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Updated: June 6, 2025
Louis, therefore, might lay claim to the whole inheritance of Charles II and entertain the hope of seeing the Bourbons supplant the Habsburgs in some of the fairest lands of Christendom. In opposition to the French contention, the emperor was properly moved by family pride to put forth the claim of his wife and that of himself as the nearest male relative of the Spanish king.
Next to the Habsburgs, the most influential German family in the eighteenth century was the Hohenzollern. As far back as the tenth century, a line of counts was ruling over a castle on the hill of Zollern just north of what is now Switzerland.
He was named cardinal and was recognized as Richelieu's disciple and imitator. From the death of the greater cardinal in 1642 to his own death in 1661, Mazarin actually governed France. Against the Habsburgs, Mazarin continued the great war which Richelieu had begun and brought it to a successful conclusion. In domestic affairs, he encountered greater troubles.
Had there been a similar movement in France, England, the United States, or even Italy, to-day the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs would be upon their thrones, realizing the fulfilment of the Pan-German vision.
But the Bavarian electors in the first half of the eighteenth century sacrificed a sound, vigorous policy of internal reform to a far-reaching ambition in international politics. Despite the bond of a common religion which united them to Austria, they felt that their proximity to their powerful neighbor made the Habsburgs their natural enemies.
He proposed to his fellow-countrymen to establish a monarchy, with some other dynasty than the Habsburgs on the throne, preferably the youngest son of the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel.
The treaty of the Pyrenees was the last important achievement of Cardinal Mazarin. But before he died in 1661 he had the satisfaction of seeing the triumph of those policies which he had adopted from Richelieu: the royal power firmly established within France; the Habsburgs, whether Austrian or Spanish, defeated and humiliated; the Bourbon king of France respected and feared throughout Europe.
The Habsburgs broke their compact with our nation by illegally transgressing our rights and violating the constitution of our state, which they had pledged themselves to uphold, and we therefore refuse any longer to remain a part of Austria-Hungary in any form.
To force into discordant union, tribes which, for seven centuries, had developed themselves into hostile nations, separated by geography and history, customs and laws, to combine many millions under one sceptre, not because of natural identity, but for the sake of composing one splendid family property, to establish unity by annihilating local institutions, to supersede popular and liberal charters by the edicts of a central despotism, to do battle with the whole spirit of an age, to regard the souls as well as the bodies of vast multitudes as the personal property of one individual, to strive for the perpetuation in a single house of many crowns, which accident had blended, and to imagine the consecration of the whole system by placing the pope's triple diadem forever upon the imperial head of the Habsburgs; all this was not the effort of a great, constructive genius, but the selfish scheme of an autocrat.
In the summer of 1603 it had been firmly but mysteriously arranged between the monarchs of France and Great Britain that the House of Austria should be crushed, its territories parcelled out at the discretion of those two potentates, the imperial crown taken from the Habsburgs, the Spaniards driven out of the Netherlands, an alliance offensive and defensive made with the Dutch republic, while the East and West Indies were, to be wrested by main force of the allies, from Spain, whose subjects were thenceforth to be for ever excluded from those lucrative regions.
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