§ 2. The capture a turning point in the war.
The campaign of 1638 was the turning point in the struggle between France and the united House of Austria. A vantage ground was then won which was never lost.
§ 3. Bernhard wishes to keep Breisach.
Bernhard himself, however, was loth to realize the world-wide importance of the events in which he had played his part. He fancied that he had been fighting for his own, and he claimed the lands which he had conquered for himself. He received the homage of the citizens of Breisach in his own name. He celebrated a Lutheran thanksgiving festival in the cathedral. But the French Government looked upon the rise of an independent German principality in Alsace with as little pleasure as the Spanish government had contemplated the prospect of the establishment of Wallenstein in the Palatinate. They ordered Bernhard to place his conquests under the orders of the King of France.
§ 4. Refuses to dismember the Empire.
Strange as it may seem, the man who had done so much to tear in pieces the Empire believed, in a sort of way, in the Empire still. "I will never suffer," he said, in reply to the French demands, "that men can truly reproach me with being the first to dismember the Empire."
§ 5. Death of Bernhard.
The next year he crossed the Rhine with the most brilliant expectations. Baner had recovered strength, and was pushing on through North Germany into Bohemia. Bernhard hoped that he too might strike a blow which would force on a peace on his own conditions. But his greatest achievement, the capture of Breisach, was also his last. A fatal disease seized upon him when he had hardly entered upon the campaign. On July 8, 1639, he died.
§ 6. Alsace in French possession.
There was no longer any question of the ownership of the fortresses in Alsace and the Breisgau. French governors entered into possession. A French general took the command of Bernhard's army. For the next two or three years Bernhard's old troops fought up and down Germany in conjunction with Baner, not without success, but without any decisive victory. The French soldiers were becoming, like the Germans, inured to war. The lands on the Rhine were not easily to be wrenched out of the strong hands which had grasped them.