In the
sixteenth century they were deeply stirred by questions of religion, and
were rent asunder by the Reformation. Compromise proved futile; the
small German states were ranked on this side or on that at the will of
their rulers and princes; men of the same race were ranged in mortal
opposition on the question of religious belief, and there was no
solution but war. For thirty years in the seventeenth century the war
raged. It was conducted with a fierceness and inhumanity that even the
present war has not equalled. The civilian population suffered
hideously. Whole provinces were desolated and whole states were bereaved
of their men. When, from mere exhaustion, the war came to an end,
Germany lay prostrate, and the chief gains of the war fell to the rising
monarchy of France, which had intervened in the middle of the struggle.
By the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 Alsace and Lorraine went to France,
and the rule of the great monarch, Louis XIV, had nothing to fear from
the German peoples. The ambitions of Germany, for long after this, were
mainly cosmopolitan and intellectual.
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