France, is distinguished by no physical characteristics that
will go far towards explaining its history. Lying within the
middle degrees of the northern temperate zone, greatly
diversified in its superficial features, and varied in the
qualities of its soil, it represents a fair average of the
more favorable conditions of human life.
The Gauls.
The inhabitants of the land when the Romans subdued it were a
Celtic people, belonging to the race which has survived to the
present day with least admixture or modification in the
Bretons, the Welsh, the Celtic Irish and the Highland Scotch.
The peculiar traits of the race in mind and temper are so
visible in French history as to show that the nation has never
ceased to be essentially Gallic in blood.
B. C. 51-A. D. 406; Roman Gaul.
Under the control and the teaching of Rome for four centuries
and a half, the Gauls were perfected in her civilization and
corrupted by the vices of her decay.
5th Century; Frank Conquest.
When the invasion of Teutonic barbarism broke the barrier of
the Rhine, they were easily but not quickly overwhelmed, and
sank under a conquest more complete than that from Rome had
been; since the whole body of the conquerors came to dwell
within the land, and to be neighbors and masters, at once. For
the most part, these invaders preferred country to town, and
carved estates for themselves in all the districts that were
fertile and fair. The Gallo-Romans, or Romanized Gauls, were
left to more freedom in their cities than outside; but their
cities were blighted in industry and in trade by the common
ruin around them. In the rural districts, few liberties or
rights were preserved for the subjugated race.
Feudalism.
The form of society which the German conquerors brought with
them into Gaul was broken by the change of circumstance, quite
as much as the form of society which they overthrew. The camp
gave place to the castle; the wandering war-chief acquired the
firmer superiority of a great land-proprietor and lord; his
warriors slipped in station from free followers to dependents,
in divers degrees; the greater chiefs won the title of kings;
the fiercer kings destroyed their rivals; and four or five
centuries shaped, by slow processes that are traceable,
indistinctly, the military structure of society called Feudal,
which organized lawlessness with picturesque and destructive
effects.
A. D. 481-752. Merovingian monarchy.
A. D. 768-814. Empire of Charlemagne.
All authority withered, except the spiritual authority of the
Church, which steadily grew. The royalty that had thrived for
a time upon the distribution of lands, dignities and powers,
lost prestige when it had expended the domains at its
disposal, and when offices and estates were clutched in
hereditary possession. Before it actually expired, there arose
a family of remarkable men--great in four successive
generations--who put its crown upon their own heads and made
it powerful again. The last and greatest of these expanded the
Frank kingdom into a new Roman Empire; but the energy of the
achievement was wholly his own, and his empire fell to pieces
when he died.
A. D. 987. Kingdom of Hugh Capet.
11th-12th centuries. Enfranchisement of the Communes.
In the part which became France, royalty dwindled once more;
the great dukes and counts nominally subject to it, in the
feudal sense, renewed and increased their power; until one of
their number took the throne, and bequeathed it to his heirs.
This new line of kings won back by degrees the ascendancy of
the crown. The small actual dominion, surrounding Paris, with
which they began, was widened slowly by the strong,
authoritative arm. They made themselves, in rude fashion, the
champions of order and law. They took the people of the towns
into alliance with them; for the towns were beginning to
catch the spirit of the free cities of Italy, and the sturdy
temper of the Flemish burghers, and to assume the name of
"communes," or commons, casting off the feudal yoke that had
been laid upon them. The kings lent their countenance to the
communes, and the communes strengthened the hands of the
kings. Between them and much helped by the stir of the
Crusades, they loosened the roots of feudalism, until its
decay set in. The king's courts and the king's officers pushed
their jurisdiction into a widening realm, until the king's
authority had become supreme, in fact as well as in name.
Even the measureless misery of a hundred years of war with
English kings brought power, in the end, to the crown, by
weakening the greater lords, and by bringing into existence a
fixed military force.
A. D. 1337-1453. Hundred Years War.
Happy accidents, shrewd marriages, and cunning intrigues
gathered the great dukedoms, one by one, into the royal
domain, and the solidarity of modern France was attained.
16th-17th centuries. Aggrandisement of the Monarchy.
But People and King stood no longer side by side. The league
of King and Commons against the Lords had proved less happy
than the alliance in England of Commons and Lords against the
King. Royalty emerged from the patient struggle alone in
possession of sovereign power. It had used the communes and
then abused them, breaking their charters--their
liberties--their courage--their hopes--and widening the
distance between class and class. The "estates" of the realm
became a memory and a name. During five hundred years, while
the Parliament of England grew in majesty and might, the
States-General of France were assembled but thirteen times.
The Court.
When royalty, at last, invented the fatal enchantments of a
"Court," then the blighting of all other powers was soon
complete. It drew within its spell, from all the provinces of
France, their nobles, their men of genius, their aspiring
spirits, and assembled them to corrupt and debase them
together--to make them its pensioners and hirelings, its
sycophants, its jesters, its knaves.
Suppression of the Huguenots.
Neither Renaissance nor Reformation could undo the spell.
Ideas from the one and a great faith from the other joined in
league for the liberty of both, and the thoughtful among the
people were rallied to them with craving eagerness. But
bigotry and frivolity ruled the Court, and the Court proved
stronger than France. Freedom of conscience, and every species
of freedom with it, were destroyed; by massacre, by civil war,
by oppressive government, by banishment, by corrupting bribes.
18th century. The "Ancien Régime."
And always the grandeur of the monarchy increased; its rule
grew more absolute; its Court sucked the life-blood of the
State more remorselessly. The People starved, that the King
might be magnificent; they perished in a thousand battles,
that his name might be "glorious;" they went into exile,
carrying away the arts of France, that the piety of the King
might not be shocked by their heresies. But always, too, there
was growing in the world, around France and in France, a
knowledge,--an understanding,--a modern spirit,--that rebelled
against these infamies.
A. D. 1789-1799. Revolution.
A. D. 1799-1815. Napoleon.
In due time there came an end. Court, and King, and Church,
and all that even seemed to be a part of the evil old regime,
were whirled into a red gulf of Revolution and disappeared.
The people, unused to Liberty, were made drunken by it, and
went mad. In breaking the gyves of feudalism they broke every
other restraint, and wrecked society in all its forms. Then,
in the stupor of their debauch, they gave themselves to a new
despot--mean, conscienceless, detestable, but transcendent in
the genius and the energy of his selfishness--who devoured
them like a dragon, in the hunger of his insatiate ambition,
and persuaded them to be proud of their fate.
A. D. 1815-1830. Bourbon Restoration.
A. D. 1830-1848. Louis Phillippe
A. D. 1848-1851. Second Republic.
A. D. 1852-1870. Second Empire.
A. D. 1870-. Third Republic.
Europe suppressed the intolerable adventurer, and France, for
three-fourths of a century since, has been under an
apprenticeship of experience, slowly learning the art of
self-government by constitutional modes. Two monarchies, one
republic, and a sham empire are the spoiled samples of her
work. A third republic, now in hand, is promising better
success. It rests with seeming stability on the support of the
great class of peasant landowners, which the very miseries of her
misgoverned past have created for France. Trained to pinching
frugality by the hard conditions of the old regime; unspoiled
by any ruinous philanthropy, like that of the English
poor-laws; stimulated to land-buying by opportunities which
came, first, from the impoverishment of extravagant nobles,
and, later, from revolutionary confiscations; encouraged to
the same acquisition by favorable laws of transfer and equal
inheritance,--the landowning peasants of France constitute a
Class powerful in numbers, invincible in conservatism, an
profoundly interested in the preservation of social order.
--------End: A Logical Outline of French History-----------
FRANCE: A. D. 861.
Origin of the duchy and of the house of Capet.
In 861, Charles the Bald, king of that part of the dismembered
empire of Charlemagne which grew into the kingdom of France,
was struggling with many difficulties: defending himself
against the hostile ambition of his brother, Louis the German;
striving to establish his authority in Brittany and Aquitaine;
harried and harassed by Norse pirates; surrounded by domestic
treachery and feudal restiveness. All of his many foes were
more or less in league against him, and the soul of their
combination appears to have been a certain bold adventurer--a
stranger of uncertain origin, a Saxon, as some say--who bore
the name of Robert the Strong. In this alien enemy, King
Charles, who never lacked shrewdness, discovered a possible
friend. He opened negotiations with Robert the Strong, and a
bargain was soon made which transferred the sword and the
energy of the potent mercenary to the service of the king.
"Soon after, a Placitum or Great Council was held at
Compiègne. In this assembly, and by the assent of the
Optimates, the Seine and its islands, and that most important
island Paris, and all the country between Seine and Loire,
were granted to Robert, the Duchy of France, though not yet so
called, moreover the Angevine Marches, or County of
Outre-Maine, all to be held by Robert-le-Fort as barriers
against Northmen and Bretons, and by which cessions the realm
was to be defended. Only a portion of this dominion owned the
obedience of Charles: the Bretons were in their own country,
the Northmen in the country they were making their own; the
grant therefore was a license to Robert to win as much as he
could, and to keep his acquisitions should he succeed. ...
Robert kept the Northmen in check, yet only by incessant
exertion. He inured the future kings of France, his two young
sons, Eudes and Robert, to the tug of war, making them his
companions in his enterprises. The banks of the Loire were
particularly guarded by him, for here the principal attacks
were directed." Robert the Strong fought valiantly, as he had
contracted to do, for five years, or more, and then, in an
unlucky battle with the Danes, one summer day in 866, he fell.
"Thus died the first of the Capets." All the honors and
possessions which he had received from the king were then
transferred, not to his sons, but to one Hugh, Count of
Burgundy, who became also Duke or Marquis of France and Count
of Anjou. Twenty years later, however, the older son of
Robert, Eudes, turns up in history again as Count of Paris,
and nothing is known of the means by which the family, soon to
become royal, had recovered its footing and its importance.
_Sir F. Palgrave,
History of Normandy and England,
book 1, chapter 3 (volume 1)._
FRANCE: A. D. 877-987.
The end of the Carolingian monarchy and the rise of the
Capetian.
Charles the Bald died in 877 and was succeeded by his son
Louis, called "the Stammerer," who reigned only two years. His
two sons, Louis and Carloman, were joint kings for a short
space, struggling with the Northmen and losing the provinces
out of which Duke Boson of Provence, brother-in-law of Charles
the Bald, formed the kingdom of Arles. Louis died in 882 and
Carloman two years afterwards; thereupon Charles, surnamed
"the Fat," king of Lombardy and Germany, and also emperor
(nephew of Charles the Bald), became likewise king of France,
and briefly reunited under his feebly handled sceptre the
greater part of the old empire of Charlemagne: When he died,
in 888, a party of the nobles, tired of his race, met and
elected Count Eudes (or Odo), the valiant Count of Paris, who
had just defended his city with obstinate courage against the
Northmen, to be their king. The sovereignty of Eudes was not
acknowledged by the nation at large. His opponents found a
Carling to set up against him, in the person of the boy
Charles,--youngest son of Louis "the Stammerer," born after
his father's death,--who appears in history as Charles "the
Simple." Eudes, after some years of war, gave up to Charles a
small domain, between the Seine and the Meuse, acknowledged
his feudal superiority and agreed that the whole kingdom
should be surrendered to him on his (Eudes') death. In
accordance with this agreement, Charles the Simple became sole
king in 898, when Eudes died, and the country which
acknowledged his nominal sovereignty fell into a more
distracted state than ever. The Northmen established
themselves in permanent occupation of the country on the lower
Seine, and Charles, in 911, made a formal cession of it to
their duke, Rollo, thus creating the great duchy of Normandy.
In 922 the nobles grew once more disgusted with the feebleness
of their king and crowned Duke Robert, brother of the late king
Eudes, driving Charles into his stronghold of Laon. The
Normans came to Charles' help and his rival Robert was killed
in a battle.
{1159}
But Charles was defeated, was inveigled into the hands of one
of the rebel Lords.--Herbert of Venmandois--and kept a
prisoner until he died, in 929. One Rodolf of Burgundy had
been chosen king, meantime, and reigned until his death, in
936. Then legitimacy triumphed again, and a young son of
Charles the Simple, who had been reared in England, was sent
for and crowned. This king--Louis IV.--his son, Lothair, and
his grandson, Louis V., kept possession of the shaking throne
for half-a-century; but their actual kingdom was much of the
time reduced to little more than the royal city of Laon and
its immediate territories. When Louis died, in 987, leaving no
nearer heir than his uncle, Charles, Duke of Lorraine, there
was no longer any serious attempt to keep up the Carolingian
line. Hugh, Duke of France--whose grandfather Robert, and
whose grand-uncle Eudes had been crowned kings, before him,
and whose father, "Hugh the Great," had been the king-maker of
the period since--was now called to the throne and settled
himself firmly in the seat which a long line of his
descendants would hold. He was known as Hugh Capet to his
contemporaries, and it is thought that he got the name from
his wearing of the hood, cap, or cape of St. Martin--he being
the abbot of St. Martin at Tours, in addition to his other
high dignities.
_G. W. Kitchin,
History of France,
volume 1, book 2, part 2, chapter 5;
book 3, chapter 1._
ALSO IN:
_Sir F. Palgrave,
History of Normandy and England,
book 1, chapter 5 (volume l)._
_C. F. Keary,
The Vikings in Western Christendom,
chapters 11 and 13-15._
See, also, LAON.
FRANCE: A. D. 987.
Accession of Hugh Capet.
The kingdom of the early Capetians.
"On the accession of the third race [the Capetians], France,
properly so called, only comprised the territory between the
Somme and the Loire; it was bounded by the counties of
Flanders and Vermandois on the north; by Normandy and Brittany
on the west; by the Champagne on the east; by the duchy of
Aquitaine on the south. The territory within these bounds was
the duchy of France, the patrimonial possession of the Capets,
and constituted the royal domain. The great fiefs of the
crown, in addition to the duchy of France, were the duchy of
Normandy, the duchy of Burgundy, nearly the whole of Flanders,
formed into a county, the county of Champagne, the duchy of
Aquitaine, and the county of Toulouse. ... The sovereigns of
these various states were the great vassals of the crown and
peers of France; Lorraine and a portion of Flanders were
dependent on the Germanic crown, while Brittany was a fief of
the duchy of Normandy. ... The county of Barcelona beyond the
Alps was also one of the great fiefs of the crown of France."
_E. de Bonnechose,
History of France: second epoch,
book 1, chapter 2._
"With the exception of the Spanish March and of part of
Flanders, all these states have long been fully incorporated
with the French monarchy. But we must remember that, under the
earlier French Kings, the connexion of most of these provinces
with their nominal suzerain was even looser than the connexion
of the German princes after the Peace of Westphalia with the
Viennese Emperors. A great French Duke was as independent
within his own dominions as an Elector of Saxony or Bavaria,
and there were no common institutions, no Diet or assembly of
any kind, to bring him into contact either with his liege lord
or with his fellow-vassals. Aquitaine and Toulouse ... seem
almost to have forgotten that there was any King of the French
at all, or at all events that they had anything to do with him.
They did not often even pay him the compliment of waging war
upon him, a mode of recognition of his existence which was
constantly indulged in by their brethren of Normandy and
Flanders."
_E. A. Freeman,
The Franks and the Gauls
(Historical Essays, 1st series, number 7)._
"When France was detached from the Empire in the ninth
century, of all three imperial regions she was the one which
seemed least likely to form a nation. There was no unity in
the country west of the Scheldt, the Meuse, and the Rhone.
Various principalities, duchies, or counties were here formed,
but each of them was divided into secular fiefs and
ecclesiastical territories. Over these fiefs and territories
the authority of the duke or the count, which was supposed to
represent that of the king, was exercised only in case these
seigneurs had sufficient power, derived from their own
personal estates. Destitute of domains and almost starving,
the king, in official documents, asked what means he might
find on which to live with some degree of decency. From time
to time, amid this chaos, he discussed the theory of his
authority. He was a lean and solemn phantom, straying about
among living men who were very rude and energetic. The phantom
kept constantly growing leaner, but royalty did not vanish.
People were accustomed to its existence, and the men of those
days could not conceive of a revolution. By the election of
Hugh Capet, in 987, royalty became a reality, because the
king, as Duke of Francia, had lands, money, and followers. It
would be out of place to seek a plan of conduct and a
methodical line of policy in the actions of the Capetians, for
they employed simultaneously every sort of expedient. During
more than three centuries they had male offspring; thus the
chief merit of the dynasty was that it endured. As always
happens, out of the practice developed a law; and this happy
accident produced a lawful hereditary succession, which was a
great element of strength. Moreover the king had a whole
arsenal of rights: old rights of Carolingian royalty,
preserving, the remembrance of imperial power, which the study
of the Roman law was soon to resuscitate, transforming these
apparitions into formidable realities; old rights conferred by
the coronation, which were impossible to define, and hence
incontestable; and rights of suzerainty, newer and more real,
which were definitely determined and codified as feudalism
developed and which, joined to the other rights mentioned
above, made the king proprietor of France. These are the
elements that Capetian royalty contributed to the play of
fortuitous circumstances."
_E. Lavisse,
General View of the Political History of Europe,
chapter 3._
See, also, TWELVE PEERS OF FRANCE.
{1160}
FRANCE: A. D. 987-1327.
The Feudal Period.
"The period in the history of France, of which we are about to
write, began with the consecration of Hugues Capet, at Reims,
the 3rd of July, 987, but it is a period which would but
improperly take its name from the Capetians; for throughout
this time royalty was, as it were, annihilated in France; the
social bond was broken, and the country which extends from the
Rhine to the Pyrenees, and from the English Channel to the
Gulf of Lyon, was governed by a confederation of princes
rarely under the influence of a common will, and united only
by the Feudal System. While France was confederated under
feudal administration, the legislative power was suspended.
Hugues Capet and his successors, until the accession of St.
Louis, had not the right of making laws; the nation had no
diet, no regularly constituted assemblies whose authority it
acknowledged. The Feudal System, tacitly adopted, and
developed by custom, was solely acknowledged by the numerous
sovereigns who divided the provinces among themselves. It
replaced the social bond, the monarch, and the legislator. ...
The period ... is therefore like a long interregnum, during
which the royal authority was suspended, although the name of
king was always preserved. He who bore this title in the midst
of a republic of princes was only distinguished from them by
some honorary prerogative, and he exercised over them scarcely
any authority. Until very near the end of the 11th century,
these princes were scarcely less numerous than the castles
which covered France. No authority was acknowledged at a
distance, and every fortress gave its lord rank among the
sovereigns. The conquest of England by the Normans broke the
equilibrium between the feudal lords; one of the confederate
princes, become a king in 1066, gradually extended, until
1179, his domination over more than half of France; and
although it was not he who bore the title of king of the
French, it may be imagined that in time the rest of the
country would also pass under his yoke. Philip the August and
his son, during the forty-six last years of the same period,
reconquered almost all the fiefs which the English kings had
united, brought the other great vassals back to obedience, and
changed the feudal confederation which had ruled France into a
monarchy, which incorporated the Feudal System in its
constitution."
_J. C. L. de Sismondi,
France Under the Feudal System
(translated by W. Bellingham), chapter 1._
"The feudal period, that is, the period when the feudal system
was the dominant fact of our country, ... is comprehended
between Hugh Capet and Philippe de Valois, that is, it
embraces the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. ... At the end of
the 10th century, royalty and the commons were not visible, or
at all events scarcely visible. At the commencement of the
14th century, royalty was the head of the state, the commons
were the body of the nation. The two forces to which the
feudal system was to succumb had then attained, not, indeed,
their entire development, but a decided preponderance. ...
With the 14th century, the character of war changed. Then
began the foreign wars; no longer a vassal against suzerain,
or vassal against vassal, but nation against nation,
government against government. On the accession of Philippe de
Valois, the great wars between the French and the English
broke out--the claims of the kings of England, not upon any
particular fief, but upon the whole land, and upon the throne
of France--and they continued up to Louis XI. They were no
longer feudal, but national wars; a certain proof that the
feudal period stopped at this limit, that another society had
already commenced."
_F. P. Guizot,
History of Civilization,
2d course, lecture 1._