1 - Mutual Legitimacy

Summary

Alsace had been devastated by the Thirty Years War. Incursions by French and Imperial armies, changing local dynasties, and contradictory political claims left it an area of contested, fragmented, and disparate authority. The Peace of Westphalia had set some guidelines, but it had failed to fix Alsace's political status; it neither firmly established royal sovereignty nor denied territorial superiority to the German lords. Just who held the upper hand and just who was the true ruler of the province's myriad territories would remain undecided until well into the next century. France only gained international recognition of its sovereignty over Alsace in the Peace of Ryswick (1697) and needed until the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (1714) to solidify it. Because of that ambiguity, the French monarchy lacked the ability to assert authority in Alsace's communities without the tacit, and often active, collaboration and cooperation of Alsace's local rulers and their officials. This situation especially pertained in Lower Alsace, which remained largely outside the French sphere of authority until several decades after the ink had dried on the Peace of Westphalia, when the Sovereign Council of Alsace, the new province's highest court, extended royal sovereignty over the whole province on the shaky legal grounds of the réunions. This process persuaded neither the empire nor most Alsatians, and a decisive answer to who really was “in charge” in Alsace would not be found for decades.

Like the kings of France, the counts palatine and dukes of Pfalz-Zweibrücken-Birkenfeld were also relative newcomers to Alsace; Christian I acquired the city of Bischwiller in Lower Alsace in 1630. The dukes, like the monarch, had trouble establishing themselves as legitimate lords in the eyes of their subjects as they expanded beyond their original base to control other Alsatian lands. Integrating new territory was surely no easy undertaking for either power, and it was a task in which the king of France and the palatine princes found themselves allies, lending each other support in their mutual efforts towards achieving legitimate authority in Alsace. Thus, instead of an adversarial relationship between two distinct powers with different political and confessional backgrounds who engaged in a desperate fight for authority, a mutually beneficial interaction evolved between king and duke.