Abstract
In April 1672, Louis XIV invaded the United Netherlands. He was confident of swift triumph. Lionne, his foreign minister, had bought over the republic’s allies and frightened her friends into neutrality. Louvois, his minister of war, had built up a huge army and a vast supply system to support it. Through the spring and summer, of 1672, the king’s troops swarmed over the land. One more thrust to The Hague, to Amsterdam, and all was won!
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References
More than a century ago, François Mignet, receiving the direction of the archives of the Quai d’Orsay as his, the scholar’s, share of the spoils of the 1830 revolution, turned his attention to this problem. The four volumes of his Négociations relatives à la sue-cession d’Espagne (Paris, 1835–42), in the Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, spell out the story by means of selected diplomatic dispatches from the years 1659 to 1679. But the secondary works, almost exclusively eighteenth-century historical collections and writings, upon which Mignet drew for the narrative background of his tale, are now hopelessly outdated and limited. Virtually all the important specialized studies in this period come after Mignet, indeed build upon his work, so that his synthetic conclusions require considerable amplification and reinterpretation. In his Het voorspel van den oorlog van 1672: De economisch-politieke betrekkingen tusschen Frankrijk en Nederland in de jar en 1660–1672 (Haarlem, 1926), the modern Dutch historian Simon Elzinga brought valuable materials out of the dust of the archives into the light of print; but we cannot trust his explanations because a systematic bias in favor of the economic factor leads him to exaggerate and distort its rôle. (See the reviews by Pieter Geyl, in History, new ser., XIII [1928], 162–63, and Nicolaas Japikse, in Bijdragen voor Vaderlandsche Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde, IV [1928], 302–06). Keith Feiling has turned his brilliant analysis upon the whole period of diplomatic history from 1660 to 1672, with remarkable success, but his attention was focused on Britain and he did not draw heavily upon the French diplomatic archives (British Foreign Policy: 1660–1672 [London, 1930]).
Le Grand Électeur et Louis XIV (Paris, 1905).
La relation demon ambassade en Hollande (1669–1671), ed. Herbert H. Rowen (“Werken uitgegeven door het Historisch Genootschap te Utrecht,” 4th ser., no. 2) (Utrecht, 1955).
Georges Livet correctly remarks (“Louis XIV et les provinces conquises: État des questions et remarques de méthode,” XVIIe siècle, II [1952], 484) that the edition by J. Mavidal of Pomponne’s Mémoires (Paris, 1861) “contributes little” to the understanding of Pomponne, and that the materials on Pomponne published by Louis Delavaud, especially Le marquis de Pomponne, ministre et secrétaire d’État aux affaires étrangères (Paris, 1911) “give only a brief glimpse of the man and his work.” The article by Henri Courteault in the Dictionnaire de biographie française (III [1939], cols. 890–97), is merely a summary of published materials. Pierre Varin writes in some detail about Pomponne in La vérité sur les Arnauld (Paris, 1847) (II, 41–179), but this author was an érudit, not a historian; his book bristles with hostility to the Arnauld family and, except for its archival materials, is little more than a piece of anti-Jansenist propaganda two centuries later. The portrait of Pomponne by the duke of Saint-Simon (Mémoires, ed. A. de Boislisle Paris, [1881–1928], VI, 337–50) is a masterpiece of characterization, but though the great memorialist here is in a favorable mood rare for him, his judgment must still be weighed in the light of the total evidence.
Feiling, p. 193.
For instance, Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s contemporary description of him as a man of “great probity”, in his History of My Own Time (ed. Osmund Airy [Oxford, 1897], I, 548).
Cf. Charles Beard, Port-Royal: A Contribution to the History of Religion and Literature in France (London, 1861), I, 20; Saint-Simon, VI, 340.
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Rowen, H.H. (1957). Introduction: The War of 1672-Masterpiece of Diplomacy?. In: The Ambassador Prepares for War. International Scholars Forum. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4778-3_1
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