alternatehistory.com

This is a project I've been working on for a while. You know me mostly from German wanks, but I assure you I am the real Onkel Willie ;). I hope everyone can forgive me for using a bit of a butterfly net in order not to make things too complicated for myself, meaning we'll still see some familiar 18th century figures like Frederick II (though whether he earns the epithet "the Great" remains to be seen). Without further ado I give you the first chapter.



Bourbon Delirium


Chapter I: The Franco-Dutch War and its Aftermath, 1672-1688.

Until the War of Devolution (1667-1668), King Louis XIV of France considered the Dutch United Provinces to be trading rivals, seditious republicans and Protestant heretics – but military allies nevertheless. In 1667 France started the War of Devolution and attacked the Spanish Netherlands because Spain had failed to pay the dowry of Louis’ wife Maria Theresa of Spain, which supposedly made the Queen’s renunciation of her inheritance invalid. France and the United Provinces had been friends and allies for a century, but this was ended by the Triple Alliance of 1668, which the Dutch signed with England (against whom they had just fought a war) and Sweden in support of Spain (also a recent foe of the Dutch). Louis now felt stabbed in the back by the Dutch, and came to regard them as an obstacle to French expansion into the Spanish Netherlands.

During the four years of peace following the War of Devolution, Louis prepared for war against the DutchRepublic. Louis’ first and primary objective was to gain the support of England, which wasn’t hard to do since the English felt threatened by the growing naval power of the Dutch. Indeed, the English had already fought two “navigation wars” against the Dutch – the first navigation war (or Anglo-Dutch War) was fought in 1652-1654, during Cromwell’s Commonwealth government in England. The second navigation war (Second Anglo-Dutch War) had just recently occurred from 1665 to 1667 and had been a decisive Dutch victory. Thus, the English did not need much encouragement to leave the Triple Alliance they had signed with the Dutch United Provinces, but to help things along, Louis XIV agreed to send financial support to the English in the amount of three million pounds annually. Sweden agreed to indirectly support the invasion by threatening Brandenburg-Prussia if that state should intervene in the war against the Dutch Republic.

Measures taken by the Marquis de Louvois, Secretary of War under Louis XIV, allowed France to mobilize about 180.000 men. Of these about 120.000 would be used directly against the United Provinces. The bulk of the French army was divided into two bodies, one of which was stationed in Charleroi under the command of Henri Turenne. This force would make its way down the Sambre River to the Meuse River and then march northward along the left bank of the Meuse to attack the Dutch. Another column of the French army under the command of Prince Louis II of Condé (the Great Condé) waited in Sedan. He would attack the Dutch up the right Bank of the Meuse. Meanwhile a third body of the French army, created from the allied armies of the prince-bishops of Münster and Cologne and under the command of Lieutenant-General Luxembourg was stationed in Westphalia. England declared war on the Dutch United Provinces on April 7th 1672, starting the third navigation war or Third Anglo-Dutch War.

Louis XIV arrived in Charleroi on May 5th 1672. Louis intended to advance into the Spanish Netherlands with the main part of his army – the 50.000-man force stationed at Charleroi, France, under the command of Marshal Turenne. On May 11th, the French army set off marching into the Spanish Netherlands and unexpectedly bypassed the major fortress of Maastricht, taking the small Dutch fort of Maaseik near Maastricht instead. The capture of this small fort provided a base from which the French could make sure the garrison at Maastricht stayed bottled up in their fort while they crossed the Rhine and marched into the heart of the DutchRepublic. The French took four small fortresses on the Rhine – Rheinberg, Wesel, Burick and Orsoy – and then moved on to capture the city of Utrecht on June 30th. Back on the border with Cleves, Marshal Turenne invested the fortress of Nijmegen on July 3rd 1672 with 4.000 infantrymen and some 400 men on horseback. The garrison of the fortress surrendered six days later. From Nijmegen, Marshal Turenne moved against FortCréve-Coeur close to ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which fell after only two days.

Despite the general mood of defeatism, the situation was not as immediately desperate as the population believed. De Witt had assumed the conflicting interests of England and France would prevent their successful co-operation. The two kings, motivated by a shared lust for revenge, had put their differences aside as long as their immediate common goal of humiliating the Republic had not been reached. Now that it was, each began to worry the other would benefit too much from the war; neither would allow a complete domination of the Republic, and its huge mercantile assets, by his formal ally.

Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, like many others, felt that the situation was hopeless and sued for peace. Given the context of mutual distrust between the French and their English allies, Louis’ was interested when a Dutch mission arrived to offer territorial and financial compensation in exchange for an end to hostilities. Louis demanded only Delfzijl, by far the least important port Charles desired, for the English. He accepted peace on the condition that the Dutch ceded the Generality Lands. [1] These were territories conquered from Spain in the Eighty Years’ War and directly governed by the States-General, lacking their own States Provincial as well as representation in the States-General. The Dutch ceded Flanders of the States (a.k.a. Zeelandic Flanders), Brabant of the States (a.k.a. North Brabant) and Limburg of the States, containing the southern fortress cities of Breda, Den Bosch and Maastricht, and they paid ten million guilders in war reparations. Also, from now on, the so-called Redemptiedorpen – villages which were independent on the condition that they paid taxes to both Holland and the Duchy of Brabant – ceased to pay taxes to the Dutch and paid the French instead. Thusly, the war ended in 1673.

In the aftermath of his debacle, Johann de Witt resigned and withdrew from political life, dying in December 1703 aged 78, outliving his rival William III who outmanoeuvred him by over a year. William III was proclaimed Stadtholder of the republic, using the situation to effectively become an authoritarian military strongman. He, however, inherited a greatly weakened DutchRepublic which lost its primacy in world trade and its great power status, two processes that went hand in hand. During the last quarter of the seventeenth century and much of the 1800s the republic’s economy would decline considerably, causing deindustrialization and deurbanization. Nonetheless a rentier-class kept accumulating a large capital fund that formed the foundation for Dutch leadership in the international capital market.

The former Generality Lands took a completely different course, especially politically and religiously. For decades, Catholics in the Netherlands had been a minority and their communal worship had been tolerated on the condition that it was conducted discretely and not in public spaces. Even in the Generality Lands, where Catholics were in fact the vast majority of the population, this applied (though it seems discriminatory, back then it was in fact a major stride forward in religious tolerance at a time when minority faiths were often persecuted). In 1673, the Holy See created the dioceses of Terneuzen and Maastricht which corresponded to the now French provinces of Zeelandic Flanders and Limburg (not to be confused with the Spanish controlled Duchy of Limburg). They also created the archdiocese of Bois-le-Duc (Den Bosch), which controlled the new ecclesiastical province composed of all three former Dutch territories. In 1676, to emphasize the triumphant return of the Roman Catholic Church, the new French rulers tore down the disused and dilapidated gothic Saint John’s Cathedral of Bois-le-Duc and some nearby slums. In 1679, they then started construction on a grand, ornate cathedral and adjacent palace for the archbishop in classicist style which befitted the city’s new status as an archdiocesan city. This was the New Saint John’s Cathedral, which was completed 26 years later in 1705 and had nearly twice the capacity of the original.

In the meantime, Louis XIV found the idea of clandestine churches appealing. Though Protestants had lost their independence in places of refuge under Richelieu as well as many of their political and military privileges after renewed religious war in the 1620s, they continued to live in comparative security and political contentment. From the outset, religious toleration in France had been a royal, rather than a popular policy. The lack of universal adherence to his religion (Roman, or rather Gallican, Catholicism) did not sit well with Louis XIV's vision of perfected autocracy. As he desired his rule, which was by the grace of God, to be absolute in every way imaginable Louis XIV resented the presence of heretics and outright non-Christians among his subjects. However, he also realized that French Protestants, commonly known as Huguenots, occupied important places in society and many of them were commercially successful and politically loyal, some of them being skilled craftsmen (working in the silk, plate glass, silver smith, watch making and cabinet making industries). Also, the population of New France was growing very slowly compared to neighbouring British North American colonies, but as of yet non-Catholics weren’t allowed to settle there. Opportunity knocked: the Huguenots could be useful and outright persecuting them would be unwise since it could cause an outright brain drain.

In 1683, the Edict of Fontainebleau was issued which determined that non-Catholic worship in France would only be tolerated if it was conducted discretely and not in public spaces. Clandestine churches and synagogues – inside houses or disguised to look like barns and other inconspicuous buildings – arose across France. Additionally, non-Catholics had to pay an additional per capita tax known as the “Fontainebleau tax”: officially it was a fee for the Catholic ruler to be able to protect his non-Catholic subjects from persecution; secondly, it was to be material proof of religious minorities’ political loyalty; officiously it was mostly a discriminatory tax meant to raise revenue to fund new wars. Protestants and Jews that converted to Catholicism would of course be exempt, but so would those who migrated to New France.

For Protestants it was a step backward in terms of emancipation (but French Jews now had much greater freedoms). Within fifty years over 150.000 Protestants, Calvinist Huguenots but also Lutherans, and 10.000 Jews went to New France, giving it a strong demographic and economic boost while ridding France of unwanted religious dissenters. Now seeing the use of New France as an easy way to get rid of unwanted people, Louis XIV started to “export” lowlifes, vagrants, prostitutes, and especially convicts. Most of these convicts were not heavy criminals, but skilled farmers and tradesmen that had ended up in jail for fairly minor offences theft of an animal, cutting down a tree, public intoxication, failing to show proper respect to social superiors etc. (minor offences like that could still get you up to a decade’s worth of hard time in those days). They rejoiced at a chance to get out early, even if it was on the condition that they embarked on an arduous venture.

These social pariahs were flung into the cargo holds of ships headed for the port of Nouvelle Paris for a voyage that could last over two months and were treated little better than slaves while plagued by scurvy, malnourishment, dehydration and illness which sometimes killed up to a quarter of them (later voyages would see much smaller mortality rates due to improved hygiene and better/more food). The first prison ships, carrying 804 prisoners, arrived at Nouvelle Paris in 1690 and by 1740 95.000 convicts (of which 19.000 were women) were transported. Most were put to work as indentured labourers, working for room and board, until their sentence was completed (usually after at least seven years). After their formal release most were given a plot of land large enough to sustain them (and their families, if applicable) to prevent a return to crime. Some others, however, misbehaved and were subjected to harsher prison regimes.

Louis XIV dismissed the protests of the archbishop seated in Quebec, who was the spiritual head of the Catholic Church in all of New France (the only archdiocese in the world spanning a continent). Archbishop François de Laval was deeply worried about the arrival of these criminals, heretics and outright non-Christians since the populations’ fervour was already very weak due to limited religious supervision, which would only be made worse by the arrival of religious competition as well as immoral criminals. Louis simply told him to buck up and put more effort into conversion efforts and, if need be, ask for help from the Vatican. In order to step up missionary activities, the archdiocese of New France requested support in terms of money and personnel from the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, the congregation of the Roman Curia responsible for missionary work and related activities.

That didn’t stop the colony from becoming more religiously and socially diverse. For example Nouvelle Paris[2] developed a Jewish quarter known as “Petit Jerusalem” where most of New France’s Jews lived. They constituted 20% of the city’s population in the middle of the eighteenth century. The colony also became more economically vibrant: large tracts of land were settled and made suitable for farming. This often went at the expense of traditional Native American hunting grounds, who responded with cattle theft and raids, followed by swift and brutal French retaliation. Other sectors of the economy were the fur trade, logging, game and fishing and, after the discovery of coal and iron ore, a burgeoning metallurgic industry. Hoped for large deposits of gold were not found. The sparsely populated colony, with less than 15.000 inhabitants spread out across an entire continent, began to turn into a well developed one. By 1750 New France had a population of 376.000. Most were either migrants from France or second or third generation settlers born there.

In 1694, a conglomerate of Huguenot and Jewish businessmen, migrants from France, was granted a monopoly on the slave trade to Louisiana by royal decree. A small town called Nouvelle Paris , built on natural levees along the Mississippi River, was the primary location where slaves disembarked. Some were loaded onto smaller river vessels headed north, but most stayed in New Paris and were sold on the slave markets organized there. New Orleans’s population of 2.000 sextupled in a decade and it become the economic hub of the entire colony (by the mid eighteenth century it had swollen to 42.000 inhabitants, making it the largest city in New France). To grow tobacco, coffee, sugarcane, indigo, cotton and cacao on the new estates they carved out for themselves, some the size of small countries, these men imported thousands of slaves from Africa and became slaveholders. All of the revenue they generated was taxed to fund the wars of their distant sovereign: the ambitious Sun King, Louis XIV.

[1] This is the PoD. IOTL Louis XIV rejected such a peace proposal and opted to continue the war against the Dutch, the end result of which we're all familiar with.
[2] OTL's New Orleans, except founded earlier and therefore under a different name as pointed out by one of my readers.
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