Susquehanna University Press

"Few historians have found the last decade of the Thirty Years War an enticing field of study, and those examining the period after 1640 have focused mainly upon the states of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg lands. Amongst the major belligerents France has been especially neglected, and this has given rise to a number of contradictory assumptions about her conduct of diplomacy and warfare. It is often supposed that the negotiations at Westphalia dragged on for five years after 1643 because the major powers, and France in particular, refused to commit themselves to a single set of demands, remaining hopeful that changing military circumstances would strengthen their bargaining position. Such a view sits uncomfortably with alternative recent assessments of Mazarin as the exponent of balance of power politics, a statesman working for the achievement of a secure European order and a system of collective security. On the military side, most historians appear to agree that armies by the 1640s had outrun the capacity of rulers adequately to administer, pay and supply them. The result was warfare constrained by logistics, which some historians argue led to modest strategies and a preoccupation with territorial control, while others suggest that it led to armies ranging ever more widely in search of food and of territory that had not previously been ravaged.

It is this network of assumptions and contradictions that Derek Croxton sets out to examine through his study of the French military and diplomatic effort of the years from 1644 to the end of 1646. He offers both a study of the complex and shifting negotiations between France, Sweden, the emperor and his chief ally, Bavaria, and a reappraisal of the strategy and military operations of the French army of Germany. By bringing these two strands together in a detailed narrative of events, the author offers a significant reappraisal of France's strategy and war aims and a challenge to recent thinking about the waging of war in the first half of the seventeenth century."

New College, University of Oxford <Top>

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