Alpha Book

Switzerland had been lost to the empire; both France and Sweden had
deliberately dismembered other valuable districts. [Footnote: For the
provisions of the treaties of Westphalia, see above, pp. 228 f.]
[Sidenote: Deplorable Results of the Thirty Years' War]
It seemed as though slight foundation remained on which a substantial
political structure could be reared, for the social conditions in the
Germanies were deplorable. It is not an exaggeration to say that during
the Thirty Years' War Germany lost at least half of its population and
more than two-thirds of its movable property. In the middle of the
seventeenth century, at about the time Louis XIV succeeded to a fairly
prosperous France, German towns and villages were in ashes, and vast
districts turned into deserts. Churches and schools were closed by
hundreds, and religious and intellectual torpor prevailed. Industry and
trade were so completely paralyzed that by 1635 the Hanseatic League
was virtually abandoned, because the free commercial cities, formerly
so wealthy, could not meet the necessary expenses.


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