THE WESTPHALIAN PROBLEM—that, absent an absolute and universal sovereign, every kingly state would attempt to aggrandize itself to the limit of its power—found its most threatening expression in the campaigns of Louis XIV that directly challenged the Westphalian settlement. The solution to this Problem was ultimately expressed in a series of eight treaties known as the Peace of Utrecht, which resolved the epochal war composed of Louis's campaigns.
France and Spain had signed the Peace of the Pyrenees in November 1659, ending the one remaining conflict left open by Westphalia, just as Cateau-Cambrésis finally ended the Valois-Habsburg wars four years after Augsburg. Louis XIV married the Spanish infanta in Bayonne and returned to Paris in triumph. France, after some years of turmoil following the death of Louis XIII, was now united.
Once Louis was liberated from internal challenges and the administrative despotism of a sophisticated kingly state was securely in place, he began to make war on the territorial settlements of Westphalia in order to become the arbiter of European affairs. During this period the French state was supreme on the continent. French became the language of diplomacy, French architecture and literature reached their zenith, and the French canons of manners and taste were accepted as the standard throughout Europe.
For seventeen years—from 1667, when he led an army into the Spanish Netherlands, until 1684 when the Truce of Ratisbon confirmed him in all his gains since 1678—Louis's ambition dominated European events. Louis attempted to compel the states of Europe to recognize Ratisbon as an amendment to the territorial dispositions of Westphalia. The design flaw of Westphalia was that it invited this limitless aggrandizement on the part of the prevailing kingly state. In the pursuit of his goal, Louis actually brought into being the coalition and the animating idea that would prove both his undoing and also the undoing of the kingly state itself.
In 1686 this coalition, the League of Augsburg, was formed between the emperor, the Dutch, the western German states, including the upper Rhine provinces, and, in the next year, Savoy. All were alarmed by French intentions and capabilities. Partly in reaction, partly in pursuit of his historic goals, Louis invaded Germany in 1688, burning Heidelberg and reducing the Rhine provinces to ruin. While Louis was thus engaged, William III of Orange landed in England, displaced Louis's ally James II, and took the English crown. Thus by the end of 1689, France faced the United Provinces, England, the Habsburg-led Empire, Spain, Savoy, and the principal German states. The Nine Years' War that ensued exhausted both sides, and in 1697 the Treaty of Ryswick brought a new armistice. Neither side was now able to penetrate the fortress line that divided them in the north. At this point Louis might have been content with his gains; he was certainly acutely aware of the forces arrayed against him. A diplomatic crisis developed, however, that ignited his dynastic ambition, ambition that drove the kingly state. This crisis, provoked by the death of Carlos of Spain in 1700, led to the final campaign of Louis's epochal war, the struggle over Spanish succession, in which Louis attempted to unite the French and Spanish kingdoms in the Bourbon line.
By 1709, however, Louis had withdrawn French forces from Spain and was fighting to preserve France itself. The battle of Malplaquet, near Mons, was a defeat for the French, though allied forces actually lost twice as many men. Now the allied campaign sank into a grinding, brutal, and expensive but indecisive struggle. Louis's efforts toward peace negotiations were consistently rebuffed.
Then in 1710 the Tory party resolved to end British participation in the war. The following year the emperor Joseph died—he had succeeded his father only six years before—and the Archduke Charles unexpectedly became emperor. Enthusiasm for continuing to fight in order to place this figure on the throne of Spain as well was hardly high in Britain. Bolingbroke, the new foreign secretary, argued that if Charles united the Habsburg possessions under a single crown, he would pose the same threat of hegemony that a Bourbon dynasty had created in uniting France and Spain. Thus Bolingbroke recast the purpose of the alliance as one organized to effect a balance of power (rather than to uphold the Treaty of London by recognizing the dynastic claims of the Archduke in opposition to Louis)—that is, replacing the war aims of a society of kingly states with those of a society of territorial states. By this means he provided the basis for a British about-face, as well as for the peace congress to follow.
Britain worked out a secret agreement with France. The British were to receive Gibraltar; Minorca; Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay in Canada; and, importantly, the asiento—the monopoly of the slave trade with the Spanish colonies—for twenty years. In return for these commitments, Britain forced the Dutch to agree to a general congress, threatening to make a separate peace if the Dutch refused. Thus the congress opened at Utrecht in January 1712, in a climate of mutual suspicion.