Lords of France: Roads to the Enlightenment

Sorry for the delay, I took a bit of time wondering what method I'd take with this section



The Alsatian Campaign was Vauban’s first true command, and it was a deeply dangerous one. With the loss of Lorraine, Alsace was a narrow peninsula of French territory into Imperial land. The two fortresses of the province, Strasbourg and Mulhouse , were separated by a days march and by the Imperial fortress of Colmar. Furthermore, Mulhouse’s defenses dated to the early Renaissance. Even with these limitations, Vauban’s intelligence described a force which outnumbered his by 30,000 men, which was going to come at his weak point, and which was led by the far more experienced Montecucolli, an Italian general with experience fighting the Lutherans and Poles..




There were some upsides, though. Vauban had managed to convince the Swiss Confederacy to join the French against the Habsburgs. Furthermore, he had two months before the weather was good enough for the Habsburg army to march through Wurttemberg and begin battle. Vauban used this time to shore up the defenses at Mulhouse, and during this time he developed one of his characteristic designs.


The ravelin is a detached wall which allows defenders to retreat further into the fortress without giving up a whole area of the defenses. The idea occurred to Vauban on the trip to Alsace, and the moment they arrived in the town he organized his 15,000 man army into twelve groups and put them on two hour shifts. At the end of the month, the first five ravelins were constructed and manned with heavy cannon.




By the summer, Vauban’s men succeeded in building no less than eleven ravelins, defending the whole northern approach to the city. As spring turned to summer and Vauban prepared for the Imperial advance, he also heard word that the Spanish campaign was over and that reinforcements were approaching. This was great news, as Montecucolli’s light cavalry had cut off Strasbourg and his forces were already interdicting the supply lines to Mulhouse.


Montecuccoli had earned his stripes on the fields of Poland and Prussia, where siegeworks still took a back seat to battles on the field. The small set of earthworks that Vauban had built seemed to Montecuccoli to be a joke, a desperate measure which would halt his troops for an hour at most. With this in his mind, he sent a smaller force of 20,000 men as well as the junior officer Risthaufen to take Mulhouse, while he led the core of his army to the already starving Strasbourg.


Risthaufen reached Mulhouse in the early afternoon on July 17. And though his men were tired, Risthaufen felt that a quick victory would make him the hero of the Alsatian Campaign and would propel him to the top ranks of the Imperial officer corps. And so he ordered for his troops to form up and march on the city within the hour. Vauban’s men, who had drilled together and felt a sense of inter-company comradery unknown to European armies at this point, lined up along the earthen walls and fixed their muskets on the enemy.


The Battle of Mulhouse is generally seen as the ignition of a new era of warfare. The quick destruction of Risthaufen’s cavalry elements by artillery and musket shot, and the resilience of Vauban’s earthworks, definitively placed fire above shock and the defense above the offense for the next century. By the day’s end, Risthaufen’s force was obliterated and its retreating elements were captured by Vauban’s single regiment of light cavalry. Risthaufen himself was brought to Mulhouse in shame.


When this news reached Montecuccoli, he was infuriated. But without a rearguard and with French reinforcements coming to his south, he was forced to withdraw to Freiburg to gather a new army. But he was not able to do that, for just as he arrived at Freiburg he got a letter with the Emperor’s stamp. His service was required to the east, for the Ottomans were on the move.




Since the capture of Constantinople, the Balkans had been a frontier between two brutal regimes, a frontier which had seen more than its share of atrocities from both sides. But the fragile nature of rule in the Balkans also led to a general policy of tolerance from both the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires with regards to the many peoples of this tattered region. It was a fragile thing, the peace of the Balkans, but it held for a good fifty years. This fragile peace, which was in fact marked by many battles between would-be crusaders and tartar raiders, finally broke in the 1650s, with the revolt of the Lutheran Hungarians.


In 1650, Hungary and western Transylvania were the largest bastions of reformist Christianity in all of Chrisendom. They were tolerated by the stalwart Emperor for their abilities as cavalrymen and their tendency to render unto caesar what is caesars. But twenty long years of fighting their protestant brethren had weakened their resolve, and fewer and fewer Hungarians and Transylvanians showed up for conscription, and less and less tax money was coming in from these regions. Emperor Leopold II responded to this by sending in troops to make sure that payments kept in tow, and it was only a matter of time before a revolt broke out. This being the Balkans, narratives vary, but we do know that after the Battle of Deva the Habsburg Reformists turned to the Ottomans for help. This played right into the internal politics of Turkey; a new vizier had risen to power from the western provinces, and he very much wanted to make a name for himself. Similarly, Mehmet IV had been raised to the glories of his forefathers, and wanted to be known as the conqueror.

The cries of Hapsburg ambassadors that this was not some skirmish, that Mehmet was truly preparing for war, was lost in the Imperial Court. It was only when news arrived that the Turkish army of 100,000 had reached Croatia that Vienna was sent into a flurry, and all Hapsburg forces were ordered back to the capitol.

With a full on war against the Ottomans to his south, Leopold was pressed for troops, and a ten year treaty was soon signed between Louis and the German Empire (as it was known soon afterwards, with the loss of the Dutch and French territories). France emerged from the War of French Succession badly damaged, with her military reputation in tatters, her position as a great power threatened by the monumental wars of the time, and her lands still in revolt.

(begin page 98) The end of the War of French Succession left France at her lowest point since the Wars of Religion. She was discounted as a power: she was unable to fight off even minor powers such as the Netherlands or Italy, she was incapable of even crossing the Pyrenees, she was saved by the emergence of a far greater power, and she was too weak to even abstain from the War of Hungary. Thankfully Jean of Burgundy participated in the war against the Ottomans and prevented an absolute route in Osijek, or otherwise France’s prestige would have been completely obliterated. In the space of three years, the cultural supremacy that Henri had been built was being blown apart. For the for time in twenty years, no French plays were shown in Berlin, Stockholm, or Rome. Schools began dropping French from their curriculum. Poets went silent. It seemed as if France were destined for perpetual instability, an instability which exiled her to the corner of the European spotlight in a time when concentrated, dictatorial regimes such as Italia, the Netherlands, or Turkey were dominating the continent.


Louis did much to reverse France’s apparent decline, but the first problem which confronted him was the last remnant of the Fronde. The Parliamentary Frondeurs still occupied the streets of Paris, Aix, and Lyon, as well as the whole region of Flandres. And while Louis had quelled any problems in his adopted homeland of the southeast, the capital of France was still under occupation by well meaning but violent rioters. This was a calamity, for three reasons. Firstly, the urban regions of France (as well as the newly nominally independent Brittany, which was still in revolt despite the deal made with Gurvand) provided over 60% of France’s tax revenues, and Louis was only taking in a trickle of this. Secondly, Louis had amassed a series of loans over his war with Jean of Burgundy, and while Henri’s silver reserves were mostly frittered away during the War of Unification, they would (end page 98) (begin page 99) pay off a good portion of Louis’ debt. Lastly, so long as Paris remained in the hands of revolters, France’s precipitous decline in prestige would remain, which would affect both the interest rate of Louis’ new regime and the linguistic dominance that Henri had spent so many livres buying.




A more belligerent man would have instigated a series of renewed Amiens Massacres. But Louis was not a zealot, or (despite his taken name) a brutal autocrat. He was first and foremost a man who had lived through war, and who knew the pain that war and repression entailed. He was, in his own way, the progenitor of the liberal political philosophy, a first practitioner who stumbled a bit implementing ideas which were still merely abstract thoughts of worthless philosophers. In our modern society, we are too sure in wholly abstract ideas, to willing to question those concepts tried and true. We say that we wish for a ‘democracy’ and we go on and on forever about it, we debate and we vote, we do not simply act as if our democracy already were in existence. We have become a society of parliaments, not the parliaments of Louis’ time, which were of course modeled on the fantastical examples of Greece and Rome, but ‘modern’ parliaments, which of course means nothing. We have opened ourselves but I would say too much. We are too willing to submit our whole system government and every thing that this entails, law, legislature, administration, culture, forestry, roads, to the petty whims of those who scrawl for pages about nothing... (end page 99)
...


(begin page 104) but I digress. Louis’ response was not to engage in the despotic violence of past regimes. Instead, his action defined the nature of French government for the next century. In the halls of the Louvre, during the Parisian Congress, we can see the beginning of the modern age, in all its glories and terrors.


Louis rode to Paris not at the head of his 50,000 man army, but rather with a single regiment. The 31st Paris Light Cavalry, a unit of early dragoons which had served in the War of Unification before being forced to retreat deep into Normandy, joined Louis de Bourbon-Orleans shortly after the Breton Campaign, and fought with honors at the Battle of Dijon and the Siege of Gironda. They now numbered less than two hundred men, but they had retained their pride in their city, and when they rode to the walls bearing a white flag, they were immediately able to converse with the men at the walls. Louis was allowed into Paris, not as a conquering king but as an equal to the city. And as he entered into the city hall, he entered in the dress of the bourgeois and with a set of terms under which Paris would be brought back into the fold. These terms would be replicated with both Lyon and Aix as well as Flandres.




Louis offered a good deal of the royal land around Paris to the city government, and furthermore agreed to rescind the law forbidding building outside of the city walls. There was also a set of small concessions given to the parliament, such as government funds for rebuilding the city’s fountains and cathedrals. But the city was truly taken in by two massive changes, which held in the heart the beginning of the greatest government that Providence has bequeathed man (I speak, of course, of Constitutional Monarchy). Outside of a few key positions (such as head of police), Paris would have full governmental autonomy, and would have a degree of choice regarding her taxes. Her top two products (much to the chagrin to the traditional guilds), grain and wine, were to be left untaxed, and Paris would decide how much of her revenues would be sent into the Royal Treasury.


Other cities would agree to similar terms. Lyon’s silks, Nantes’ ships, Toulouse’s books, and the imports of Bordreaux, Nice, and Aix would remain wholly untaxed, and each of these cities were governed by the new parliaments set up during the Fronde. These new parliaments were mostly made up of fresh faces, for the old families had been by and large killed and exiled during the Fronde (end page 104) (begin page 105). These seven municipalities were joined by another independent entity.




The Republic of Flandres was also created in the period immediately after the Parisian Congress. This encompassed the whole province of Flandres, and was given a government elected by the elders of each city in the province. And while the Flemings have abused their rights, the republic of Flandres has remained the first experiment in republican government in all of France.


Not all provinces gained autonomy following the Parisian Congress. Brittany was stripped of much of its provincial strength and placed under direct Bourbon rule, the product of a desire by Bretons to attack the corruption in their province. The exile of the Duke of Burgundy and his lieutenants led to their lands coming under the purview of Louis XIII, and the whole duchy became the king’s personal property.

volksmarschall said:

Looks like France is going to need a nice long period of rebuilding and replenishing after the end of the war. Also, it's nice to see that Debrecen is still the Calvinist Rome!

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Yes it will need quite a bit. And yes! Austria has that awful luck of being defender of Catholicism while having a massive Lutheran population. Luckily the Turks have charitably relieved them of this problem.

Quick question guys, which section would you prefer to come first? There's going to be a set of sections on the reform of the French military and a set of sections on the economy of southern France (and Mediterranean trade)

(start page 193)Louis’ regime was marked not by the expansion or retraction of the state, but rather by a transformation of the state’s role in French society. No longer the patron of all the arts of France, Louis’ administration focused more on the just roles of the state; the national defense, the protection of trade and property, and the creation of laws. This led to great results in all of France, but it can be most seen in the undeveloped regions of southern France.




Although the coast of France is now a deeply developed area, and our efforts have spread to inland France, it is easy to forget that the riviera was once a land of sustenance farmers and fisherman. Although Marseille was an important harbor, it gained relatively little in trade due to the monarchy’s inattention to southern matters. In 1655, southern France lagged far behind the north (let alone Flandres) in market infrastructure, courthouses, canals, and ports. Though Marseille had a beautiful natural harbor, it had fallen into disrepair since the last king who focused on the south (Louis XI), and much of it had become swampland. Her trading companies had long been outcompeted by the Italians, and the (end page 193) (begin page 194) city had been facing lowered revenues for a century. Furthermore, the port of Marseilles had not kept up with the times, and could only dock the smallest of trading vessels.


The Aix revolt was the first in a series of events which led to the South’s move away from being a the backwater of France into the French frontier, where massive fortunes were amassed. The Parisian Congress had given the Aix region (which included Marseille and the whole of the Etang de Berre bay) complete control over the taxes levied from Mediterranean imports. This was the exact thing that Marseilles needed. Longtime traders across the Mediterranean, the Provencals had been slowly beaten out of their usual haunts in Oran, Constantinople, and Syracuse by the Italians and Spaniards. The French were also constantly harangued by pirates, and Ottoman restrictions on trade deeply hurt the Provencal region.




Had this been all the monarchy did for Provence, it would have remained a backwater. Instead, Provencals were one of the largest groups in Louis’ court, being outnumbered only by Gascons. These Provencals, such as Martin d’Anjou or Pierre Laurent, influenced Louis’ policy in such a way as to benefit their province several times through the 17th century, but three key projects marked Louis’ early reign.


The first was the building of a series of canals which connects Lyon, Marseille, and Montpellier. These canals, which trumped even the Flandres-Paris canal in their grandeur, made for easier transportation of armies along southern France and, during peacetime, led to a massive explosion in trade. Lyonnais silks and Occitan dyes were brought together, turning southern France into a textile producer which in time surpassed even Flandres. Revenue from the production of dyed fabric had reneged the costs of the canal by 1723, a mere sixty years after the canal’s construction.


The second major project occurred early in Louis reign. De Gurvand, who gave up his role as governor of Brittany in 1662 and joined the admiralty, had long been an advocate for galley fleet in the style of Scandinavia’s Archipelago fleet. This fleet, which would consist entirely of galleys and a small squadron of frigates, would allow France to compete with Spain in the Mediterranean and would fend off pirate attacks. France had long left her Mediterranean coast to the mercy of the Berber pirates, and though Charles VII had created a series of naval forts and task forces to fight pirate attacks in the 15th century, this did little for the French traders who ventured into the open sea. The creation of a standing fleet of ten frigates and twenty galley squadrons marked the end of France’s pirate troubles, and necessitated the expansion of the Marseille port to account for the fleet. The Etang de Berre lagoon was drained, creating one of the largest natural ports in the world.


Lastly, Louis pursued amiable relations with the Ottoman Empire, and in 1659 became the first European power allowed to trade in the orient since the 15th century. While I shall address this later, its effects were quickly made clear. French traders made connections with Arab Christians and Jews across the Levant and North Africa, and their access to East Asian goods and refined textiles allowed for a mass opening of trade, and soon Marseille became the hub through which all Turkish goods flowed.




Soon, the fine silks of Constantinople, Egyptian cotton, and all the olive oil of north africa and the Levant poured into Southern France, and this changed the very nature of the economy of southern France. No longer did men foolishly plant crops for them and them (end page 194) (begin page 195) alone, instead the Occitans embraced the beauty of trade and worked to create trade goods. In the span of a single generation, southern France moved from a backwater into a region with a developed market.

And again, thank you so much Volksmaschall!

GulMacet said:

People always talk about the changes war and violence brings, but in my opinion, changes such as the one you describe are far more profound.

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Yeah I find the more I write this the more bored I can get with writing battle scenes and the more interested I am in the broader changes (like the fact that southern France is increasingly creating goods just for export is going to come up in a big way later)

Oh I literally thought that volks meant the fact that some of the lines went over land in the map and I spent like five minutes correcting it before saying 'screw this'

(begin page 196) the question: how did Louis fund such an expansion of the French state? A Mediterranean fleet, the largest army in Europe, and a series of massive infrastructure projects bring up the question of how, exactly, Louis was able to fund these projects. And while the production of finished goods increased by a third over the course of the 17th century, the revenues from this increase were slight. Furthermore, while the new Urban provinces soon developed a tradition of giving 17-20% of their revenues to the crown, a tradition which still represented a decrease in taxes previously accrued. And while Henri had left a considerable surplus, this was soon used up along with much of the goodwill that Henri had fostered among the merchant class.


There is one source of revenues which rose considerably over Louis’ reign, a rise large enough to provide for a considerably larger army as well as a major new fleet. This revenue source was the colonies. And while I will later discuss the developments in the New World, increasingly France came to rely upon the money flowing in from her East indies colonies. These moneys were immeasurably increased by Louis’ negotiations with the Ottoman Empire for the safe passageway of French merchants through the Suez passageway.




Suez had been a major port since the days of early Mohammedanism, when the city of Kolzum stood as the end of a canal linking the Red Sea to the Nile, the first of many attempts at a canal linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Even the Romans fancied such an idea. But each attempt to bridge the two seas has ended with failure. Perhaps it is an impossible task. But (end page 196) (begin page 197) regardless, Suez has remained one of the key ports of the Red Sea. Even without a canal, it remained the closest link between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and it meant that the Ottomans were still able to influence events in the East Indies without a sizeable navy.


In the 1670s, after a decade of trade between France and the Turks, the great ambassador Francis Viscomte de Landresse approached the padishah with a great agreement: France would promise to trade a quarter of the goods from their East Indies colonies if French merchants would be allowed to pass through the Suez passageway. Though the red sea passageway was a dangerous path, and the Suez caravans were consistently attacked by Berber raiders, the opening of the Suez passageway (as well as local innovations) led to a twofold increase in the goods France gained from her East Indies colonies. It also allowed for a closer connection between France and the French East India Company and the Kingdom of Min, leading to a closer cultural connection between France and the East than one sees in any other kingdom.


Although future kings would misuse this connection to the East, Louis took what we would call today a ‘laissez faire’ approach towards his colonies. While the navigation acts would be stringently enforced, tariffs would remain low through his whole reign, and the companies were encouraged to trade with their neighbors (at a slight cost). In particular, France and England cooperated in order to weaken their enemies’ positions in the East Indies and New World. And while France likely lost a great deal of value due to the forced trades they made with Berbers, Arabs and Turks, the Suez passageway led to the reinvigoration of Alexandria, which became the major port through which French East Indie imports flowed, and a renewed interest in all things Egyptian in the courts of Europe. This led to the most worldly court in all of Christendom in Henri III’s Versailles, which had two offices, one adorned with Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greek statues, and the other decorated with Minese artifacts. Henri graced one office or the other depending on mood, and conducted much of his work in these rooms.


The opening of the Suez Passage to French trade is simultaneously one of the most undiscussed and important events of the 17th century. It brought the culture of the East Indies to Europe in a way previously impossible, and vice versa. It allowed France to maintain its position as a colonial power in Asia without any ports in West Africa. It fostered France’s interest in the Mediterranean and North Africa, an interest which has remained over the last century (and in the forseeable future). It has put immeasurable wealth in the coffers of the crown and French merchants. And it has improved our relations with the Turkish Empire a great deal.

Hey guys, I also have an announcement about Lords of France.

While going 'off the rails' when my save game collapsed in the fall of 2012 led to a far better AAR then I could have imagined, I feel that my narrative has been diverging significantly from the beautiful framework of the mod for a long time. Personally, I very rarely read AARs without game screens to at least tell you what's going on, and now I've found myself writing just that sort of AAR for over a year. Beyond this, the EU3 forum has had a steadily declining readership for a long while and I've always intended this to partially be an exegesis on the process of writing an AAR and to be a guide to people who are getting into writing some serious history, I feel that I haven't been reaching that audience within this forum. Beyond even that, I feel like I've started to go into a bit of a slump writing wise, and I feel that I need to make a bit of a change (though I'm still 100% interested in finishing the story). Lastly, I have to express my fullest respect for Frankfuck's Christmas Momod which I firmly believe is the fullest expression of the game system present in EU3.

That said, I'm announcing Lords of France, the Video Let's Play!

Just kidding. What's going to happen is that I'm going to finish up the reign of Louis XIII, and when that's done I'll move to the EU4 forums and likely use the M&T mod (which I've really liked and gets a lot of the spirit of Magna Mundi) with Lords of France II: Politics After the Revolution. I'm going to keep the same look, the same writings and the same everything else, but I'm hopefully going to get more screencaps in and reach a larger audience.

I thank all of you guys, your readership and your acclaim has really helped me with writing this (especially at darker points when it's been so easy to let this fall by the wayside). I hope to deliver the quality that you guys have come to expect from LoF, and I hope that you guys decide to come over with me to the EU4 forums.