On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists attacked New York's Twin Towers. The United States then embarked on a “War on Terror” similar to seventeenth-century politics. France was then the superpower that went on the attack out of fear. The biggest enemy was the Netherlands.
Security checks at US airports have become an hour-long procedure. The vague fear of terrorism has since been replaced by actual experience of bloody attacks. The bitter thing is:the War on Terror proclaimed by US President George W. Bush after the attack on the Twin Towers did not defeat terrorism, but helped develop it. We were trying to prevent something and somehow conjured up our nightmare. This war is counterproductive and it is far from over.
Just under three hundred years ago, something similar happened in Europe during the long and dogged struggle that Louis XIV (1638-1715) waged to make his country safer. In his youth, the Sun King had to experience that the Spaniards attacked France from the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium) and were able to approach close to Paris. To ensure that such a thing could never happen again, he relied on his army and attacked other countries, including the Republic (the Disaster Year) in 1672. But instead of making the kingdom more secure, he became the target of a growing host of attackers.
Army
It was a Dutchman who caused Lodewijk's nightmare:Prince William III of Orange (1650-1702). The two leaders would engage almost all of Europe in a battle. Although the Sun King prepared well for his attack on the Dutch Republic, he grossly underestimated his opponent. This was due to the difference in size:the French army numbered 120,000 men, the Dutch 20,000. Add to that the disdain of a great king for a state ruled by citizens, and then there's the religious component:Lodewijk was Catholic, proudly held the title Most Christian King and regarded the Protestant Republic as a colony of apostates.
France was the undisputed superpower in late seventeenth century Europe. It appropriated a room for maneuver comparable to that of the United States in our time. Louis XIV occupied his throne with the same verve as George W. Bush did in the White House, was also surrounded by an aggressive staff and was equally convinced of the greatness of his country and convinced of his right to complete security.
Historical comparisons never coincide seamlessly, but this is the essential and most striking similarity between the two unproductive wars, the one against terrorism and that of the Sun King:both superpowers allowed themselves in their agitation an approach that disproved the purpose of their actions. helped out. In both cases, aggression was unleashed in the name of self-defense against a scorned enemy. A process arose that did not result in the elimination of the problem, but only led to a phase in a spiral where aggression caused fear, and fear caused aggression.
Buffer zone
Great countries have always been sensitive about security and irritable about honor. Small countries are much less safe, but you don't hear them, it's the big ones that have the luxury of being touchy. Before Lodewijk was provoked by the Dutch, he had his army march into the Spanish Netherlands in 1668. The aim was to push the French borders northwards to remove the threat of the past once and for all. But what Lodewijk hoped to gain in French security in this war was at the expense of the security of the Dutch.
The Republic had emerged from the Revolt (1568-1648) as an assertive nation. This small country wanted the Spanish Netherlands in the south to remain a buffer zone between itself and the emerging France, under Spanish rule.
When, after a few warnings from The Hague, Lodewijk quietly continued to incorporate pieces from the Dutch cushion, Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, together with the ambassador of England, quickly put together the Triple Alliance:an offensive-defensive alliance that threatened to unite forces to aggressor back to Paris if he did not do so voluntarily. Lodewijk chose eggs for his money. He also swore to take revenge on the Dutch 'herring traders'.
Block waterline
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French security did not directly benefit from an action against the Republic. In fact, to hit that country, Lodewijk had to go all the way around the Spanish Netherlands with his gigantic army, the area he had first wanted to conquer. He did not want to come into conflict with the Dutch and the House of Habsburg at the same time. In May 1672, French troops moved north, along the Meuse and Rhine.
A month later, more than sixty towns and fortresses had surrendered, and French troops and their German allies occupied more than half of the Dutch territory. The fact that the road to The Hague was blocked by the water line did not seem to Lodewijk an insurmountable problem. He thought then that the capitulation was a matter of a few days, but he was wrong.
Disaster year changes
The Sun King's attack had an important but unintended consequence in the Republic. Until then, the young Prince of Orange was politically in stagnant water. For nearly twenty years, the most powerful politician, Grand Pensionary De Witt, had made it impossible for William III to fulfill a meaningful role in the Dutch system. The Disaster Year 1672 changed everything for Willem because the entire regent regime collapsed, with the murder of the De Witt brothers as a bloody climax.
The prince had not received any appreciable military training and had neither military nor diplomatic experience. To everyone's surprise, it didn't matter. Left and right, he drew capable men from the shadows to help him sort out taxes, build the army, and search for allies in foreign capitals. What turned out? The way the French superpower thought it was crushing the Republic reminded many other small states of their own experiences with haughty French ambassadors.
A superpower never lacks strong enemies, in Louis's case Emperor Leopold I of Habsburg. Leopold would have preferred to remain neutral, but Willem's envoy managed to strike the right chord in Vienna. Moreover, the general experience of French arrogance was reinforced by a political paradigm:the guiding idea that Louis aspired to the 'universal monarchy', that he wanted to be supreme king of Europe in order to be able to treat all other monarchs like puppets.
It explained his aggression, it gave meaning to the French intrigues at European courts, it also gave sharpness to the pageantry of his palace at Versailles. This almost diabolical image of the enemy suited both the Emperor and William, because the more fearful they were of the Sun King, the greater the number of potential allies.
Underdog bites back
William succeeded in turning the French invasion of the Republic into an international war against Louis. Within a year, the Dutch front got a new front in the south of the German Empire, not even that far from the French border. That was hard for Lodewijk, because it was precisely the borders of his kingdom that had to benefit from the war. He hastily removed soldiers from the Low Countries to be able to defend his empire against the enemy. Seventeen months after the French attack, Willem managed to get the considerably thinned out foreign troops out of the country.
Lodewijk seemed supremely powerful and an aggressor to the outside world, but in reality he was not free of fear germs. For example, during the Dutch War, as the French call the war that started with the Disaster Year, he started building extra forts. In Sebastien le Prestre Vauban, he had the best engineer of the century. From Vauban came a design for absolutely safe borders in Flanders, the famous pré carré, a double line of approximately fifteen fortified cities each.
Not much later, Vauban would get to work on the French eastern border. Never before had a defensive building program of such magnitude been initiated by a French king. In total, Vauban built, innovated and renovated some 160 fortresses along the French borders in thirty years.
Power hunger confirmed
Anyone who has such a warm relationship with the phenomenon of security could perhaps also have some understanding of other people's need for security. Unfortunately. Major powers usually assume the right to give way to the security of other countries for their own, refusing to see that they are putting their own security at risk. William only had to be patient, but sooner or later the Sun King automatically confirmed the image that was painted of him throughout Europe:the universal monarch with his insatiable appetite for power.
And sure enough, shortly after the Treaty of Nijmegen (1678) he started grabbing pieces of Germany. Willem and his supporters made no mistake about it in their propaganda:the 'universal monarch' was clearly at work here. Protestant Europe realized with a shock that this monarch was also a Catholic in 1685, when Lodewijk banned the large Protestant minority of the Huguenots by edict. They were then exposed to violent Catholicization.
Counter-aggression
Lodewijk had awakened the political prodigy Willem, after which his career began its climb. But fear was also Willem's part and would remain so. Whoever reads his personal correspondence hears, as it were, his voice skipped in exclamations such as 'the end is near' and 'if no one stops France then…'. Without this fear, William would never have had the persistence to lead Europe in the taming of the Sun King until his death, and he probably would never have become king of England.
Lodewijk had conveyed his desire for safety to William, unwillingly and to his own detriment, for Willem became particularly good at what he did:frighten Louis. His Grand Alliance of 1689 became the largest coalition to date against a single country. The spiral of fear and violence continued inexorably. The Great Coalition did not make France more cooperative, but more aggressive. Lodewijk had the Palatinate burn down in southern Germany and bombard entire cities from the face of the earth.
Until just before his death in 1715, Louis had to wage war against a Europe that never ceased to be afraid of him. "I've loved war too much," he sighed on his deathbed, after nearly forty years of uninterrupted clattering of arms. It was a meaningful insight, albeit very late.