The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (May 1668) ended the short Franco-Spanish war over territory in the Spanish Netherlands. Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715) and his advisers had been concerned at the prospect of a coalition (the Triple Alliance) opposed to further French gains and had anticipated the enforcement of the secret partition treaty for the division of all the Spanish territories on the death of the young king, Charles II. But as Charles demonstrated unexpected vitality, and Louis was assured by his generals that a second campaign in 1668 would have conquered the whole of the Spanish Netherlands, Aixla-Chapelle seemed an exasperating mistake. By 1669 Louis wanted another war, but his ministers were sharply divided as to whether this aggression should be directed once again at the Spanish Netherlands or toward powers likely to oppose this French expansion, most notably the Dutch Republic. Neither the secretary for foreign affairs, Hughes de Lionne (1611–1671), nor the finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), favored war in the early 1670s, but both recognized that obstructing the king's will on this matter would play into the hands of their rivals. Lionne regarded further belligerence against the Spanish Netherlands as the option most likely to forge a coalition against France; Colbert reluctantly considered that a war against the Dutch would at least serve some of his mercantilist goals of acquiring a larger share of European trade for French merchants. Playing on Louis's resentment of Dutch "presumption" and "ingratitude," the ministers turned Louis away from the Spanish Netherlands, and constructed an apparently effective system of alliances to isolate the Dutch Republic.
Careful military planning ensured a rapid sweep across the Rhine and into the Dutch Republic in May 1672. The Dutch forces were ill-prepared and under strength; a frantic population lynched Johan and Cornelis de Witt, the principal directors of the States of Holland, and acclaimed William III of the House of Orange (1650–1702) as military leader and stadtholder. During the campaign of 1672 the French armies appeared unstoppable: Utrecht fell on 30 June, Nijmegen on 9 July. The Dutch offered generous terms for peace that would have abandoned any opposition to a French conquest of the Spanish Netherlands. But Louis now sought to destroy Dutch political autonomy and strip the Dutch of a swathe of landward territory extending northward to Utrecht. When the Dutch responded by flooding the land around Amsterdam and blocking the French advance, the rejection of the earlier Dutch peace proposals made both settlement and outright victory equally unattainable.
European alarm increased through the summer and autumn of 1672. Troops from Brandenburg intervened on behalf of the Dutch, but French forces drove them back in the last months of the year. More serious was the confrontational mood in Vienna, among many other princes in the Empire, and within Spain. In 1673, despite Louis's capture of the prestigious fortress of Maastricht, allied troops in Germany outmaneuvered the French and forced them onto the defensive. With supply lines to the Dutch Republic disrupted, Louis was obliged to evacuate all his troops from Dutch territory. Although French armies subsequently enjoyed piecemeal success and overran Franche-Comté for the second time in 1674, the war was now being fought in campaign theaters and for aims unconnected with original French war plans. Tax revolts at home and the worsening plight of the French economy indicated that the conflict was spiraling out of control. France was sustaining an unprecedented military burden of around 250,000 soldiers against a coalition that remained united in the face of military setbacks. Successive French campaigns alternated between years of military stagnation such as 1675, when the death of marshal Henri de La Tour d'Auvergne, vicomte de Turenne while leading his army led to the collapse of military activity in Germany, and years of impressive French military success such as 1678. Peace negotiations began at the Dutch city of Nijmegen as early as 1676, but they dragged on as the various powers surveyed the shifting balance of military advantage. When a series of agreements were finally reached between August 1678 and February 1679, it was clear that French victories late in the war had helped gain considerable advantages for Louis XIV. But Spain, not the Dutch Republic, paid the price of the settlement with the loss of Franche-Comté and further territory in the Spanish Netherlands. The Dutch profited, gaining the abolition of punitive French trade tariffs imposed in 1667, and economic recovery from the war years followed rapidly in the 1680s. The political and military turnaround since 1672 had entrenched William in the republic, and until his death in 1702, Dutch foreign policy was shaped by William's implacable hostility to Louis XIV.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Actes et Mémoires des Négociations de la Paix de Nimègue. Reprint. 4 vols. Graz, 1974. First edition, Amsterdam, 1679.
Louis XIV. Mémoires for the Instruction of the Dauphin. Translated and edited by Paul Sonnino. London, 1970.
Secondary Sources
Bély, Lucien. Espions et Ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV. Paris, 1990.
Ekberg, Carl J. The Failure of Louis XIV's Dutch War. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1979.
Israel, Jonathan I. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806. Oxford, 1995.
Rowen, Herbert H. The Ambassador Prepares for War: The Dutch Embassy of Arnauld de Pomponne, 1669–1672. The Hague, 1957.
——. John de Witt: Grand Pensionary of Holland 1625–1672. Cambridge, U.K., 1978.
Sonnino, Paul M. "Louis XIV and the Dutch War." In Louis XIV and Europe, edited by Ragnhild Hatton, pp. 153–178. London, 1976.
——. Louis XIV and the Origins of the Dutch War. Cambridge, U.K., 1988.
Wolf, John B. Louis XIV. New York, 1968.
—DAVID PARROTT
