Louis XIV's megalomaniacal designs? What, are you British or something. (Oh, wait. You are. Cool.)
God, where do I start?
The beginning, right. Megalomaniacal was perhaps too strong an adjective, but they were certainly hegemonic, if not during the war itself, then certainly in the decades leading to it. Louis was nothing if not a long term planner.
It's hard to argue that Louis XIV had "megalomaniacal designs" when it's not totally clear that he even had designs during the War of the Spanish Succession.
He didn't
need any by 1701, it was the culmination of an expansionist career that you conveniently listed above. The WSS was the opportunity needed to undo as much of Louis' achievements as possible. Just because he didn't take any active steps to expand his power during the WSS doesn't mean we can excuse the rest of his career, the designs of the past decades having become the status quo.
this is evidently a misunderstanding brought about by a poorly worded sentence on my part; not help by my exaggeration for effect what with all the replacing "hegemonic" with "megalomanaiacal" and invoking the present tense all.
But after 1697, it's hard to see how France was supposed to react to the events occurring around it without doing more or less what it ended up doing in the first place. The alternative to Bourbon - not Louisine, but Bourbon - rule in Spain, after the demise of the Bavarian claimant, was Habsburg. Could France just sit by and let that happen? Of course not, not any more than the British could sit by and let somebody potentially competent - i.e. a new Bourbon Spanish monarch - take over security for the Spanish empire in the Americas and the East
Just because he had no choice in the matter doesn't make it any less necessary to oppose it, as you say (if the Spanish and Austrians had not been so stubborn the life long enemies Louis and William could have agreed on the Second Partition treaty and life could have gone on as normal).
Besides, he had no choice in accepting a Bourbon Spain, but he did have a choice in flooding the garrisons in the Spanish Netherlands with French troops and bringing the Bishopric of Liege on side to deprive the Dutch of their much coveted barrier. Finally, he didn't have to declare James Francis Edward Stuart the rightful James III on his father's death in 1701, undermining the shaky legitimacy of Queen Anne. This was the straw that broke the back of the majority of British public opinion and made the fate of English Succession dependent on the outcome of the War over the Spanish one
(Clauses IV and V)
Besides, while it was clear that Philip was not Louis' puppet, it required the Treaty of Utrecht to stipulate that the crowns of Spain and France could never be held by a single person (Clause VI)- and although this wasn't an aim personally for the then ancient Sun King, it was definitely something the next generation or two could try. Again, Louis was in it for the long term.
How would Bourbon rule in Spain, with the question of personal union remaining up in the air, be any more destabilizing than, say, the accession of the Dutch stadholder to the English throne?
Because Stadtholder William was no Louis XIV. Even together, England and the Netherlands did not equal the population of France at that time. Besides, the purpose of William's life and career was always the thwarting of the ambitions of Louis, not Dutch hegemony, and that was the main purpose of the 1688 invasion, to force England into opposing Louis, not unreasonable given Charles II and James II's close ties with France.
In a sense, the struggle over Felipe V's kingship was nearly as asinine as the French war against united Germany in 1870 over a similar issue. The accession of a Bourbon king in Madrid could not and did not equate to French rule there, or even French dominance. In the following century and change, Bourbon Spain allied with France when and if it was convenient to do so, as in the Family Compacts, and opposed it when it was convenient to do that. Although there was more likelihood of Franco-Spanish policy congruence in the eighteenth century than Spanish-German policy congruence in the nineteenth (a lot more), this just meant that those two countries were threatened equally by British economic imperialism, where Spain and Germany had basically zero interests in common.
Agreed, the "Spanish Succession" part of the WSS was, frankly, nominal until the capture of Barcelona in 1706 which convinced the Whigs and Ministerial Tories (Well, Marlborough and Godolphin) that there could be "No Peace without Spain". Had they not stuck to that the war could have been over by 1708-9.
During the war itself, Louis' armies' main offensive campaigns were the early ones in southern Germany, designed as much to keep France's ally Bavaria fighting effectively as anything else. It's hard, if not impossible, to spot French territorial ambitions in the Breisgau, let alone all of Swabia, in the early 1700s. In the event, France failed, and the Austrian monarchy was able to effectively annex Bavaria for ten years.
Again, he didn't need to go on the offensive, he started the WSS as the victor and it was up to the Allies to push him back on
every front.
But yeah, tendentious claims of Britain valiantly striving against Continental hegemons while itself remaining blameless and not destabilizing or aggressive whatsoever annoy me. Louis XIV was not Hitler; he was not even Napoleon. And Marlborough was neither Wellington nor Castlereagh.
I didn't say that, either; I even freely admitted we did very well out of the Treaty of Utrect, screwing over our steadfast allies, the Dutch, and breaking promises with everyone from Austria, to Portugal, to the Catalans.
How you manage to twist a paragraph long statement basically saying "there was more to the WSS than Catalans you know" into some "Britain saved the world again at great expense to ourselves, isn't Britain wonderful?" Nationalist diatribe is beyond me.
I didn't mention how we managed to secure the Asiento, the Spanish Slave trade, thus further dipping our hands in the blood of innocents, or how our Textile industry took off because of the widespread destruction of the Flemish textile industry (and, coincidentally, the Polish Textile trade in the Great Northern War) or how Spain was important to merchants in itself as well as as access to lucrative trade in the Levant, because, frankly, it wasn't relevant to the issue Catalan independence. Maybe I should have been more careful in how I phrased it, but sometimes there just isn't time to add all the necessary asterisks and footnotes on the off-chance that somebody might take me for some swivel-eyed, foaming at the mouth, Daily Mail reading, blinkered nationalist.
By the by, a Marlborough/Wellington comparison doesn't really work. Marlborough was General, Government Minister and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary largely responsible for cementing and keeping the Grand Alliance together even if Blenheim or Oudenarde was no Waterloo.
EDIT: I've just re-read my original post and I'm even more puzzled- I didn't mention Britain; I said "the War of the Spanish Succession had everything to do with limiting the megalomanaical designs of Louis XIV..." I didn't even imply Britain working alone, you just assumed it! I don't have the post count for you to clock up precedent so I don't quite get where this is all came from.
