France, victorious in her struggle for dynastic
aggrandizement on the continent of Europe, was destined to suffer
defeat in her efforts to secure colonies in Asia and America.
This period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was marked
likewise by the constant decay of old political and social institutions
in Italy and in Germany, by the gradual decline of the might and
prestige of the Ottoman Turks, and by the extinction of the ancient
kingdom of Poland. In their place appeared as great world powers the
northern monarchies of Prussia and Russia, whose royal lines--
Hohenzollerns and Romanovs--were to vie in ambition and prowess, before
the close of the period, with Habsburgs and Bourbons.
Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined. As
steadily arose the numbers, the ability, and the importance of the
traders and commercial magnates, the moneyed people, all those who were
identified with the new wealth that the Commercial Revolution was
creating, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the merchants,--the
so-called middle class, the _bourgeoisie_, who gradually grew
discontented with the restrictive institutions of their time.
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