The picture illustrates a fact all too frequently ignored by ‘philosophic’ historians -namely, that art can be almost completely irrelevant to life, and that the study of the masterpieces of painting and poetry and music throws very little light upon the actual character of the age in which they were produced. From a collection of fifteenth-century Italian paintings, who could possibly infer the society described by Machiavelli? More often than not, the work of even the most ‘representative’ artists shows at best what their contemporaries would have liked to be, not what they were. If such creators as Rubens, say, and Corneille are historically significant, it is not because they tell us anything about the concrete facts of real characters of their time; it is because their pictures and dramas so vividly illustrate certain aspects of the bovaristic dreams by which the seventeenth-century mind was haunted -the dream of superhuman splendour and the dream of superhuman nobility, the desire for a more than Persian magnificence impossibly combined with a more than Spartan heroism.
For a little while the King and the Cardinal-Infante almost succeeded in living up to the glories of Peter Paul’s imaginary picture of them. On September 6th, at Nordlingen, they met the main Swedish army under Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and overwhelmingly defeated it. Eger put an end to Wallenstein’s dream of a Germany united under military dictatorship; Nordlingen put an end to Gustavus’s dream of a great Protestant German empire, ruled from Stockholm. Paradoxically enough, Nordlingen also put an end to Ferdinand’s dream of a Catholic, Counter-Reformation empire under the authority of the Hapsburgs. Gallas’s all too decisive victory precipitated the active intervention of France; and that active intervention was to result in the final ruin of Spain and the permanent exclusion of Austria from western and northern Germany.
In France, the months that followed Nordlingen were spent in preparing the men and munitions for an immense campaign on several fronts -in Italy, in the Valtelline, on the Rhine, in Flanders. Two hundred thousand troops were raised, taxes yet again increased and the oppression of the poor intensified. In his bare, cold rooms at Rueil or in the Palais Cardinal, Father Joseph worked harder than ever at the execution of policies, which it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to ‘annihilate’ in the consciously realized will of God. One in particular must have strained all his powers, not merely as a contemplative, but even as a casuist. This convinced crusader was now trying, through the Prince of Transylvania, to negotiate an agreement with the Turks, who were to be subsidized to attack the Austrian Hapsburgs by land and the Spanish Hapsburgs with galleys and a military expedition across the Mediterranean.
To himself and other scrupulous Catholics Father Joseph justified his scheme by arguments similar to those he had used in defence of the Protestant alliances. A small dose of Turks, he claimed, would prove an antidote, not merely to Hapsburg power, but also (surprisingly enough) to the power of Turkey. How did Father Joseph expect to achieve this feat of political homeopathy? The answer is best given in the words used by Louis XIII in a statement made to his confessor, Father Gaussin. ‘I should like the Turk to be in Madrid,’ said the King, expounding in abbreviated form the ingenious projects of his minister, ‘so as to force the Spaniards to make peace with me; and afterwards I would join the Spaniards to make war on the Turk.’ It is the reductio ad absurdum of Machiavellian power politics; Tenebroso-Cavernoso had really excelled himself. Fortunately, perhaps, for the French no less than for the Hapsburgs, the Turks fought shy of the proposed alliance. The negotiations with the Prince of Transylvania and, through him, with the Porte were continued to the time of Father Joseph’s death and were spasmodically renewed for years afterwards. Before they could give any concrete results, the signing of the Peace of Westphalia made the Turkish alliance unnecessary, and the whole plan was quietly dropped.
While Richelieu and Father Joseph were moving towards an open declaration of war against Austria, the Emperor was, for the first time, seriously trying to make peace. Withdrawing from the extreme Counter-Reformation position, he now agreed with John George of Saxony to compromise on the question of the Edict of Restitution. The Elector and any other Protestant prince who so desired might make peace with the Empire on the basis of a return to the status quo in 1627. This peace treaty, which was finally concluded at Prague in the middle of May 1635, provided a solid and reasonably just basis for a general pacification. Unfortunately, one week before it was signed, a French herald made his appearance in the Grand’ Place at Brussels and, with elaborate medieval ceremonies, announced that His Most Christian Majesty was now at war with the House of Austria.
A day or two before this declaration of war, Father Joseph wrote to d’Avaux that ‘The King’s intention is to bring about as soon as he can a general peace with guarantees for the future -a peace which will be a golden age, and, as it were, a new era of Augustus. His means for achieving this are as follows: to back up by the action of several armies every promising negotiation and opening for peace.’ In other words, war was to be made in order that the world might be delivered from the Hapsburgs and made safe for Bourbon autocracy, with Louis XIII playing the name part, not indeed in a drama (for dramas are dynamic, and Father Joseph cherished the illusion, common to almost all politicians, of a definitive and lasting settlement), but of a magnificent and unchanging tableau vivant of the Augustan Age.
Both Richelieu and Father Joseph believed that the war would he short and decisive. The French strategical plan of simultaneous attack on several fronts (a plan, incidentally, conceived on a scale unprecedentedly vast) was nicely designed to shatter the Austro-Spanish power at a single stroke. One summer’s campaign was to bring decisive victory. That it failed so lamentably to do so was due to a combination of causes -the undisciplined state of the French armies and the high efficiency of the Spanish infantry, which was still (though its commanders made war in a rather old-fashioned way) incomparably the best in Europe; the difficulty, given the inadequate organizations at Richelieu’s disposal, of supplying widely scattered forces; and finally, the chronic shortage of money.
Except in the Valtelline, the anticipated successes were not achieved. The only considerable result of the campaign of 1635 was the reduction of Alsace to a condition almost worse than that of Pomerania in 1630. Father Joseph’s policy at Ratisbon bore its fruit in a famine that killed its tens of thousands and transformed many of the surviyors into cannibals. Executed malefactors were cut down from the gibbets to serve as butcher’s meat, and the recently bereaved were forced to guard the cemeteries against the ghoulish activities of body-snatchers.
After Nordlingen, many thousands of the defeated Protestants’ camp-followers went wandering in great troops, like foraging baboons, desperately looking for something to eat. Unprotected villages were overrun and looted; the larger towns closed their gates and sent out troops of soldiers to drive them away. Strasburg left its gates open, and thirty thousand of the almost sub-human creatures entered the town and, having exhausted the charity of the burghers, began to die by hundreds in the streets. Thereupon the city fathers had the survivors herded out at the point of the pike to die in the country. To these camp-followers were ‘added the uncounted victims of military outrage-peasants who had been robbed of everything, down to their means of livelihood, ruined artisans, destitute shop-keepers and professional men. For a time they managed to subsist on carrion and grass.
Then they died; or else, if they met with soldiers from either camp, they were killed -not for what they had, for they possessed nothing; just for fun. ‘He who had money,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘was the soldiers’ enemy. He who had none was tortured because he had none’-because, too, the habit of committing atrocities had developed a general taste for atrocities. With cruelty, as with lust, avarice, gluttony and the love of power, l’appetit vient en mangeant. Hence the importance of preserving at any cost the unreasoned tradition of civilized conduct, the social convention of ordinary decency.
Destroy these, and immediately large numbers of men and women discovering within themselves no obvious reasons why they should not behave like devils, do behave like devils, and go on doing so until such time as they physically destroy themselves, or grow weary of the strain and uncertainty of diabolic life, or else, for whatever providential reason, discover deep in their own souls the hidden springs of compassion, the potential goodness, latent even in the worst of men and, by the best, fully actualized in the superhuman splendour of saintliness. In 1635 the war-time reaction
