Mary Platt Parmele - A Short History of France
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Mary Platt Parmele >> A Short History of France
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12 [Frontispiece: Gambetta proclaiming the Republic of France. From the
painting by Howard Pyle.]
A SHORT HISTORY OF FRANCE
BY
MARY PLATT PARMELE
ILLUSTRATED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1907
Copyright, 1894, By
WILLIAM BEVERLEY HARISON
Copyright, 1898, 1905, 1906, By
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Early Conditions in Gaul
CHAPTER II.
Julius Caesar's Conquest of Gaul
Lutetia
CHAPTER III.
Birth of Christianity
Its Dissemination
Its Espousal by the Roman Empire
Hunnish Invasion
CHAPTER IV.
The Frank in Gaul
Clovis
Rois-Faineants
Charles Martel
Mahometanism
Pepin Seizes the Crown
CHAPTER V.
Charlemagne
Holy Roman Empire
Treaty of Verdun
CHAPTER VI.
Invasions by Northmen
Normandy Given to Invaders
Feudalism
Decline of Kingship
Ascendancy of the Church
Hugh Capet
"Truce of God"
William the Conqueror
CHAPTER VII.
Social Structure of France
Free Cities
Their Creation and Enfranchisement
The Crusades
Philip Augustus
War with King John of England
Toulouse and the Albigensian War
CHAPTER VIII.
Abelard
Louis IX.
End of Crusades
Philip III.
Philip IV. and Papacy
Creation of States-General
Popes at Avignon
Knights Templar Exterminated
Change in Succession
CHAPTER IX.
Edward III. Claims French Throne
Crecy
Poitiers
Treaty of Bretigny
Charles V. and Bertrand du Guesclin
Death of Black Prince
Charles VI.
A Mad King
Feud Between Houses of Orleans and Burgundy
Siege of Orleans
Joan of Arc
Charles VII.
CHAPTER X.
Standing Army Created
Louis XI.
The Passing of Mediaevalism
Charles VIII.
Invasion of Italy
Louis XII.
Francis I.
Struggle for Throne of the German Empire
The Reformation
CHAPTER XI.
The House of Guise
Marie Stuart
Francis II.
His Death
Regency of Catharine de' Medici
Her Designs
Coligny
Henry of Navarre
His Marriage
Charles IX.
St. Bartholomew's Eve
Henry III.
His Death
Henry of Navarre King
CHAPTER XII.
Edict of Nantes
Ravaillac
Louis XIII.
Regency of Maria de' Medici
Richelieu
The Fronde
CHAPTER XIII.
Louis XIV.
Four Great Wars
Revocation of Edict of Nantes
A Victorious Coalition
Death of Louis XIV.
Louis XV.
CHAPTER XIV.
John Law
Life at Versailles
Marriage of Dauphin
Unseen Currents
Approaching Crisis
Death of Louis XV.
CHAPTER XV.
Louis XVI.
American Revolution
Turgot
Necker
States-General Summoned
National Assembly
Destruction of Bastille
Revolution
Lafayette
Varennes
The Temple
Triumphant Jacobins
Execution of the King
Charlotte Corday
Execution of Queen
Fate of the Dauphin
Girondists
Philippe Egalite
Revolution Ended
CHAPTER XVI.
France a Republic
Napoleon Bonaparte
Breaking Chains in Italy
Campo Formio
Campaign in Egypt
An Empire
Rapid Steps from Toulon to Versailles
A New Map of Europe
Maria Louisa
Moscow
Leipsic
Elba
CHAPTER XVII.
Louis XVIII.
Return of Napoleon
Waterloo
St. Helena
Bourbon Restoration
Charles X.
Louis Philippe
Revolution
Second Republic
Louis Napoleon
CHAPTER XVIII.
Second French Republic
The _Coup d'Etat_
Napoleon III.
A "Liberator" in Italy
Peace of Villafranca
Suez Canal
An Empire in Mexico
Franco-Prussian War
Sedan
CHAPTER XIX.
Third French Republic
The Commune
The Germans in Paris
Reconstruction from Thiers to Loubet
Affaire Dreyfus
Law of Associations
Separation of Church and State
Conference at Algeciras
Election of M. Fallieres
Conclusion
Sovereigns and Rulers of France
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Gambetta, proclaiming the Republic of France . . . _Frontispiece_
Coronation of Charlemagne
Burning of Joan of Arc at Rouen, May 30, 1431
Napoleon at the Battle of Rivoli, January 14, 1797
Josephine crowned Empress, December 2, 1804,
in Notre Dame Cathedral
The Revolution of July 28, 1830
A SHORT HISTORY OF FRANCE.
CHAPTER I.
One of the greatest achievements of modern research is the discovery of
a key by which we may determine the kinship of nations. What we used
to conjecture, we now know. An identity in the structural form of
language establishes with scientific certitude that however diverse
their character and civilizations, Russian, German, Englishman,
Frenchman, Spaniard, are all but branches from the same parent stem,
are all alike children of the Asiatic Aryan.
So skilful are modern methods of questioning the past, and so
determined the effort to find out its secrets, we may yet know the
origin and history of this wonderful Asiatic people, and when and why
they left their native continent and colonized upon the northern shores
of the Mediterranean. Certain it is, however, that, more centuries
before the Christian era than there have been since, they had peopled
Western Europe.
This branch of the Aryan family is known as the Keltic, and was older
brother to the Teuton and Slav, which at a much later period followed
them from the ancestral home, and appropriated the middle and eastern
portions of the European Continent.
The name of Gaul was given to the territory lying between the Ocean and
the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenees and the Alps. And at a later
period a portion of Northern Gaul, and the islands lying north of it,
received from an invading chieftain and his tribe the name _Brit_ or
_Britain_ (or Pryd or Prydain).
If the mind could be carried back on the track of time, and we could
see what we now call France as it existed twenty centuries before the
Christian era, we should behold the same natural features: the same
mountains rearing their heads; the same rivers flowing to the sea; the
same plains stretching out in the sunlight. But instead of vines and
flowers and cultivated fields we should behold great herds of wild ox
and elk, and of swine as fierce as wolves, ranging in a climate as cold
as Norway; and vast, inaccessible forests, the home of beasts of prey,
which contended with man for food and shelter.
Let us read Guizot's description of life in Gaul five centuries before
Christ:
"Here lived six or seven millions of men a bestial life, in dwellings
dark and low, built of wood and clay and covered with branches or
straw, open to daylight by the door alone and confusedly heaped
together behind a rampart of timber, earth, and stone, which enclosed
and protected what they were pleased to call--a _town_."
Such was the Paris and such the Frenchmen of the age of Pericles! And
the same tides that washed the sands of Southern Gaul, a few hours
later ebbed and flowed upon the shores of Greece--rich in culture, with
refinements and subtleties in art which are the despair of the world
to-day--with an intellectual endowment never since attained by any
people.
The same sun which rose upon temples and palaces and life serene and
beautiful in Greece, an hour later lighted sacrificial altars and
hideous orgies in the forests of Gaul. While the Gaul was nailing the
heads of human victims to his door, or hanging them from the bridle of
his horse, or burning or flogging his prisoners to death, the Greek,
with a literature, an art, and a civilization in ripest perfection,
discussed with his friends the deepest problems of life and destiny,
which were then baffling human intelligence, even as they are with us
today. Truly we of Keltic and Teuton descent are late-comers upon the
stage of national life.
There was no promise of greatness in ancient Gaul. It was a great,
unregulated force, rushing hither and thither. Impelled by insatiate
greed for the possessions of their neighbors, there was no permanence
in their loves or their hatreds. The enemies of to-day were the allies
of to-morrow. Guided entirely by the fleeting desires and passions of
the moment, with no far-reaching plans to restrain, the sixty or more
tribes composing the Gallic people were in perpetual state of feud and
anarchy, apparently insensible to the ties of brotherhood, which give
concert of action, and stability in form of national life. If they
overran a neighboring country, it seemed not so much for permanent
acquisition, as to make it a camping-ground until its resources were
exhausted.
We read of one Massillia who came with a colony of Greeks long ages
ago, and after founding the city of Marseilles, created a narrow,
bright border of Greek civilization along the southern edge of the
benighted land. It was a brief illumination, lasting only a century or
more, and leaving few traces; but it may account for the superior
intellectual quality which later distinguished Provence, the home of
minstrelsy.
It requires a vast extent of territory to sustain a people living by
the chase, and upon herds and flocks; hence the area which now amply
maintains forty millions of Frenchmen was all too small for six or
seven million Gauls; and they were in perpetual struggle with their
neighbors for land--more land.
"Give us land," they said to the Romans, and when land was denied them
and the gates of cities disdainfully closed upon their messengers, not
land, but vengeance, was their cry; and hordes of half-naked barbarians
trampled down the vineyards, and rushed, a tumultuous torrent, upon
Rome.
The Romans could not stand before this new and strange kind of warfare.
The Gauls streamed over the vanquished legions into the Eternal City,
silent and deserted save only by the Senate and a few who remained
intrenched in the Citadel; and there the barbarians kept them besieged
for seven months, while they made themselves at home amid
uncomprehended luxuries.
Of course Roman skill and courage at last dislodged and drove them
back. But the fact remained that the Gaul had been there--master of
Rome; that the iron-clad legions had been no match for his naked force,
and a new sensation thrilled through the length and breadth of Gaul.
It was the first throb of national life. The sixty or more fragments
drew closer together into something like Gallic unity--with a common
danger to meet, a common foe to drive back.
Hereafter there was another hunger to be appeased besides that for food
and land; a hunger for conquest, for vengeance, and for glory for the
Gallic name. National pride was born.
For years they hovered like wolves about Rome. But skill and superior
intelligence tell in the centuries. It took long--and cost no end of
blood and treasure; but two hundred years from the capture of Rome, the
Gauls were driven out of Italy, and the Alps pronounced a barrier set
by nature herself against barbarian encroachments.
Italy was not the only country suffering from the destroying footsteps
of the Western Kelts. There had been long before an overflow of a
tribe in Northern Gaul (the Kymrians), which had hewed and plundered
its way south and eastward; until at the time of Alexander (B.C. 340)
it was knocking at the gates of Macedonia.
Stimulated by the success at Rome fifty years earlier, they were, with
fresh insolence, demanding "land," and during the centuries which
followed, the Gallic name acquired no fresh lustre in Greece.
Half-naked, gross, ferocious, and ignorant, sometimes allies, but
always a scourge, they finally crossed the Hellespont (B.C. 278), and
turned their attention to Asia Minor. And there, at last, we find them
settled in a province called Gallicia, where they lived without
amalgamating with the people about them, and four hundred years after
Christ were speaking the language of their tribal home in what is now
Belgium. And these were the Galatians--the "foolish Galatians," to
whom Paul addressed his epistle; and we have followed up this Gallic
thread simply because it mingles with the larger strand of ancient and
sacred history with which we are all so familiar.
It is not strange that Roman courage became a byword. The fibre of
Rome was toughened by perpetual strain of conflict. Even while she was
struggling with Gaul and with the memories of the Carthaginian wars
still fresh at Rome, the Goths were at her gates--their blows directed
with a solidity superior to that of the barbarians who had preceded
them. Where the Gauls had knocked, the Goths thundered.
Again the city was invaded by barbarian feet, and again did superior
training and intelligence drive back the invading torrent and triumph
over native brute force.
Such, in brief outline, was the condition of the centuries just before
the Christian era.
It is easy now to read the meaning of these agitated centuries, and to
recognize the preparation for the passing of the old and the coming of
the new.
CHAPTER II.
The making of a nation is not unlike bread or cake making. One element
is used as the basis, to which are added other component parts, of
varying qualities, and the result we call England, or Germany, or
France. The steps by which it is accomplished, the blending and fusing
of the elements, require centuries, and the process makes what we
call--history.
It was written in the book of fate that Gaul should become a great
nation; but not until fused and interpenetrated with two other
nationalities. She must first be humanized and civilized by the Roman,
and then energized and made free from the Roman by the Teuton.
The instrument chosen for the former was Julius Caesar, and for the
latter--five centuries later--Clovis, the Frankish leader.
It is safe to affirm that no man has ever so changed the course of
human events as did Julius Caesar. Napoleon, who strove to imitate him
1800 years later, was a charlatan in comparison; a mere scene-shifter
on a great theatrical stage. Few traces of his work remain upon
humanity to-day.
Caesar opened up a pathway for the old civilizations of the world to
flow into Western Europe, and the sodden mass of barbarism was infused
with a life-compelling current. This was not accomplished by placing
before the inferior race a higher ideal of life for imitation, but by a
mingling of the blood of the nations--a transfusion into Gallic veins
of the germs of a higher living and thinking--thus making them heirs to
the great civilizations of antiquity.
Was any human event ever fraught with such consequences to the human
race as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar?
The Gallic wars had for centuries drained the treasure and taxed the
resources of Rome. Caesar conceived the audacious idea of stopping
them at their source--in fact, of making Gaul a Roman province.
It was a marvellous exhibition, not simply of force, but of force
wielded by supreme intelligence and craft. He had lived many years
among this people and knew their sources of weakness, their internal
jealousies and rivalries, their incohesiveness. When they hurled
themselves against Rome, it was as a mass of sharp fragments. When the
Goths did the same, it was as one solid, indivisible body. Caesar saw
that by adroit management he could disintegrate this people while
conquering them.
By forcibly maintaining in power those who submitted to him, being by
turns gentle and severe, ingratiating here, terrifying there, he
established a tremendous personal force; and during nine years carried
on eight campaigns, marvels in the art of war, as well as in the
subtler methods of negotiation and intrigue. He had successively dealt
with all the Keltic tribes, even including Great Britain, subjugating
either through their own rivalries, or by his invincible arm.
Equally able to charm and to terrify, he had all the gifts, all the
means to success and empire, that can be possessed by man. Great in
politics as in war, as full of resource in the forum as on the
battle-field, he was by nature called to dominion.
It was not as a patriot, simply intent upon freeing Rome of an
harassing enemy, that he endured those nine years in Gaul; not as a
great leader burning with military ardor that he conducted those eight
campaigns. The conquest of Gaul meant the greater conquest of Rome.
The one was accomplished; he now turned his back upon the devastated
country, and prepared to complete his great project of human ascendency.
Rome was mistress of the world; he--would be master of Rome.
In the early days of the conquest of Gaul a small island lying in the
river Seine was chosen for the residence of the Roman Governors, and
called _Lutetia_. The residence soon grew into the Palace of the
Caesars; and then bridges spanned the river, and roads and aqueducts
and faubourgs sprang into existence across the Seine, and _Lutetia_ was
swallowed up in Paris--so named for a Gallic tribe, the _Parisii_,
which had once encamped there. Standing within the Palais de Justice
on this island to-day, one is in direct touch with Rome when she was
mistress of the world. The feet of the Caesars have pressed those
stones. Those vaulted ceilings have looked down upon Julian the
Apostate; he who upon his throne in the far East sighed for
"Lutetia"--his "dear Lutetia."
At Passy and Montmartre, and where stands the Palais Royal, rich Romans
had their suburban homes, and Roman legions were encamped where are now
the Palais de Luxembourg and the Sorbonne. And with a mingling of
Keltic and Latin, there had commenced a new form of human speech.
Not Paris alone, but all of Gaul felt the awakening touch of a great
civilization, and with improved ideals in living there came another
great advance. The human sacrifices and abhorrent practices of the
Druidical faith were abandoned, and Jupiter and Minerva and the gods of
Parnassus supplanted the grim deities of a more ancient mythology. But
while Rome was a powerful teacher, she was a cruel mistress--and
shackles were galling to these free barbarians. In the midst of
universal misery there came tidings of something better than the gods
of Parnassus, when in A.D. 160 Irenaeus came to Lyons and there
established the first Church of Christ; and here it was that Marcus
Aurelius ordered the persecution which was intended to stamp out the
new and fanatical heresy.
CHAPTER III.
While the Star of Empire was thus moving toward the West, another and
brighter star had arisen in the East. So accustomed are we to the
story, that we lose all sense of wonder at its recital.
Julius Caesar's brief triumph was over, Marc Antony had recited his
virtues over his bier, Rome had wept, and then forgotten him in the
absorbing splendors of his nephew Augustus. In an obscure village of
an obscure country in Asia Minor the young wife of a peasant finds
shelter in a stable, and gives birth to a son, who is cradled in the
straw of a manger from which the cattle are feeding.
Can the mind conceive of human circumstances more lowly? The child
grew to manhood, and in his thirty-three years of life was never lifted
above the obscure sphere into which he was born; never spoke from the
vantage-ground of worldly elevation; simply moving among people of his
own station in life, mechanics, fishermen, and peasants, he told of a
religion of love, a gospel of peace, for which he was willing to die.
Who would have dreamed that this was the germ of the most potent, the
most regenerative force the world had ever known? That thrones,
empires, principalities, and powers would melt and crumble before His
name? Of all miracles, is not this the greatest?
The passionate ardor with which this religion was propagated in the
first two centuries had no motive but the yearning to make others share
in its benefits and hopes; and to this end to accept the belief that
Jesus Christ had come in fulfilment of the promise of a Saviour--who
should be sent to this world clothed with divine authority to establish
a spiritual kingdom, in which he was King of kings, Lord of lords,
Meditator between us and the Father, of whom he was the "only begotten
Son."
The religion in its essence was absolutely simple. Its founder summed
it up in two sentences: expressing the duty of man to man, and of man
to God. That was all the theology he formulated.
For two centuries the religion of Christ was an elemental spiritual
force. It appealed only to the highest attributes and longings of the
human soul, and under its sustaining influence frail women, men, and
even children were able to endure tortures, of which we cannot read
even now without shuddering horror.
Nature's method of gardening is very beautiful. She carefully guards
the seed until it is ripe, then she bursts the imprisoning walls and
gives it to the winds to distribute. Precisely such method was used in
disseminating Christianity. It was not for one people--it was for the
healing of the nations, and its home was wherever man abides.
Nearly five decades after Christ's death upon the cross, Jerusalem was
destroyed by Titus. The home of Christianity was effaced. At just the
right moment the enclosing walls had broken, and freed to the winds the
germs in all their primitive purity.
Imperial favor had not tarnished it, human ambitions had not employed
and degraded it, nor had it been made into complex system by ingenious
casuists. The pure spiritual truth, unsullied as it came from the hand
of its founder, was scattered broadcast, as the band of Christians
dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, naturally forming into
communities here and there, which became the centres of Christian
propagandism. Lyons in Gaul was such a centre.
The fires of persecution had been lighted here and there throughout the
empire, and the Emperor Nero, under whom the Apostles Peter and Paul
are said to have suffered martyrdom, had amused himself by making
torches of the Christians at Rome. But until A.D. 177 Gaul was exempt
from such horrors.
Marcus Aurelius--that peerless pagan--large in intelligence, exalted in
character, and guided by a conscientious rectitude which has made his
name shine like a star in the lurid light of Roman history, still
failed utterly to comprehend the significance of this spiritual kingdom
established by Christ on earth. He it was who ordered the first
persecution in Gaul. In pursuance of his command, horrible tortures
were inflicted at Lyons upon those who would not abjure the new faith.
A letter, written by an eye-witness, pictures with terrible vividness
the scenes which followed. Many cases are described with harrowing
detail, and of one Blandina it is said: "From morn till eve they put
her to all manner of torture, marvelling that she still lived with her
body pierced through and through and torn piecemeal by so many
tortures, of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her; to
which she only replied, 'I am a Christian.'"
The recital goes on to tell how she was then cast into a dungeon--her
feet compressed and dragged out to the utmost tension of the
muscles--then left alone in darkness until new methods of torture could
be devised.
Finally she was brought, with other Christians, into the amphitheatre,
hanging from a Cross to which she was tied, and there thrown to the
beasts. As the beasts refused to touch her she was taken back to the
dungeon to be reserved for another occasion, being brought out daily to
witness the fate and suffering of her friends and fellow-martyrs; still
answering the oft-repeated question, "I am a Christian."
The writer goes on to say, "After she had undergone fire, the talons of
beasts, and every agony which could be thought of, she was wrapped in a
network and thrown to a bull, who tossed her in the air"--and her
sufferings were ended.
Truly it cost something to say "I am a Christian" in those days.
Marcus Aurelius probably gave orders for the persecution at Lyons, with
little knowledge of what would be the nature of those persecutions, or
of the religion he was trying to exterminate. Some of the hours spent
in writing introspective essays would have been well employed in
studying the period in which he lived, and the empire he ruled.
Paganism and Druidism, those twin monsters, receded before the
advancing light of Christianity. Neither contained anything which
could nourish the soul of man, and both had become simply badges of
nationality.
Druidism was the last stronghold of independent Gallic life. It was a
mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of metempsychosis, coarse,
mystical, and cruel. The Roman paganism which was superimposed by the
conquering race was the mere shell of a once vital religion. Educated
men had long ceased to believe in the gods and divinities of Greece,
and it is said that the Roman augurs, while giving their solemn
prophetic utterances, could not look at each other without laughing.
In the year 312--alas for Christianity!--it was espoused by imperial
power. When the Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian,
there was no doubt rejoicing among the saints; but it was the beginning
of the degeneracy of the religion of Christ. The faith of the humble
was to be raised to a throne; its lowly garb to be exchanged for purple
and scarlet; the gospel of peace to be enforced by the sword.
The empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and
social conditions of modern times were forming. Paganism and Druidism
would have been an impossibility. Christianity, even with its lustre
dimmed, its purity tarnished, its simplicity overlaid with
scholasticism, was better than these. The miracle had been
accomplished. The great Roman Empire had said, "I am Christian."
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