been in the reign of Francis I.; and at the time of his death that most popular of the Bourbon kings was engaged on a plan having for its object the subversion of the Austrian power. His assassination changed the course of events for a few years; but Richelieu became the ally of the Swedes and Protestant Germans in the Thirty Years' War, though he was a Cardinal, had destroyed the political power of the Huguenots, and might have aspired to the Papacy. Mazarin, another Cardinal, followed Richelieu's policy. Louis XIV. was repeatedly at war with the House of Austria, though he was the son of an Austrian princess, and was married to another. His last war with that house was for the throne of Spain, when the elder branch of the Hapsburgs died out, in 1700. Louis XV. had two contests with Austria; but in 1756, under the lead of Count Kaunitz, France and Austria were united, and acted together in the Seven Years' War, the incidents and effects of which were by no means calculated to reconcile the French to the departure of their government from its ancient policy. One of the causes of the French Revolution was the Austrian alliance, and one of its effects was the complete rupture of that alliance. Austria was the most determined foe that the French Republic and Empire ever encountered. Including the war of 1815, there were six contests between Austria and republican and imperial France. In all these wars Austria was the aggressor, and showed herself to be the enemy of _France_ as well as of those _French principles_ which so frightened the conservatives of the world in those days. In the first war, she took possession of French places for herself, and not for the House of Bourbon; and in the last she purposed a partition of France, long after Louis XVIII. had been finally restored, and when Napoleon was at or near St. Helena. She demanded that Alsace and Lorraine should be made over to her, in the autumn of 1815. She sought to induce Prussia to unite with her by offering to support any demand that she might make for French territory; and, failing to move that power, endeavored to get the smaller German States to act with her,--the same States, indeed, that are now so hostile to France, and which talk of a march upon Paris, and of a reduction of French territorial strength. Nothing prevented the Austrian idea from being reduced to practice but the opposition of Russia and England, neither of which had any interest in the spoliation of France, while both had no desire to see Austria rendered stronger than she was. It was to England that Austria owed her Italian possessions, which, in 1814, she at first had the sense not to wish to be cumbered with; and to make her still more powerful north of the Alps was not to be thought of even by the Liverpools and Castlereaghs. The Czar, too, had in his thoughts a closer connection with France than it suited him then to avow, and for purposes of his own; and therefore he