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By Root 2427 0

between 1643 and 1715, in 1667 Louis embarked on a programme of conquest that, on the surface, foreshadowed that of Napoleon. First of all, a series of conflicts with Holland and other powers brought France an important slice of the Spanish Netherlands and the region of Alsace, and then in 1700 the death without issue of King Charles II of Spain opened up the possibility of acquiring for France - or at least a suitable ‘cat’s-paw’ in the person of Louis’s grandson, Philippe - the whole of the inheritance of the Spanish Habsburgs. Had this ploy succeeded, Louis would have ended up with a sphere of influence encompassing Spain, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, Lombardy and the Spanish Netherlands, not to mention a colonial empire that would have incorporated much of North and South America.

With France effectively propelled to superpower status, her domination of Western Europe would have been total, and thus it was that a broad coalition of powers arose to challenge Louis in the War of the Spanish Succession. On the one side were France, Spain (where Philippe had quickly established himself as Felipe V) and a few minor German states that had fallen out with Austria; and on the other, Britain, Holland, Denmark, Austria and most of the states of the Holy Roman Empire. The following struggle was for its time at least as demanding as the Napoleonic Wars. The armies raised by the combatants were very substantial. In 1710 Louis XIV’s army amounted to 255,000 men and that of Queen Anne of Britain to about 58,000; indeed, one estimate places the figure for the French army as high as 360,000. At first sight these figures appear quite small, and certainly much smaller than the armies that were fielded in the Napoleonic period, but then, the population base was much lower. In 1700 France had about 20 million inhabitants, whereas by 1800 the figure had risen to some 33 million, the equivalent figures for Britain being 5 million and 16 million. With general prosperity and especially levels of agricultural prosperity at a lower level, warfare was also a far greater burden on society. And for France in particular the War of the Spanish Succession represented a veritable calvary. As Louis was unable to maintain a presence in either Germany or Italy, the entire weight of the struggle fell on his unfortunate subjects. Conscription was very heavy–between 1701 and 1713

455,000 men were called up - and still more men were periodically pressed to dig fortifications, with the result that agricultural production experienced a significant fall, thereby forcing up bread prices. Larger armies, an obsession with the attack and defence of fortresses and the ever greater prominence of cannon all made the cost of the fighting enormous. Between 1700 and 1706 government expenditure amounted to 1,100 million francs, while between 1708 and 1715 it rose to 1,900 million. Then in 1709 there came natural catastrophe. France had already been ravaged by epidemics of dysentery and other scourges, but in that year she was struck by one of the worst winters ever recorded. With the harvest completely destroyed, the populace succumbed to famine. No one knows how many died, but so apocalyptic are the descriptions that have come down to us that the figure certainly ran to many hundreds of thousands, and possibly several millions.

Elsewhere things were not quite so desperate (though some of the German states almost certainly put a greater proportion of their men under arms than they ever had to in the Napoleonic period), and it might, too, be pointed out that battles were by no means as frequent as they were a hundred years later. This was an important distinction, but when the rival armies did meet the results were still spectacular. In the first place, the field armies of the period were not that much smaller than their Napoleonic counterparts. At Blenheim, for example, 60,000 French and Bavarian troops faced 56,000 Allies; at Malplaquet Marlborough had 110,000 troops and Villars, 80,000; at Oudenarde 80,000 Allies fought 85,000 French; and at Ramillies the two sides had