Mind-Munitions

126 Propaganda in the Age of Gunpowder and Printing
La Clef du cabinet des Princes de l’Europe reached a wider audience
by combining political and literary news and Torcy was able to
insert pro-French articles into this publication, which also carried
anti-French pieces (thus enhancing their credibility and their disguise).
French pamphlet propaganda, which had gone into decline in the
last quarter of the seventeenth century, was revived as a means of
debating the validity of Hapsburg and Bourbon claims to the
Spanish throne on the death of Charles II in 1700. The accession of
Louis’ grandson, Philip V, and the Sun King’s recognition on the
death of James II of his Catholic son as rightful heir to the English
throne, had revived fears of a universal monarchy, and the outbreak of
a new Europe-wide war had prompted a renewed burst of ideological
propaganda in which the pamphlet played a significant role.
As one contemporary noted, ‘when a pamphlet goes unanswered,
people are persuaded that it is a sign that one agrees with
what is contained therein’; or, as another claimed, ‘silence is taken
as evidence of the accused party’s guilt and acquiescence’. The need
for counter-propaganda was thus paramount. The charge of
universal monarchy was answered by reasoned denials and by
pointing to the political rather than the religious machinations of
France’s enemies: how else could Catholic Austria ally itself with
Protestant England and Holland? Or was it because the morally
corrupt Austrian regime had become the willing dupe of an Anglo-
Dutch attempt to establish a Protestant Europe? Was it not France’s
duty to God and true Christendom to prevent this? That was why
France had to uphold the claims of the Bourbons to the Spanish
throne and of the Stuart Pretender to the English at the expense of
the House of Orange. France was the last bastion of the Counter-
Reformation, an unwilling and reluctant victim of Protestant-
Lutheran-Calvinist-Huguenot conspiracy. All these points were
made with the utmost objectivity, as befitted the emerging intellectual
climate known as the Enlightenment. An increased awareness
in the eighteenth century of the existence of a public that needed to
be addressed in the interests of the State, whether at home or
abroad, was not, however, matched by a corresponding ability on
the part of French propagandists to forge any bond of unity
between rulers and ruled. Torcy and his successors failed to learn
the lessons of the Cromwellian experience in England and this
failure was a major reason why absolutist monarchy in France was
eventually to fall victim to the French revolutionaries of 1789.