Peace of Westphalia

“ Sweden and France as guarantors of the peace acquired the right of interference in the affairs of the empire, and the former gained a voice in its councils. For many years Germany thus became the principal theatre of European diplomacy and war. But if the treaty of Westphalia pronounced the dissolution of the old order in the empire, it facilitated the growth of new powers in its component parts, especially Austria, Bavaria and Brandenburg. ”

“ The long and bloody wars that ensued were closed by the Peace of Westphalia; and then it was found that Central and Northern Europe had cast off the intellectual tyranny of Rome, that individualism had carried its point, and had established the right of every man to think for himself. ”

“ As religious wars are admitted to be the most intense, most idealistic, and most sacrificial of all wars, and therefore most difficult to stop, can it be ascertained just how the Thirty Years' War, culminating in the peace of Westphalia, brought about the end of all religious wars? This might suggest how all political wars may be made to cease. If the seventeenth century accomplished the more difficult task, the peace conference at Paris ought to succeed in the less difficult one. ”

“ Its culmination. Peace of Westphalia.The political combinations which had thus occurred as Protestantism rapidly acquired temporal power gave rise, as might have been anticipated, to wars. The peace of Augsburg, 1555, furnished the Reformers the substantial advantages they sought—freedom from Italian ecclesiastical authority, the right of all Germans to judge for themselves in matters of religion, equality in civil privileges for them and the Catholics. ”

“ By thus making a certainty of the most important question of all history, no matter how difficult and delicate matters of greater or less importance may be, the League of Nations will have assured its success in advance as the greatest and most beneficent influence that the world has ever experienced, just as the peace of Westphalia was in its generation. ”

“ From the tenth century until the peace of Westphalia, these territories belonged to the German empire, being ruled by sovereign dukes and princes. In 1648 portions of both provinces were ceded to France, and a few years later, in times of peace, Strasburg was ruthlessly seized and appropriated by the arch-despot and militarist, Louis XIV. By the treaty of Ryswick, that of Westphalia was ratified, and thenceforward Alsace and Lorraine remained radically and passionately French. ”

“ After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which marked the close of the great struggles that had so long convulsed Europe, the older and more brutal customs fell into disuse, and the theory that only so much stress should be put upon an enemy, and primarily upon the combatant portion, as was sufficient to destroy his power of resistance was substituted for it. ”

“ This war is closed by the peace of Westphalia. Alsace thereby goes to France, Switzerland is separated from the empire and the Palatinate is divided. The secularized lands of northern Germany are secured to Protestantism, while leaving to Catholicism Austria, Bohemia and Bavaria. Germany is left desolate. ”

“ The ruthless policy of extermination of the best element in Bohemian national life is best indicated by the fact that when the peace of Westphalia was concluded, the prosperous kingdom was little better than a desert, with about eight hundred thousand impoverished inhabitants. ”

“ The Pope (at that time Innocent X.) declared the Treaty of Westphalia null and void, and issued a bull against its observance. The parties to the treaty, however, did not allow this bull to be published in Germany. The Catholics in all parts of the country (except Austria, Styria and the Tyrol) had suffered almost as severely as the Protestants, and would have welcomed the return of peace upon any terms which simply left their faith free. ”

“ A long period of peace had softened the minds, and deadened those hereditary hatreds that oppose the communication of feelings and the similarity of ideas between different nations. Europe, since the treaty of Westphalia, had become a republic of perfectly balanced powers, where the general equilibrium of power resulting from each formed a counterpoise to the other. ”

“ Among the many schemes which the Imperial brain is supposed to be continually engendering, it is far from impossible that one may be the reconstruction of the kingdom of Westphalia, or at least of some Rhenish kingdom with the concurrence of Prussia, by concluding a bargain of partition with her. ”

“ It was not, indeed, till the settlement of Westphalia in 1648, after the Thirty Years’ War, that this territorial division of Christendom became stereotyped, but the process had been going on for a hundred years previously; in some states, as in England and Scotland, it had long been completed; in others, as in South Germany, Bohemia and Poland, it was defeated by the political and missionary efforts of the Jesuits and other agents of the counter-Reformation. ”

“ And, after the treaty of Westphalia had fixed the political relations of Europe, the love of theological strife so greatly subsided, that men no longer thought it worth their while to raise a religious revolution, and to risk their lives in an attempt to overturn the creed of the state. ”

“ WESTPHALIA, TREATY OF, a collective name given to the two treaties concluded on the 24th of October 1648 by the empire with France at Münster and with Sweden and the Protestant estates of the empire at Osnabrück, by which the Thirty Years' War (q.v.) ”

“ They are the most important happenings in the public life of man since the Treaty of Westphalia nearly 300 years ago. That treaty brought to an end religious war and legalized religious persecution, established freedom of thought and freedom of worship, and set the nations of modern EUrope on their feet, each to go its way, in the long process of nation building. They have conflicts and wars without number, culminating in the great war, the greatest that humanity has ever recorded, and, please God, the greatest that history will ever record. ”

“ Cannibalism existed for thousands of years, slavery also, yet both have been practically abandoned, and now there seems to be a chance to do away the last and greatest enemy of humanity—war. To stop an evil that has existed so long and whose roots reach back into the beginning of history will necessarily require colossal effort and great sacrifice. Such an effort has been successful only once in the history of the world. That was when the Westphalian peace treaty was signed, in 1648 after the Thirty Years' War. ”

“ New principles of alliance.In this state of things, a new principle of alliances and wars is opened. The Treaty of Westphalia is, with France, an antiquated fable. The rights and liberties she was bound to maintain are now a system of wrong and tyranny which she is bound to destroy. Her good and ill dispositions are shown by the same means. To communicate peaceably the rights of men is the true mode of her showing her friendship; to force sovereigns to submit to those rights is her mode of hostility. ”

“ The kingdom of Westphalia, which was formed by Napoleon for his brother Jerome after the Treaty of Tilsit, was an entirely new creation, not an enlargement of a former German state like Bavaria and Würtemberg. It consisted of the Electorate of Hesse-Cassel, the Prussian territories on the left of the Elbe, including the bishoprics of Paderborn and Hildesheim, the Old Mark of Brandenburg, etc., the Duchy of Brunswick, a portion of Hanover, and other scattered districts. ”