Schwetzingen - Schlösser-Magazin

VI.
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VI. Schwetzingen – Historical Context
letters confer such a vivid picture of the Sun
King’s court. During the War of the League of
Augsburg (in German called “War of Palatine
Succession”), Louis XIV. applied the notorious
“scorched-earth”-tactics which left a trail of
almost complete destruction in the Palatinate
and the neighbouring territories. Faced with
the still visible traces of these barbaric acts,
Voltaire, when coming to Schwetzingen in
the 1750s, felt such shame, that he suggested
to his Italian secretary, Collini (died 1806), to
also pretend to be a native of the peninsula. 3
The Wars of Spanish, Polish and Austrian
Succession were also partly fought in the
central territories of the electorate, driving
many of its inhabitants into emigration. It was
not until the early 1750s, that a long period
of peace began, lasting to the outbreak of the
revolutionary wars in 1792. The number of
inhabitants grew sharply during this period
– and it was only then, after almost 200 years,
that it reached and surpassed the figures of
the late sixteenth century!
By the peace of Rijswick in 1697, which ended
the War of the league of Augsburg, the French
king had abandoned his attempt to annex the
Palatinate. It remained in the hands of the
Neuburg branch of the Palatine Wittelsbachs.
Apart from the electorate proper, they also
ruled over the dukedoms of Jülich and Berg on
the lower Rhine around Düsseldorf, acquired
in 1610, and the dukedom of Neuburg on the
Danube, which had been given to the Palatine
Wittelsbachs in the early sixteenth century. In
1742, the House of Neuburg died out and the
representative of yet another collateral line,
the Count Palatine of Sulzbach in the Upper
Palatinate, Carl Theodor (1724-1799), inherited
the electorate. Sulzbach and a few counties by
the mouth of the Rhine, the new elector had
inherited from his mother, were added to the
Palatine territories. Altogether, in the 1790s,
the electoral lands comprised about 17,000
square kilometres and had about one million
inhabitants.
3 Cosmo Alessandro Collini, Mon séjour auprès de Voltaire, Paris
1807, p. 105.
Although the elector could rely on a rather big
income from his lands – a French diplomat
called Carl Theodor, the “richest uncrowned
monarch”, the fact that the Palatine territories
stretched from the mouth of the Rhine to the
Danube meant that they were incoherent and
frayed – quite unlike the other electorates. The
various dukedoms and counties had their own
history and customs; in many, though, not in
the electorate proper, the elector’s power was
restricted by powerful estates which jealously
guarded their rights and refused to be
adequately taxed. Each territory was exposed
to military attack by one or more of the great
European powers. An independent foreign
policy or a military establishment, sufficient
to deter a potential aggressor, were quite
beyond the means of the electors.
The religious situation in the Palatinate was
equally delicate: The House of Neuburg had
originally embraced Lutheranism in the 16th
century, but had reconverted to Catholicism
in the early 17th century. The Catholic zeal
of the Neuburg electors subjected their new
possessions to what has been called a “belated
counter-reformation”. And although the
attempt at a re-conversion of the Palatinate
as a whole failed, the electors succeeded in
completely changing the religious setup of
the ruling caste, supplanting an “imported”
catholic aristocracy, that formed a “landed
gentry” (that had not existed before in the
Palatinate) for the old mainly bourgeois
Calvinist elite. The Catholics, once a
disadvantaged and disparaged group, became
the privileged minority in the state. In 1705,
the intervention of the great Protestant
powers led to a settlement that preserved an
uneasy balance between the denominations
throughout the 18th century.
While the Elector Johann Wilhelm (1658-
1716) had resided in Düsseldorf to avoid the
ravages of the War of the League of Augsburg,
his brother and successor Carl Philipp (1661-
1742) moved the court back to Heidelberg, the
old capital of the Palatinate. A conflict of the
staunchly Catholic Elector with the Heidelberg