under construction in Artois was thus a major threat, not only to Vigny personally, but to the whole absolutist project that Vigny was trying to build. Understandably, Vigny convened a meeting at the regency council over what to do with the Artois Clique.

This meeting quickly became the most contentious of the regency, with half of the council arguing for the rights of the Clique, either on the grounds that they were the sons of major noble houses or (in the case of de Saint-Chaumond) on a more general principle. For a while it seemed that the proposal would come down to a tie and the Artois Clique would be allowed to continue their work. Vigny couldn’t allow this to happen, so he chose to use a drastic measure—he argued that Saint-Chaumond did not deserve a place on the regency council as he was simply a tutor. He stripped Saint-Chaumond of his council seat and relocated the Prince and his entourage to the Bourbon castle in Versailles in order to remove Saint-Chaumond from Parisian politics.


With Saint-Chaumond gone, Vigny was able to act with a fullness of authority over the Artois Affair. He immediately ordered that the Artois Clique be arrested and ordered that all copies of L’Histoire be burned, and that those found with copies of L’Histoire be arrested as well. L’Histoire remained a banned book until the authoritative end of the Bourbon monarchy, and even then its “pacifistic, proto-Socialist” themes kept it banned in many countries until the mid-20^th century. Only fragments remain, and yet these few fragments remain some of the most authoritative sources on the history of the French War of Religion.


Historians argue over when the Middle Regency period ended—some argued that it ended with Saint Chaumond’s expulsion from the regency council, some argue it ended during the events of 1620. But this moment, with books burning all along the Kingdom of France, Saint-Chaumond exiled from the city of Paris, and “The Enlightenment laying, half drowned in the tub”, is as good a moment as any to end this section.

Rifal said:

So France broke the Enlightenment? Way to go France *Massive Sarcasm Intended*

Click to expand...

No, but she delayed it, and this particular form of Enlightenment (based on Montaigne's rather than Des Cartes' scepticism) would have been a far more Critical one. I considered having Montaigne start the Enlightenment in the 1610s as a part of my storyline, but then I realized that that would be too wild a divergence from our timeline--considering that management theory is still running on the Cartesian split now, I would posit that it would be nearly impossible to imagine a world where the Enlightenment was started on wholly different grounds.

What is going to happen though, will depend on whether of not Saint-Chaumond retains any influence.

I'm sorry that I've disappeared--I recently got a job at a direct marketing firm (selling FiOs door to door which is...better than you'd expect) and it's a 10 hour a day job. I still have a section halfway finished, and I'll likely finish it on Saturday. Sadly this may slow down my writing a bit in the future, but I'll soldier on and keep on writing. Thank you very much for the responses! You guys are keeping this going as much as I am, and I'm glad to have such an intelligent and keen readership.

There are some french only recent about the setting up of the Gallic church and some reforms have been narrative only but to have any control over reforms you need to be the papal controller

Apologies in advance for the mispellings, I wrote the majority of this on the bus to work






The general assumption made about the Treaty of Mayence is that it showed the beginnings of a fully free nation-states system, unconstrained by the limits of international law. This simply wasn’t true--the 40 Years War left a long tradition of international law in its wake, albeit mostly the creation of a set of laws of warfare, a legal tradition that survived into the later 18th century. These new rules forbade the total war seen during the religious conflicts of the time, a ban that most states were fully willing to accept after seeing the horrors that wracked all of Europe during the 40 Years War, when whole villages were militarized and mobilized against each other, leading to mass killings on the largest scale Europe will see until the Second World War.




Germany was a nation of towns before the war--villages with between three and five hundred people each accounted for most of the Holy Roman Empire’s population, and allowed it a certain economic dynamism which wasn’t seen in the agricultural societies of France, Spain, or England. Indeed the Hanseatic League, which spanned much of the Empire, was even a threat to the Italian city states for a time. The war changed all that. This was particularly true in the two battlegrounds of the war--Saxony and the Rhineland. But the effects of these deaths differed greatly—the Rhineland became a part of France’s imperial periphery, while Saxony-Thuringia became a major power, the great destabilizer of Europe, and perhaps the first ‘rogue state’.




Thuringia-Saxony was one of the three Protestant powers that emerged in Germany in the wake of the Forty Years War. It was also the least likely of the Protestant countries to rise to power—it was the main battleground of the war between the League of Stettin and the Austrians, and the Emperor’s last offensive into Protestant territory in 1607 left Leipzig and Dresden in ruins. But the Thuringian state had one massive advantage—it had begun a process of nation building based on the radical form of Protestantism that emerged from the streets of Dresden.




Thuringia was the first nation to convert to Protestantism, in 1520 soon after the death of Martin Luther. Martin’s Acolytes were radicalized by his death, and over the years they developed modes of religious-political thinking that gave increasing amounts of power to religious leaders. By 1570, “Lutheranism”, or Reform Christianity, had adopted a doctrine of complete integration between secular and religious functions. Soon enough, Lutheranism had spread through much of Eastern Germany, becoming the majority religion in Thuringia, the Bishopric of Wurzburg, and the city of Nuremburg.


This concept proved too radical for the upper aristocracy and Duke Leopold von Paltz, who saw this as a threat against their power. Leopold especially, didn’t want to hurt his relationship with the other Protestant states, so while a majority of the people of Dresden converted to Lutheranism, the state remained solidly Calvinist.




The Forty Years War changed all of this. After twenty years of inconsequential fighting in the Rhineland and the Sudenten Mountains, the Austrian Cabinet decided that by attacking in force through Thuringia, the army could use Dresden and Leipzig as staging areas for a larger attack on Brandenburg. This concentrated attack on Thuringia pitted 10,000 Thuringian troops against an Imperial army eight times it's size. Duke Norman von Hohenzollern, for his part, saw a unification of the four northern Protestant states (Prussia, Brandenburg, Silesia and Pommerania) under his crown as the first and most important goal of the League of Stettin (more on this later), and saw the attack on Thuringia as a way to buy time for his efforts. So Thuringia was left to fight a massive imperial power on her own.




While the Austrian generals saw Dresden and Leipzig as important locations to occupy and attack from, the Austrian population had been indoctrinated for years that Protestants were barely human satanists, and the capture of Dresden (under the pretense that the Austrians would do no harm to the city) led to a month long pillaging of the city. Whole quarters were burned to the ground, the property of the burghers was stolen, and murders in the realm of the tens of thousands occurred. The occupation was ten years old when General von Wallenstein, a minor Austrian general, took control of an Austrian unit. Despite a decade long occupation, tensions between the . The event was a key turning point in the early Forty Years War—the brutality of his men led von Wallenstein to leave his post and convert to Lutheranism, and the event drove Leopold to near madness.




Wallenstein, a Bohemian nobleman who had seen several of his cousins and brothers killed for practicing the Lutheran faith, had always been on the fence on the issue—he had joined the army after realizing that he did not want to lead the life of a jurist, but all the same he saw the Empire, and the law and order it stood for, as an important cause that he could spend his life protecting. It was this kindness and moderation that allowed him to end the siege of Dresden quickly. But seeing the sack of Dresden and being the only officer who even attempted to stop it led to a great change of heart and the realization that the Holy Roman Empire’s law and order didn’t exist—perhaps it had never existed. This realization led Wallenstein to leave his headquarters and travel north, to Leipzig, to command the remaining army of Thuringia.


Leopold, in a fit of despair, surrendered his country to the Austrian duke, accepting the religious dominance of the Catholic faith and promising Emperor Matthias that he would work to convert the people of Thuringia.


The news reached Leipzig while Wallenstein was busy drilling the ever larger Leipzig militia, and it led to a conflict of morals within the city--should they betray their duke, or their faith? Wallenstein, hearing of the Duke's betrayal, said "Yes, your Duke has betrayed you. He has betrayed all classes of society, has surrendered his lands to a foriegn tyrant, and worst of all, he has betrayed our God. But that is no reason to surrender! We will bleed our foe to death by a million cuts!"




After this, the Leipzig council accepted Wallenstein as Grand Duke of the Lutheran Commonwealth of Thuringia-Saxony, effectively creating a separate state within the now Catholic state of Thuringia. For the next five years, Wallenstein led an army of 7,000 which he extensively trained in the use of pike, musket, and guerilla warfare. This, the Holy Army of Saxony, harassed the occupying Austrian armies before melting into the Saxon woods and mountains. Over time, the Holy Army grew larger and larger, as Lutheran soldiers from the Army of Thuringia defected. By 1607 the Holy Army numbered 15,000 and the Austrian army had given up patrols in the countryside.


Despite the rapid growth of the Holy Army, Wallenstein made sure that a rigid selection of easily replicable drills kept the men disciplined across all of the army's units. This form of warfare, focused on highly disciplined tercio units, who were able to fight in both close and loose order. This flexibility led to a massive victory over the occupying troops on the fields of Dresden and the acceptance of the army's general as the new Duke of Thuringia.


This development gave pause to the leaders of the great powers--what were they to think of a new Lutheran state (the first such state in the Empire), not to mention a state ruled by an illegitimate ruler using a strange new form of government that reeked of republicanism. Duke Norman, in particular, saw the splitting of the Protestant faction as a massive threat to his position as the ruler of the Protestants in Germany. This meant that though the Calvinist states gave minor aid to Thuringia-Saxony during the rest of the 40 Years War, they turned on their sectarian rival during the Treaty of Mayence and forced Wallenstein to release his southern conquests. This led, directly, to the War of the Schism, which lasted through the 1610s.




The War of the Schism, fought between the Protestant and Reformed Christtians for control over northern Germany, was a testing ground for the new forms of warfare that would emerge at the end of the 40 Years War. The old form, perfected by Louis XII, involved mass cavalry charges using pistols. Thuringia, however, had lost most of its aristocracy during the 40 Years War and thus relied on its highly trained heavy infantry and units of massed musketeers to carry battles. Furthermore, the Thuringian government, which blended the lines between statal and religious authority to a degree not seen before, was one of the first countries to mandate something close to a modern draft, and thus was able to punch far beyond its weight. Although Thuringia-Saxony was fighting nearly every state in northern Germany, her policy of conscription allowed her to create an army of 75,000 (which, for comparison, meant that its army was as large as Austria's). In particular, the 'free shooting' tactics which Wallenstein adopted (which involved having musketeers shoot in volleys, allowing them to function seperately without pikemen detatchments.




Other Thuringian policies led to its unbeatable army, though. Promotion into the upper ranks wasn't limited to any particular social class, and an officer with a rank of major or higher was eligible for an aristocratic title. This kept fresh blood in the officer class until the mid 18th century and made the army the route of preference for the socially mobile burgher class. Within five years Wallenstein had retaken his old conquests, and by the end of the War of the Schism in 1630 he had conquered Altmark, Brunswick, and Hesse.



Wallenstein's 'free shooting' tactics soon spread across the Protestant states, as prolonged warfare between the Lutheran and Calvinist sects led to rapid innovation and the rapid spread of innovation. With the exception of France, England, and Austria, nearly all armies had adopted this form of warfare by 1650.

Whew! That was tough. Now I remember why Lords of Prussia was such a slog at times--creating the histories of new nations whole can be an exhausting process [I don't have as much past history to build off of]. Next issue (which I will hopefully write over the course of the week) will offer a return to France, and in turn, the return of Saint-Chaumond to Parisian politics! Furthermore I've been reading a book over the last two weeks that you guys may appreciate called Paris in the Age of Absolutism, which goes over Paris in the 17th century and will likely be the foundation of a couple of entries written on the French capital. I'd strongly recommend it!