Meanwhile the Austrian arms had elsewhere been more successful. The French and Bavarians, after winning a few trifling victories in Bohemia, had been forced back to the upper Danube. Munich was occupied by the troops of Maria Theresa at the very time when the elector was being crowned at Frankfort as Holy Roman Emperor. The whole of Bavaria was soon in Austrian possession, and the French were in retreat across the Rhine. Gradually, also, the combined forces of Austria and Sardinia made headway in Italy against the Bourbon armies of France and Spain.
In the last years of the war, the French managed to protect Alsace and Lorraine from Austrian invasion, and, under the command of the gifted Marshal Saxe, they actually succeeded in subjugating the greater part of the Austrian Netherlands and in carrying the struggle into Holland. On the high seas and in the colonies, the conflict raged between France and Great Britain as "King George's War," which has already been separately noted. [Footnote: See above, pp. 311 f.]
[Sidenote: Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): Indecisive Character of
Struggle between Prussia and Austria]
The treaties which ended the War of the Austrian Succession were signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. They guaranteed the acquisition of Silesia by Frederick II of Prussia and restored everything else to the situation at the opening of the conflict. The Wittelsbach family was reinstated in Bavaria and in the Palatinate, and the husband of Maria Theresa, Francis of Lorraine, succeeded Charles VII as Holy Roman Emperor. France, for all her expenditures and sacrifices, gained nothing. The War of the Austrian Succession was but a preliminary encounter in the great duel for German leadership between Prussia and Austria. It was similarly only an indecisive round in the prolonged battle between France and Great Britain for the mastery of the colonial and commercial world.
[Sidenote: Coalition against Frederick the Great]
In the war just closed, Austria had been the chief loser, and the resolute Maria Theresa set herself at once to the difficult task of recovering her prestige and her ceded territory. Her first efforts were directed toward internal reform—consolidating the administrations of her various dominions by the creation of a strong central council at Vienna, encouraging agriculture, equalizing and augmenting the taxes, and increasing the army. Her next step was to form a great league of rulers that would find a common interest with her in dismembering the kingdom of Frederick. She knew she could count on Saxony. She easily secured an ally in the Tsarina Elizabeth of Russia, who had been deeply offended by the caustic wit of the Prussian king. She was already united by friendly agreements with Great Britain and Holland. She had only France to win to her side, and in this policy she had the services of an invaluable agent, Count Kaunitz, the greatest diplomat of the age. Kaunitz held out to France, as the price for the abandonment of the Prussian alliance and the acceptance of that of Austria, the tempting bait of Frederick's Rhenish provinces. But Louis XV at first refused an Austrian alliance: it would be a departure from the traditional French policy of opposing the Habsburgs. Kaunitz then appealed to the king's mistress, the ambitious Madame de Pompadour, who, like the Tsarina Elizabeth, had had plenty of occasions for taking offense at the witty verses of the Prussian monarch: the favor of the Pompadour was won, and France entered the league against Prussia.
[Sidenote: The "Diplomatic Revolution">[
Meanwhile, however, Great Britain had entered into a special agreement with Frederick with the object of guaranteeing the integrity of Hanover and the general peace of the Germanies. When, therefore, the colonial war between Great Britain and France was renewed in 1754, it was quite natural that the former should contract a definite alliance with Prussia. Thus it befell that, whereas in the indecisive War of the Austrian Succession Prussia and France were pitted against Austria and Great Britain, in the determinant Seven Years' War, which ensued, Austria and France were in arms against Prussia and Great Britain. This overturn of traditional alliances has been commonly designated the "Diplomatic Revolution."
[Sidenote: The Seven Years' War, 1756-1763]
The Seven Years' War lasted in Europe from 1756 to 1763, and, as regards both the number of combatants and the brilliant generalship displayed, deserves to rank with the War of the Spanish Succession as the greatest war which the modern world had so far witnessed. The story has already been told of its maritime and colonial counterpart, which embraced the French and Indian War in America (1754-1763) and the triumphant campaigns of Clive in India, and which decisively established the supremacy of Great Britain on the seas, in the Far East, and in the New World. [Footnote: See above, pp. 312 ff.] There remains to sketch its course on the European continent.