Absolute monarchy on the frontiers: Louis XIV’s military occupations of Lorraine and Savoy

By Phil McCluskey

French territorial ambitions and consequent military activity during the reign of Louis XIV ensured that a number of territories bordering on France were subject to military occupation for strategic reasons from the 1660s onwards. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study presents the occupation of two of these territories, Lorraine and Savoy, from a comparative perspective. It investigates the aims and intentions of the French monarchy in occupying these regions, the problems of administering them, and French relations with key local elite groups.

Absolute monarchy on the frontiers makes a significant contribution to understanding this crucial era in the development of civil-military relations. It also places the occupations of Lorraine and Savoy within the framework of recent scholarship on early modern border societies and frontiers, and on the practice of ‘absolutism’ at the frontiers of the French kingdom. The book will appeal particularly to scholars and students of early modern France and Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526110503

Phil McCluskey

Phil McCluskey is Lecturer in the History of Early Modern Europe at the University of Sheffield

Book preview

The eastern frontiers of France

in the age of Louis XIV

1

Lorraine, Savoy and

the frontiers of France

Lorraine and Savoy existed in the political and cultural borderlands that separated France from, respectively, the Rhenish imperial principalities and Reichsitalien. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rulers and elites of these frontier territories found themselves caught in the ongoing power struggle between the Valois/Bourbons and the Habsburgs, who jostled for influence in these small but strategically vital territories.¹ Subject to frequent French military intervention over the centuries, both were occupied either wholly or partly on two separate occasions during the personal rule of Louis XIV.

This chapter examines the background to the conquest and occupation of these territories during the reign of the Sun King. It begins with a brief exploration of French Government policies on the eastern frontiers of the kingdom in this period, with the aim of identifying the priorities and mindset of the king and his ministers. This context is essential in understanding the occupations of Savoy and Lorraine. This chapter also seeks to establish the political, social, economic and cultural circumstances of the territories themselves. Historians of more recent military occupations have demonstrated that, to fully comprehend the priorities and attitudes of both occupier and occupied, it is essential to understand the regime that preceded the occupation.² Lorraine and Savoy were not, as they have sometimes been portrayed, wayward frontier provinces of France. Both were components of larger politico-dynastic sovereign entities which had their own ancient, separate histories. The dukes of Lorraine and Savoy ruled over ‘composite’ states (though they were composite by varying degrees),³ which comprised disparate lands held together principally by bonds of dynastic loyalty. The internal dynamics of these composite political structures would have an important effect on the way these territories responded to foreign occupation, as will become clear in Part III of this book.

French frontier strategy under Louis XIV

The first three decades of Louis XIV’s personal rule saw significant territorial additions to the kingdom of France. At the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, the Spanish province of Rosselló and part of the Cerdanya region were annexed and became the province of Roussillon. In the north, the border was gradually pushed back as parts of the Spanish Netherlands were annexed piecemeal at the Peace of the Pyrenees and the treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) and Nijmegen (1678), and Lorraine, the Franche-Comté, Strasbourg, Luxembourg and other réunion territories on the north-eastern frontier were conquered in the 1670s and early 1680s (see Map 1). Current thinking on the strategy behind these acquisitions is that Louis XIV was continuing the principal concern of French rulers for centuries: securing the kingdom’s borders through the acquisition of buffer zones and more defensible frontiers.⁴ The Valois and Bourbon kings had gained territories and fortifications on the Rhine and at strategic sites in northern Italy as a means of pursuing offensive and defensive warfare more effectively. As Gaston Zeller put it, ‘the ideal frontier was not only, nor even principally, that which sheltered the French from invasion; it was above all that which would permit them to carry their arms outside of the kingdom’.⁵ The real Leitmotiv of Louis XIV’s reign, it now seems, was ensuring the security of the Bourbon dynasty and the maintenance, if not strengthening, of the kingdom by boosting French prestige and influence. Partly this could be attained by the acquisition of territory to further develop these ‘strategic frontiers’ and partly by bringing surrounding smaller states directly into France’s orbit.

Louis’s strategic goals were in many ways a continuation of the all-embracing concept of ‘long-term security’ seen in the assertive foreign policy of Cardinal Richelieu, whereby the cardinal sought to gain the greatest possible territorial and strategic advantages for France.⁶ In particular, Richelieu’s government was preoccupied for much of the early 1630s with the threat of an invasion across France’s eastern frontiers, and adopted the geostrategic concept of ‘gates’ – points of secure entry and exit for troops operating in Germany; he also occupied territories on France’s frontiers as a means of guaranteeing communications with France’s allies while disrupting Habsburg communication routes. Although the French crown routinely advanced dynastic claims to further its strategic aims on the frontiers throughout the seventeenth century, these claims had largely become a mere matter of form. Dynastic ambition was without doubt still a driving force in French foreign policy, but by Louis XIV’s reign it was tempered by a more general stress on considerations of raison d’état.⁷

These policies also reflected contemporary notions of the frontière, which by the seventeenth century denoted a liminal space at the extremity of the realm, a zone that could shrink, expand or shift location following territorial changes.⁸ Yet such concepts were far from static through this period. Despite a revisionist stress on limited change in international relations before and after the Peace of Westphalia, improvements in mapping in the second half of the seventeenth century led to a firmer grasp of the nature both of the frontier and of political sovereignty.⁹ This evolution in mentalities was certainly reflected in policy: from the 1670s, strategists such as Vauban advocated the creation of more linear frontiers and, over the course of Louis XIV’s reign, the northern border which stretched from the North Sea to the Meuse was successfully squared off.¹⁰ But in spite of these trends, many of France’s borderlands remained irregular, riddled with enclaves, exclaves and pays indivis (territories where sovereignty was shared), and whose shape was still determined by feudal fief boundaries, well into the eighteenth century.¹¹ This was especially the case in the northeast, where innumerable overlapping feudal jurisdictions meant that the frontier continued to be undefined and confused.¹²

Linked with these changes, an idea gained currency that the kingdom’s ideal form should constitute a space bounded and enclosed by nature. As Vauban put it in 1693, ‘All the ambitions of France should be contained within the summits of the Alps and the Pyrenees, the Swiss and the two seas: it is there that she should intend to establish her boundaries by legitimate means according to the times and the occasions.’¹³ While the concept of ‘natural frontiers’ as a guiding principle in Louis XIV’s foreign policy came to be dismissed by historians, thanks to the work of Gaston Zeller, more recent developments in methodology have meant that the debate over France’s ‘natural frontiers’ rumbles on, though with somewhat different points of emphasis. Peter Sahlins has argued that natural frontiers were, in a way, pivotal to French frontier policy, ‘not as boundaries but as passages’.¹⁴ Furthermore, Daniel Nordman has pointed out that Zeller ignored the importance of many publications in the seventeenth century, especially by Jesuits, which helped to make natural frontiers such as the Rhine a common image which permeated all levels of society from the nobility to labourers. While this may not have directly influenced the policy of Louis XIV, Nordman argues that the wide extent to which it informed contemporary preoccupations towards territory and strategy should not be ignored.¹⁵ Such geographic ‘visions’ of France’s frontiers in the popular consciousness extended not only to the Rhine, but to the entire limits of ancient Gaul, which extended in the south-east to the Alps and the Var.¹⁶

Prominent in the popular consciousness though such images may have been, the legitimating discourse in French expansionism in this period was not nature but a combination of history, dynastic inheritance and feudal law. In seventeenth-century Europe, brute conquest alone was rarely seen as sufficient for annexation, and territorial changes needed to be explained and justified by reference to both history and legal titles.¹⁷ The French were sensitive to this: under Richelieu, if circumstances dictated the permanent occupation of territories to which France had no dynastic claims, for instance in the towns of Alsace, the concept of military and diplomatic ‘protection’ was used instead; this shielded France from the reputation of Sweden, which was notorious for having claimed territory by right of conquest alone.¹⁸ To facilitate its strategic objectives, the French crown developed and maintained an arsenal of jealously guarded claims to territories on the kingdom’s frontiers, which needed to be kept alive, if hibernating, and could be activated whenever necessity dictated. The ‘use and abuse’ of history and feudal law to legitimise French expansionism had come into its own under the cardinal ministers: the annexations of Alsace and Roussillon, for example, were presented as ‘reunions’ of the crown’s legitimate patrimony to the kingdom.¹⁹ By the time Louis XIV assumed personal control of his government, therefore, there was already ample precedent for activating latent claims on titles to legitimise a French monarch’s control of conquered territory, which could be strengthened by the invocation of history and the laws of dynastic succession.

At the French court, views on frontier states such as Lorraine and Savoy were conditioned also by the presence of a cohort of princes belonging to cadet branches of the ruling dynasties, such as the Lorraine-Guise, the Savoy-Nemours and the Gonzaga-Nevers. As Jonathan Spangler has recently suggested, these princely clans could be of great use to France in its cross-frontier links in several unofficial ways.²⁰ Their continued presence and importance at court meant that the French Government had a channel of influence to Lorraine and Piedmont-Savoy, by which it could exert pressure and bind the Lorrain and Savoyard rulers to France. These links were also maintained by the presence in these borderlands of elites who belonged to a shared ‘geo-cultural landscape’ and whose family, property and material interests transcended the idea of the linear frontier, as Part III of this study details.²¹ Yet beyond the ‘society of princes’ and the elites who surrounded them, ideas about occupation, annexation or interstate relations with foreign territories just beyond the frontier did not extend into popular consciousness at this time; French public concepts of these territories were generally limited to crude stereotypes.²²

Overall, factors conditioning French relations with Lorraine and Savoy were driven most of all by strategic and dynastic interests, and to a lesser extent by changing concepts of the frontier. The next section investigates these relations in further detail: it looks at diplomatic relations between the rulers, at the ties that existed across the frontier, and also at how France was viewed from within Lorrain and Savoyard societies.

Lorraine and France, c.1552–1670

Lorraine sat at the crossroads of Europe – from the Middle Ages it had been open to influences from Germany, Italy, the Low Countries and France, flourishing culturally and artistically through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its location, at a strategically vital point on the frontier between France and the Holy Roman Empire, heightened its relative importance. The multiple influences and pressures upon it had made the territory extremely complex in terms of overlapping frontiers: feudal, administrative, judicial, financial and religious – as one historian has said, Lorraine was ‘not one, but multiple’.²³ Within what was termed ‘Lorraine’ were: the duchy of Lorraine proper (which had been a legally independent ‘protectorate’ of the Empire since 1542); the duchy of Bar, half of which (the Barrois mouvant) fell under the jurisdiction of the Parlement of Paris, while the other half (the Barrois non-mouvant) was under the full sovereignty of the dukes; and various small territories in the Holy Roman Empire. Further complicating the picture was the status of the Trois Evêchés – the towns of Metz, Toul and Verdun, which had been conquered by the French in 1552 and which were officially received into French sovereignty at the Treaty of Münster in 1648. These three bishoprics and their hinterlands came to be organised into a French généralité with its own intendant and governor, and the presence of these French exclaves meant that the Lorraine region was officially shared between two sovereignties, a fact which would prove to be of great diplomatic and strategic consequence, as these sovereignties were bound, by their orientation and interests, to compete against each other (see Map 2).

The complexity and incertitudes of the political geography of the region did not predispose Lorraine to a centralised regime. Furthermore, the feudal nobility, naturally associated with public affairs thanks to the practice of holding yearly meetings of the Estates General, still wielded significant influence in the running of the state into the seventeenth century. The Lorrain nobility traditionally administered much of the justice in the state through the feudal Cour des assises, over which the duke had very little control.²⁴ Though the sixteenth century had seen conflict between the duke – who wished to exert greater control over the state and its institutions – and the ancienne chevalerie (akin to the French ‘sword’ nobility), the continued existence of the tribunal of the assises attests to the place the nobility conserved for themselves in Lorrain society.²⁵ In the Barrois, however, neither the chevalerie nor the assises existed, and government institutions were in general closer to the French model.²⁶

Families of the ancienne chevalerie were also an important link between Lorraine and France. Among them were the Choiseul, Apremont and Nettancourt families, all originally from Champagne, the Ludres from Burgundy and the Beauvau family, who came from Anjou in the fifteenth century.²⁷ The Haraucourts, Lenoncourts and other high nobility married into French grandee families, creating dynastic alliances.²⁸ Many of these families had long traditions of French military service and several – the Stainville-Couvonges, Lenoncourts and Nettancourts – fought on the French side in the Thirty Years War.²⁹ The Barrois elites were particularly close to France. Many married into French society and became francisised in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a trend that continued despite – or because of – the ensuing French occupations.³⁰

Economically, too, the Barrois was orientated towards the neighbouring French province of the Champagne, partly because its rivers flowed into the Marne and Meuse, whereas Lorraine looked east and was traditionally geared more to Rhenish trade networks than to France.³¹ Yet the French occupation of Metz, Toul and Verdun from 1552 contributed to the economic stagnation of both duchies. After its sixteenth-century peak, Lorraine’s economy declined significantly and commerce was severely hampered by an under-developed industrial sector. While the Trois Evêchés enjoyed significant trade and were home to a fairly cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, including many Protestants and Jews,³² society in ducal Lorraine remained overwhelmingly Catholic and rural, its towns few and small, its scattered bourgeoisie scarcely constituting a political or social force.

Lorraine’s overlapping jurisdictions deprived it of strength and unity, and made it vulnerable. Moreover, due to its location it was caught, from the sixteenth century onwards, in a precarious position between France and the Holy Roman Empire. French rulers pursued a policy of dynastic alliances with Lorraine through the second half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, as a means of maintaining and extending their influence there.³³ Henri II’s occupation of the Trois Evêchés in 1552 gave France a firm military foothold in the region, curtailing Lorraine’s ability to pursue an independent foreign policy. This became increasingly apparent in the Thirty Years War.³⁴ In the mid-1620s a succession crisis in the duchy raised tensions between France and Lorraine, intensified in 1629 when Gaston d’Orléans went into open opposition to Richelieu and took refuge in Nancy. Given the increasingly volatile situation in Europe, the hostility of Duke Charles IV towards France presented Cardinal Richelieu with the alarming prospect of a potential imperial place d’armes in Lorraine. Attempts at forcing protectorate status on Lorraine proved fruitless after the duke repeatedly showed himself to be unreliable and unable to adhere to French terms.³⁵ An irritated Cardinal Richelieu decided to solve the problem of Lorraine with a pre-emptive strike.

Louis XIII occupied Bar in August 1633, meeting very little opposition; after a brief siege, Nancy fell in mid-September. The whole of Lorraine, including its fortresses, was in French hands by the middle of 1634.³⁶ As David Parrott has argued, Lorraine’s importance for France originated in Richelieu’s strategic, fiscal and logistic requirements. The aim was to spare France as much as possible the burdens of war, while increasing costs for the Spanish and the Imperials, and the key to this policy was to seize large swathes of enemy territory.³⁷ These provinces could then serve as places d’armes: military zones in which occupying French armies could systematically plunder all resources they required from the local population, while also denying them to the enemy.

Several months before the conquest of the duchies, the French had created the Parlement of Metz. This new institution, which started work in August 1633, marked a major development of the French Government’s influence and control in the region.³⁸ After the suppression of a short-lived Conseil souverain in Nancy in 1637, the Parlement became the linchpin of French administration in Lorraine.³⁹ Also in 1637, central authority was bolstered with the creation of an intendant residing in Metz.⁴⁰ Yet the occupation rested very much on native services: the Chambres des comptes of Nancy and Bar were maintained, along with the bailliages and prévôtés (local courts). This reflected Richelieu’s intention to encourage collaboration with the Lorrain elites, and set the tone for French policy towards them for the rest of the occupation.⁴¹

Cardinal Mazarin maintained the same system of administration in Lorraine as established by Richelieu: governors and intendants were superimposed on an indigenous local administration, collecting established taxes and making troops live off the province.⁴² Despite initial French military success, Croats de bois ravaged the country and these raiding parties tied down many French soldiers. Writing several decades later, the marquis de Beauvau claimed that these Lorrain brigands did far more harm to their compatriots than the French troops did, reducing the peasantry to a ‘deplorable misery’ and bringing famine: ‘one even saw many women reduced to the necessity of eating their own children so as not to starve’.⁴³ A new governor, the comte de La Ferté-Senneterre, appointed in 1643, served for eighteen years. Though rapacious and avaricious, he re-imposed order on the duchies and put an end to much of the activity of the raiding parties, pointing to a shift in style from Richelieu’s era.⁴⁴

The problem of Lorraine was not resolved at the Peace of Westphalia. Cardinal Mazarin wavered, uncertain whether to annex the duchies or return them demilitarised to the duke.⁴⁵ The French therefore engineered the exclusion of the Lorrain envoys from the peace negotiations, and, as Charles IV was closer to the Spanish than to the emperor, the imperial negotiators would not make the return of Lorraine a precondition of peace. Furthermore, the duke had to watch from the sidelines as the emperor handed sovereignty of Metz, Toul and Verdun to the French monarchy. As the war between France and Spain continued, no solution could be found, and Lorraine’s fate was now more closely than ever tied up with the conflict. For the time being, the duke could do little other than go on supporting the Spanish side, and Lorraine remained under French rule.

The assimilation of Lorraine into the French monarchy continued, but it remained fragile and superficial.⁴⁶ The French simply lacked the time and resources required to fully impose their political or juridical authority on the duchies. Though in theory they had superimposed a new top layer of administration while co-opting the rest of the duchies’ traditional apparatus, this strategy was in practice frustrated by a laxity of control from Paris. Conditions were favourable to clandestine maintenance of the ducal-aligned administration, alongside that imposed by the French. Wherever French garrisons were not close, Lorrain tribunals loyal to the duke continued to function and exercise justice in Charles IV’s name, and still commanded much respect from the population.⁴⁷ Furthermore the Cour souveraine of Lorraine continued to sit in exile in Luxembourg, ‘the soul of resistance to the French presence in Lorraine’, judging cases and reciprocally annulling the decrees of the Parlement of Metz. It also raised contributions for Charles IV, showing the ineffective control exercised over the duchies by the French.⁴⁸ The example of Lorraine shows that French strategies of administering conquered provinces under the cardinal ministers were deeply problematic. It would be for Louis XIV and his ministers to study the mistakes of their predecessors and ensure they were not repeated.

Despite a brief, partial reconquest of Lorraine during the Frondes, Charles IV remained exiled and, for the second half of the 1650s, imprisoned by the Spanish. During his captivity, the Lorrain regiments under the duke’s brother Nicolas-François passed into French service, playing an important role at the siege of Montmédy in 1657, and at the Battle of the Dunes the following year. As a result, fewer troops were quartered in Lorraine and the French authorities started a process of pacification and economic reconstruction.⁴⁹ In 1659 Charles IV was not permitted to send emissaries to the peace negotiations between France and Spain. By the terms of the Peace of the Pyrenees that year, Lorraine would be returned to its duke defortified, and the Barrois was to be annexed by France. Along with these humiliations, the French were to have military rights of access through Lorraine, and the duke was to be obliged to quarter and provision French troops when necessary.⁵⁰ Outraged by the Spanish sell-out of his interests, Charles refused to accept these terms and upon his release went to Paris to put his case to Mazarin directly. He succeeded in getting Louis XIV and Mazarin to re-open negotiations for the future of Lorraine, and discussions continued through 1660. Finally, on 28 February 1661, the dying Cardinal Mazarin solved the ‘Lorraine problem’ by concluding the Treaty of Vincennes, the terms of which differed considerably from those of the Peace of the Pyrenees. Most notably, Charles IV was to receive back the duchy of Bar, while the French gained certain villages in Lorraine which created a ‘French corridor’, allowing their troops to pass from France into Germany without hindrance. Lorraine had regained its independence, but had lost much of its territorial integrity, though this had been somewhat curtailed even before 1633. Henceforth the duchy of Lorraine would be indefensible; at any moment French soldiers could intervene.⁵¹

Through the conflict, Lorraine had been ravaged by enemy troops, plague and brigandage.⁵² As a consequence of nearly thirty years of occupation and hostilities, it suffered a demographic and economic catastrophe, perhaps losing as much as two thirds of its population.⁵³ It is a striking feature of this occupation that the miseries it brought affirmed ‘le patriotisme lorrain’.⁵⁴ Popular sentiment towards France was envenomed further by the confiscations of property of those who remained loyal to Charles IV. Mazarin’s policy at Vincennes of preparing the way for a future annexation had failed. Indeed, the prospect now seemed more distant than ever; as Braun put it, ‘thirty years of occupation, far from consummating the voluntary union of peoples which language, values and history had for a long time brought together, actually sowed in Lorraine the feelings of defiance, hostility and rancour … which did not disappear until the Revolutionary era’.⁵⁵ Though the Lorrains had ceased to look to Spain to protect their interests after Westphalia, they were in no mood to throw in their lot with the French.

Charles IV’s restoration, 1661–70

As the French regime was dismantled, a power struggle developed between the restored duke and the old elites of the duchy. No sooner had Charles signed the Treaty of Vincennes than he was forced to deal with the ancienne chevalerie of Lorraine which had, without his permission, met in Liverdun to discuss how to recover their old rights and privileges, lost during the war. He had the newly reconstituted Cour souveraine – established to abase the powers of the assises – issue an arrêt banishing the baron de Saffre – one of the principal leaders of the Liverdun assembly – and his family, giving them eight days to leave his states.⁵⁶ Charles dealt harshly with members of the old elites who resisted his assaults on their privileges: exile and property confiscations were not uncommon.⁵⁷ The duke also created new senior officers whose competence covered both duchies, in an attempt to reinforce the links between them. But he further alienated the old nobility from 1663 by appointing lower nobles and recently ennobled bourgeois to new judicial offices.⁵⁸ They were also upset by Charles IV’s refusal to call the Estates General. The abolition of the tribunal of the assises deprived Lorrain noblemen of the possibility of supporting the interests of their corps, and Charles IV also divided them with the distribution of favours, appointing a new generation of nobles to state offices (a generation which had never known local liberties in their full existence).⁵⁹

In February 1662 Louis XIV and Charles IV signed the Treaty of Montmartre, which was intended to unite Lorraine and France by peaceful means. By its terms, Charles IV ceded his sovereign rights to the duchies of Lorraine and Bar, allowing France to annex the duchies on his death. In return he and his entire family would be aggregated to the royal family of France and placed in line to the French throne. The king was eager for gloire at this stage of his personal reign, and was more than willing to aggrandise the Lorraine-Guise family, for whom he had great respect, in exchange for strengthening the unstable northeastern frontier.⁶⁰ French propaganda immediately presented the impending acquisition of Lorraine as the ‘reunion’ of an ancient French province. As the author of one such tract wrote to Louis, ‘You have not acquired Lorraine, you have only recovered it’, and he extolled the virtues of the king for beginning to give back to the French monarchy its ancient territorial limits.⁶¹ However, the treaty met with strong resistance in many quarters, including the Parlement of Paris, the Cour souveraine of Lorraine, the Imperial Diet, the French princes du sang, the duke’s heirs Nicolas-François and his son Prince Charles, and the whole of Lorrain society.⁶² Within a year the treaty had been completely abandoned as a dead letter due to the strength of opposition. The duke sent emissaries to the Imperial Diet to request the formal annulment of the treaty, but neither the emperor nor the German princes wished to upset Louis XIV, so the treaty was left in juridical limbo – something the French would later try to capitalise on.⁶³

Strife would only increase. In 1663, citing one of the clauses of the Treaty of Montmartre, Louis XIV invested the fortress of Marsal. The duke had little choice but to agree to hand over the fortress. With Marsal occupied, future occupations would be just a case of a simple march forward. Further antagonism grew out of the uneasy relationship between Charles IV and the intendant of the Trois Evêchés, Jean-Paul de Choisy. On many occasions, Charles IV complained of Choisy’s lack of deference towards him, and relations between the two men became increasingly uncomfortable; Charles IV dubbed Choisy ‘the artillery’, and the French war minister Louvois was prompted to rebuke the intendant for his lack of respect.⁶⁴ Essentially this antagonism was the manifestation of a more fundamental anxiety for both France and Lorraine: that of assuring their respective sovereignty and security. The decade saw repeated clashes over territorial control of certain towns, over rival claims to the appointments of benefices, and over Charles IV’s attempts to circumvent French ecclesiastical domination over his states by the creation of a new bishopric. More significantly still, Choisy was given orders to actively research all the titles and deeds which could prove the rights of the king in Lorraine, research which would ultimately prove the basis for the ‘reunions’ of the 1680s.

If French intentions were driven by long-term interests such as this, the duke’s methods were driven by ill-will towards France. The later 1660s saw a marked anti-French stance in Charles IV’s foreign policy. During the War of Devolution (1667–8), Charles negotiated a treaty of neutrality that served to allow Spanish soldiers from Luxembourg to use the duchies of Lorraine as a base from which to pillage the Trois Evêchés.⁶⁵ Irritated by this, Louis XIV demanded the help of Lorrain troops for the Flanders campaign. Charles was understandably hesitant about military collaboration with France, obliging Louis to send his envoy d’Aubeville to Nancy to apply more pressure on the duke.⁶⁶ In the end, the duke reluctantly agreed, but managed to frustrate Louis’s plans by sending only a part of the contingent he had promised, composed of inexperienced and badly armed recruits. From 1667, Charles also sought an alliance with England, Sweden and Holland to counter-balance the over-powerful position of France.

His patience quickly dwindling, Louis XIV in January 1669 ordered Charles IV to disarm, threatening to invade his states if he did not comply. Confronted by an army of 15,000 French troops on his doorstep at Metz, the duke backed down and disarmed.⁶⁷ But his intrigues continued, first negotiating a defensive alliance with the archbishop of Cologne and several German counts, and then attempting to obtain an alliance with the emperor and Spain.⁶⁸ The closer relations between Lorraine and the Dutch Republic, facilitated by Prince Charles of Lorraine’s candidacy for the throne of Poland in 1669, was a further cause of worry for Louis XIV.⁶⁹ Faced with this, Louis XIV charged his secretary of state for foreign affairs, Hugues de Lionne, with devising a plan to depose the duke. Choisy’s advice to Lionne was annexation of the duchies, but Lionne’s own project envisaged replacing Charles IV with his brother Nicolas-François, and fixing the succession on the descendants of Prince Charles.⁷⁰

The dire state to which Franco-Lorrain relations had sunk by the end of 1669 was compounded in 1670 by a string of provocations on the part of Charles IV. Ducal agents raised customs on commerce between Charles’ lands and the Trois Evêchés, paralysing commerce and leading to a retaliatory French trade embargo. The duke’s position was now desperate, and he appears to have counted on the success of negotiations with the emperor and Holland to save him. Matters came to a head in April 1670 when rumours reached Paris that Lorraine had joined the Triple Alliance of England, Holland and Sweden, while popular unrest broke out in Metz as people suffered under the new customs barriers. As the situation in the Evêchés became more and more untenable, the position of the French Government finally shifted, and military occupation was decided upon, in either late July or August.⁷¹ With war against the Dutch Republic looming, it was impossible to leave a ruler as untrustworthy as Charles IV in possession of this strategically vital point for the security of both the frontier with Germany and the French lines of advance down the Meuse and Rhine. For this reason the occupation of Lorraine was a necessity for Louis XIV. Yet it had never been an inevitable course of action. To the king and his ministers, the actions of the duke amounted to a succession of needless provocations. Louis XIV, in his frustration, ultimately had little option but to impose a military solution.

Of Charles IV, Louis would probably have shared Saint-Simon’s view that the duke’s life was ‘a tissue of perfidies’ and that through his sheer deceitfulness he had squandered the opportunity for peaceful co-existence between Lorraine and France.⁷² But the French king was equally to blame for the breakdown in relations during the 1660s, through his arrogant and overbearing behaviour. Thus, despite Louis’s attempts during Charles IV’s restoration to bring Lorraine into France’s political orbit, the House of Lorraine grew ever closer to the Habsburgs, and the kingdom’s north-eastern frontier remained weak and exposed. Moreover, for the population of Lorraine, thirty years of occupation had reinforced feelings of defiance and hostility towards France, which would remain strong and unyielding for the remainder of Louis XIV’s reign.⁷³

Savoy and France, c.1559–1690

Far to the south things were no easier. In the late seventeenth century the House of Savoy ruled over the principality of Piedmont,