The reigns that were ordered by
Louis and Louvois were much more difficult than they had excpected in fact
"most of the cities had surrendered without shot: Kaiserslautern,
Heidelberg, Pfortzen, Heilbron, and many others simply opened their gates when
the French army appeared but Mannheim, Coblenz, and one or two others refused
to surrender without a siege. [...] on November 7, [the first year of the war]
Louvois wrote to his commander, "the King sees with pain that you have not
started the bombardment of Coblenz..."; and a few days later, after
hearing that Boufflers had reduced the city to ashes, "The King sees with
pleasure that after having well burned Coblenz and having done all the damage
possible to the palace of the elector, you are marching on Mainz." these
letters are interesting since they seem to give both indication on Louis' added
to toward the demolitions and burnings and evidence of the decay of French
diplomacy." (Wolf 448-449). As Louis and Louvois had orders
"Mannheim was to be demolished so that not a "stone remained on a
stone"[...] the King intervened to save several chapels but not the houses
of man. It is one thing to order the demolition of cities of towns and quite
another to accomplish it. In the first place, effective demolition would
require an army of workmen and much powder; fire alone would make the town only
temporarily usable" (Wolf 452).
As these many helpless cities were
destroyed "the Germans looked out over the blackened villages, ruined
chateaus, demolished towns and cities, they "knew, that the dragonnades
had been applied to Germany. Everything the Huguenot refugees had said
about Louis XIV must be true. A widely read pamphlet screamed "the French
are cannibals" and “their king is a tyrant."[...] this may have been
the time when the fateful movement, German nationalism."(Wolf 455).
After this Wolf goes on to explain that this very action in history that
led the Germans to nationalize and think of superiority might just be the push
that later on led to Adolph Hitler. "[...] by the summer of 1690
Louis was faced with a coalition that included all his neighbors, and except
for a tenuous relationship with the Ottoman Empire, he did not have a single
ally. His consolation: France did have a powerful army; the French fleet
was the largest in th world; and while his enemies where united in their
dislike of France, they were quite disunited in their arms and
aspirations." (Wolf 456).
