In the year 1500, Europe comprised some 500 or so princely domains, independent cities, and contested territories. By the middle of that century, the princely states that had superseded this rich variety of constitutional forms were already being transformed themselves by the advent of kingly states. Three such states in particular—Sweden, France, and England—embodied this nascent, potential constitutional successor to the princely state. Like Spain, all three had greatly expanded the permanent bureaucracies of the princely states, introducing and maintaining standing armies, and they had centralized taxation specifically directed toward the ability to finance war.2 As Charles Tilly concluded, European “state structure appeared chiefly as a by-product of rulers' efforts to acquire the means of war.”3 Not coincidentally these states commenced to codify their civil and criminal laws at this time, a constitutional ramification of the objectified State. The precise state structure that emerged during the period from roughly 1550 to 1660—the kingly state—was only one possibility. The imperial realm, a dynastic conglomeration of princely states, also presented an option. This was the constitutional form pursued by Habsburg Spain. France, whose development of the kingly state set the pattern for all others once it had shown itself to be strategically dynamic and overpowering, provided one constitutional model of the kingly state. Sweden also effected an historic transition from princely to kingly state when Gustavus Adolphus and his gifted minister Oxenstierna collaborated to transform a succession crisis into the consolidation of this new constitutional form. All of this unfolded when strategic developments decisively undermined the constitutional role of the princely state at the end of the century.
In 1494, the year that Charles VIII began his campaign in Italy, he did so at the head of a multinational army,* paid regularly by royal finances whose collection and disbursement had been reformed in order to provide a fully stipendiary force in the field for the life of the campaign. “With hindsight we can describe Charles VIII's force as the first ‘modern' army, in that it consisted of the three arms deployed in various mutually supporting tactical combinations, and was very largely made up of men paid from a central treasury.”4
The military lessons that the French invasion had prompted the princes and oligarchs of Italy to learn—the requirement of larger professional mercenary forces, the need for artillery, new fortress design—were applied by unified Italian administrative organizations supported by consistent finance. When France developed the princely state, however, she could draw on a great national culture, nourished by a vast and contiguous estate that could staff and pay for its bureaucratic apparatus, which in turn provided the mechanisms for raising even greater revenue. It is often said that the Valois successes in the Italian invasion can be attributed to the introduction of mobile artillery, and this is doubtless true. France had no monopoly on the manufacture of artillery, however. (Nor were there many “French” in the French army, it being mainly composed—like the forces of the Italian cities—of foreign mercenaries, chiefly Swiss.) Rather it was a combination of French reforms and the diplomatic paralysis of the Italian cities that led to the inevitable military outcome. In 1494 Charles VIII had moved against Naples, which had a secure dynasty and lay near to many of the richest cities in Europe, of which she was one, and had defeated the Neapolitan forces by February 1495. Initially, each of the neighboring cities had sought to defend its own autonomy rather than unite with Naples. Milan, in fact, gave the French army free passage. Florence revolted against its regime, and the citizens set up a republican government that was in effect a French satellite.
The princely state in Italy had been developed by families who wished to re-enforce their legitimacy to govern, and who required a more efficient means of marshaling wealth in order to defend their claims by means of expensive mercenaries. The kingly state took the Italian constitutional innovation—fundamentally, the objectification of the state—and united this with dynastic legitimacy. The result was a formidable creation that dominated Europe for the next century. Confronting the princely state and the imperial realm as competing constitutional forms, the kingly state proved able to vanquish these forms strategically and, as a consequence, historically. As before, the development of constitutional forms came about in tandem with a revolution in military tactics.
Prior to this period, the progress of operations in war had become increasingly drawn out. The combination of missile fire and rapid movement, so lethally effective at Agincourt in the fifteenth century, had been succeeded in the sixteenth century by the Swiss tactics using massive formations of pike and musket. The Swiss order of battle ranged men in twelve or more rows, practically immobilizing them once deployed. Spain used these tactics for the relentless and terrifying assaults of the tercio, a tightly packed rectangle, often fifty files wide and forty ranks deep, whose heart was formed of pikemen wielding fifteen-foot spears, flanked by mus-ketmen (arquebusiers) who protected the formation from cavalry attacks. The armies of which these formations were composed were hardly more mobile: they depended upon magazines located in fortresses and thus could not stray far or for long from their very limited communications with these fixed points. The fortresses themselves, reconstructed along the lines discussed earlier, could no longer be easily reduced by artillery, which meant that siege campaigns became more drawn out and were themselves a complex logistical process of assembling artillery and stores. Campaigns now came to revolve around sieges, and great battles were seldom fought. Europe appeared to be locked into a situation of military stalemate: a heavily defended fortress sheltering perhaps 10,000 troops had to be seized by an advancing army, but barring surprise (as in the capture of the Dutch towns in 1572 by the Sea Beggars) or treachery (as at Aalst in 1576, where the town was sold by its English garrison to the Spanish), this could be a matter of many months, even years.
The introduction of small arms, which dates to the middle of the six-teenth century, eventually changed this situation and brought a revolution in tactics. Reliance on firepower on the battlefield led not only to a changed role for the cavalry—because infantry now became a potentially decisive force—but also added urgency to the move to larger armies. Such a move depended upon consistent finance, centralized government organization, and logistics planning of a high order. When Michael Roberts coined the phrase “military revolution” to describe these innovations, his characterization became perhaps the single most influential concept in the studies of early modern warfare in Europe.5 He argued not only that these tactical changes were responsible for a dramatic shift in the strategy and scale of warfare, but also for a change in the societies that undertook such warfare.
What was this revolution in tactics and what brought it about? It is associated, at least in its initial appearance, with Maurice of Nassau, who led Europe in the development of a year-round professional force. The Dutch, owing to the great wealth amassed from their maritime trade, were able to afford a standing army. That meant that the state could specify the conditions of training, and this fact actually made possible the revolution in warfare that is associated with Maurice, the Dutch leader.
Maurice's cousin, William Louis of Nassau, wrote him a letter from Groningen dated December 8, 1594—which has been preserved—in which he first suggested the technique of an infantry countermarch. William Louis had just read Aelian's description of a drill practiced by the Roman army; inspired by this account, William Louis suggested that six rotating ranks of musketeers could replicate with gunfire the continuous hail of missiles that the Romans had achieved using javelins and slingshots. By this means, it would be possible to create tidal waves of fire through a coordinated fusillade, replacing individual aiming. Maurice modified the ancient Roman practice by alternating ten ranks in order to maintain constant musket fire, and the technique of rolling musket volleys soon became the standard battle tactic of European armies.6
This innovation was perhaps as crucial in the transformation of the state during this period as the development of fortresses had been in the previous era, or the use of artillery against fortified cities before then. Muskets capable of piercing armor plate at 100 yards had been introduced earlier in the century, but the rate of fire was torturously slow, owing to the complicated process of reloading. If this problem could be solved, however, muskets promised to remake armies because muskets required little experience to use compared to the long bow and were as effective against cavalry as the pike. Moreover, large tight squares of pikemen made attractive targets for the not-very-accurate muskets.
If the innovation of fortress design had been to take a target—the fortified city—and transform it into a platform for fire, then the Spanish tercio did much the same thing for shock: it took infantry otherwise vulnerable to charges from cavalry and made them a sort of gunless prototank, invulnerable and inexorable. These slow-moving formations would crush anything in their way, unless it was another such massive square, in which case neither side would gain a decisive advantage. Battles tended therefore, like sieges, toward stalemate. The tactics of the period provided no effective means of penetrating this type of defense in depth.
Maurice, however, saw
that fire power was now the decisive element rather than shock: that the pike was there to protect the musket, not the other way round. It was thus necessary to devise both formations which would maximize fire power, and procedures to ensure its continuous and controlled delivery. Instead of pike squares several thousand strong… Maurice adopted elongated formations of musketeers… countermarching in their files, reloading as they did so, so that their front rank was always giving continuous fire.7
In the armies that adopted this innovation—the forces of the anti-Habsburg coalition—the infantry was deployed in shallower, more linear firing formations that allowed for more tactical flexibility than did the tercio, with its massive squares of infantry composed of central blocks of pikemen forty to sixty soldiers deep, encased on all sides by deep sleeves of musketeers who protected them from assault. To perfect these tactics, intricate drills were practiced in order to speed up the rate of fire until Gus-tavus Adolphus introduced a variation that concentrated fire on massive simultaneous volleys by multiple ranks, opening up the opposing pike formation to a cavalry charge. While Spanish cavalry were still practicing the traditional caracole—in which successive ranks of horsemen charged toward an enemy line, fired their handguns and then wheeled off to the flanks—Swedish cavalry restored the attack with the saber, directly charging into those ranks decimated by a focused musket volley.
These innovations required a great degree of control by the commander, a prerequisite of which is discipline in the ranks. “It was discipline and not gunpowder,” Max Weber concluded, “which initiated the transformation. [G]unpowder and all the war techniques associated with it became significant only with the existence of discipline.”8 That in turn was only possible with forces that were constituted over a long term, were constantly drilled, and sought their identity in the professional esteem of the corps, rather than the glory of feudal knights or the personal enrichment of mercenaries. This required a state apparatus, but not just any sort of state. Rothenberg reminds us that, up to this time,
the greatest obstacle to the conduct of consistent military operations could be found [not just in problems of logistics and siege warfare, but] in the social characteristics of most armies. Altogether, the ascendancy of the tactical defense, the strength of the new fortifications, and the mercenary character of troops explain why warfare in Europe had become so drawn out and indecisive.9
Therefore, when Maurice of Nassau attempted to exploit the use of infantry firepower through a technique that put a premium on fast arming, he introduced further innovations, which required standardization in weaponry and the extensive training of troops. Only thorough practice could train troops to withstand the terror of cavalry charges without losing their nerve and either breaking and running, or at the very least disrupting the complicated rhythm of the volley and permitting themselves to be assaulted at close quarters. When Gustavus Adolphus adopted these tactics, putting his troops in line (rather than in the classic squares that had dominated European battlefields), he changed their tactical mission. By teaching his forces to use a countermarch in which musketeers rotated their positions by slowly moving through the ranks of their own men, moving backward to reload, then moving forward through stationary reloaders, he enabled his line to take the offensive rather than being forced to remain static. These tactics had the effect of restoring the infantry to its status as a battle-winning force and reducing the significance of the artillery-encrusted bastioned fortresses. Such tactics, however, required the continuity of substantial forces in being. Only a standing army would have the professionalism to execute such complicated and harrowing tactics. Roberts argued that these standing armies tended to enhance monarchical power, and militarize the nobility as well as much of the general populace through conscription. Thus there was, he argued, a mutually reinforcing relationship between the professionalization of the military required by these tactical innovations and the rise of the kingly state. Roberts wrote that “the new principle of concentrating military power under the absolute control of the sovereign” was a consequence of “the transformation in the scale of war [that] led inevitably to an increase in the authority of the state… Only the state, now, could supply the administrative, technical, and financial resources required for large-scale hostilities.”10 Speaking of this period, William McNeill concurred that “new weaponry began to favor larger states and more powerful monarchs,” and he referred to the “centralizing effects of the new technology of war.”11 As Jeremy Black has observed of Roberts's thesis,
the chronology of military change is apparently matched by a more general political chronology… Thus the modern art of war, with its large professional armies and concentrated yet mobile firepower, was created at the same time as—and indeed made possible and necessary by—the creation of the modern state.12
The strategic innovations of ever more expensive fortress design and complex infantry fire crushed those constitutional forms that could not adapt in order to exploit those innovations: first princely states, with their modest revenue bases; then the discontinuous Habsburg empire of princely states that risked decisive battles in so many theatres that it was bled dry by the new, more dynamic and lethal warfare.
The chief advantage of the kingly state over the princely states it dominated was sheer scale. Yet this advantage was not enjoyed by the Habsburg empire, which assembled a vast collection of princely states into a single constitutional unit. It is important to see how, despite enormous wealth and experienced forces, who were, as at Nördlingen, capable of devastating victories, the Habsburg imperial constitutional form was nevertheless vulnerable to the escalating possibilities of violence posed by the revolution in tactics.
The sheer quantitative advantage that imperial and kingly forms shared should not blind us to the constitutional, qualitative difference between the kingly state and the princely state. Henry VIII may have broken with Rome in order to marry again, a princely prerogative, but the fact that he could make himself head of a new national church is indicative of a change in the nature of monarchy.
When at the end of this period, the last of the great figures of the kingly state proclaimed, “L'état, c'est moi,” he was saying no more than other monarchs of the kingly state could have claimed; but he was saying a great deal more than the proudest Medici or Sforza. The kingly state had a voice distinct from that of the princely state. We can hear it clearly in the work of Jean Bodin, one of the most influential European political philosophers. In his preface to the Six Books Concerning a Republic, written in 1576, Bodin attacks Machiavelli—the poet of the princely state—for suggesting that the leader of a state is bound to different moral rules than an ordinary man. Machiavelli's idea is fundamental to the notion of the State as something other than a human being, and thus something in whose service the prince must obey imperatives other than those that govern ordinary human behavior. Bodin challenges this advice as tending to weaken the monarch's authority. Whereas for the princely state the great leap is from the prince as person to the prince plus an administrative structure—the prince and the State—the transformation to the kingly state (the state already having been objectified) reverses this move and makes the monarch the apotheosis of the State. To put it differently: the princely state severed the person of the prince from his bureaucratic and military structure, thereby creating a state with attributes hitherto reserved to a human being; the kingly state reunites these two elements, monarch and state, and makes of the king the State itself: “L‘état, c'est moi.”
If such a king were seen as immoral, Bodin argued, this would undermine the state's legitimacy. Moreover, he wrote:
In addition to the counselors of tyranny [e.g., Machiavelli], there are others… who are no less dangerous and are maybe even more so. These are the ones who under the pretext of the people's liberties cause subjects to rebel against their natural princes, and thereby open the way to factious anarchy which is worse than tyranny ever was.13
These “others,” perhaps even more “dangerous” than Machiavelli, were writers who claimed the right of resistance for the people. Bodin insisted that all authority had to be vested in a sovereign, a single will. The king could impose any law on his subjects with or without their consent; to hold otherwise meant that the State was something less than sovereign, that it could be thwarted as when a man with a severe physical disorder finds himself unable to command his limbs to move. A king's will is the sovereign of the State just as a man's will is the sovereign of his body. This is the credo of absolutism, and it is the constitutional doctrine of the kingly state.
Perhaps we today are inclined to exaggerate the actual absolutism of the kingly state.14 Things may look more monolithic from a distant perspective. Doubtless a more consensual and complex arrangement prevailed at the time than may now appear. For our purposes, however, it is enough to observe that contemporaries of this period perceived both an enormous change under way in the centrality of the State as well as a crisis of legitimacy besetting that State. For it was a significant change to place the State in man, especially when it had been scarcely a century since the State was torn from the local princes who were so soon to be made redundant by it. Hobbes saw this clearly, and made it his life's work to give reasons why the monarch was not simply another man—owing to the move to an objectified State—and why the obedience owed the State could be owed to a man. In the Behemoth, he complains:
Lastly, the people in general were so ignorant of their duty [they had been seduced and corrupted], that no one perhaps of ten thousand knew what right any man had to command him, of what necessity there was of King or Commonwealth, for which he was to part with his money against his will; but thought himself to be so much master of whatsoever he possessed, that it could not be taken from him upon any pretense of common safety without his own consent. [Moreover] king, they thought, was but a title of the highest honor, to which gentlemen, knight, baron, earl, duke were but steps to ascend to, with the help of riches…15
To overcome this attitude had been one of the chief goals of the consti-tutional form of the kingly state. Some form of constitutional response was certainly necessary owing to those strategic innovations that were marginalizing the princely states as well as imposing new demands upon them. The kingly state established itself as an absolute yet legitimate state form in the era that witnessed the permanent schism of the ecclesiastical regime (which had been the main barrier to the emergence of the kingly state) and the destruction of the imperial regime (which was the kingly state's main rival to succeed the princely state as the dominant constitutional order in Europe).
This outcome was far from obvious in the first half of the sixteenth century when Charles V attempted to consolidate a Habsburg empire against the opposition of the French king Francis I. In a way, the princely state can be said to have originated in the rivalry between the Habsburg dynasty and that of the Angevin/Valois of France, because the invasion of Italy in 1494 had been undertaken to support a French claim to the throne of Naples against the claims of Aragon; to this claim was later added the assertion of a French dynastic right to the Duchy of Milan against the Sforzas and their Imperial patrons. The opposition to French claims became unified, however, and vastly increased with the consolidation in one Habsburg heir, Charles V, of a staggering dynastic inheritance. Thereafter the modest princely states of the Italian peninsula were no longer principal players. Instead, Charles's vast continental realm of dynastic properties was eventually opposed by an alliance of princely states led by the champions of the emerging constitutional order of kingly states. Thus the competing variants of the State all contended, and, thanks to the sheer scope of Charles's inheritance, these forms played for stakes that would be historically decisive.
Charles was born at Ghent in 1500. His father was the Habsburg archduke of Austria, son of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, and of Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy. Charles's mother was the daughter of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile. Thus Charles promised to unite within one person an Austrian-Spanish realm that included the Low Countries, to which he might add the German emperorship and even lay fair claim to Burgundy. It was an astounding example of the dynastic conglomerations that were acquired through inheritance and the alliances of marriage. Such a “realm,” as I have used the term, was in essence a personal union of territories. To the modern eye some of these dynastic states seem very odd indeed, and would appear to have little hope of survival; their various geographic components seem too disparate in terms of culture, language, and institutions. This observation, however, anticipates the outcome of a struggle that Charles V and his successors had first to play out: it is only because the universalism of the Empire and the Church was shattered during that struggle that it seems to us that national culture, language, and local institutions are the stuff out of which viable states must be made. Indeed it was Charles's goal to reverse this development and restore the unity of a Catholic Europe.*
One might say that the inheritance of Charles V created the conditions for a perfect experiment to determine whether in fact the State could encompass many different nations once the Reformation had so greatly sharpened the cultural differences among the peoples under his rule.
When Charles was crowned emperor in 1519, he had inherited not only vast dynastic properties from his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon and his other grandfather, Maximilian, but also quarrels over the thrones of Naples and Milan, respectively; plus a third dispute over the crown of Navarre from one grandmother, Isabella, as well as a fourth dynastic claim, from his other grandmother, over lands lost to France by her father, the Duke of Burgundy. In all of these disputes his antagonist was the losing candidate for the emperorship, Francis I, who had become king of France.
What is important for our study is that both Charles and Francis failed to achieve their strategic objectives, so that by the end of this period in the mid-sixteenth century, it was clear that a dynastic realm agglomerating princely states across Europe could not succeed in creating an imperial state. Such an entity simply could not manage sufficient control of its domestic resources in order to maintain standing armies capable of the prolonged campaigns required to vindicate dynastic claims that were often geographically remote and politically fraught.
It took an entire century, however, for the new constitutional form of the kingly state to triumph, ascending a helical staircase whose steps connected religious conflicts on one side and dynastic ones on the other. For at the same time that Charles V was concluding the compact of Noyon with Francis I, which provided him with safe passage to his new Spanish inheritance, Martin Luther was proclaiming his doctrines for the reform of the Church. In the ensuing two decades—that is, until the beginning of the more radical career of John Calvin, which made matters considerably more difficult—religious strife rendered the domestic bases of both Francis and Charles ever more insecure, so that when their conflict ended with Francis's death in 1547, the main objective of Charles's policy was the suppression of the Protestant cause, which he himself had done much indirectly to support when his pursuit of hegemony in Europe had united anti-imperial German princes with religious reformers. Charles's motives at this moment were expressed in a letter to his sister:
[I have decided to attack the Protestant League because] if we fail to intervene now, all the Estates of Germany would be in danger of breaking with the faith… After considering this and considering it again, I decided to embark on war against Hesse and Saxony as transgressors of the peace… [a]nd although this pretext will not long disguise the fact that it is matter of religion, yet it will serve for the present to divide the renegades.16
The hostility of France toward Habsburg designs did not die with Francis, however personal the quarrel with Charles. Indeed the possibility of alliance between German princes and Henry II, Francis's successor, drove Charles to agree to the Treaty of Passau, whose provisions led to the Augsburg settlement in 1555.
Augsburg is an historic agreement because it provided that rulers were to determine the religious denomination of their respective states (the constitutional principle of cuius regio eius religio), matching Lutheran princes with Lutheran subjects and Catholic rulers with Catholic peoples. According to this principle, the decisions of the ruler as to which sectarian preference to adopt were binding also upon his subjects with the concession that dissatisfied persons were welcome to emigrate to more congenial states. This, with the migrations that followed, sealed the dominance of the princely state over the feudal princes who had ruled within a universal Christendom, and intensified the sectarian basis of the princely state. Augsburg enshrined the constitutional form of the princely state because it attached to the State an attribute—religious affiliation—hitherto associated with a human being, the prince.
Charles, in frustration and despair at these developments, which forever fragmented Europe and ended his dream of a restored, single Christendom, abdicated in October 1555. He left his Spanish dominions (including the Netherlands) to his son, Philip II, and arranged for the imperial crown to be assumed by his brother Ferdinand, who possessed the Austrian lands of the Habsburgs. A putative constitutional successor to the princely state—a dynastic empire accumulating many princely states—had thus far failed.
Although foreigners frequently regarded the empire of Charles V or that of Philip II as monolithic and disciplined, it was in fact a congeries of territories… There was no central administration… The absence of such institutions which might have encouraged a sense of unity and the fact that the ruler might never visit the country, made it difficult for the king to raise funds in one part of his dominions in order to fight in another.17
But the princely states of Italy had not succeeded either, for these states had been extinguished by the wars between Charles and Francis, with whom the comparatively small states of the Italian cities could not compete, even though they had pioneered the techniques by which the energies and resources of their conquerors were concentrated. The sack of Rome by Habsburg mercenaries in 1527 is perhaps the best date for the death certificate of the innovative Italian states whose “precocious development of an urban economy”18 had produced the wealth that could employ, and the vulnerability that would require, mercenary forces and had thus begun the process of modern state formation. The next historic constitutional event, the development of the kingly state, could not be completed so long as civil war threatened those great states that were candidates for absolute monarchical rule. A domestic, constitutional imperative—consolidation—drove the strategic aims of the State; when this was accomplished the strategic innovations by which this prerequisite was achieved still required further constitutional change before the kingly state, a unified, autocratic, monarchical state—the “absolute” State of early modern Europe—could fully emerge. Such states, though legitimated by dynastic rules, had to be reconfigured by the demands of war for mass taxation and state efficiency.
The Peace of Augsburg had the unfortunate effect of giving free rein to savage repression by those sovereigns who stayed within its rules, and thus the Inquisition and the civil wars in France, Germany, and the Netherlands began in earnest at this time. The ensuing Thirty Years' War made evident the weakness of both the princely and the imperial options for the state. But the kingly state did not truly triumph as a stable and powerful entity until constitutional centralization became a reality. The Peace of West-phalia, ending the Thirty Years' War, ratified this new political creation, uniting the legitimacy of the dynastic realm and the Italian administrative innovations of the Renaissance, with the permanence of a fixed and contiguous national population. Westphalia provided France—the first and most successful kingly state—with a period of domestic consolidation, and effectively ended the Habsburg drive for empire. Ironically, it also set the stage for the next constitutional form of the state, the territorial state,* as if the triumph of one constitutional order somehow germinates the form that will ultimately vanquish it.
In France, as in the rest of Europe, the experience of the Italian Renaissance had paved the way for the Reformation. The Italian Wars begun by Charles VIII in 1494 had brought the French into contact with a spirit that is reflected in the colorful chateaux that replaced the dark feudal castles of medieval France, and in the works of Rabelais, and, somewhat later, Montaigne. In time this spirit must catch fire in theology: five years before Luther's 95 theses, a lecturer in Paris had published a commentary on St. Paul in which the doctrine of justification by faith was asserted.
In response to these developments, Charles's successor, Francis I, and his successor, Henry II, favored a policy of Protestant suppression; this became in time a policy of persecution. The accession of Francis II produced no change. When, in 1560, a Protestant conspiracy to seize the government was exposed, a new round of persecution began. The death of Francis II in 1560 brought an eleven-year-old, Charles IX, to the throne. Neither he, nor his mother, Catherine de Medici, nor her other son, Charles's successor, Henry III, seem to have had any especially intense sectarian convictions. Their chief goal was simply to maintain themselves in power between two powerful contending parties. In the event, they presided over forty years of civil war, including the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of Protestants on August 24, 1572, which is as good a date as any to mark the end of the princely state in France. The massacre was a consequence of strategems attributed to the Florentine Queen Mother whereby the leader of the Protestant party was to be killed, and the blame laid on the leader of the Catholic party. The last Valois monarch, Henry III, finally murdered the head of the Catholic League, and was himself assessinated by a Burgundian monk. After four further years of fighting, Henry of Navarre, a Calvinist Bourbon prince who was the next in the dynastic line, agreed to a nominal conversion to Catholicism—his was the famous phrase, “Paris is worth a mass”—and was crowned at Chartres in 1594. Having subdued the last remnants of civil war, Henry propounded the Edict of Nantes on April 13, 1598, granting religious toleration to all sects. His assassination in 1610 by a deranged monk cut short this experiment in multiculturalism, and made way for the full development of the kingly state in France, which depended upon a united, rather than internally tolerant but divided, populace.
The architect of the French kingly state was the remarkable minister Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. One significant contrast between the kingly and princely states can be detected in the contrasting concepts of raison d‘état and ragione di stato, principles of the kingly and princely constitutional orders, respectively. Among the Italian princely states, ragione di stato simply stood for a rational, unprincipled justification for the self-aggrandizement of the State, whereas raison d‘état achieved a parallel justification through the personification of the state, and leveraged the imperatives of this justification to impose obligations on the dynastic ruler. This enabled Richelieu to pursue a policy abroad that was in pragmatic harmony with his domestic policy, though distasteful to his ruler. Such an approach contrasted also with the constitutional imperatives of the Habsburgs: Olivares, Richelieu's Spanish counterpart, was not allowed the same latitude, dealing as he was with a dynastic ruler who was not committed to the personification of the state but rather to the reverse, one who instead saw his realm as an objectification of himself. “If constitutions do not allow this, then the devil take constitutions,” Philip IV once exclaimed in frustration. Thus Olivares's strategic designs were largely governed by Philip's personal religious convictions, a limitation that ultimately proved fatal to the plans of both men. Richelieu, on the other hand, contended that state decisions were not to be confused with questions of personal religious preference: the State (and therefore the king who embodied the State) had special responsibilities for preserving peace and the general welfare, and the king was divinely appointed to this role. History does not record Richelieu's reply to a prominent Jansenist who asked, “Would [the king] dare to say to God: let your power and glory and the religion which teaches me to adore You be lost and destroyed, provided the state is protected and free from risks?” but we can imagine his reply: “Take this up with God—it is He who has imposed this responsibility on me.”