[p. 550]
The other principle threatening a dissolution of the state was [the] Huguenots, whom Richelieu suppressed as a political party; his procedure against them does not fall at all under the point of view of a suppression of freedom of conscience. They had armies of their own, fortified cities, alliances with foreign powers, etc., and accordingly formed a kind of sovereign state; in opposition to them the grandees had formed the Ligue, which had brought the French state to the brink of the abyss. Both opposing parties were an armed fanaticism and raised above public power. In destroying the state of the Huguenots Richelieu at the same time destroyed the right of a Ligue, and he dealt with the rightless and unprincipled remnant of it, the insubordination of the grandees. In the extirpation of the state of the Huguenots he left them freedom of conscience, churches, worship, civil and political rights, equal to the Catholics. Through his consistency as a statesman he found and practised toleration, which more than centuries later was asserted as the product of a more cultivated humanity and as the most brilliant merit of philosophy and of the softening of customs; and it was not ignorance and fanaticism of the French if in the war and in the Peace of Westphalia they did not think of the separation of state and church in Germany and made religion the foundation of a distinction of political and civil rights and asserted in Germany a principle which they abolished in their own country.
Thus France, England too, Spain and the other European countries succeeded in bringing the elements fermenting in their interior and threatening to shatter the state to quiet and to union, and, through the freedom of the feudal constitution which Germania [showed] them, in attaining to a centre determined by laws through freedom and gathering all forces – the properly monarchical or modern republican form, which however
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