France Declares War on Spain

MAY 19 1635 · 12:00

Cardinal Richelieu, architect of France's open entry into the war on the Protestant side in 1635. Place: Grand-Place, Brussels (the French herald) · the Council, Paris (the declaration) Figures: Cardinal Richelieu, First Minister of France · Louis XIII of France · Philip IV of Spain · the French herald Jean Gratiollet, who read the declaration A Herald in the Grand-Place On the morning of 19 May 1635 a French herald, Jean Gratiollet, presents himself in the Grand-Place of Brussels and reads aloud Louis XIII's formal declaration of war against Philip IV of Spain. The pretext is technical: Spanish troops have seized the Elector of Trier, a French ally, the previous spring. The substantive reason had been visible since Nördlingen the previous September: the Habsburg recovery in Germany threatened to free Spanish forces to envelop France from the Pyrenees, Italy, the Low Countries, and Franche-Comté simultaneously. Catholic France has been subsidizing Lutheran Sweden against Catholic Habsburgs since the Treaty of Bärwalde (see [[gustavus-adolphus-lands-1630]]) four years earlier. With Sweden visibly faltering and the Peace of Prague (see [[peace-of-prague-1635]]) being signed eleven days later, the subsidies are no longer enough. Richelieu commits French armies directly. The Catholic-Catholic war runs from this declaration to the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, twenty-four years. The Principle Operationalized Richelieu's own justification, recorded across his Political Testament and his correspondence with Père Joseph, is unambiguous. The interest of the state is distinct from the interest of the faith. A Catholic king has a duty to defend France that is logically prior to, and operationally overrides, his duty to defend a particular configuration of Catholic powers. Raison d'état is the formula. Henri de Rohan's De l'intérêt des princes et États de la chrétienté, published in Paris three years later, makes it a Europe-wide vocabulary. What 1635 does to confessional politics is what 1789 will do to dynastic legitimacy and what 2008 will do to monetary monopoly: it makes the inherited justification optional. The war's confessional pretext, already strained since Bärwalde, is now publicly discarded by its largest belligerent. The remaining thirteen years of the Thirty Years' War run on raison d'état alone. The settlement at Westphalia in 1648 is the constitutional document of a Europe whose states will, from this point, organize their wars and peaces around the same principle.