Search

THE COMITÉ AND CREDIT POLICY With the humbling of Ségur and Castries, the comité des finances appeared to have vanquished all opposition. Only four months later, however, it had been swept away in the political and financial crisis of October 1783. This extraordinary reversal of fortune had its origins in the contrôle-général rather than the court. The fall of the comité was not principally the work of the disaffected ministers and the queen's party, although they contributed to it to some extent and benefited from its collapse. The comité fell because of profound disagreements among its members over credit policy. At the centre of these disagreements, yet again, stood those pillars of ministerial despotism, the crown's financial officers. Not only did they administer the royal finances, they also doubled as the crown's chief providers of credit. This situation had major disadvantages. As venal office-holders, the receveurs-généraux and similar functionaries regarded themselves as proprietors rather than employees, and were thus less receptive to central control from above. Most important of all, as wealthy individuals in their own right, they became the chief source of loans for a monarchy that was almost constantly in debt. The extent of the crown's dependence on la finance – and the reason it found it so difficult to reform in this area – was most obvious at the highest level. The greatest part of the crown's day-today debt was relieved by a select group of immensely rich financiers, no more than twelve at any one time, who were known collectively as the faiseurs de service du roi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One crucial aspect of the warfare at Versailles after 1783 was its speedy spread to other parts of the political nation. The most important victim of this process was the parlement of Paris. By 1787 Calonne and Breteuil had between them accomplished the most destructive political feat of the reign of Louis XVI – the crippling of the parti ministériel. By mid-1784, the senior magistrates had beaten off the attacks of the lower chambers and their clique of allies in the grand'chambre over judicial and criminal reform. A period of calm would no doubt have ensued had they had a stable ministry at Versailles with which to negotiate. This, unfortunately, was precisely what was denied them. Part of the problem was Breteuil. The queen's favourite minister was boxed in at the maison du roi by his enemies, and his only way of breaking out of this lay in extending his field of operations to Paris. The main target of his manoeuvres was Calonne, and this is hardly surprising. As John Hardman has pointed out, there was an institutional as well as a personal rivalry between the two men. There was a considerable overlap in the competences of the maison and the contrôle, especially where the administration of Paris was concerned. If Breteuil was checked at Versailles, it was logical for him to use his influence in the capital to undermine Calonne's financial operations on the bourse and the passage of edicts and loans through the parlement. A deeper cause of the subsequent upheavals lay in the personality of Calonne himself, and his abysmally low standing with the magistrature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William II was stadholder for a shorter time than any other Prince of Orange, but none had a more powerful impact upon the institution of the stadholderate. He challenged to the quick the ambiguity upon which the government of the Dutch Republic had always rested – the sovereignty of the States overlapping the leadership, always military and sometimes political, of the House of Orange. On the one hand, in law the ultimate power rested beyond question in the States assemblies, although just how it was shared between the provincial States and the States General was not settled with absolute clarity and precision; on the other hand, the Princes of Orange were not mere subjects but a quasi-hereditary if not quasi-monarchical power whose judgment and will could not be neglected by the sovereigns. William II drew together some of the most significant threads of the political life of the country until his time, and in the dramatic events of the summer of 1650 almost created a new constitutional fabric. That he did not do so may have been only a question of his early death a few months later, hacking off intentions of revolutionary transformation which he kept concealed, as some historians have contended; or he may have had in mind much less than they thought, seeking only new policies rather than a crown. In either case, he brought about a deep change in the character of political debate and struggle in the United Provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘deux sortes de queues: queues à la messe, queues à la porte des boulangeries’. ‘La Révolution aux yeux du peuple catholique est promotion bourgeoise et protestante.’ ‘Laissez une paroisse vingt ans sans prêtre, on y adorera les bêtes.’ In the history of catholicism in France the years 1789–1801 constitute a watershed. It was not merely that the church lost its landed wealth or its claim to a monopoly of truth, that 50 per cent or more of those responsible for the cure of souls in 1789 found themselves in flight or that images were broken and acts of orgiastic desecration were perpetrated. It was that the total experience had a profound and lasting effect upon the laity. Neither catholics nor the institution to which they lent adherence were ever quite the same again. The revolutionary decade emphatically severs a world of almost unquestioned obeissance to catholic teaching from one in which significant sectors of the populace slipped away into indifference. The eighteenth-century church was very much the product of the post-Tridentine reform movement. Its most outstanding characteristic was a seminary-trained priesthood whose education, periodically reinforced by conference and retreat, committed the parochial clergy to define their chief function as the elevation of the spiritual level of their flock by unproved catechetical instruction, a remorseless attack on lax morality and on the ‘superstitious’ aspects of popular religion, such as local cults of pagan or doubtful derivation, or customs, such as the ringing of the parish bell to avert hail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the German army and air force attacked in the early hours of 1 September 1939 it was difficult to predict how long the Poles would be able to hold out. Initially, the Polish political and military leaders were convinced that, if in due course they obtained British and French assistance, they would be able to create a credible Eastern front. But by 5 September they were more preoccupied with leaving Poland and transforming themselves into a leadership-in-exile. The immediate fate of Poland, and the Polish people facing the onslaught of the German troops, became a matter of secondary importance. During the course of their joint military talks in May 1939 neither British nor French military leaders had credited the Polish army with an ability to withstand a full-scale German attack. They were, of course, thinking of the Polish army's organization, its strategic thinking and degree of preparedness, and the supplies available to it. They did not doubt the Polish leadership's commitment to fighting, its bravery and most of all its political unity and organizational skills. These turned out to be as much a source of Polish military weakness as was the general Polish unreadiness to face the German attack. In the years to come these problems of the government-in-exile's political disunity and organizational ineptitude were to remain unresolved. The Polish–German war was not concluded by a negotiated armistice. This fact itself moulded the mentality of the Poles who subsequently went into exile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When on 1 July 1701 Marlborough left England with William his role was to act as the king's deputy. The dual appointments which he held also reflected a situation in which war against France was highly likely, but not yet inevitable. As ambassador extraordinary he received instructions to negotiate with French and Spanish diplomats at the Hague for a settlement on what by later standards were very generous terms – a French evacuation of the Spanish Netherlands and satisfaction to the Emperor for his claims. His instructions did not spell these out because it was for Marlborough to negotiate them in working out the terms of the Grand Alliance. Secondly, as commander-in-chief of the English and Scottish forces assembling in the Dutch Republic Marlborough was to assume the active role of general which William's failing health made it impossible for him to sustain. However William would still have been in the background, and had he lived longer would certainly have intervened, a serious complication which Marlborough was spared. William's choice of Marlborough, despite their mutual dislike and past antagonisms, was dictated by the king's life-long commitment to subordinate all personal considerations to the mission of containing and reducing the excessive and aggressive power of France. William knew that the recent parliamentary and journalistic onslaughts against the employment of foreign soldiers made it impossible to nominate a Dutch general, such as the experienced Athlone (Ginkel) or the royal favourite Albemarle to whom he had recently given the Garter, still withheld from Marlborough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial decline and steel: the British debate The question about enterprise strategies and technical progress in the German and British steel industry must in the end refer to the assessment of the relative efficiency and capacity for innovation of these two industries, including the entrepreneurs who ran them. While the technical competence and managerial ability of the German steel industrialists was never in doubt and the discussion was primarily sparked off by the political consequences of their dominant position in the Reich, their British colleagues were subjected to occasionally destructive criticism and were made partly responsible for Great Britain's gradual loss of her hegemony around the turn of the century. The different structures of the German and British steel industries, whose development has been studied in this book, have led to the conclusion that, by the late nineteenth century, there was a successful German way based on the Thomas process and the use of poor, domestic iron ores. The origins of the British steel industrialists' tendential decline lay in their failure to follow this successful model, which is attributed solely to incompetence on the part of British entrepreneurs. This orthodox picture was subjected to a fundamental revision by McCloskey at the beginning of the 1970s, which gave a strong boost to the debate about ‘entrepreneurial decline’ in Great Britain. Before we undertake a comparative assessment of the efficiency and capacity for innovation of the German and British steel industrialists on the basis of our preceding research, we intend to make a critical analysis of the positions adopted by the two most important antipodes of this debate: Burn and McCloskey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the first phase of the new steel industry, which was distinguished by a uniform product, still bore the familiar features of unmistakable British superiority and of diligent imitation on the Continent, maintained by tariffs and cartels, the following phase of diversification, however, brought forth two clearly differentiated autonomous structures. While the terms of the institutional frameworks in both countries continued to be retained as far as possible – state protectionism and collective restrictions on competition in Germany and, after the brief episode with the IRMA, free competition and entrepreneurial autonomy in Great Britain – their production mechanisms developed along quite different directions. Whereas capacities in Germany were further extended for the newly opened markets mainly by using the Thomas process, in Great Britain mainly the open-hearth process was used instead. Much significance has been attributed to this difference for explaining British steel production's lower growth rate during the following decades, claiming that the British steel industry would have been able to maintain its lead on the world markets had it applied the obviously successful ‘German’ production technology. Before we deal with the question of entrepreneurial prescience in both countries, let us first investigate how these different structures and their underlying conditions and motives came into being. Basic Bessemer steel The introduction of the Thomas process When assessing the great economic importance of the Thomas process above all for the German steel industry, it is often overlooked that, in technical terms, it involved only a slight modification to the original Bessemer process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cahiers de doléances, or lists of grievances, drafted in the towns and villages of France during the spring of 1789, have attracted a great deal of attention from historians, unlike the elections to the Estates General which accompanied them. Yet these elections were of great moment, not only because they mobilised the French people in an unprecedented fashion and created the first generation of revolutionary leaders, but also on account of their legacy to the electoral practice and procedure of the Revolution itself. This has rarely been recognised, since the last Estates General met for only two months before it was transformed into a National Assembly and consigned to the past. Contemporaries were naturally loath to acknowledge any influence of the old régime upon the new and sedulously cultivated the myth of the Revolution as a fresh start. In fact, there was a strong electoral tradition to draw upon for, even during the age of absolutism, elections had persisted at the local, if not central level. A careful study of the poll of 1789 helps to demonstrate the extent to which, in the words of François Furet, ‘the ancien régime influenced the Revolution via the Estates General’. In the first place, the franchise for the final Estates General provoked disagreements which anticipated the famous suffrage debate of succeeding years. The three orders might continue to meet separately, in time-honoured fashion, but all tax-payers were given the vote. Many of them used it, though there were considerable variations in turnout from one community to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After seeing what fédérés did in an official capacity, we can now turn to what they did and said of their own account. First, fédéré writings will be considered to determine what fédérés wanted. Then, the political tendencies of the federations will be discussed, paying particular attention to whether individual associations were Jacobin, Bonapartist, or a mixture of both. Finally, the extent of the movement and the social basis of the associations will be assessed. Fédéré writings Fédéré writings give us the common denominator of fédéré aspirations. Any movement which wished to emphasise unity had to be built on certain common principles and objectives. Significantly, most of these were closely associated with the early years of the Revolution. Historians have recently placed great stress on how, through the passage of time, more and more Frenchmen were alienated by the evolution of the Revolution, and how opposition to it slowly mounted and gained force. Internecine battles between groups of men who initially had supported the Revolution eventually fragmented the movement and weakened it to the point that Napoleon was able to impose dictatorship. Observers in 1815 repeatedly pointed out that the federative movement had drawn on men from all epochs of the Revolution. This amalgamation was brought about by the experience of 1814. Invasion, occupation, return of intransigent émigrés and Bourbon government had combined to remind patriots of what they had fought to achieve during the early years of the Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dijon in 1815 was a small regional capital with a population of approximately 21,000. It was the administrative centre of the Côte-d'Or and boasted a leading French academy. Its economy was exceedingly diverse and the boutiquiers and artisans who comprised fifty-seven per cent of Dijon's active work-force were involved in a variety of trades wholly characteristic of a pre-industrial society. Local historians have often pointed to the moderation of Dijon revolutionaries. It was due only to the insistence of Bernard, the représentant en mission from Paris, that Dijonnais tribunals sent ten men to the guillotine during the Terror. Indeed, during this period one finds Jacobin lawyers and the future fédérés Larché and Dézé defending aristocrats. However, moderate behaviour should not be mistaken for indifference to the Revolution. The Jacobin Société des Amis de la Constitution remained in control of Dijon well into Thermidor and, although dissolved in 1796 after condemnation by the représentant en mission, Calès, was refounded after the coup d'état of Fructidor (4 September 1797). As late as 1798 the leading terrorist, Sauvageot, was elected mayor of Dijon. Many Jacobins retained their positions of local power under Napoleon. As P. Viard has noted, these men were more dangerous to Bonaparte than local monarchists. Although they accepted Brumaire because of Napoleon's popularity with the masses, they did not give up their old convictions. Belonging for the most part to the administrative and judicial corps, they formed ‘une sorte de club’ to monopolise local government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been nothing more dramatic in the history of France than the vol d'aigle. On 1 March 1815, having slipped free of captivity on the island of Elba, Napoleon landed on the shore of the Gulf of Juan and invaded France with a token force of some 1,200 men. When confronted at Laffrey by ostensibly hostile troops, Bonaparte stepped forward to offer himself as a target, forcing the soldiers to choose between himself and Louis XVIII. Past loyalties proved decisive; the troops refused to fire. Marshal Ney, having vowed to his Bourbon master to bring the Eagle back to Paris in an iron cage, proved no different. What had begun as a perilous forced march soon became a triumphal procession as peasants and workers flocked to the Emperor's side. First Grenoble and then Lyons gave Napoleon a rapturous reception. By 20 March he had flown from ‘belfry to belfry’, finally alighting in a Paris free of the hastily departed Bourbon king Louis XVIII. Although middle-class Parisians greeted Bonaparte with an indifference born of fear for the future, there could be no mistaking the satisfaction of lower-class Parisians with this extraordinary turn of events. The vol d'aigle was, however, more than simply the return of a beloved leader to his adoring public, for along the route the Emperor had donned new clothing – he now appeared in the curious guise of arch-defender of the Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a full measure of the Protestant Reformation in France in the first half of the sixteenth century, we must look beyond the insurgence itself to the closing settlements. In their own way they marked a stage. After so much feuding and fanatic bigotry, the new men at the forefront of affairs came willingly or unwillingly to temper the righteousness of their cause with mingled feelings of chagrin, exhaustion, and uneasy compromise. The dynasty of Valois-Angoulême had faded and disappeared, leaving Henry of Navarre to claim the rich patrimony of the Crown. In a jaunty mood of elation he may well have said that Paris was worth a mass. Yet, when on 25 July 1593 before the archbishop of Bourges in the great church of Saint-Denis he abjured the tenets of his Protestant upbringing, the moment of truth and disillusionment was patently clear: France remained staunchly Catholic. He had to recognise that profound reality before validating his inheritance. For all the show of undeniable pugnacity, the Protestant cause could not reach beyond the posture of a minority. Its stance and conduct betrayed the very attitudes of a minority. All the more striking, therefore, was its success in carving out a niche of recognition in the structured life of France. Here lay one of the great dramas of early modern Europe and summed up a host of novelties, crises of conscience, deeply felt desires for reform as much by those who followed the path of revolt as by those who remained in or returned to the doctrines and traditions of Catholicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘God Almighty raised up these two great princes sworn enemies to one another, and emulous of one another's greatness; an emulation that has cost the lives of two hundred thousand persons, and brought a million of families into utter ruin; when after all neither the one nor the other obtained any other advantage by the dispute than the bare repentance of having been the causers of so many miseries, and of the effusion of so much Christian blood.’ Many historians of the Habsburg–Valois wars have followed the broad outline of Blaise de Monluc's retrospective assessment, fascinated by what appears at first glance to be a destructive and almost incomprehensible duel between two highly cultured Renaissance princes: the Habsburg Charles V, and the Valois Francis I. Yet the wars, which took place in an age that produced both Erasmus and Machiavelli, involved many Christian and Muslim powers. They continued after Charles and Francis were dead, and their repercussions were felt throughout the known world either directly – as participants or victims of the fighting – or indirectly, since the struggle consumed Christian resources and enabled the Ottoman state to expand. And while the conflict was extremely destructive, states and individuals – such as Monluc – participated in the wars because they also brought considerable benefits. As the second decade of the sixteenth century dawned, however, it seemed that war had been banished from Christendom. In March 1518 Pope Leo X had proclaimed a crusade, and imposed a general peace upon all Christian states for five years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the two years that followed the conclusion of the Treaty of Dover, history seemed to play cruelly with De Witt, like a cat toying with a mouse before it suddenly kills it. He could dart this way and that, but he could never break out of the fatal circle of his dilemma. His intelligence, his strength of will, his courage yielded no solution to the problem of how to win the war against Europe's mightiest monarch that was surely coming. The picture would have been even bleaker if he had realized that Charles II intended not merely to practice a profitable neutrality while Louis XIV invaded the United Provinces but would join in the attack. But the knowledge would not have changed what he had to do: to seek such allies as Dutch money or fear for their own security could recruit; to build up the Republic's army and navy; and to hold on to power within the country against the rising fortunes of the Prince of Orange, whom he still saw as doing the bidding of the king of England. Rational calculation could offer no hope in such a situation; only belief in a God of Hosts who decided the course of battle even against the odds of human expectations could give solace. The first task remained to achieve whatever was possible in restoring good relations with France and England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It seems that one is taken up with destroying, as much as the remains of prejudices will put up with it, these former divisions of France into dioceses, governments, généralités and bailliages, which are no longer suitable to the representative order and could only maintain seeds of scission and ideas of corps and ordres. As the year 1789 began, and a sense of the nation began to crystallize, France was gripped by the imminent convening of the Estates-General, which was universally viewed as the forum for solving the problems facing the country. The level of enthusiasm was partially sustained, however, by a misapprehension on the part of the clergy and the nobility on the one hand, and the Third Estate on the other. For their part, many within the clergy and nobility, especially the latter, interpreted the December 27, 1788, decision by the Crown to double the representation of the Third Estate as an independent action that did not necessarily amend the traditional method of voting by order. The Third Estate, however, believed that vote by head was implicit in the doubling of its representation, and most elements within it felt a sense of gratitude toward Louis for the action. The drafting of cahiers in preparation for the opening of the Estates-General particularly encompassed many of the contradictory currents circulating in France during the early months of 1789. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural France in the nineteenth century was first and foremost a mosaic of regions. The landscape provided an immediate image of diversity: mountains and forests looked down on lush valleys and plains; pays de vignoble stood out from surrounding arable and grass lands; maritime France differed from continental France. Most importantly of all, the great open-field systems characteristic of the north and east could be distinguished from the enclosed bocages of the west and the irregular ‘square’ fields more common in the south. Adolphe Blanqui, writing during the 1850s, depicted such contrasts between neighbouring pays in terms of oases in the desert: ‘Thus, the Limagne of the Auvergne shines like a diamond at the foot of the wilderness of Cantal; the Vaucluse plain at the entry to the terres brûlantes of Provence; the Médoc at the threshold of the Landes; the Touraine close by the Sologne; the gardens of Annonay at the exit from the gorges of Forez.’ These physical differences were matched by an equally wide variety of social structures. In much of northern France, on the vast open fields of the Ile-de-France, Picardy, the Beauce and parts of Normandy, the concentration of farms meant that a few wealthy tenant farmers and laboureurs held sway over a vast army of dependent agricultural labourers. Elsewhere, in the Mediterranean coastal district, the south-west, the Massif, Brittany and Flanders, society was nearer the Jacobin ideal of a ‘republic of peasants’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education amongst the peasantry of nineteenth-century France continued to be dominated by the Medieval notion of apprenticeship. Following this approach, children were plunged headlong into the world of adults as early as possible in order to learn the ‘art of living’ from those around them. All of the ideas, the beliefs and the values of peasant society were transmitted in this way, as well as the manual skills needed for work. In the absence of specialized institutions, education melted imperceptibly into the normal round of activities in the village. However, as the century wore on, this informal type of education came increasingly to be supplanted by a new rival: the elementary school. A very different philosophy of education was percolating down from middle- and upper-class circles, one which required children to be sheltered from an outside world judged too dangerous and too corrupt for their sensibilities. Children were now to be taught systematically in the cloistered atmosphere of the school, before being launched on their chosen occupations. The profound upheaval in customs that this extension of childhood implied was not to be achieved in the short term. The movement to school the population was spread over several centuries, starting in the case of primary education with the petites écoles of the reign of Louis XIV, and ending with the free, compulsory schooling of the Third Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategic plans produced by the great powers before the First World War were abstract, ambitious and largely unrealistic. When British, German and Soviet strategists returned after 1933 to consider the role of Scandinavia in a future war, they did so in the light of experience which their predecessors had lacked. There appear to have been no serious examinations of the possibility of military operations on Scandinavian territory of the kind which loomed so large in pre-1914 deliberations. The primary focus was on economic and naval warfare. For both Great Britain and Germany, the lesson of the last war was that economic pressure on Germany had been of decisive importance. Moreover, in the light of Germany's territorial losses after Versailles and the exploitation of new mineral resources in Scandinavia, it was reasonable to assume that Germany's economic dependence on indigenous Scandinavian products would be greater in both relative and absolute terms than it had been in 1914–18. Scandinavian resources would also be of great importance to Great Britain, but its geographical position, naval superiority, financial resources and world-wide empire would give Britain access to alternative sources of supply and the capacity to deny such access to Germany. Britain's principal aim in wartime would therefore be to enlist the Scandinavian countries in an economic blockade. Germany, by contrast, would require only business as usual. The logic of British strategy meant not only that the machinery of economic warfare, with all that this implied for the Scandinavian neutrals, must be applied from the very outset, but also that neutrality itself was dispensable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both geographically and in the European imagination, Scandinavia lies on the northern margin of Europe. Havelock Ellis conveyed a characteristic nineteenth-century image when he described Norway as ‘a land having, in its most characteristic regions, a year of but one day and night – the summer a perpetual warm sunlit day filled with the aroma of trees and plants, and the rest of the year a night of darkness and horror; a land which is on the extreme northern limit of European civilisation’. The facts of Scandinavian life are harsh by European standards: Scandinavia is ‘the western part of Siberia’. It is a Siberia tempered by the Gulf Stream, and this moderating influence has made civilised existence possible in such high latitudes for centuries. Nevertheless, until very recent times the physical environment imposed rigid constraints on human activity in the far north of Europe. Since the resources which could be exploited by primitive technology were so meagre, much of the population lived on the very edge of subsistence. In the late nineteenth century the Scandinavian countries were still among the poorest in Europe in terms of per capita income. It is only within the last hundred years that the physical constraints have been decisively overcome through the application of modern technology to every field of activity: communications, housing, agriculture and extractive and manufacturing industry. The tyrannies of climate and terrain have to a large extent been overcome, but the habits of isolation and detachment have persisted into the late twentieth century. Scandinavians still feel different from, and sometimes superior to, other Europeans; the rest of Europe still takes notice of Scandinavia only intermittently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was the often caustic Voltaire who penned the famous line, “This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” Voltaire's aphorism has become a tired but popular cliché to the great annoyance of scholars who study this area of central Europe. Many who have cast a hurried glance at the complex bundle of imperial territories have wondered what inner logic kept this decentralized polity functioning for so long in a viable fashion. Thought by many a living anachronism, the Empire confounded its critics as it creaked forward through time displaying a remarkable ability to redefine itself for each new generation. It weathered a whole series of crises that often brought civil war or dynastic struggle to other European states. Our discussion of irenicism begins in one such period of crisis – years of political uncertainty when the Habsburg princes once more sought a new source of unity for the Empire and its estates. The decade 1545 to 1555 was particularly crucial for the emperor. This period began with the Habsburg triumph of the Schmalkaldic War when there seemed to be one last opportunity to reimpose a uniform religious and political settlement on the imperial lands. The Augsburg Interim of 1548 was Charles's final attempt to unite Catholic and Protestant. At the same time he also sought to establish a new confederation of German estates that would serve the Habsburgs as the Swabian League had done in the past. Both projects failed. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg at least temporarily acknowledged the strength of German particularism and the reality of a divided confessional polity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]