ATTACK ON THE NETHERLANDS.—Louis had already purchased of the English Dunkirk,—which was shamefully sold to him by Charles II.,—when Philip IV. of Spain died (1665). He now claimed parts of the Netherlands as being an inheritance of his queen, according to an old law of those provinces. He conquered the county of Burgundy, or Franche Comté, and various places in that country. Holland, afraid that he might push his conquests farther, formed the Triple Alliance with England and Sweden. In the Treaty of Aachen (Aix), Louis gave up to the Spaniards Franche Comté, but retained the captured cities in the Netherlands (1668), which Vauban proceeded to fortify.
ATTACK ON HOLLAND.—The next attack of Louis was upon Holland. Holland and the Spanish Netherlands were at variance in religion, as well as in their political systems, and rivals in trade and industry. The first minister of the emperor, Leopold., was in the pay of Louis. Sweden, in the minority of Charles XI., was in the hands of the Swedish nobles. England had now joined Louis, who, in return for help in the Netherlands, was to furnish subsidies to assist Charles II. in establishing Catholicism in his realm. In Holland, there was a division between the republicans, of whom the grand pensionary, John de Witt, was the chief, and the adherents of the house of Orange.
THE WAR: THE PEACE OF NIMWEGEN.—Louis, having first seized Lorraine,—whose duke had allied himself to the United Provinces,—accompanied by his famous generals, Condé, Turenne, and Vauban, put himself at the head of an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men, which crossed the Rhine, and advanced to the neighborhood of the capital of Holland. The Orange party charged the blame of the failure to defend the land on their adversaries, whom they accused of treachery. De Witt and his brother, Cornelius, were killed in the streets of Hague. William III., the Prince of Orange (1672-1702), assumed power. Gröningen held out against the French troops. Storms on the sea and on the land aided the patriotic defenders of their country. The "Great Elector" of Brandenburg, Frederic William, lent them help. At length the German emperor was driven by the French aggressions to join actively in the war, on the side of the Dutch. The English Parliament (1674) forced Charles II. to conclude peace with them. In the battle of Sasbach, Turenne fell (1675). Sweden took the side of France, and invaded the elector's territory; but the elector's victory at Fehrbellin (1675) laid the foundation of the greatness of Prussia. William III. kept the field against the great generals of France, and married the daughter of James, the Duke of York, the brother of Charles II. In bringing the war to an end, Louis, by shrewd diplomacy, settled with the United Provinces first. By the Peace of Nimwegen (1678 and 1679), Holland received back its whole territory; France kept most of her new conquests in the Netherlands, with the county of Burgundy, the city of Besançon, and some imperial towns in Alsace not ceded in the Peace of Westphalia; the emperor lost to France Freiburg in the Breisgau. The elector, left to shift for himself, was forced to give back his profitable conquests to Sweden (1679).
EFFECT OF THE WAR.—In the war with Holland, Louis had shown his military strength, and his skill in making and breaking alliances. He had made progress towards the goal of his ambition, which was to act as dictator in the European family of states. To the end of the century, France stood on the pinnacle of power and apparent prosperity.
CONDITION OF FRANCE.—Manufactures flourished to an astonishing degree. France became a naval power with a large fleet and with all its services better organized than those of the contemporary English marine. Colbert finished the canal between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Colonies were founded in St. Domingo, Cayenne, Madagascar. Canada was increasing in strength. A uniform, strict judicial system was established. Restless nobles were cowed, and the common people thus drawn to the monarch.
THE FRENCH COURT.—In his court, the king established elaborate forms of etiquette, and made himself almost an object of worship. The nobility swarmed about him, and sought advancement from his favor. Festivals and shows of all sorts—plays, ballets, banquets, dazzling fireworks—were the costly diversion of the gay throngs of courtiers, male and female, in that court, where sensuality was thinly veiled by ceremonious politeness and punctilious religious observances. Poets, artists, and scholars were liberally patronized, and joined in the common adulation offered to the sovereign. Stately edifices were built, great libraries gathered; academies of art and of science, an astronomical observatory, and the botanic garden for the promotion of the study of natural history, were founded. The palace at Versailles, with its statues, fountains, and gardens, furnished a pattern which all the rest of Europe aspired to copy. Every thing there wore an artificial stamp, from the trimming of the trees to the etiquette of the ballroom. But there was a splendor and a fascination which caused the French fashions, the French language and literature, with the levity and immorality which traveled in their company, to spread in the higher circles of the other European countries.
THE GALLICAN CHURCH.—Louis XIV. desired, without any rupture with Rome, to take to himself a power in ecclesiastical affairs like that assumed in England by Henry VIII. Under the pontificate of Innocent XI., the assembly of the French clergy passed four propositions asserting the rights of the national Gallican Church, and limiting the Pope's prerogative (1682). The king had for his ecclesiastical champion the able and eloquent Bossuet, the Bishop of Meaux. Subsequently, under Innocent XII., Louis, afraid of a schism and anxious to procure other advantages, yielded up the four obnoxious propositions.
JANSENISM.—The controversy raised by the Jansenists was an important event in the history of France. They took their name from Jansenius, who had been Bishop of Ypres, an ardent disciple of St. Augustine's theology. They strenuously opposed the theology and moral maxims of the powerful Jesuit order. Their leaders, St. Cyran, Pascal, Arnauld, Nicole, and others, were called Port Royalists, from their relation to a cloister at Port Royal, where some of them resided. They were men of literary and philosophical genius, as well as theologians and devotees. Blaise Pascal wrote the "Provincial Letters," a satirical and polemical work against the Jesuit doctrines. This has always been deemed in style a masterpiece of French prose. His posthumous Thoughts is a profound and suggestive fragment on the evidences of religion. In the heated controversy that arose, the Jansenist leaders were for a more limited definition of the Pope's authority in deciding questions of doctrine. The French court at length took the side of the Jesuits. In 1713 the Pope's bull against the Moral Reflections of Quesnel, a Jansenist author, was a heavy blow at his party. Finally, the Jansenists were proscribed by the king, and the cloister at Port Royal leveled to the ground. The Jansenist influence made a part of the tendencies to liberalism that led to the Revolution at the close of the century.
THE HUGUENOTS.—After Mazarin's death, the king fell under the influence of a party hostile to the Huguenots. Louvois fostered this feeling in him, as did Madame de Maintenon, whom he had secretly married, and by whom he was influenced through life. As he grew older, he sought to appease a guilty conscience by inflicting tortures on religious dissenters. He issued edicts of the most cruel character. He adopted the atrocious scheme of the dragonade, or the billeting of soldiers, over whom there was no restraint, in Huguenot families. In the course of three years, fifty thousand families, industrious and virtuous people, had fled the country. In 1685 the Edict of Nantes, the charter of Protestant rights, was revoked. Emigration was forbidden; yet not far from a quarter of a million of refugees escaped, to enrich by their skill and labor the Protestant countries where they found an asylum. Many of the refugees were received by the Elector Frederick, and helped to build up Berlin, then a small city of twelve thousand inhabitants. France was not only in a degree impoverished by those who fled, but, also, by the much larger number who remained to be harassed and ruined by the foolish and brutal bigotry of their ruler.
The loss to France by the exile of the Huguenots was incalculable. "Here were the thriftiest, the bravest, the most intelligent of Frenchmen, the very flower of the race; some of their best and purest blood, some of their fairest and most virtuous women, all their picked artisans. In war, in diplomacy, in literature, in production of wealth, these refugees gave what they took from France to her enemies; for they carried with them that bitter sense of wrong which made them henceforth foremost among those enemies, the forlorn hope of every attack on their ancient fatherland. Large numbers of officers, and those among the ablest, emigrated; among them pre-eminent Marshal Schomberg, 'the best general in Europe.' The fleet especially suffered: the best of the sailors emigrated; the ships were almost unmanned. The seamen carried tidings of their country's madness to the ends of the earth: as Voltaire says, 'the French were as widely dispersed as the Jews.' Not only in industry, but in thought and mental activity, there was a terrible loss. From this time literature in France loses all spring and power."