th sides, he
had been well content to see Germany watering its soil with the blood of
its people. Nearly a third of the population had been swept away during
the terrible war. Many hundreds of towns and villages had already
disappeared, while large tracts of country lay uncultivated, and
whichever party won a victory France gained by it. Her interest,
however, lay with the Protestant confederation. So long as Germany was
cut up into a number of small principalities, divided by religion and
political animosity, she could count for little against a foreign enemy.

France had for centuries suffered from the same cause. The families
of Lorraine, Bouillon, Enghien, Burgundy, the Guises, Longueville, the
Counts of Armagnac, and other powerful vassals of France, paid but a
nominal allegiance to the crown, and were really independent princes.
Louis XI had done much to break their power. Richelieu continued the
work, and under him France for the first time became consolidated into
a whole. Had he lived, the work would doubtless have been completed, but
his death and that of the king postponed the work for years. The long
regency, controlled by a minister possessing none of the courage and
firmness of Richelieu, and personally obnoxious alike to the nobles and
to the population of Paris, again threw the power into the hands of
the great nobles, plunged France into civil strife, and the wars of the
Fronde, like those of the Roses in England, so weakened the nobles that
the crown under Louis XIV became absolutely dominant.

Had Austria succeeded in crushing the Protestant princes, that empire,
with all Germany under her control, would have become a power greatly
superior in strength and population to France. It was principally to
prevent this result that Richelieu after the battle of Nordlingen threw
himself into the struggle, but his aim was also to carry the frontier of
France up to the Rhine. Here the territories of the Dukes of Lorraine,
and Bouillon Prince of Sedan, not only cut France off from the Rhine and
the Moselle, but opened a door by which she could at any time be invaded
from Germany. The Dukes of Lorraine had always borne themselves as
independent princes, giving, indeed, a nominal allegiance to France, but
as often allying themselves with German princes as with her. The Duc de
Bouillon, on the north of Lorraine, and the Duke of Savoy, farther
to the south, also regarded themselves as independent. The former, as
Hug