The World полностью

In 1672, Louis and Charles went to war against de Witt’s Holland. French armies swept into Holland and the Dutch collapsed, only rescuing their country by flooding it. The Dutch rightly called this Rampjaar – their disaster year – and never recovered their global pre-eminence.

The Orangeists furiously blamed de Witt, who was wounded in an assassination attempt and then forced to resign. All eyes turned to the prince of Orange, the twenty-two-year-old William, who was appointed stadtholder and captain-general and desperately tried to hold back the French. ‘My country’s indeed in danger,’ he said, ‘but there’s one way to never see it lost and that’s to die in the last ditch.’ Flinty, angular and tough, William had known little love, his father dead before he was born, his mother tormented by the killing of her father Charles I, and his frosty relationship with de Witt scarcely alleviated by games of tennis. He saw his chance. Orangeite militiamen, organized by or on behalf of William, seized and shot de Witt and his brother before handing them over to a mob that eviscerated and skinned them, hung them naked, selling ears, fingers and other ‘scraps’ in the streets and then cooking and eating their livers – an astonishing cannibalistic feast in Europe’s most sophisticated city. Yet the gruesome ritual had a logic: Witt had ‘disembodied’ the Dutch state; now the Dutch disembodied him.

Louis seemed unstoppable, next annexing Strasburg and Alsace. Hailed as the Sun King, spoiled by fortune, touched with the self-righteous narcissism that is the fate of those eternally in power, he believed he was master of Europe. French glamour concealed cold ambition. He had the iron constitution necessary for interminable war, ceremony and intrigue: when later he endured an excruciating six-hour operation to cut out an anal fistula without anaesthetic, he never cried out except to say ‘Mon Dieu’ twice.^* But now he was going to need his nerve: as the Oranges and Habsburgs plotted against him, he was laying the foundations for a worldwide French empire to challenge England in America and India.

HIGH QING, GREAT MUGHAL AND CHHATRAPATI

In 1664, Louis founded matching Compagnies Françaises des Indes Occidentales and Orientales to promote, by trade and sword, French empire – though he was far behind his Portuguese, Dutch and English rivals. In 1682, in ‘our territory of New France’, his explorer sieur de La Salle, aided by Native American allies, built forts around the Great Lakes, adding to France’s earlier settlements in Quebec, and claimed the entire Mississippi valley which he called Louisiana. Yet the French colonists were few. Starting in 1663, Louis sent out over 800 women – les filles du roi – to marry settlers.

Louis’s conquistadors were fascinated by the strange liberty of Native Americans, who disdained the Europeans as cruel, money-crazed, status-obsessed slaves to kings and aristocrats. ‘They imagine,’ wrote a French Jesuit, ‘they ought by right of birth to enjoy the liberty of wild-ass colts rendering homage to no one.’ Another observed, ‘There’s no people on earth freer than them,’ noting, ‘Fathers here have no control over their children.’ Ruled by assemblies in which women as well as men could speak and argue, a sort of democracy with elements of matriarchy, they elected rulers only to command wars or special hunts.