The Wars of Louis XIV

Book Review

Reviews by "Old Duffer"

John Lynn for Longman

And here comes John Lynn following the steps of his vast Giant of the Grand Siecle to give a brief history and analysis of the wars of Louis. One gets the firm impression that much of this has been extracted from Quincy, but since the latter is not available we will take it. There are some clear themes proposed by Lynn.

Firstly, that the real difficulty of the era was not starting a war well, but ending one gracefully. Louis' early wars were still pursued before France had reduced the number of available allies by its success. They tended to be shorter. But when France bestrode the Continent like a colossus it also faced states that were willing to go the extra mile to avoid defeat (not necessarily to win the victory).

It seems that one had to batter the other side to the ground, so much then for the limited range of the Lace Wars. The Nine Years War saw the French victorious repeatedly, but they still felt it worth abandoning much of their spoil in return for Peace. Indeed one begins to see the difficulty of the usual victory conditions. Where one side seeks Peace at almost any price (The Dutch in 1672 and Louis in 1708) the other side feels too cocky. In the end both sides can keep fighting far beyond their resources but at a terrible cost to the future (because of war-debt).

Lynn's other great theory is that war was not intended to be decisive with movements like a thunderclap. Instead he sees the style of warfare as attritional. Each Marshal in all his glorious raiment is still at heart a condottiere worrying about paying his men. The essence of the game, believes Lynn, is that one first controls resources and then uses those resources. The French, although wealthy, could only sustain war by fighting it at other peoples' expenses. Most of the campaigns were fought amongst the Walloons or the Rhenish Germans, all of whom paid contributions to Louis and not to their own rulers. Having seized "turf" the Marshal set about protecting it by either entrenching it (the Lines of Brabant or Stollhofen for example) or capturing controlling nodes – usually protected by fortresses. Rather like the prudent finance director considering his cash-flow the Marshal matched his forward projections of costs to finding the capital to finance them, and income to earn from them. Once he had built his base forward organically then he might move across the Rhine and seek to influence the Danube, but not in a precipitate fashion. Louis knew he was losing late in the Spanish Succession when the fortresses under siege were his French fortresses. Fortunately for him, England wanted the Asiento and not Landrecies. Lynn is seldom an exciting writer, but this is an exciting tale and for once well-told. It covers an era about which the Anglo-Saxons know little until the last episode. The analysis is prominent, and the detail sufficient to follow the wars easily on a theatre basis with the occasional diversion into greater detail. A recommend addition to Longman's excellent Modern Wars in Perspective. (And what can one say of an era when most of the French generals shared an initial with me!).

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© Copyright 1999 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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