The Financial Decline of a Great Power

The reign of Louis XIV was, to borrow a contemporary cliché, a game of two halves. The first two decades of his personal rule were marked by apparent successes on the battlefield and in diplomatic policy, alongside a firm restoration of the royal authority in the domestic sphere. Thereafter, storm clouds gathered, and, during the decade of the 1680s in particular, the king’s seemingly arrogant, overly aggressive policy of réunions and his cruel persecution of the Huguenots helped to crystallise fears of French power and ambition. When the king sanctioned the infamous campaign of 1688–9 in the Palatinate, he helped to consolidate a coalition of European powers which would fight long and hard during the ensuing Nine Years War (1688–97) to restrict French ambitions. After a gruelling conflict, during which France suffered the terrible famine of 1693–4, hopes of peace were high. Instead, the decision of Charles II, last Habsburg ruler of Spain, to bequeath his empire to Louis XIV’s grandson, the future Philip V, triggered yet another conflict, the global War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13). By now the balance of forces had shifted against France, and a series of painful defeats at Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde pushed the kingdom to the brink of collapse. Further demographic disasters, notably following the harsh winter of 1709, meant that, had the French army of Flanders succumbed at the battle of Malplaquet in September 1709, invasion and total defeat would almost certainly have followed. Instead, the king’s enemies won the definitive Pyrrhic victory, and thereafter French military fortunes gradually improved, allowing the maréchal de Villars to win the victory at Denain in July 1712 that would make an honourable peace possible

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