The Peace of Westphalia

 

THE SETTLEMENT of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which ratified the constitution of the society of princely states, was thrown into doubt in 1608 when Prince Maximilian of Bavaria annexed and re-Catholicized the Lutheran city of Donauworth. The Augsburg settlement had given sovereign princes the right to determine the religion of their subjects according to each prince's religion; and it had permitted free emigration in order to allow the transfer of Lutherans or Catholics to a sympathetic prince or city. The Treaty had also barred any Catholic bishopric or free city from converting to Lutheranism, and it had required that any spiritual prince—certain cardinals and bishops—give up his office and lands upon becoming a Lutheran.*

The treaty, however, had simply made no provision for the seizure of a city; it had fixed frontiers as they had been in 1552. Re-Catholicization jeopardized all the Protestant holdings that were the result of Church lands having been secularized after 1552: the return of these properties—bishoprics, abbeys, cloisters, and countless parishes—not only meant the loss of incomes from these holdings but also the enforced conversion, or expulsion, of the populations involved. The collapse of the Augsburg Constitution invited the carnage of the Thirty Years' War, which might be thought of as a civil war within the young society of states.

Out of the anarchy that characterized the final stages of the Thirty Years' War, there arose a stronger, more coherent society of states whose legal structure was redefined by a new constitution for that society. This constitution is the set of treaties known collectively as the Peace of West-phalia. At the apex of this society was the kingly state of France, which had displaced Spain, the leading princely state. Richelieu, who died in 1642, had never deviated from the strategic plan with which he began: 1 to cut the communications of the Spanish with their possessions in the Netherlands, and to obtain entry into the politics of the Empire. On his deathbed his confessor asked, “Do you forgive your enemies?” To which he replied, “I never had any, except those of the State.”2 For a man who was targeted for assassination by the king's brother, among others, this shows a remarkable degree of personal detachment and a deep identification with the State. Indeed, this remark is the administrator's equivalent of the classic formulation of the kingly state— “L'tat, c'est moi” — the most famous utterance of the beneficiary of Richelieu's labors, who was four years old at the time of the cardinal's death.

Louis XIV, as the child became, continually asserted his own interpretations of the constitutional arrangements of the Peace of Westphalia and did his best to amend these arrangements by force. This raises two important points. First, “amendment” to an international constitution must be provided for or at least implicit in the constitution itself. The treaties of West-phalia accepted war as a legitimate means of changing the territorial settlement negotiated by the parties. Louis was not acting extraconstitu-tionally in his campaigns to expand his state and magnify his glory: the constitutional settlements that accompanied the subsequent wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invariably stated that they were merely partial renovations of the Westphalian agreements.3

Second, the domestic constitutional archetype of the State does not of itself determine the constitutional content of the international arrangement within which it sits; neither does the international constitutional form necessarily determine the domestic constitutional architecture. A kingly state may exist within a society dominated by princely states. An epochal settlement, like the Peace of Westphalia, however, recognizes and legitimates the dominant domestic constitutional order because that archetypal order has been forged in the conflicts that are composed by the peace settlement, and its triumph is reflected in the consensus that that triumph has wrung from the exhausted combatants.