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manhefnawi

The Art of Kingship: Louis XIV, A Reconsideration | History Today - 0 views

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Louis XIV France Absolute Monarch

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  • On June 7th, 1654, Louis XIV was crowned in the traditional manner at the cathedral of Reims
  • It was indeed one of the least significant events in the whole reign of Loins XIV
  • The minority had ended at rather an early age, but kings of France were not as ordinary men, in that, among other things, they had the capacity of coming of age prematurely
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • For ten years after he had come of age Louis XIV left the government in the hands of Mazarin, apparently willingly
  • Louis XIV would as soon have neglected his Council as his grand couvert, when he dined in public
  • Louis never forgot the flight from Paris or the humiliations inflicted on his childhood by the Fronde. Saint-Simon said that he often spoke of those times with bitterness, even telling how he was so neglected that one evening he had been pulled dripping out of the fountain in the Palais Royal, where he had fallen and been left to lie. The lesson he drew from the Fronde was that the king must be absolute
  • The same standards were demanded from those who surrounded the King
  • A population of some twenty millions, when England or Spain had under five and the largest German states barely one or two millions, was, given able generals and domestic unity, a guarantee of military success. But such a cautious monarch as Louis did not fling himself into a course of foreign conquest without preparation
  • Given this, and a King like Louis XIV to play the central role, it became the scene of something like a perpetual ballet performed before an audience of twenty millions
  • An Italian visitor compared Louis XIV leaving his chateau, surrounded by body-guards, carriages, horses, courtiers, valets, to the Queen bee when she takes flight into the fields with her swarm
  • The Queen died about this time; and Louis, who by now was wanting to settle down, married Mme Scarron secretly
  • Versailles, court, etiquette, mistresses, were all part of the ornamental framework of monarchy, but Louis XIV was no mere playboy king. His pride was in his mastery of what he called the metier de roi, and it is important to note what this meant, because it has sometimes been given too extensive an interpretation
  • It was natural that Louis XIV should devote his attention above all to foreign affairs, but it was with his characteristic moderation and sense of the possible that he began his career of conquest
  • A king was in those days still primarily a great landowner and his first aim was to add to the extent of the lands possessed by his dynasty. In this sense the state was identified with the monarch and this was the meaning of I’Etat e’est moi. Louis XIV put the position quite clearly himself: “In working for the state, the monarch is working for himself; the good of the one is the glory of the other; when the former is happy, noble and powerful, he who has brought this about is glorious.
  • The devastating invasion of a German state was calculated to do so, and in this sense it succeeded, but only at a price
  • Under Louis XIV the higher nobility were domesticated at Court and ceased to be even a nuisance. Robbed of their leadership, the lesser nobles and gentry—of course they did not come to Versailles, as is sometimes implied, there would not have been standing room if they had—could safely be left to rot in idleness in their chateaux and manor-houses. With one exception Louis had no minister of noble birth throughout his reign
  • Under Louis XIV the royal bureaucracy, which had been so many centuries in the growing, reached its apogee
  • The government of France was now a complete bureaucracy and Louis XIV the grand bureaucrat.
  • If the Catholics were loyal, the Huguenots were not less so. It almost seemed as if there were a competition which religion could elevate the King on a higher altar
  • Louis XIV did not have to initiate the persecution of the Huguenots
  • In the cause of religion Louis XIV had lost, as Sorel put it, more than he could have gained by the most victorious war or than could have been demanded by his enemies as the price of the most disastrous peace
  • He had seen a whole generation of his subjects pass away. Within a few months, in 1711, his son, his grandson and his elder great-grandson all died, leaving only a weak baby to carry on the Bourbon dynasty
  • The last of the agreements was signed in November 1715, but the King of France had died at Versailles on September 1st, at the age of seventy-seven and in the fifty-sixth year of his personal rule
  • The sun king had gone down not in splendour but amid clouds of foreign defeat and domestic distress, to be succeeded, against his will and testament, not by his bastard Maine, whom he loved, but by Philip of Orleans, whom he hated. The Regent was to try to put the clock back, to undo the work of the great monarch in every field. In foreign policy, religion, government, finance, the Regency was an attempt at revolution from above
  • Three-quarters of a century after Louis XIV had died the monarchy which had reached its height, and been given its final majestic proportions under him, came crashing down in ruins; and in this case it is just to tax the architect with ill-matched aims
  • Every time the King creates an office, it was said, God creates a fool to buy it. In fact, the purchasers were not quite so foolish as the saying suggests
  • Finally, it must be said that Louis XIV had not even successfully completed his especial task of securing the emancipation of the monarchy from the danger of a future Fronde. He had bound the noblesse to the Crown, but he had equally bound the Crown to the privileged orders. If Louis XIV was the master of his Court, his successors were to be the dependants of their own courtiers. Parlements, provincial estates still remained; and, powerless under a strong king, they were to be a menace under weak ones. The wheel came full circle in 1787 with the révolte nobiliaire, when the last Fronde began the revolution against Louis XVI, and the privileged orders destroyed the absolute monarchy, though in doing so they also destroyed themselves
Javier E

FC95: The Age of Louis XIV, the "Sun King" (1643-1715) - The Flow of History - 2 views

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Louis XIV history france

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  • Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".
  • Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.
  • Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Religion was one aspect of Louis' reign that illustrated the absolute nature of his monarchy quite well.  Louis himself was quite a pious Catholic, learning that trait from his mother.  However, in the spirit of the day, he saw religion as a department of state subordinate to the will of the king.  By the same token, not adhering to the Catholic faith was seen as treason. As a result, Louis gradually restricted the rights of the French Huguenots and finally, in 1685, revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given them religious freedom since the end of the French Wars of Religion in 1598.  This drove 200,000 Huguenots out of France, depriving it of some of its most skilled labor.  Thus Louis let his political and religious biases ruin a large sector of France's economy.
  • Versailles Louis' religious faith was largely a superficial one attached to the elaborate ritual of the Catholic mass.  This love of ritual also showed itself in how Louis ran his court at his magnificent palace of Versailles, several miles outside of Paris.  Much of the reason for building Versailles goes back to the Fronde that had driven Louis from Paris as a young boy.  Ever since then, Louis had distrusted the volatile Paris mob and was determined to move the court away from the influence of that city.  Versailles was also the showpiece of Louis' reign, glorifying him as the Sun King with its magnificent halls and gardens.
  • Just as Louis's palace at Versailles dominated European culture during the late 1600's and early 1700's, his diplomacy and wars dominated Europeans political history.  As Louis himself put it: "The character of a conqueror is regarded as the noblest and highest of titles."  Interestingly enough, he never led his troops in battle except for overseeing a few sieges from a safe distance.
  • Louis' main goals were to expand France to its "natural borders": the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees.  This, of course, would make him enemies among the Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Spanish, and English.  Therefore, Louis' diplomacy had to clear the way to make sure he did not fight everyone at once.  For this purpose he skillfully used money to neutralize potential enemies (such as Charles II of England in the Secret Treaty of Dover) and extracted favorable terms from stalemate or losing situations.  But Louis could also make some fateful blunders to hurt his cause.  His obsessive hatred of the Dutch dominated his policy too much, as did his own self-confidence and arrogance in trying to publicly humiliate his enemies.  However, this just alarmed Louis' enemies more, especially the Dutch, Austrians, and English, who allied against Louis to preserve the balance of power.
  • Exhaustion on both sides finally led to the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.  Louis' grandson took the throne of Spain and its American empire, but the French and Spanish thrones could not be united under one ruler.  Austria got the Spanish Netherlands to contain French aggression to the north.  Just as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 had contained Hapsburg aggression, the Treaty of Utrecht contained French expansion.  Two years later Louis XIV was dead, with little to show for his vaunted ambitions as a conqueror except an exhausted economy and dissatisfied populace.
  • Results of Louis' reign The age of Louis XIV was important to European history for several reasons.  First of all, it saw the triumph of absolutism in France and continental Europe.  Versailles was a glittering symbol and example for other European rulers to follow.  Any number of German and East European monarchs modeled their states and courts after Louis XIV, sometimes to the point of financial ruin.  Second, Louis' wars showed the system of Balance of Power politics working better than ever.  French aggression was contained and the status quo was maintained.  All this had its price, since the larger sizes of the armies and the final replacement of the pike with the musket took European warfare to a new level of destruction.  Finally, Louis' reign definitely established France as the dominant power in Europe.  However, the cost was immense and left his successors a huge debt.  Ironically, the problems caused by Louis XIV's reign would help lead to the French Revolution in 1789 and the spread of democratic principles across Europe and eventually the world.
  • I am the state. — Voltaire, incorrectly quoting Louis XIV
manhefnawi

The Last Years of James II | History Today - 0 views

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James II in France William III

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  • For eleven years, from his defeat at the Boyne in July 1690 until his death in September 1701, James II lived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (near Versailles) in one of the most spectacular royal palaces of the Baroque period
  • Louis was obliged to recognise William III as de facto King of England, as a condition for signing the peace treaty of Ryswick, which marked the end of the War of the League of Augsburg. The treaty in no way affected James II’s status as de jure king, nor his son’s status as de jure Prince of Wales, but James now had to tolerate the presence in Paris, and occasionally at the French Court, of a hostile English ambassador
  • At the tercentenary of the King’s death, it is surely time to take a closer look at the life that James led in France
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • When James returned from Ireland in the summer of 1690 he was intent on preparing an invasion of England across the Channel from Normandy. Energetically supported by the leading Jacobites in exile, his negotiations with Louis XIV resulted in the major Franco-Jacobite invasion attempt of June 1692
  • James calculated, correctly, that these three ingredients would stimulate loyalty and attract visitors to his Court – whether Jacobites already in exile, others impatiently awaiting his return to England, or the many French courtiers who, like Louis XIV himself, regularly made the short journey from Versailles to Saint-Germain
  • James’s optimism remained with him throughout the period 1690-92, particularly when his able and devoted Secretary of State, the Earl of Melfort, rejoined him from a lengthy embassy to Rome at the end of 1691
  • He wrote to Louis XIV, blaming himself for bringing bad luck to the French fleet and offering to leave France, so that Louis’ military and naval successes could be resumed. The King of France kindly rejected his offer
  • Religious nonconformity had been illegal in France since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, so James had to be cautious. He knew perfectly well that Louis had strong feelings on the subject, and that he had refused to allow Anglican and other Protestant services to be held openly, even within the Château de Saint-Germain
  • The disappointment which James  had experienced in 1692 was repeated in 1696. At the end of February, James left Saint-Germain and travelled to Calais, where an army had been assembled to invade England
  • The abortive Assassination Plot, an unauthorised attempt by certain Jacobites to break the deadlock by killing William III, resulted in the cancellation of the planned invasion and James’s return (his third) to Saint-Germain
  • William III used Louis’ recognition of James III as de jure king of England to renew his war with France, but it was no more than a pretext. All English kings, including William himself, claimed to be the de jure kings of France. During the 1690s, James II had been admitted as a Canon of Tours Cathedral because that was a privilege claimed by the English kings as de jure Counts of Anjou
  • It is extraordinary that the last years of any British king, and particularly one whose life is quite well documented, should have received such little attention from generations of British historians
  • These medals were intended to remind people that his son was the de jure Prince of Wales, and that one day he would unavoidably become King James III
  • James wanted to be absolutely sure that Louis XIV would recognise his son as James III when he was dead. He need not have worried. Recognition was in no sense contrary to the Treaty of Ryswick, and Louis already knew that it was his religious duty to recognise the legitimate succession
  • Louis would become the guardian of both of James’s children, and would recognise his son as James III so long as he remained a Catholic. James II recorded Louis’ side of the agreement in a codicil to his will, dated March 5th
  • In this way it was already settled that Louis would eventually give the same treatment to James III as he was already giving to James II, not in September 1701 – an important point which all historians seem to have overlooked
  • At the end of the year he was distressed to discover that Louis XIV intended to lay off even more Irish troops and wrote unsuccessfully to dissuade him
  • The letter contained some confidential comments, as one might expect between two brothers, about the Jacobite sympathies of various Scottish noblemen and the chances of persuading France to resume its support for James II’s claims to the British thrones
  • All that remained was to remind the prince repeatedly that he must continue to be a Catholic if he was to retain and deserve the support of Louis XIV. James finally died on September 16th. Louis’ recognition of James III, as we have seen, had been arranged long before it finally came into effect
  • James II decided to establish in the Chapel Royal at Saint-Germain the devotion known as Bona Morte, a confraternity of people who would meet together to contemplate the Passion of Christ
  • When England terminated the Treaty of Ryswick by declaring war on France in 1702, Louis XIV was able to resume the support of the Stuarts which he could not do while the Treaty remained in force
  • The circumstances of his death make James II an ideal subject for the study of royal DNA. His remains are more accessible than those of any other British monarch, and thus allow us to determine definitely, one way or the other, if the porphyria gene which was passed down by Mary, Queen of Scots through James I to his daughter Elizabeth, the ‘Winter Queen’ (and from her to the Hanoverians and their descendants today) was also transmitted by Charles I to the later Stuarts, including James III and Bonnie Prince Charlie.
manhefnawi

Louis XII of France: The Unlikely Lad | History Today - 0 views

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Louis XII France Political

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  • Louis XII became king of France by accident. Or, more precisely, because of an accident. On April 7th 1498, his cousin, the reigning monarch Charles VIII, stumbled and hit his head on the lintel of a doorway through which he was passing on his way to watch a tennis match in the royal chateau at Amboise. The king had recently been ill. He seemed to be recovering but this final blow in a life full of hard knocks finished him off. Having no surviving male heir, the crown passed to his nearest male relative, Louis duke of Orleans, who was crowned king in Rheims cathedral on 27 May 1498
  • Louis ended his reign having reformed the French legal system, reduced taxes, having enjoyed some military success in Italy and bearing the loving accolade, 'Father of the People'. In many respects he stands comparison with his contemporary, Henry VII of England
  • Louis was born in 1462 during the reign of his second cousin Louis XI. His father was Charles duke of Orleans, a celebrated poet and the head of a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Louis XI was succeeded by his son, Charles VIII, in 1483
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  • his first priority was political security. This is the first respect in which his reign parallels that of Henry VII. The first Tudor had also rebelled against his sovereign, ultimately seizing the crown itself from Richard III in 1485
  • Within six months of his accession Louis had his first marriage, to Louis XI's daughter, Jeanne, annulled. He then married Charles's widow, Anne of Brittany, the daughter of duke Francis. Louis thereby retained the French crown's hold on Brittany. Like Henry VII's marriage to Elizabeth of York, Louis's marriage to Anne also enabled him to extend his domestic power base beyond his immediate family and those favoured by the previous monarch.
  • Henry did besiege Boulogne in October 1492, ostensibly to assert his claim to the crown of France following Anne of Brittany's marriage to Charles VIII in 1491. To buy him off, Charles offered Henry a pension of 745 000 crowns under the treaty of Etaples.
  • Like Henry VII, Louis was expected to ‘live off his own’. He was reasonably successful at this task. He did not make the monarchy profitable in the way Henry was able to, but neither did he impoverish it. Louis inherited a deficit of about 1.4 million livres and left Francis I a deficit of about the same amount – and this despite several very expensive military campaigns of the kind which Henry VII studiously avoided and Louis’s reduction of the taille
  • There was nothing in France to parallel the renowned English system of 'Chamber' finance begun by Edward IV and adopted by Henry VII to increase control over the collection and disbursement of domainal revenues.
  • This suggests that the system worked well enough until the end of his reign, but it was overhauled substantially by Francis I.
  • Louis was less innovative than Henry VII in developing legal machinery and institutions with which to control the nobility. Bonds and recognizances or institutions such as the Council Learned at Law were once seen as evidence that Henry VII was a 'new' monarch whose regime was dominated by lawyers and financial officials upon whom he depended to marginalise the unreliable nobility, the traditional royal servants
  • Louis continued Henry's pension conducted relatively warm relations with him, although he worried about England's ties with the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. He had good cause to after Henry VIII's accession in April 1509
  • Louis's fortunes began to fade in 1510. The new pope, Julius II, was determined to recover the papal lands which Borgia predecessor, Alexander VI, had with French help, alienated to his son Cesare
  • Then in August the Swiss invaded Burgundy and besieged the city of Dijon. They only withdrew on Louis's promise to relinquish his claim to Milan and to pay then a sizeable indemnity. On top of all of this, Queen Anne died in January 1514 leaving Louis no surviving male heir
  • Maximilian and Ferdinand of Spain followed suit, deserting their erstwhile ally Henry VIII, who was furious. Under pressure from Leo X, Henry dramatically reversed his isolation by becoming Louis's ally. His young and very beautiful sister Mary married Louis in October 1514.
  • Compared with that of his successor, Louis' artistic and intellectual patronage was not exceptional. He did not influence Henry VII in the direct way that Francis I did Henry VIII
  • Louis XII died on New Year's Day 1515. Despite his apparently fatal vigour with which he took to his third marriage, it provided him with no son. He was succeeded by Francis of Angouleme, during whose reign Louis's was oevrshadowed on every count except. perhaps, popularity among commoners. His various campaigns against Milan were disparaged by the new regime. However, Francis's campaigns may have been more glamorous but ultimately they were no more successful. It would be idle to claim Louis as one of France's great military commanders, but for 12 of his 16 years as king he did practise successful warfare, outdoing the deeds of Maximilian, Ferdinand and Henry VII
  • Louis's ambitions were to secure his kingdom politically and to enhance the glory of his dynasty. For him, as for Henry VII, increased financial or judicial controls over the kingdom were means to these ends, not ends in themselves, As the founder of a new dynasty Henry's task was undoubtedly more difficult than Louis's and he showed greater ingenuity in developing methods of making his subjects accountable to him
  • Having begun uncertainly, both quickly projected a strong sense of their authority, but the efforts of some historians to characterise Louis as a 'proto-absolutist', anticipating the supposed ambitions of Francis I or even Louis XIV to centralise the state, were wide of the mark. Louis's 'good government' was essentially traditional
manhefnawi

The Afterlife of Henry of Navarre | History Today - 0 views

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Bourbon King Navarre Louis XIV Henry IV XIII

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  • the very survival of the first Bourbon king amid the dangers and conspiracies of his time suggests a certain element of rational calculation, if not outright hypocrisy.
  • Navarre were established during his own lifetime
  • In 1594 Jean Boucher, the most influential curé among the revolutionary leaders of the Leaguer Sixteen, launched an attack upon the hypocrisy of the king’s conversion fully as personal and venomous as his earlier indictment of the last Valois, Henri III
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  • in terms comparable with the later self-promoting propaganda arranged for his grandson, Louis XIV
  • It was, however, to the legendary hero that all sides appealed after his death in the troubles of the regencies of his second wife, Marie de Médicis, and then of Anne of Austria, the widow of his son, Louis XIII
  • In the 1660 Parisian entry ceremony for Louis XIV, it was the twenty-two year-old king who replaced his ancestor as Hercules on a triumphal arch
  • His attitude to the legend of Henri IV was more a matter of personal judgement than of any desire to flatter Louis XIV. His Histoire de France began to be published soon after the death of Louis XIII in 1643, and reached the year 1598 in 1651
  • Navarre’s great-grandson, the regent Philippe d’Orléans, who promoted his ancestor’s memory in the belief that he closely resembled him in appearance and character.
  • Navarre, as it had been for Louis XIV after the latter’s death.
  • Hence Henry of Navarre could appear an exemplary figure of a king of proto-Enlightenment.
  • Henri IV could be understood both as the product of his experience and of his inherent qualities of courage and sensibility.
  • in assessing Henry of Navarre he felt obliged to say: ‘Here the legend is nothing more than history; here fiction can add nothing to truth’.
manhefnawi

The Regency of Philip of Orleans | History Today - 0 views

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Philip of Orleans Louis XV France Bourbon Spanish Throne

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  • The ambitions of Louis XIV dissipated French resources in a series of wasting wars against the combined powers of Europe
  • The King had succeeded in placing his second grandson upon the throne of Spain as Philip V
  • Frankish aristocracy had been distorted by the rise of monarchical despotism
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Since Philip V was barred from the succession by the treaties confirming his Spanish throne, and since the third grandson of Louis XIV, the Due de Berry, died in 1714, only one sickly five-year-old child, the second son of the Due de Bourgogne, would separate Philip of Orleans from the crown at the old King’s death
  • The powers bestowed upon Orleans as Regent deflated the pride of the over-confident Du Maine and frustrated the plans of his ambitious wife
  • Apart from the defeated faction, which had the backing of the ultramontane party, and in particular of Madame de Maintenon (the former governess of the royal bastards and keeper of the late King’s conscience), the triumph of Orleans was greeted with enthusiasm
  • The personality of Philip of Orleans lives in the correspondence of his mother, Elizabeth Charlotte of Bavaria
  • the Regent acted as his own Beau Brummell, and directed with whimsical inconsequence the adoption of Turkish, Polish and English fashions
  • Nevertheless, it continued the persecution of the Huguenots instituted by the late King, and ran counter to the intentions of the tolerant and free-thinking Regent
  • The reaction was so strong that in January 1718 the Regent yielded to the pressure of the old order and suppressed the dixième, a minor tax levied by Louis XIV and borne in part by the nobility
  • In October, at the time when a similar wave of speculation in England was in the process of collapse, the Regent withdrew his support
  • The Due de Bourbon, encouraged by his profits, began to challenge the political power of the Regent and Dubois
  • Since their bargain with Philip of Orleans in the repudiation of Louis XIV’s will, the magistrates had made use of their right of remonstrance to win a permanent share of the power of the monarchy
  • Both the regency and the Hanoverian Whig regime in England were subject to external threats—the Regent from the designs of Philip V, abetted by the Du Maine faction, and the government of George I from the plots of the Pretender
  • Austria, too, was threatened in Italy by the ambitions of Philip V’s Queen, Elizabeth Famese and of his chief minister, the adventurer Alberoni. The Hapsburg Emperor, Charles VI, knew that he might count on English support
  • the Triple Alliance of 1717, and then with Austria in the Quadruple Alliance late in the same year
  • His pupil, the Regent, himself occupied the post of First Minister in the few months that were left to him
  • Louis XV displayed affection for no one save his former governess, the Duchesse de Ventadour; but the kindly Regent won his respect
  • The crises of later years were in part due to the failure of the Regent to exorcise the ghost of Louis XIV during the minority of his great-grandson.
  • He liked to be compared with Henry IV, that first and most humane of Bourbon Kings
manhefnawi

War of the Grand Alliance | European history | Britannica.com - 0 views

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Louis-XIV Leopold-I Hapsburgs Bourbon United-Provinces

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  • the third major war of Louis XIV of France, in which his expansionist plans were blocked by an alliance led by England, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Austrian Habsburgs
  • the epileptic and partly insane king Charles II, was unable to produce heirs
  • the Austrian Habsburgs, headed by the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • To oppose this, the League of Augsburg was formed on July 9, 1686, by Emperor Leopold, the electors of Bavaria, Saxony, and the Palatinate, and the kings of Sweden and Spain
  • he planned a short French invasion of the Rhineland
  • Louis sent his forces into the Palatinate
  • Louis’s inveterate opponent, William of Orange, stadtholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, would be preoccupied with his coming attempt to overthrow James
  • Many German princes were aroused by Louis’s actions and feared French annexations
  • William had been quickly and completely successful in expelling James II from the English throne (January 1689), and the Jacobite counterrevolution that Louis supported in Ireland was crushed by William (now William III of England) at the Battle of the Boyne (July 1690)
  • Instead of a short venture in Germany
  • France was now forced to fight a nine-year-long, worldwide war
  • the members of the Grand Alliance responded with alacrity when Louis XIV in 1695 opened secret, separate negotiations
  • A movement for a general peace culminated in the Treaty of Rijswijk in September-October 1697
  • The rise of England and Austria as effective counterforces to France and the development by William III of the strategy of building and maintaining the Grand Alliance stand out as the significant features of this war
manhefnawi

Orleanist | historical French partisan | Britannica.com - 0 views

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July Monarchy Louis XVIII

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  • Orleanist, French Orléaniste, any of the constitutional monarchists in 18th- and 19th-century France who favoured the Orléans branch of the house of Bourbon (the descendants of Philippe, duke d’Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV). Its zenith of power occurred during the July Monarchy (1830–48) of Louis-Philippe (duke d’Orléans from 1793 to 1830).
  • the centre of opposition to the encroachment of Bourbon royal power.
  • the Orleanists returned at the restoration of Louis XVIII and were identified with liberal and bourgeois principles. It is true that Louis XVIII had been induced to grant a constitutional charter, but he and his successor, Charles X, claimed to rule by divine right and to confer liberties upon their subjects of their own will.
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  • The July Revolution of 1830 brought Louis-Philippe and the Orleanists into power.
  • The Orleanists supported Louis-Philippe’s grandson and heir, Louis-Philippe-Albert, count de Paris, after the fall of the July Monarchy in 1848 and during the Second Republic and Second Empire. The demise of the Second Empire, in 1870, offered another chance for a restoration of the monarchy, but the Third Republic was born while the Orleanists and Legitimists were still arguing over a candidate. After the direct male line of the elder Bourbons died out in 1883, most of the Legitimists joined the Orleanists in fruitlessly supporting the count de Paris for the throne.
manhefnawi

Voltaire and the Massacre of St Bartholomew | History Today - 0 views

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France Catherine de Medici Christianity ST Bartholomew

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  • Henry of Navarre
  • Mahomet II conquered Constantinople
  • One section of the citizens of Paris massacred the rest on Saint Bartholomew’s night
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • This plan seems to have remained in Catherine de Medicis’ mind as an alternative for use in an emergency. In all the frantic discussions of August 23rd it involved no more than the killing of the inner circle of Protestant nobles, the young Bourbon princes, Navarre and Condé, excepted
  • The peace of Saint-Germain in August 1570 held some prospect of permanence, since the house of Orange, leading resistance to Spain in the Netherlands
  • Although the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, had conferred in 1565 with Philip II’s lieutenant, the Duke of Alba, the close association of the French Crown with Spain had been broken by the death of her daughter, Philip’s Queen, in 1568
  • crossed the frontier to assist the rebels, and by mid-summer the French government was on the brink of open war with Spain
  • a majority opposed Coligny’s policy of foreign war to ensure domestic peace, but the decision lay with the King, and the ascendancy Coligny had established over Charles IX suggested he would opt for war
  • Catherine initiated the train of events that led to the massacre. Elizabeth of England, who had no wish to see France in control of the Netherlands, informed Alba that she did not regard the Anglo-French treaty as committing her to war, and Alba passed this information to Catherine. The Huguenot armies sustained severe setbacks, and the Queen Mother persuaded herself that war at this time would end in disaster
  • Associated with these conscious motives was her bitter resentment at being replaced in her son’s confidence by Admiral Coligny
  • to check the drift to war, but her success was uncertain
  • The slaughter of the Huguenots was not the outcome of a skilfully contrived and long premeditated plan, but the passions of the time, the enormity of the act, and the assertions of those who claimed, or seemed to claim, foreknowledge of the event
  • The massacre became a general slaughter because the Crown needed a military force strong enough to ensure success.
  • When Henry of Guise, who had pursued a group of escaping Huguenots, returned to the city, the King was obliged to accept public responsibility for the counter-blow to the alleged Protestant plot
  • Belief in a diabolical and long-standing deception on the part of Charles IX and his mother became widespread soon after the massacre
  • The joy with which Philip II and Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the news confirmed Protestant suspicion of the complicity of Madrid and Rome
  • The age of Louis XIV, into which Voltaire was born, witnessed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the persecution of Catholic Jansenists and Quietists as well as of Huguenots
  • During the Regency that followed the death of Louis XIV in 1715 there was a need for another kind of hero to replace the Sun King’s tarnished military glory and record of religious persecution. Voltaire chose Louis’ grandfather, Henry of Navarre, who had accepted Catholicism after the massacre, reverted to Protestantism on his escape from court in 1576, and found Paris worth the price of a mass seventeen years later. The King who had healed French divisions after the religious wars, and granted the edict of toleration that Louis XIV had revoked, seemed the perfect candidate
  • asserted that the Queen Mother planned the massacre at the time of the peace of Saint-Germain in 1570
  • the cynical bad faith of Catherine de Medici, the turbulence of the aristocracy, and the cruelty of popular fanaticism. The lesson was reiterated with little variation
  • Catherine de Medici ordered the massacres in the midst of the wedding celebrations, in circumstances of profound peace, and after the most solemn oaths. Frightful as they were - and wholly destructive to the good name of France-their memory must be perpetuated, so that those who are always ready to begin unhappy religious disputes may see to what excess a partisan spirit ultimately leads
  • Saint Bartholomew’s day had been prepared two whole years in advance. It was a day when one section of the nation slaughtered another; when the assassins pursued their victims under the very beds and even into the arms of princesses who vainly tried to intercede [a reference to the memoirs of Marguerite de Valois]; when Charles IX himself fired from a window of the Louvre upon those of his subjects who had escaped the butchers
  • Saint Bartholomew had accounted for about 90,000 martyrs
manhefnawi

France - France, 1490-1715 | Britannica.com - 0 views

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16TH Century France

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  • When Charles VIII (reigned 1483–98) led the French invasion of Italy in 1494, he initiated a series of wars that were to last until the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559.
  • organization appeared during the Wars of Religion of the 16th century and survived until the time of Louis XIV.
  • In the later part of the 17th century, the reforms of the army by Michel Le Tellier and his son the marquis de Louvois provided Louis XIV with a formidable weapon.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The growth of a large royal army, however, was only one effect of the increased level of military activity. The financial administration of the country also underwent a drastic reorganization
  • By the reign of Francis I, the king, even in times of peace, was unable to make do with his ordinary revenue from rents and seigneurial dues. In 1523 Francis established a new central treasury, the Trésor de l’Épargne, into which all his revenues, ordinary and extraordinary, were to be deposited.
  • Successive monarchs were forced, therefore, to seek additional revenue. This was no simple matter, because French kings traditionally could not tax their subjects without their consent.
  • The early Valois kings had negotiated with the Estates-General or with the provincial Estates for their extra money; but in the middle of the 15th century, when the Hundred Years’ War with England was reaching a successful conclusion, Charles VII was able to strike a bargain with the Estates. In return for a reduction in overall taxation, he began to raise money to support the army without having to seek the Estates’ approval.
manhefnawi

Augsburg | Germany | Britannica.com - 0 views

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Holy Roman Emperor Charles V Louis XIV League Lutherans Catholics

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  • Augsburg, city, Bavaria Land (state), southern Germany.
  • At an imperial Diet held in the city in 1530, the Lutherans presented their Augsburg Confession to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and at the Diet of 1555 the Peace of Augsburg was concluded between Roman Catholics and Lutherans within the empire.
  • The League of Augsburg, which opposed the expansionist policies of Louis XIV of France, was agreed upon in Augsburg in 1686.
manhefnawi

Power of the Court | History Today - 0 views

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Inside the Court in s Monarchy Power Positions

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  • Courts are a key to understanding European history. Defined as ruling dynasties and their households, courts transformed countries, capitals, constitutions and cultures. Great Britain and Spain, for example, both now threatened with dissolution, were originally united by dynastic marriages; between, respectively, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile in 1469; and between Margaret Tudor and James IV King of Scots in 1503, leading to the accession a hundred years later of their great-grandson, James I, to the throne of England. 
  • The House of Orange was crucial to the formation of the Netherlands, the House of Savoy to the unification of Italy, the House of Hohenzollern to that of Germany. Dynasties provided the leadership and military forces that enabled these states to expand. As Bismarck declared, while asserting the need for royal control over the Prussian army, blood and iron were more decisive than speeches and majority decisions. 
  • Like previous European conflicts, including the Napoleonic Wars and repeated wars ‘of Succession’, the First World War was in part a dynastic war; between the Karageorgevic rulers of Serbia, whose supporters had murdered the previous monarch from the rival Obrenovic dynasty, and the Habsburgs, determined to oppose Serb expansion, symbolised by another Serbian victim, the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand; and between the Hohenzollerns and Romanovs for domination in Eastern Europe. The fall of four empires in 1917-22 – Romanov, Hohenzollern, Habsburg and Ottoman  – was a European cataclysm comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire 1,500 years earlier. 
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  • The history of capitals, as well as countries, confirms the importance of courts. The rise of Berlin, Vienna, Madrid (often called Corte), St Petersburg and Istanbul cannot be understood except as court cities, apparent in the appearance of their streets and squares or, in Istanbul, mosques. A final, fatal expression of that role occurred in July 1914. Thousands, eager for war, gathered in front of palaces in London, Berlin, Munich (where, in a photograph, the young Hitler can be seen in the crowd) and St Petersburg, to wave hands, flags and hats, cheer and sing the national anthem as their monarch appeared on the palace balcony
  • The Louvre was a royal palace before it became an art gallery, founded by Francis I and principal residence of Louis XIV from 1652 to 1671. After the Revolution Paris again became a court city and remained one from 1804 to 1870.
  • The development of constitutions also owed much to courts. The rise of the House of Commons was helped by disputed royal successions – no monarchy had more of them than England – as well as the needs of royal finances. The founding document of constitutional monarchy in 19th-century Europe was the Charte constitutionelle des francais, promulgated by Louis XVIII (who was one of its authors) on June 4th, 1814. The Charte became the principal model for other constitutions in Europe, including those of Bavaria (1818), Belgium (1831), Spain (1834), Prussia (1850), Piedmont(1848) and the Ottoman Empire (1876). Britain could not have a comparable influence, since it did not have a written constitution to copy
  • A constitution was a royal life insurance policy: when Louis XVIII’s brother Charles X violated it in July 1830 the dynasty was deposed. Nevertheless France finally became a republic, after 1870, only after three dynasties – the Bourbons, Orléans and Bonapartes  – had been tried and found wanting
  • Having helped to finance the struggle against the French Empire, the Rothschilds became financiers to the Holy Alliance. They financed Louis XVIII’s return to France in 1814, Charles X’s departure in 1830, the Neapolitan Bourbons both before and after their exile in 1861 and the Austrian monarchy. As one Rothschild wrote to another, on February 8th, 1816: ‘A court is always a court and it always leads to something.
  • Under Edward VII public ceremonial increased in splendour, the court entertained more frequently than before and there were more royal warrant-holders
  • He wrote admiringly about monarchs, from Henri IV and Louis XIV to Charles XII. In the 19th century Walter Scott was an admirer of George IV, whose visit to Edinburgh he arranged; Chateaubriand was a brilliant royalist pamphleteer and memorialist; Stendhal and Mérimée were convinced Bonapartists
  • Court history also subverts national boundaries. The Tudors came to power with French help: Henry VII, after 14 years of exile in Brittany and France, had French as well as English troops in his victorious army at Bosworth. One aspect of Anne Boleyn’s appeal to Henry VIII was her French education and the skills she had acquired while serving at the French court. The House of Orange was both German and Dutch (and partly English), the Bourbons acquired Spanish, Neapolitan and Parmesan branches. The Habsburgs were  able to switch nationalities and capitals between Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon and, in the brief reign of Philip I, London
  • Through the prism of courts and monarchy, Cortes could communicate with Montezuma. The Sunni-Shi’a struggle now destroying Syria and Iraq is another war of succession. It began as a dynastic dispute, between the prophet Muhammad’s Umayyad cousins and his son-in-law Ali over succession to the caliphate: from the start Islam was a state as well as a religion. In 680 the struggle culminated in the murder of Ali’s son, the Imam Hussein, in Kerbela in Iraq. Every year, on the Day of Ashura, this murder is commemorated by Shi’a in mournful flagellatory processions
  • Above all, courts subvert boundaries between the sexes. Because of a European consort’s role in assuring the succession and enhancing dynastic prestige, her household and apartments could rival in size and splendour those of the monarch. Sometimes she controlled her own finances. The court of France was called ‘a paradise of women’. A court was therefore the only arena where women could compete with men, on near equal terms, for power and influence. Hence the decisive impact on national and international politics of, to name only a few consorts, Anne Boleyn, Catherine the Great and Marie Antoinette. Or, among rulers’ mothers: Catherine de’ Medici and Anne of Austria in France; 17th-century Valide Sultans in the Ottoman Empire; and the Empress Dowager in China
manhefnawi

Return of the King: The Bourbon Restoration | History Today - 0 views

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France Monarch Restoration Europe Napoleon Louis XVIII

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  • On June 18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleon's attempted comeback in the Hundred Days
  • At this point, two centuries ago, the victorious Allies – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – would determine the fate of France
  • The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, came from Vienna, Tsar Alexander from St Petersburg and, from Berlin, the 72-year-old Prussian Marshal Blücher
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  • Since both the republican and imperial models were discredited and unacceptable to the victorious Allies, a royal restoration was inevitable; Wellington warned that there would be no peace in Europe unless the Bourbons mounted the throne again. The Congress of Vienna, held to define European frontiers after two decades of war, reversed Napoleon's conquests but was otherwise generous to France
  • The new monarch, Louis XVIII, had made a poor fist of it on his first return from exile in Britain in May 1814. He surrounded himself with appointees who had been out of government business for more than two decades and the first restoration was brought to an abrupt end by the Hundred Days. Louis fled once more, to return three weeks after Waterloo
  • Louis Stanislas Xavier Bourbon, grandson of Louis XV and brother of Louis XVI, became heir to the throne when Louis' son died in prison in 1795
  • If France is still France, it is thanks to the Russians
  • Then came 15 years wandering around Europe, including two in remote Courland in the Baltic, after which he came to rest for seven years in England
  • The Allies imposed financial indemnities on an economy that had been weakened by the demands of Napoleon's constant war-making and the effects of the British naval blockade
  • At the end of November 1815 a white-faced Richelieu signed the definitive peace agreement dictated by the Allies, lamenting that 'all is finished (by) this fatal treaty'
  • Russia, Prussia and Austria proclaimed their Holy Alliance and Britain joined them in the Quadruple Alliance
  • Ignoring the king's desire for national unity, royalists in various parts of the country exacted their revenge for events since the Revolution of 1789
  • France was on its way to being re-integrated into the European system. This reflected the country's continental importance; Europe could not function without it. The path to national recovery was faster than might have been expected in the summer of 1815
  • the Hexagon between the Alps and the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Channel could no longer aspire to dominate Europe as it had sought to do under Louis XIV and Bonaparte
manhefnawi

The French Restoration, 1814-1830: Part II | History Today - 0 views

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Restored Bourbons French House

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  • If the restoration, above all the Second Restoration, was in its own opinion forced to rely on the noblesse, it was equally forced to rely on the Church
  • The alliance of “throne and altar” seemed to nearly everybody, on either side, desirable and inevitable
  • By the Concordat of 1802, the Church had, in a sense, been restored, before the Crown.
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  • The head of the Church, the Pope, had been the most august witness of the coronation of the usurper; and Pius VII retained, to his dying day, a weakness for Bonaparte.
  • Hence, the attempts to restore what was left of confiscated church property, to endow the Church and not merely carry its expenses on the budget; hence the unsuccessful effort to replace the Concordat of 1802 by that which Francis I had made in 1517
  • Neither Louis XVIII nor Charles X fell into the fatal mistake made by Louis XV and Louis XVI, of barring promotion to roturiers—no commoner bishop was appointed after Massillon down to 1789. But efforts were made to “décrasser l'épiscopat”; and, by 1830, most bishops were nobles and legitimists
  • The great problem of the restored Church of France was the pastoral clergy. All through the years of the Consulate and Empire, the old priests, ordained before 1789
  • In some regions, faith was lively. But in others the thread of Christian life had been cut; a generation had grown up that knew little of the old faith. Churches had been pillaged, destroyed, secularized
  • There might seem few follies left to commit; but Charles X was a true kinsman of James II.
  • Yet Louis XIV and even Bossuet were irrelevant to the new situation of the Church of France. The parallel with James II was close. High church and Dissenters were alike alienated. So were less serious bodies of opinion. The zealous Sosthene de la Rochefoucauld was busy putting fig leaves on statues and lengthening the skirts of ballet dancers and, belatedly, the Prefect of Police was suppressing illegal brothels. Both measures alienated the studious youth of Paris, as did the attack on the Empire promenade in London their kin some half-century ago
  • the House of France now had an heir; for the birth of the enfant du miracle, the posthumous child of the Due de Berry, cut out the hated Due d’Orléans, on whose accession so many “liberal” hopes had been quietly placed. The birth of the Due de Bordeaux, better known as the Comte de Chambord, repeated the history of the English restoration
  • But the easy, legal transition from the elder to the younger branch, from the Bourbons who had learned nothing to the Bourbons who had come to terms with the modern world of the Revolution, was made impossible
  • Charles X, to universal surprise, showed in the first few months of his reign a talent for winning popularity that had been hidden while he was a chief of a political faction. Chateaubriand, Scott, Byron himself, and the efflorescence of new literary taste that we call the romantic movement, all worked to reconcile the young to the traditional monarchy
  • But, even in 1825, the ritual of the anointing aroused anti-clerical suspicions, as the royal mourning for Louis XVIII had aroused absurd suspicions that the new king was a “secret bishop” because he wore violet, the mourning colour of the House of France. Worse still was the impression made by Charles X’s walking in a jubilee procession, submissive to the clergy.
  • The conquest of Algiers, with all its immense and, at this moment, undecided consequences, is a great event in French history, even if the successful intervention in Spain is only remembered because the storming of the Troca-dero brought a new name into the nomenclature of French architecture
  • The faults and follies of the Restoration, serious enough even under Louis XVIII, were intolerable for the intelligent observer under Charles X. But, under these kings, France had a government that was “digne et probe.” Not many French governments since then have been able to claim as much.
magnanma

Palace of Versailles: Facts & History | Live Science - 0 views

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  • Located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the palace is beside the settlement of Versailles. The town was little more than a hamlet before becoming the seat of royal power. By the time of the French Revolution, it had a population of more than 60,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in France.
  • France's kings were first attracted to Versailles because of the area's prolific game. Louis XIII, who lived 1601-1643, bought up land, built a chateau and went on hunting trips.
  • The chateau Louis XIII built was little more than a hunting lodge having enough space to house the king and a small entourage. It was his successor, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the "Sun King," a ruler who chose the sun as his emblem and believed in centralized government with the king at its center, who would radically transform Versailles making it the seat of France's government by the time of his death.
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  • Spawforth notes that the palace contained about 350 living units varying in size, from multi-room apartments to spaces about the size of an alcove. The size and location of the room a person got depended on their rank and standing with the king. While the crown prince (known as the dauphin) got a sprawling apartment on the ground floor, a servant may have nothing more than a space in an attic or a makeshift room behind a staircase.
  • Scholars have suggested a number of factors that led him to build a great palace complex at Versailles and move the French government there. It's been noted that by keeping the king's residence some distance from Paris, it offered him protection from any civil unrest going on in the city. It also forced the nobles to travel to Versailles and seek lodging in the palace, something that impeded their ability to build up regional power bases that could potentially challenge the king.
  • A series of gardens, created in a formal style, stood to the west of the palace (one of them today is in the shape of a star) and contained sculptures as well as the pressurized fountains capable of launching water high into the air. The formality and grandeur of the gardens symbolized Louis XIV's absolute power, even over nature
  • Despite the richness of the palace, the kings had to make do with makeshift theaters up until 1768 when Louis XV allowed the building of the royal opera. It contained a mechanism that allowed the orchestra level to be raised to the stage allowing it to be used for dancing and banqueting. Spawforth notes that the opera required 3,000 candles to be burned for opening night and was rarely used due to its cost and the poor shape of France's finances.
  • After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette would be stripped of power, brought to Paris and ultimately beheaded. The palace fell under the control of the new republican government.Many of its furnishings were sold to help pay for the subsequent Revolutionary Wars. When Napoleon came to power, he had an apartment created for himself in the Grand Trianon, complete with a map room.
  • In 1871, after France had lost a war against Prussia, Kaiser Wilhelm I was proclaimed Emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the French defeat. For several years after this defeat, the situation in France was so bad that its Chamber of Deputies and Senate opted to meet at Versailles, rather than Paris, for reasons of safety.
  • Today, Versailles is one of the most-visited sites in France. Visitors are drawn to its architectural grandeur, the stunning water features (concerts are often played in the gardens during the summer) and its sense of history. 
manhefnawi

1704: Blenheim, Gibraltar and the Making of a Great Power | History Today - 0 views

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Europe in 1700s Philip V of Spain War Succession Gibraltar British Military Marlborough General

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  • glories of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), ‘that short period of our History, which contains so many illustrious Actions
  • The most significant of these actions were in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13, Britain not involved until 1702), as the European powers jostled for control of the Spanish empire following the death of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, in 1700. On July 23rd, 1704, British naval forces captured Gibraltar and held out against Franco-Spanish attempts to regain it, while a few weeks later on August 13th, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, heavily defeated a Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in Bavaria
  • The Blenheim campaign was crucial in preventing French hegemony in western Europe. Allied with Britain and the Dutch against France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705) was central to the struggle on the European mainland as his defeat would have allowed the French to dominate both Germany and northern Italy and to concentrate against the Anglo-Dutch efforts in the Low Countries and the lower Rhineland
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  • A combination of Louis XIV of France, the Elector of Bavaria, Max Emanuel, and Hungarian rebels, threatened to overthrow Leopold, and thus to end the Habsburg ability to counter-balance French power
  • These depots enabled the army to maintain cohesion and discipline, instead of having to disperse to obtain supplies
  • Marlborough had been more successful than his opponents in integrating cavalry and infantry; his cavalry were better trained for charging; and the artillery, under Colonel Holcroft Blood, manoeuvred rapidly on the battlefield, and was brought forward to help support the breakthrough in the centre
  • The victory ended the threat to Austria. Most of the Franco-Bavarian army was no longer effective after the battle and its subsequent retreat to the Rhine. The Allies followed up the battle with the conquest of southern Germany, as Bavaria was ‘taken out’ of the war, and took the major fortresses of Ulm, Ingolstadt and Landau before the close of the year. It was not until 1741 that French forces were again to campaign so far to the east – and later, and more seriously, in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when no British army marched to the Danube. In contrast, Marlborough’s advance into Germany had prepared the way for George II to campaign there in 1743, a campaign that culminated in another victory for the British and Austrians over the French at Dettingen, to the east of Frankfurt
  • Under Marlborough at Blenheim, the British army reached a peak of success that it was not to achieve again in Europe for another hundred years, until Wellington
  • Marlborough’s army was the most battle-hardened British army since those of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, but the armies of the Civil Wars had not been engaged in battles that were as extensive or sieges of positions that were as well fortified as those that faced Marlborough’s forces
  • The British in Gibraltar were now besieged on land by the French and the supporters of Philip V, but, as with the lengthy siege of Gibraltar by the Spaniards in 1780 during the American War of Independence, British fleet action proved crucial to the relief of the besieged garrison
  • As Marlborough was Master-General of the Ordnance as well as Captain-General of the Army, he was able to overcome any institutional constraints on co-operation between artillery and the rest of the army
  • Like Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War seventy years earlier, Marlborough made his cavalry charge fast and act like a shock force, rather than as mounted infantry relying on pistol firepower
  • Marlborough went on to win other battles – notably Ramillies (1706), Oudenaarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) – but none had the dramatic impact of Blenheim, in part because that victory ended the danger that the anti-French alliance would collapse. But he also found that victory did not make it any easier to get the Allied forces to work together, and this, combined with differences in military and diplomatic strategy among the political leaders (the Dutch were especially cautious), made his task very difficult
  • Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier the seizure of Gibraltar had brought together Britain’s role as a Continental power with her interests as a maritime state. British troops were engaged in Iberia in support of ‘Charles III’, Leopold I’s second son and the Habsburg candidate for the crown of Spain, against Louis XIV’s second grandson, Philip V of Spain, who had been installed in 1700 under the terms of Charles II’s will. It proved far easier for Britain to intervene on the littoral, however, than to control the interior
  • the seizure of Gibraltar proved important as it registered the shift of naval hegemony from France to Britain. In the early 1690s Britain and France had contested the English Channel, but following the British victory at Barfleur in 1692, the navy had become far more effective in the Mediterranean. The dispatch of a large fleet under Russell to the Mediterranean in 1694 had been followed by its wintering at the then Allied port of Cadiz, a new achievement. The competing interests of Austria, France and Spain in the western Mediterranean ensured that this area was the cockpit of European diplomacy
  • n 1702, Sir George Rooke had concentrated on Spain’s Atlantic waters as a consequence of an attempt to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World. His attack on Cadiz had failed, but the Franco-Spanish fleet at Vigo was successfully attacked. British naval strength encouraged Portugal to switch sides in 1703; but, in an even more significant move, the same year Sir Cloudesley Shovell entered the Mediterranean and persuaded Victor Amadeus II of Savoy-Piedmont to abandon his alliance with Louis XIV
  • Rooke’s capture of Gibraltar on July 23rd, 1704, when the landing force was crucially supported by naval gunfire that silenced the enemy battery on the New Mole, led the French to mount a naval response to regain Gibraltar for Philip V and to demonstrate that France was still the leading naval power in the Mediterranean
  • Marlborough’s battles were fought on a more extended front than those of the 1690s, let alone the 1650s
  • These blows led the French to abandon the siege. Gibraltar’s inhabitants had been allowed to remain in the town if they took an oath of fidelity to ‘Charles III’, but ultimately the victory of Philip V, the Bourbon claimant, in the wider war removed this option, and instead the British acquired Gibraltar under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. In an attempt to improve relations with Spain, in 1721 George I promised to approach Parliament for consent to return Gibraltar to Spain, but this was not deemed politically possible
  • Three years later a fleet based at Gibraltar discouraged a junction between Bourbon naval forces in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when the Mediterranean formed a frontline between the alliance systems of two clashing empires, Gibraltar was a key British resource
  • Maintaining a presence in Gibraltar thereafter ceased to be of vital strategic concern to the British and became a curiosity to many; but its major role for a quarter-millennium of national history should not be underplayed.
  • It failed, after a night-time error in navigation led to the loss of eight transport ships and nearly 900 men in the St Lawrence estuary, but the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 left Britain with recognition of its wartime gains: not only Gibraltar and Minorca, but also Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This weakened the defences of New France and left the British clearly dominant in North American waters
manhefnawi

Europe in the Caribbean, Part II: The Monarch of the West Indies | History Today - 0 views

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Division Caribbean France Spain England West Indies

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  • the dispute will be whether the King of England or of France shall be the Monarch of the West Indies, for the King of Spain cannot hold it long
  • The wars between the Kings of France and Britain were, on the contrary, waged for supremacy in the Caribbean itself and it was this aspect that gave West Indian history, from Cromwell’s Protectorate to the battle of Trafalgar, its special stamp
  • a handful of stubborn and self-reliant Commonwealth soldiers within five years got the better of the King of Spain
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • We are starving
  • In 1635 Guadeloupe and Martinique became and, after several changes, remained profitable French possessions
  • The French, unlike the British, also established themselves on Hispaniola, Spain’s largest, most prestigious and administratively most important island in the area.
  • Just before the last Habsburg King of Spain died, the French presence in the Spanish mare nostrum generally, and in Hispaniola in particular, was given international recognition in the treaty of Ryswick of 1697
  • The Most Serene King of Great Britain, his Heirs and Successors, shall have, hold and possess for ever, with full sovereignty, ownership and possession, all the lands, regions, islands, colonies and dominions, situated in the West Indies or in any part of America, that the said King of Great Britain and his subjects at present hold and possess
  • The recognition of the new status quo, distressing but realistic so far as Spain was concerned, while being a considerable political and commercial boon to Charles II’s government
  • the peace of Utrecht was in reality only an uneasy truce
  • Thus with the restoration of Charles II and the almost simultaneous taking up of the reins of government by the young Louis XIV, Britain and France stood poised in the Caribbean facing each other from positions of great potential wealth, strategic advantage and political power. Both monarchs had triumphed over their enemies at home, but equally they had both come into an inheritance accumulated by their predecessor
  • The Netherlands had in fact been the first country deliberately to challenge the power of the King of Spain on his own ground in the Indies
  • No wonder that in 1609 Philip III offered these irrepressible heretics a twelve years’ truce, which implied a preliminary recognition of independence
  • Rich in ships, men and money -the days of the Dutch sea-beggars were over -the company, parent and model of all future companies of this type, pursued an ambitious programme. Not content like the British and French to settle on the smaller islands of the Caribbean neglected by Spain, they attacked the mighty colony of Brazil itself since until 1640 the crowns of Portugal and Spain were united in personal union under the Habsburgs
  • With the Treaty of Westphalia we enter in the West Indies on the violent but passing era of the buccaneers, when Englishmen like Henry Morgan
  • This uncontrollable anarchy in the Caribbean and along the coasts of Central and South America was exceeded only by the savage cruelty with which these accomplished but coarsened sailors pursued their greedy aims, and the spectacle was viewed with mounting disfavour by the governments at Whitehall and Versailles
  • The first opportunity to root out this barbarous nuisance came during the negotiations at Utrecht and elsewhere for a settlement to end the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1713 the Bourbons were accepted as Kings of Spain and the Indies
  • Spain, weakened by Protestant aggression and incapable of adapting its rigid and creaking caste system to the new realities of maritime and economic life
  • In the French islands, les grands blancs, among whom the family of the future Empress Josephine at Martinique was perhaps the most celebrated example, ruled on the basis of the code noir, introduced by Louis XIV and subject to various reforms and modifications in subsequent reigns, especially that of Louis XVI
  • Where in the French islands absolutist rule was maintained by the conseils supérieurs appointed by the King at Versailles, in the British possessions political power was vested in a Governor sent out from England by letter-patent together with a handful of other political and administrative officers
  • In the south another ex-slave presently proclaimed himself Emperor of Haiti, while in 1811 the black titan of the North, Jean Christophe, became King Christophe I of Haiti
manhefnawi

House of Habsburg | European dynasty | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...House-of-Habsburg

Europe's Most Formidable Dynasty the Habsburg Habsburg-Lorraine

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  • royal German family
  • of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century
  • The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg
  • ...41 more annotations...
  • built in 1020 by Werner
  • in the Aargau
  • in what is now Switzerland
  • rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950
  • Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232)
  • Rudolf III’s descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IV’s descendants before dying out in 1408
  • Albert IV’s son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From that date the agelong identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins
  • the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon. In the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spain’s principal enemies and feeble France’s most fluent encouragers
  • Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy
  • The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him
  • his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I.
  • Charles II’s next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his father’s two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIV’s mother and the other the emperor Leopold I’s
  • Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemy’s acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance
  • Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIV’s grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued
  • To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I, in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Joseph’s brother Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial
  • Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy.
  • Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720
  • Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs’ male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line
  • he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brother’s daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces’ line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts
  • The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VI’s main concern from 1716 onward
  • By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza
  • acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia, which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession
  • Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and France’s support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy
  • The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her father’s hereditary lands
  • her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the House of Habsburg–Lorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs
  • An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it
  • the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory
  • when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Joseph’s brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany
  • The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph II’s time, was a result not so much of Joseph’s initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772)
  • The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes
  • On Napoleon’s downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered House of Habsburg naturally benefitted
  • a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the House of Este; and Napoleon’s Habsburg consort, Marie Louise
  • The history of the House of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire
  • German, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian—gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to Sardinia–Piedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy
  • Next, the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia.
  • Franz Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his “multinational empire”
  • he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of Austria–Hungary.
  • The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars
  • Remote from Austria’s national concerns but still wounding to the House of Habsburg was the fate of Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864
  • In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had “occupied” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey
  • World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but “German” Austria and Hungary proper
manhefnawi

Francis I, the Greatest French King | History Today - 0 views

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Francis French Monarch

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  • 'This Big Boy will ruin everything', so Louis XII of France is reported to have said, on more than one occasion, of his own son-in-law and putative successor: not exactly a ringing endorsement
  • Yet, 500 years after his accession, if there is one king of France before Louis XIV that the French people remember – and with affection – it is Francis I
  • Francis was betrothed to Louis XII's eldest daughter, Claude de France, in May 1506. Two years later he moved to court, was acknowledged as heir presumptive with the courtesy title of 'dauphin' and soon attracted attention throughout France and beyond
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Francis married Claude in May 1514 and, in October of the same year, Louis XII married the young and beautiful Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Had she conceived a son, all Francis' hopes would have been dashed. Yet, less than three months after his marriage, Louis XII was dead and the 20-year-old Francis was proclaimed king of France on January 1st, 1515
  • He inherited Charles VIII's claim to the Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily and most of southern Italy. He claimed certain territories along the ill-defined border between France, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, whose Habsburg overlord was the future emperor, Charles V. Francis also wanted the city of Tournai, conquered by Henry VIII in 1513, to be returned to France. For roughly 20 of his 32 years as king, Francis was preparing for war, active in it, or managing its consequences in expensive and convoluted diplomacy
  • Barely nine months after his accession, in September 1515, Francis conquered Milan, after defeating a Swiss mercenary army at the battle of Marignano
  • He secured this prominence through peace treaties and alliances, culminating in his inclusion in the 'Universal Peace' of 1518, agreed in the name of Pope Leo X but actually organised under the auspices of Henry VIII, who felt a keen and life-long rivalry with Francis
  • Francis had hoped to impress and intimidate Henry into committing himself as an ally against Charles V, whose power in Italy unnerved Francis
  • appreciated that securing and maintaining the support of interest groups, particularly the nobility, was vital to effective kingship
  • Francis was taken to Spain as the emperor's prisoner. France was left vulnerable to its enemies and to internal dissent, which Louise de Savoie, as her son's regent, had much to do to overcome while trying to secure Francis' release. She immediately sought the assistance of the English and sympathetic Italian states, who were wary of the immense power of Charles V in the wake of his triumph at Pavia
  • Disappointed by Charles V's lack of support for his own claim to France, Henry once more turned the tables on the emperor. A renewed Anglo-French alliance enabled Francis to repudiate the treaty of Madrid and led indirectly to a more acceptable agreement
  • Francis maintained peace with his English counterpart until 1542
  • He never finally secured Milan from Charles but he did, nevertheless, maintain his dynastic rights against the emperor's potentially overwhelming power. This he did in part by allying with the papacy, with various Italian states, with the heretical Henry VIII and with the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. These last two alliances scandalised Catholic Europe, but keeping Charles' enemies close for as long as he could assisted Francis in projecting royal power well beyond the borders of the French state throughout his reign
  • Another important factor in Francis' capacity to project this power was his widespread reform of crown fiscal administration after his return from Spain in 1526. These were prompted first and foremost by the need to pay huge debts incurred in the war and in securing peace with Henry and Charles
  • His sale of judicial offices set up long-lasting difficulties for the monarchy
  • He made an ill-advised pre-emptive strike against imperial territory in the Netherlands and Spain in early 1521
  • Daily life there was never as elaborately choreographed under Francis as it would be under his successors. He is perhaps second only to Henry IV in his reputation for informality and spontaneity as a French king.
  • The 'big boy' had come close at times to ruining everything, but had also made France a power to be reckoned with and made his own mark on its history
  • Under Francis, the court of France was at the height of its prestige and international influence during the 16th century.
manhefnawi

Spain | Facts, Culture, History, & Points of Interest - The early Bourbons, 1700-53 | B... - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...The-early-Bourbons-1700-53

Spanish Succession Philip-V Ferdinand-VI Charles-III

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  • Spain’s central problem in the 17th century had been to maintain what remained of its European possessions and to retain control of its American empire
  • In the 17th century the greatest threat had come from a land power, France, jealous of Habsburg power in Europe; in the 18th it was to come from a sea power, England, while the Austrian Habsburgs became the main continental enemy of Spain
  • In 1700 (by the will of the childless Charles II) the duc d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV of France, became Philip V of Spain
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Austria refused to recognize Philip, a Bourbon
  • a Bourbon king in Spain would disrupt the balance of power in Europe in favour of French hegemony
  • Spain under a Bourbon king as a political and commercial appendage of France
  • He wished to regenerate and strengthen his ally by a modern centralized administration
  • the allied armies of Britain and Austria invaded Spain in order to drive out Philip V and establish the “Austrian” candidate, the archduke Charles (later the Holy Roman emperor Charles VI), on the throne
  • An efficient administration had to be created in order to extract resources from Spain for the war effort and thus relieve pressure on the French treasury
  • Castile was ferociously loyal to the new dynasty throughout the war. The support of Castile and of France (until 1711) enabled Philip V to survive severe defeats
  • Spanish lawyer-administrators such as Melchor de Macanaz
  • They were supported by the queen, María Luisa of Savoy
  • The opponents of reform were those who suffered by it
  • Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia
  • a Castilian centralizing imposition in conflict with the local privileges, or fueros
  • the church, whose position was threatened by the ferocious and doctrinaire regalism of Macanaz
  • The disaffection of all these elements easily turned into opposition to Philip V as king
  • war taxation and war levies drove Catalonia and Aragon to revolt
  • When Philip V tried to attack Catalonia through Aragon, the Aragonese, in the name of their fueros, revolted against the passage of Castilian troops
  • When the archbishop of Valencia resisted attempts to make priests of doubtful loyalty appear before civil courts, the regalism of Macanaz was given full course
  • This was the last direct triumph of the reformers. With the death of Queen María Luisa in 1714
  • Macanaz was condemned by the Inquisition
  • the fueros were abolished and Catalonia was integrated into Spain
  • The “Italian” tendency was influenced by Philip V’s second wife, Isabella, and her desire to get Italian thrones for her sons.
  • The attempt to recover the possessions in Italy involved Spain in an unsuccessful war with Austria, which was now the great power in Italy
  • Nevertheless, Isabella’s persistence was rewarded when her son, the future King Charles III of Spain, became the duke of Parma in 1731 and king of Naples in 1733, relinquishing his claims to Parma
  • The “Italian” and “Atlantic” tendencies existed side by side in the late years of Philip V’s reign
  • It made possible an alliance of France and Spain against Austria, giving Isabella the opportunity to settle her second son, Philip, in an Italian duchy
  • Ferdinand VI (1746–59) was concerned with the domestic recovery of Spain rather than the extension of its power in Europe
  • the treaty merely strengthened Spain’s position in Italy when Philip became duke of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. The Atlantic tendency became dominant under Ferdinand VI
  • Because Britain was Spain’s most significant enemy in the Americas (as Austria had been in Italy), Spain’s “natural” ally was France
  • hence a series of family pacts with France in 1733 and 1743
  • The American interest was reflected in increased trade
  • Charles III, Ferdinand’s successor, implemented dramatic reforms that followed along the path set by Ferdinand.
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