The Age of Louis XIV

by Will Durant

  One quality Frederick William did not have—the military genius of the Swedish kings. For twenty years he shifted his force from side to side in the conflicts of Sweden with Poland and of the Empire with France, barely preserving himself by diplomacy. But when Charles XI invaded Brandenburg, Frederick William’s army justified itself by defeating the Swedes at Fehrbellin (1675); it was this victory that won him the title of Great Elector. In the end, despite his fluctuating policies and narrow resources, he added forty thousand square miles to his state.

  More important were his economic and adminstrative reforms. Under his urging the nobles improved agricultural methods, and expanded the yield, on their estates. He developed a prosperous silk industry by the extensive planting of mulberry trees. He reversed the trend to deforestation by requiring peasants to plant twelve trees before they married. He planned and financed the building of the Frederick William Canal to connect the Oder with the Spree. When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, the Great Elector issued an “Edict of Potsdam” (November, 1685), inviting the distressed Huguenots to come and settle in Brandenburg-Prussia; he sent agents to guide and finance their migration; 5 twenty thousand came, proved a spur to Prussian industry, and formed five regiments in the Prussian army. Frederick William himself, like his descendant Frederick the Great, labored assiduously in administration, and established the principle, later accepted by Peter of Russia and the “enlightened despots” of the eighteenth century, that the ruler should be the dedicated servant of the state. He recognized that religious intolerance was an obstacle to economic and political development; he distinguished himself in Germany by allowing his people to remain Lutheran while he himself remained Calvinist; and he gave religious freedom to Catholics, Unitarians, and Jews.

  He died in 1688, aged sixty-eight. His will, dividing his several states among his sons, would have canceled the unifying effect of his rule, but his successor repudiated the document and maintained the central power. Frederick III earned the good will of the Emperor Leopold I by joining him against France; for this, and eight thousand soldiers, Leopold granted him the title of König in Preussen. He was crowned Frederick I at Königsberg on January 18, 1701, and Prussia began its career toward Bismarck and German unity.

  It is a plume in Frederick’s record that he founded the University of Halle; another that he supported the efforts of his second wife to promote the intellectual graces in Berlin. Sophia Charlotte, daughter of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, was reputed to be the prettiest and wittiest woman in Germany. From her long stay in Paris she brought to the court of Berlin an attractive union of culture and charm. Urged on by her and Leibniz, Frederick established the Berlin Academy of Sciences, destined to make history under Frederick II. For her the Elector built (1696) the famous Schloss—castle or palace—in the suburb that took her name, Charlottenburg. To her salon in the Schloss Charlottenburg came scientists, philosophers, freethinkers, Jesuits, and Lutheran ministers; Charlotte loved to prod them into theological battles that sometimes lasted through the night. There her sister-in-law, Queen Caroline of England, drank in the learning and art that were to startle England. When Charlotte died (if we may believe her grandson Frederick the Great) she rejected both Catholic and Protestant offers of religious ministrations; she told the divines that she was dying in peace, and rather in curiosity than in hope or fear; now, she said, she would satisfy her inquisitiveness about the origin of things, “which even Leibniz could never explain to me”; and she consoled her ceremony-loving husband with the thought that her death would “afford him the opportunity of giving me a magnificent funeral.” 6 Sophia Charlotte was among the many women of character and education who adorned Germany as the seventeenth slipped into the eighteenth century.

  The court of Berlin, among the more than three hundred that then consumed the revenues of the Empire, was rivaled only by the Saxon court at Dresden. Augustus the Strong, who ruled Saxony (1694–1733) as Elector Frederick Augustus I, bequeathed to Europe a bevy of bastards, among them the famous Maréchal de Saxe. He made his capital “the prettiest city in Germany,” 7 the center and pride of the minor arts; but the Saxons could not forgive him his change of faith, his use of their money and men in Poland’s wars, and the costly luxuries of his court.

  The Electorate of Hanover contributed to history in this period by sheltering Leibniz and annexing England. In 1658 Sophia, the dethroned Princess Palatine, daughter of Elizabeth Stuart (Queen of Bohemia), married Ernest Augustus, who became Elector of Hanover. Her erudition discomfited her husband, for she spoke five languages with few interruptions, and knew more English history than the English ambassadors at her court. For a time she maintained at Hanover a salon of scholars and philosophers. But her consuming passion was to secure the throne of England for her son George; her blood tingled with royalty, for she never forgot that she was the granddaughter of James I. In 1701 the English Parliament, as we have seen, settled the succession to the throne upon Sophia and “the heirs of her body, being Protestant.” She contemplated with pleasure the future of her son as George I, but without pleasure the prospect of her daughter-in-law, Sophia Dorothea, as a queen; and she looked with equanimity upon the breakup of their marriage. George, suspecting his wife of adultery with Count Philipp von Königsmarck, had him killed, divorced Sophia Dorothea, and imprisoned her from 1694 till her death in 1726. Meanwhile the Electress Dowager died in June, 1714, aged eighty-four, just two months before the crown of England descended upon the head of her son. So the great god Chance, from his ubiquitous throne, shuffled the fates and states and men.

  II. THE GERMAN SOUL

  The struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism for the soul of Germany was moderating its violence, for the Thirty Years’ War had brought theological hatreds to a reductio ad absurdum. Largely through Jesuit persuasion some Protestant princes went over to the Roman Church in this period. Calvinism gained on Lutheranism, which tended to a stiff Scholastic dogmatism. Chiefly in reaction to this formalism the Pietist movement spread, seeking to replace outward observances with an inner spirit of union with God. In the second half of the seventeenth century George Fox, William Penn, and Robert Barclay carried their Quaker gospel to Germany, and perhaps this missionary movement shared in developing Pietism there; we note that Philipp Jakob Spener’s Pia desideria (1675) appeared four years after Penn’s first visit. Spener, as pastor of a Lutheran church in Frankfurt-am-Main, supplemented its services with the mystic devotions of private assemblies (collegia pietatis) in his home. The name Pietist, like Puritan and Methodist, was given to these devotees by their critics as a term of ridicule; it was accepted by them, and became a badge of humble pride. They clung with fervor to the millenarian hopes that had consoled some of the German masses during the war. They thought of the Second Advent not as a vague doctrine of theology, but as a warm and active inspiration of their daily lives. At any moment now Christ would reappear on earth; he would still the strife of faiths and end the reign of force and war; he would establish a purely “spiritual church,” without organization, without ritual, without priests, but practicing with joy a generous Christianity of the heart.

  August Francke carried on the movement with the ardor of a prophet. Many women were touched by his practical Christianity and enlisted in the cause of personal piety and public charity. Influenced by English Puritanism and French Quietism, the movement in turn influenced English Methodism and German poetry, and made itself felt in America, where Cotton Mather hailed it hopefully: “The world begins to feel a warmth from the fire of God, which thus flames in the heart of Germany.” 8 But Pietism, like Puritanism, injured itself by making its piety public and professional, sometimes falling into affectation and cant. In the eighteenth century it was swamped by the rationalist flood that poured in from France.

  The successes of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Louis XIV, and the growing wealth and splendor of the French court, had an irresistible influence upon German society in the century following the Peace of Westphal
ia. For a time cosmopolitanism overcame nationalism. French ways dominated the princely courts in language, literature, liaisons, manners, dances, art, philosophy, wine, and wigs. The German aristocracy now spoke German chiefly to servants. German authors wrote in French for the upper classes or in Latin for the learned world. Leibniz, who wrote mostly in French, admitted that German “manners have been somewhat modified toward elegance and politeness” by French example, but mourned the replacement or infiltration of German speech by the language or phrases of France. 9

  Only one German book of this age has survived—the Simplicius Simplicissimus (1669) of Hans von Grimmelshausen. In form it is the picaresque episodic autobiography of Melchior von Fuchshaim, who is one-quarter fool, one-quarter philosopher, and one-half rogue. In spirit it is a goodhumored but pessimistic satire on the Germany that was left barely alive after thirty years of war. Melchior begins as the foster child of a peasant, whose life is described in courtly terms:

  Instead of pages, lackeys, and hostlers my sire had sheep, goats, and pigs, and each waited upon me on the chase until I drove them home. His armory was well provided with plows, mattocks, axes, hoes, shovels, dung forks and hay forks, wherewith he practiced every day, for hoeing and digging were his disciplina militaris;. . . drawing out manure was his science of fortification, holding the plow his strategy, cleaning out the stable his knightly diversion, his tournament. 10

  A band of soldiers breaks into this peasant paradise, and tortures the family to make it reveal nonexistent hoards. Melchior escapes and finds refuge with an old hermit, who gives him his first lessons in theology. Asked for his name, he answers, “Rascal or scape-gallows,” for he has never heard himself otherwise addressed; his foster-father’s name, on the same basis, was “clown, ruffian, drunken dog.” Captured by soldiers, he is taken to the court of the governor of Hanau; there he is trained to be a fool, and is christened Simplicius Simplicissimus. He is kidnaped, becomes a thief, finds a hidden treasure, becomes a gentleman, seduces a girl, is forced to marry her, deserts her, becomes a Catholic, visits the center of the earth, loses his fortune, recoups it by quackery, wearies of wandering, and retires to lead the life of a hermit disillusioned with the world. This is Candide a century before Voltaire, except that its satire is softened with German humor rather than graced with Gallic wit. The book was condemned by the critics, and became a classic, the most famous production of German literature between Luther and Lessing.

  We must not take it as a fair picture of Germany in the generation after the war. The German might be too fond of drink, but he kept his bubbling good humor even in his cups; his wife might call him a drunken dog, but she loved him faute de mieux, and reared his children sturdily. Perhaps there was a more wholesome morality in the Germany of this age than in France. Poor Charlotte Elisabeth, Princess Palatine, married (1671) against her wishes to “Monsieur” Philippe d’Orléans, the invert widower of “Madame” Henrietta, never forgot the cool loveliness of Heidelberg; and after fortythree years of uncomfortable living with the comforts of the French court, she still longed for “a good dish of sauerkraut and smoked sausages” as far preferable to the coffee, tea, or chocolate of Paris or Versailles. 11 Her stoic fidelity to her worthless husband, and her patience with the royal brotherin-law who ordered or permitted the devastation of the Palatinate, show us that even amid the ruins of Germany there were women who could teach decency and humanity to beribboned, embroidered, periwigged, perfumed kings.

  III. THE ARTS IN GERMANY

  Moreover, and contrary to all reasonable expectations, this age was one of the most productive in German architecture. It saw the first flowering of German baroque, which gave a new front of charm and gaiety to Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Dresden, Bayreuth, Würzburg, and Vienna. It was the time of builders like Johann Fischer von Erlach, Jakob Prandtauer, Johann and Kilian and Cristoph Dientzenhofer, and Andreas Schlüter, whose names would be as well known to English-speaking peoples as those of Wren and Inigo Jones, were it not for the prison of frontiers and the babel of tongues. Some of their work, however, was destroyed in the invasions of Germany by French armies (1689), and some in the Second World War. 12 History is a race between art and war.

  Some lovely churches rose amid the poverty and desolation. We should dishonor our record if we found no line for Johann Dientzenhofer’s cathedral at Fulda or his abbey church at Banz, or for the work of Christoph and Kilian Dientzenhofer on the churches of St. Nicholas and St. John in Prague. In 1663 the Italian architect Agostino Barelli began the Nymphenburg Palace outside Munich, and Joseph Effner completed its interior in a successful merger of classic pilasters and baroque decoration. Ornament was the besetting temptation of baroque; it went to excess in the Festsaal, or Festival Salon, of the Schloss Berlin, and in the pavilion of the Zwinger Palace built at Dresden by Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann for Augustus the Strong; here baroque passed into a pretty rococo rather befitting a boudoir interior than a palace front. This was mostly destroyed in the Second World War; so were the Schloss Charlottenburg and the Schloss Berlin, the royal palace begun by Andreas Schlüter in 1698.

  Schlüter was the outstanding German sculptor of the age. All Germany was thrilled by his equestrian statue of the Great Elector, Der Grosse Kurfürst, which withstood all the bombs of war, and now rides the Charlottenburg plaza outside Berlin. At Königsberg Schlüter set up an equally imposing figure of Frederick I, just made King of Prussia. Julius Glessker carved a quietly mourning Head of Mary for a Crucifixion group in the cathedral at Bamberg. The wood carvers showed their skill in the magnificent choir stalls of the Klosterkirche in Silesia, but they went to excess in the extravagantly carved furniture demanded by patrons who had more pride than taste.

  German painting begot no masterpieces in this period, unless we count as such a charming Young Man with a Gray Hat by Christoph Paradiso. 13 The tapestries designed for the Würzburg Palace by Rudolf Byss are among the finest; and Paul Decker’s engravings in copper were near the top of their kind. The little town of Warmbrunn—the Warm Springs of Silesia—was famous for its cut glass; Dresden made “Dresden china” fashionable; Augustus the Strong was also le roi de faïence; and at Meissen, suitable clays having been found nearby, he established (1709) the kilns that produced the first hard porcelain in Europe.

  But it is in music that the German spirit found its most characteristic expression; this, so to speak, was the eve of Johann Sebastian Bach. The forms and instruments came from Italy, but the Germans poured into them their own tender sentiment and massive piety, so that while Italy excelled in melody and France in graceful rhythm, Germany moved toward primacy in lieder, organ music, and chorales. In G. F. Krieger’s 12 Suonate a due Violini (1688) the sonata sequence is already established in three movements—allegro, largo, and presto. Instrumental music, rising out of dance forms (pavan, saraband, gavotte, gigue, etc.), was declaring its independence of both dance and voice.

  Italian musicians were still in demand in Germany. Cavalli reigned in Munich, as Vivaldi later in Darmstadt. Italian opera was imported, and had its first performance in Germany at Torgau (1627); others followed at Regensburg, Vienna, and Munich. The first German opera, called a Singspiel, was Johann Theile’s Adam und Eva, produced at Hamburg in 1678; from that time, for half a century, Hamburg held the leadership in German opera and drama. There Handel brought out his Almira and Nero in 1705, and his Daphne and Florinda in 1706, before going to conquer England. The great name in the German opera of this period is Reinhard Keiser, who produced 116 operas for the Hamburg company.

  After 1644 German composers won pre-eminence from the Italians in compositions for the organ and the church. The hymns of Paul Gerhardt expressed his uncompromising Lutheranism. Jan Reinken dominated the organ in the Katherinenkirche at Hamburg from 1663 till his death at the age of ninety-nine in 1722. Dietrich Buxtehude, born in Denmark, became organist in the Marienkirche at Lübeck in 1668; his performances there, and especially his Abendmusik concerts for organ, orchestra, and chorus,
were so renowned that in 1705 the great Bach walked fifty miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear him play. 14 Nearly seventy of his compositions for the organ have survived; many are still performed; and his chorales shared in forming Johann Sebastian’s style. Johann Kuhnau preceded Bach as organist at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig; he developed the sonata, for the clavier, and composed Partien of the same type as Bach’s suites.

  The Bach family was now entering upon the musical scene in bewildering profusion. We know of some four hundred Bachs between 1550 and 1850: all musicians, sixty of them holding important posts in the musical world of their time. They formed a kind of family guild, meeting periodically at their headquarters in Eisenach, Arnstadt, or Erfurt. They constitute unquestionably the most extensive and remarkable dynasty in cultural history, impressive not merely by their number, but by devotion to their art, by a typically Germanic steadiness of purpose, and by their productivity and influence. They do not come prominently into musical annals until their fifth generation, with Johann Christoph and Johann Michael Bach, sons of Heinrich Bach, organist at Arnstadt. Johann Christoph was chief organist at Eisenach for thirty-eight years: a simple, serious, painstaking man who trained choirs and composed for organ and for orchestra. His brother Johann Michael became organist at Gehren in 1673, remained there till his death in 1694, and gave his fifth daughter to be the first wife of Johann Sebastian. Heinrich’s brother Christoph Bach, organist at Weimar, had twin sons who were violinists; one of them, Ambrosius, was Johann Sebastian’s father. Johann Bach, brother of Heinrich and Christoph, was organist at Erfurt from 1647 till 1673, when he was succeeded by his son Johann Christian Bach, who in 1682 was succeeded by his brother Johann Egidius Bach. All the forces of nature seem to have been directed to produce and prepare Johann Sebastian Bach.