Second Hundred Years War
As the Second Hundred Years War , some, mainly British historians, refer to a series of wars that took place in the early modern period between 1689 and 1815 between the Kingdom of England (from 1707 the Kingdom of Great Britain and from 1801 the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland ) and France (up to 1792 Kingdom, then First French Republic , from 1802 First Empire ). The term was believed to have been coined by the English historian John Robert Seeley in his influential 1883 work The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures .
Like the Hundred Years War of the late Middle Ages , the term does not describe a military conflict, but rather an almost always ongoing state of war between the two main conflicting parties. The use of this term shows the connection of all wars as components of a rivalry between France and Great Britain for world supremacy. It was a war over the future of the respective colonial empires .
The numerous wars between the two states in the course of the 18th century usually included other European countries in large alliances, but apart from the war of the Quadruple Alliance , France and Great Britain always faced each other as warring opponents.
In the continental European perspective, when looking at these wars, the Habsburg-French antagonism or the rivalry between the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties is in the foreground. This lasted from the early 16th century until the reversal of the alliances in 1763. The British-French rivalry survived this too. Some of these wars, such as the Seven Years War , are considered world wars and included battles in the growing colonies of India , America, and on the ocean shipping routes around the globe.
The series of wars began with the ascension of the English throne by the Dutch governor William of Orange in the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89. As converts to the Roman Catholic faith, the last Scottish-English kings of the House of Stuart sought a friendly relationship with Louis XIV . Their predecessors Jakob I and Karl I , both Protestants , had avoided British intervention in the Thirty Years' War and also strived for a peaceful deal with France. The English kings Charles II and James II even supported Louis XIV in his war against the Dutch Republic . William of Orange, however, opposed the Catholic monarchy of Louis XIV and tried to establish himself as a forerunner of the Protestant cause, Ludwig sought in vain to reinstate the fallen Stuarts in the Nine Years' War . In the following decades tensions continued, as France supported the Jacobites , who tried to overthrow Wilhelm and his successors from the House of Hanover (from 1715) through uprisings, especially in Scotland .
After the end of the reign of Wilhelm III. From Orange the antagonism between France and Great Britain shifted from religion to economy and trade, the two states now competed for colonial supremacy in America and Asia.
The Seven Years' War was one of the largest and most decisive conflicts.
The military rivalry continued with British opposition to the French Revolution and with the ongoing wars with the new republic and the First Empire of Napoléon Bonaparte , the first with his defeat in the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 , followed by the Hundred Days and the second defeat Napoleons ended up in the Battle of Waterloo .
French perception as "Carthage" and "Rome"
Many French of the time spoke of Britain as the “perfidious” Albion , suggesting that it was a fundamentally implausible nation. The two countries have been compared to ancient Carthage and Rome , with the former seen as a greedy, imperialist state collapsing, while the latter has been an intellectual and cultural center that persisted and flourished:
“The Republicans knew as well as the Bourbons that British domination of the oceans outweighed continental power politics and that France could not rule Europe without destroying Britain. 'Carthage' - the vampire, the tyrant of the seas, the 'perfidious' enemy and carrier of a corrupt commercial civilization - was opposed to 'Rome', the carrier of a universal order, philosophy and selfless values. "
literature
- TCW Blanning : The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 . Oxford, Oxford University Press 2002.
- Arthur H. Buffinton: The Second Hundred Years' War, 1689-1815 . New York, Henry Holt and Company 1929.
- Tony Claydon: William III. Edinburgh, Pearson Education Limited 2002.
- Francois Crouzet: The Second Hundred Years War: Some Reflections. French History 10 (1996), pp. 432-450.
- Scott, HM Review: "The Second 'Hundred Years War' 1689-1815." The Historical Journal 35 (1992), pp. 443-469. (A collection of reviews of articles on the Anglo-French wars of the period, grouped under this heading)
- Robert and Isabelle Tombs: That Sweet Enemy - The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present . London, William Heinemann, 2006.