Pre-historic Gaul.
The identity of the earliest inhabitants of Gaul is veiled in obscurity,
though philologists, anthropologists and archaeologists are using the
glimmer of traditions collected by ancient historians to shed a faint
twilight upon that remote past. The subjugation of those primitive
tribes did not mean their annihilation: their blood still flows in the
veins of Frenchmen; and they survive also on those megalithic monuments
(see STONE MONUMENTS) with which the soil cf France is dotted, in the
drawings and sculptures of caves hollowed out along the sides of the
valleys, and in the arms and ornaments yielded by sepulchral tumuli,
while the names of the rivers and mountains of France probably
perpetuate the first utterances of those nameless generations.
Iberians and Ligurians.
The first peoples of whom we have actual knowledge are the Iberians and
Ligurians. The Basques who now inhabit both sides of the Pyrenean range
are probably the last representatives of the Iberians, who came from
Spain to settle between the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay. The
Ligurians, who exhibited the hard cunning characteristic of the Genoese
Riviera, must have been descendants of that Indo-European vanguard who
occupied all northern Italy and the centre and south-east of France, who
in the 7th century B.C. received the Phocaean immigrants at Marseilles,
and who at a much later period were encountered by Hannibal during his
march to Rome, on the banks of the Rhône, the frontier of the Iberian
and Ligurian territories. Upon these peoples it was that the conquering
minority of Celts or Gauls imposed themselves, to be succeeded at a
later date by the Roman aristocracy.
Empire of the Celts.
The Roman Conquest.
When Gaul first enters the field of history, Rome has already laid the
foundation of her freedom, Athens dazzles the eastern Mediterranean with
her literature and her art, while in the west Carthage and Marseilles
are lining opposite shores with their great houses of commerce. Coming
from the valley of the Danube in the 6th century, the Celts or Gauls had
little by little occupied central and southern Europe long before they
penetrated into the plains of the Saône, the Seine, and the Loire as far
as the Spanish border, driving out the former inhabitants of the
country. A century later their political hegemony, extending from the
Black Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar, began to disintegrate, and the
Gauls then embarked on more distant migrations, from the Columns of
Hercules to the plateaux of Asia Minor, taking Rome on their way. Their
empire in Gaul, encroached upon in the north by the Belgae, a kindred
race, and in the south by the Iberians, gradually contracted in area and
eventually crumbled to pieces. This process served the turn of the
Romans, who little by little had subjugated first the Cisalpine Gauls
and afterwards those inhabiting the south-east of France, which was
turned into a Roman province in the 2nd century. Up to this time
Hellenism and the mercantile spirit of the Jews had almost exclusively
dominated the Mediterranean littoral, and at first the Latin spirit only
won foothold for itself in various spots on the western coast--as at Aix
in Provence (123 B.C.) and at Narbonne (118 B.C.). A refuge of Italian
pauperism in the time of the Gracchi, after the triumph of the oligarchy
the Narbonnaise became a field for shameless exploitation, besides
providing, under the proconsulate of Caesar, an excellent point of
observation whence to watch the intestine quarrels between the different
nations of Gaul.
Political divisions of Gaul.
These are divided by Caesar in his _Commentaries_ into three groups: the
Aquitanians to the south of the Garonne; the Celts, properly so called,
from the Garonne to the Seine and the Marne; and the Belgae, from the
Seine to the Rhine. But these ethnological names cover a very great
variety of half-savage tribes, differing in speech and in institutions,
each surrounded by frontiers of dense forests abounding in game. On the
edges of these forests stood isolated dwellings like sentinel outposts;
while the inhabitants of the scattered hamlets, caves hollowed in the
ground, rude circular huts or lake-dwellings, were less occupied with
domestic life than with war and the chase. On the heights, as at
Bibracte, or on islands in the rivers, as at Lutetia, or protected by
marshes, as at Avaricum, _oppida_--at once fortresses and places of
refuge, like the Greek Acropolis--kept watch and ward over the beaten
tracks and the rivers of Gaul.
Political institutions of Gaul.
These primitive societies of tall, fair-skinned warriors, blue-eyed and
red-haired, were gradually organized into political bodies of various
kinds--kingdoms, republics and federations--and divided into districts
or _pagi_ (_pays_) to which divisions the minds of the country folk have
remained faithfully attached ever since. The victorious aristocracy of
the kingdom dominated the other classes, strengthened by the prestige of
birth, the ownership of the soil and the practice of arms. Side by side
with this martial nobility the Druids constituted a priesthood unique in
ancient times; neither hereditary as in India, nor composed of isolated
priests as in Greece, nor of independent colleges as at Rome, it was a
true corporation, which at first possessed great moral authority, though
by Caesar's time it had lost both strength and prestige. Beneath these
were the common people attached to the soil, who did not count for
much, but who reacted against the insufficient protection of the regular
institutions by a voluntary subordination to certain powerful chiefs.
Caesar in Gaul.
This impotence of the state was a permanent cause of those discords and
revolts, which in the 1st century B.C. were so singularly favourable to
Caesar's ambition. Thus after eight years of incoherent struggles, of
scattered revolts, and then of more and more energetic efforts, Gaul, at
last aroused by Vercingetorix, for once concentrated her strength, only
to perish at Alesia, vanquished by Roman discipline and struck at from
the rear by the conquest of Britain (58-50 B.C.).
Roman Gaul.
This defeat completely altered the destiny of Gaul, and she became one
of the principal centres of Roman civilization. Of the vast Celtic
empire which had dominated Europe nothing now remained but scattered
remnants in the farthest corners of the land, refuges for all the
vanquished Gaels, Picts or Gauls; and of its civilization there lingered
only idioms and dialects--Gaelic, Pict and Gallic--which gradually
dropped out of use. During five centuries Gaul was unfalteringly loyal
to her conquerors; for to conquer is nothing if the conquered be not
assimilated by the conqueror, and Rome was a past-mistress of this art.
The personal charm of Caesar and the prestige of Rome are not of
themselves sufficient to explain this double conquest. The generous and
enlightened policy of the imperial administration asked nothing of the
people of Gaul but military service and the payment of the tax; in
return it freed individuals from patronal domination, the people from
oligarchic greed or Druidic excommunication, and every one in general
from material anxiety. Petty tyrannies gave place to the great _Pax
Romana_. The Julio-Claudian dynasty did much to attach the Gauls to the
empire; they always occupied the first place in the mind of Augustus,
and the revolt of the Aeduan Julius Sacrovir, provoked by the census of
A.D. 21, was easily repressed by Tiberius. Caligula visited Gaul and
founded literary competitions at Lyons, which had become the political
and intellectual capital of the country. Claudius, who was a native of
Lyons, extended the right of Roman citizenship to many of his
fellow-townsmen, gave them access to the magistracy and to the senate,
and supplemented the annexation of Gaul by that of Britain. The speech
which he pronounced on this occasion was engraved on tables of bronze at
Lyons, and is the first authentic record of Gaul's admission to the
citizenship of Rome. Though the crimes of Nero and the catastrophes
which resulted from his downfall, provoked the troubles of the year A.D.
70, the revolt of Sabinus was in the main an attempt by the Germans to
pillage Gaul and the prelude to military insurrections. The government
of the Flavians and the Antonines completed a definite reconciliation.
After the extinction of the family of Augustus in the 1st century Gaul
had made many emperors--Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Domitian;
and in the 2nd century she provided Gauls to rule the empire--Antoninus
(138-161) came from Nîmes and Claudius from Lyons, as did also Caracalla
later on (211-217).
Material and political transformation of Roman Gaul.
The romanization of the Gauls, like that of the other subject nations,
was effected by slow stages and by very diverse means, furnishing an
example of the constant adaptability of Roman policy. It was begun by
establishing a network of roads with Lyons as the central point, and by
the development of a prosperous urban life in the increasingly wealthy
Roman colonies; and it was continued by the disintegration into
independent cities of nearly all the Gaulish states of the Narbonnaise,
together with the substitution of the Roman collegial magistracy for the
isolated magistracy of the Gauls. This alteration came about more
quickly in the north-east in the Rhine-land than in the west and the
centre, owing to the near neighbourhood of the legions on the frontiers.
Rome was too tolerant to impose her own institutions by force; it was
the conquered peoples who collectively and individually solicited as a
favour the right of adopting the municipal system, the magistracy, the
sacerdotal and aristocratic social system of their conquerors. The
edict of Caracalla, at the beginning of the 3rd century, by conferring
the right of citizenship on all the inhabitants of the empire, completed
an assimilation for which commercial relations, schools, a taste for
officialism, and the adaptability and quick intelligence of the race had
already made preparation. The Gauls now called themselves Romans and
their language Romance. There was neither oppression on the one hand nor
servility on the other to explain this abandonment of their traditions.
Thanks to the political and religious unity which a common worship of
the emperor and of Rome gave them, thanks to administrative
centralization tempered by a certain amount of municipal autonomy, Gaul
prospered throughout three centuries.
Decline of the imperial authority in Gaul.
But this stability of the Roman peace had barely been realized when
events began to threaten it both from within and without. The _Pax
Romana_ having rendered any armed force unnecessary amid a formerly very
bellicose people, only eight legions mounted guard over the Rhine to
protect it from the barbarians who surrounded the empire. The raids made
by the Germans on the eastern frontiers, the incessant competitions for
the imperial power, and the repeated revolts of the Pretorian guard,
gradually undermined the internal cohesion of Gaul; while the
insurrections of the Bagaudae aggravated the destruction wrought by a
grasping treasury and by barbarian incursions; so that the anarchy of
the 3rd century soon aroused separatist ideas. Under Postumus Gaul had
already attempted to restore an independent though short-lived empire
(258-267); and twenty-eight years later the tetrarchy of Diocletian
proved that the blood now circulated with difficulty from the heart to
the extremities of an empire on the eve of disintegration. Rome was to
see her universal dominion gradually menaced from all sides. It was in
Gaul that the decisive revolutions of the time were first prepared;
Constantine's crusades to overthrow the altars of paganism, and Julian's
campaigns to set them up again. After Constantine the emperors of the
East in the 4th century merely put in an occasional appearance at Rome;
they resided at Milan or in the prefectorial capitals of Gaul--at Arles,
at Treves (Trier), at Reims or in Paris. The ancient territorial
divisions--Belgium, Gallia Lugdunensis (Lyonnaise), Gallia Narbonensis
(Narbonnaise)--were split up into seventeen little provinces, which in
their turn were divided into two dioceses. Thus the great historic
division was made between southern and northern France. Roman
nationality persisted, but the administrative system was tottering.
Social disorganization of Gaul.
Upon ground that had been so well levelled by Roman legislation
aristocratic institutions naturally flourished. From the 4th century
onward the balance of classes was disturbed by the development of a
landed aristocracy that grew more powerful day by day, and by the
corresponding ruin of the small proprietors and industrial and
commercial corporations. The members of the _curia_ who assisted the
magistrates in the cities, crushed by the burden of taxes, now evaded as
far as possible public office or senatorial honours. The vacancies left
in this middle class by this continual desertion were not compensated
for by the progressive advance of a lower class destitute of personal
property and constantly unsettled in their work. The peasants, no less
than the industrial labourers, suffered from the absence of any capital
laid by, which alone could have enabled them to improve their land or to
face a time of bad harvests. Having no credit they found themselves at
the mercy of their neighbours, the great landholders, and by degrees
fell into the position of tenants, or into servitude. The curia was thus
emptied both from above and from below. It was in vain that the emperors
tried to rivet the chains of the curia in this hereditary bondage, by
attaching the small proprietor to his glebe, like the artisan to his
gild and the soldier to his legion. To such a miserable pretence of
freedom they all preferred servitude, which at least ensured them a
livelihood; and the middle class of freemen thus became gradually
extinct.
[Illustration:
FRANCE at the end of the 10th. Century.
FRANCE in the 13th. Century.
FRANCE in the 14th. Century.