PART II
DYNASTIC AND COLONIAL RIVALRY
In the seventeenth century and in the greater part of the eighteenth, public attention was directed chiefly toward dynastic and colonial rivalries. In the European group of national states, France was the most important. Politically the French evolved a form of absolutist divine-right monarchy, which became the pattern of all European monarchies, that of England alone excepted. In international affairs the reigning family of France—the Bourbon dynasty after a long struggle succeeded in humiliating the rulers of Spain and of Austria— the Habsburg dynasty. The hegemony which, in the sixteenth century, Spain had exercised in the newly established state-system of Europe was now supplanted by that of France. Intellectually, too, Italian leadership yielded to French, until France set the fashion alike in manners, morals, and art. Only in the sphere of commerce and trade and exploitation of lands beyond the seas was French supremacy questioned, and there not by declining Portugal or Spain but by the vigorous English nation. France, victorious in her struggle for dynastic aggrandizement on the continent of Europe, was destined to suffer defeat in her efforts to secure colonies in Asia and America.
This period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was marked likewise by the constant decay of old political and social institutions in Italy and in Germany, by the gradual decline of the might and prestige of the Ottoman Turks, and by the extinction of the ancient kingdom of Poland. In their place appeared as great world powers the northern monarchies of Prussia and Russia, whose royal lines— Hohenzollerns and Romanovs—were to vie in ambition and prowess, before the close of the period, with Habsburgs and Bourbons.
Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined. As steadily arose the numbers, the ability, and the importance of the traders and commercial magnates, the moneyed people, all those who were identified with the new wealth that the Commercial Revolution was creating, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the merchants,—the so-called middle class, the bourgeoisie, who gradually grew discontented with the restrictive institutions of their time. Within the bourgeoisie was the seed of revolution: they would one day in their own interests overturn monarchy, nobility, the Church, the whole social fabric. That was to be the death-knell of the old regime—the annunciation of the nineteenth century.