Gaul had been Latinized and Christianized. Now one more thing was
needed to prepare her for a great future. Her fibre was to be
toughened by the infusion of a stronger race. Julius Caesar had shaken
her into submission, and Rome had chastised her into decency of
behavior and speech, but as her manners improved her native vigor
declined. She took kindly to Roman luxury and effeminacy, and could no
longer have thundered at the gates of her neighbors demanding "land."
The despotism of a perishing Roman Empire had become intolerable; and
the thoughts of an overtaxed and enslaved people turned naturally to
the Franks. They had rescued them from one terrible fate, might they
not deliver them from another? And so it came about that the young
savage Chlodoveg, or _Clovis_, grandson of Meroveus, found himself
master of the fair land long coveted beyond the Rhine; and Gaul and
Roman alike were submerged beneath the Teuton flood, while Clovis,
sitting in the Palace of the Caesars, on the island in the Seine, was
wearing the kingly crown, and independent and dynastic life had
commenced in what was hereafter to be not Gaul, but _France_.
But the king of whom she had dreamed was of her own race; not this
terrible Frank. Had she exchanged one servitude for another? Had she
been, not set free, but simply annexed to the realm of the barbarian
across the Rhine? Let us say rather that it was an espousal. She had
brought her dowry of beauty and "land," that most coveted of
possessions, and had pledged obedience, for which she was to be
cherished, honored, and protected, and to bear the name of her lord.
It will be well not to examine too closely the conversion of Clovis to
Christianity, any more than that of Constantine to the religion of
Christ, or that of Henry VIII. to Protestantism. The only thing Clovis
wanted of the gods was aid in destroying his enemies. At a certain
dark moment, when the pagan deities failed him, and the tide of battle
was turning against him, in desperation he offered to become a
Christian, if the God of the Christians would save him. He kept his
word. His victory was followed by Christian baptism, and the Church
had won a great defender, whose ferocious instincts were thereafter to
be directed toward the extermination of unbelievers. And while hewing
and consolidating and bringing his kingdom into form, whether by
treacheries or intrigues or assassination, this converted Frank was not
alone defender of the faith, but of the orthodox faith. The Visigoth
kingdom in Spain was given over to that heresy known as _Arianism_! So
in a crusade, like another of a later date, he swept them over beyond
the Pyrenees, thus establishing a frontier which always remained.
Such were the rough beginnings of France, geographically and
historically.
Ancient heroes are said to be seen through a shadowy lens, which
magnifies their stature. Let us hope that the crimes of the three or
four generations immediately succeeding Clovis have been in like manner
expanded; for it is sickening to read of such monstrous prodigality of
wickedness; whole families butchered--husbands, wives, children,
anything obstructing the path to the throne--with an atrocity which
makes Richard III. seem a mere pigmy in the art of intrigue and
killing. The chapter closes with the daughter and mother of kings
(Brunhilde or Brunhaut), naked, and tied by one arm, one leg, and her
hair to the tail of an unbroken horse, and amid jeers and shouts dashed
over the stones of Paris (A.D. 600).
Upon the death of Clovis his inheritance was divided among four sons,
who, with their wives and families and their tempestuous passions,
afforded material for a great epic. Whether Fredegunde or Brunhilde
was the more terrible who can say? But the story of these rival
queens, with their loves and their hatreds and their ambitious,
vengeful fury, is more like the story of demons than of women. But
these conditions led to two results which played a great part in
subsequent events. One was the exclusion of women from the succession
by the adoption of the Salic Law. Then, in order to curb the
degeneracy or to reinforce the inefficiency of the hereditary ruler,
there was created the office of _Maire du Palais_, a modest title which
contained the germ of the future, not alone of France, but of the world.
To imperfect human vision it would have seemed at the time a fatal
mistake to bury out of sight the refinements which a Latin civilization
had been for nearly five centuries planting in Gaul. But so often has
this been repeated in the history of the world, one is compelled to
recognize it as a part of the evolutionary method. Again and again
have we seen old civilizations effaced by barbarians. But these
barbarians with their coarseness and brutality have usually brought
something better than refinement; a spirit so transforming, so
vitalizing, that we are compelled to believe it was the end sought in
the catastrophe we deplore: that is, a spirit of liberty, a sense of
personal independence, without which the refinements of art, even
reinforced by genius, are unavailing. Such was undoubtedly the
invigorating leaven brought into Gaul by the Frank, although for a time
he succumbed to the enervating Gallic influence, and, while conquering
and subduing, was himself conquered and subdued.
The cultivated Roman in his toga appealed to the imagination of the
fine barbarian; the habits of the Romanized cities were a tempting
model for imitation. Bridges, aqueducts, palaces, with their splendid
mingling of strength and beauty, fragments of which still linger to
convince us of our inferiority, these were awe-inspiring to the Frank
and filled him with longings to drink deep at this fountain of
civilization. The heroic strain brought by Clovis was quickly
enfeebled and debauched by luxury. The court of the Merovingian king
became a miserable assemblage of half-Romanized barbarians covered with
the frayed and worn-out mantle of imperialism. It is a strange picture
we have of this descendant of Clovis, this _Roi Fainéant_ (Do-nothing
King) in a royal procession on a state occasion. Curled and perfumed,
he emerges from the _Palais des Thermes_, attended in great pomp by
Romans and Romanized Frankish warriors. Then, in remembrance of the
primitive simplicity of his ancestral line, sitting alone in a wagon
drawn by bullocks, he leads the pageant through the narrow streets of
old Paris.
But while masquerading as a simple barbarian he was only a poor
imitator of the vices and dregs of a perishing civilization. But in
proof that virility was still a characteristic of the Frank in Gaul, we
are told that while the Church and the offices of State were filled by
Romans or Gallo-Romans, the army at this time was composed entirely of
Franks.
With the degeneracy of these _Rois Fainéants_ the kingdom of Clovis was
gradually shrinking, and men were already waiting to seize the power as
it fell from incompetent hands. When Clovis made gifts of large
estates to reward, or to purchase, followers, Roman or Gallic, he laid
the foundations of a system which would prove fatal to his successors.
With these estates came titles and authority, multiplying and growing
with each succeeding reign. A count, who was the chief officer of a
county, was in fact the sovereign of a small state, and so on a smaller
scale were a duke or a marquis. And it was to these smaller bodies
that the power naturally gravitated as it vanished from the throne.
This meant disintegration into helpless fragments, and this meant the
end of a Frankish kingdom, unless some power should arise great enough
to compel the crumbling state to become homogeneous.
It was a Romanized-Frankish family dwelling in the Valley of the Rhine
which saved the kingdom of Clovis from this fate. France had already
fallen apart into an eastern and a western kingdom, known respectively
as _Austrasia_ and _Neustria_. A certain Duke of Austrasia, known as
Pepin the Elder, was the forerunner of the Carlovingian line of kings.
With him the centralizing force began to work with saving power. The
one end kept in view was the restoration of the power of kingship--the
strengthening of the power at the centre. To this end, from generation
to generation, these early Pepins steadily moved. In 687 Pepin the
Younger, grandson of the Elder, by a victory at Testry over Neustria,
brought together these two sundered divisions under himself, with the
new title Duke of the Franks. The Pepins had already succeeded in
making the office of Maire du Palais hereditary in their family, and in
the year A.D. 732, Charles, son and successor of Pepin the Younger,
made himself forever the hero not of France alone, but of Christendom,
by driving the Saracen invasion back over the Pyrenees, and was in turn
succeeded by his son, Pepin the Short, who seized the Merovingian crown
itself; this remarkable family, the appointed channel for the
centralizing forces, reaching its climax in his son Charlemagne;
creator of a Holy Roman Empire.
There had appeared an enemy to the true faith more to be feared than
paganism.
Less than one hundred years after the death of Clovis, there had come
out of Asia, that birthplace of religions, a new faith, which was
destined to be for centuries the scourge of Christendom, and which
to-day rules one-third of the human family. Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ,
had successively come with saving message to humanity, and now (A.D.
600) Mahomet believed himself divinely appointed to drive out of Arabia
the idolatry of ancient Magianism (the religion of Zoroaster).
Christianity had passed through strange vicissitudes. Kings, emperors,
popes, and bishops had been terrible custodians of its truths; and
while many still held it in its primitive purity, ecclesiastics were
fiercely righting over the nature of the Trinity, the divinity of the
Virgin Mother, and the Church was shaken to its foundation by furious
factions.
In this hour of weakness the Persians (A.D. 590) had conquered Asia
Minor. Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary were profaned; the Holy
Sepulchre had been burned, and the cross carried off amid shouts of
laughter. Magianism had insulted Christianity, and no miracle had
interposed! The heavens did not roll asunder, nor did the earth open
her abysses to swallow them up. There was consternation and doubt in
Christendom.
Such was the state of the Church when Mahometanism came into existence.
"There is but one God, and Mahomet is his Prophet." Such was its
battle-cry and its creed, and the moral precepts of the Koran were its
gospel. There seems nothing in this to account for the mad enthusiasm
and the passion for worship in its followers. But in less than a
hundred years this lion out of Arabia had subjugated Syria,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Northern Africa, and the Spanish Peninsula. Now,
sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, the Mahometan had crossed
the Pyrenees and was in Southern Gaul.
Under the strange magic of this faith the largest religious empire the
world had known had sprung into existence, stretching from the Chinese
Wall to the Atlantic; from the Caspian to the Indian Ocean; and
Jerusalem, the metropolis of Christianity--Jerusalem, the Mecca of the
Christian--was lost! The Crescent floated over the birthplace of our
Lord, and, notwithstanding the temporary successes of the Crusades, it
does to this day.
If the Pyrenees were passed the very existence of Christendom was
threatened. Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, averted
this danger when he stayed the infidel flood at the battle of Tours,
A.D. 732.
The Merovingian kings, if not devout, were faithful sons of the Church,
and when the pope appealed to the last Merovingian king to protect him
from the Lombards, near the end of the eighth century, Pepin, then
Maire du Palais, but holding supreme power, twice crossed the Alps with
an army, wrested five cities and a large extent of territory from the
enemies of the pope, which, upon parting, he tossed as a gift into the
lap of the Church. And this, known as the _Donation of Pepin_, was the
beginning of the temporal power of the popes in Italy. So when Pepin
resolved to assume the crown, Pope Zacharias in gratitude sanctioned
the audacious act, by sending his representative to place the symbol of
power upon the head of this faithful son and usurper! (A.D. 751.)
But this was only the stepping-stone for a greater elevation. When
Pope Adrian I. again needed protection from the Lombard, a greater than
Pepin was wearing the crown his father had audaciously snatched.