Mary Platt Parmele - A Short History of France

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A belief in the gods of Parnassus, which Rome had imposed upon Gaul,
had now become a heresy to be exterminated. If fires were lighted at
Lyons or elsewhere, they were for the extermination not of Christians,
but of pagans, and of all who would depart from the religion of Christ
as interpreted by Rome. It was a death-bed repentance for the cruel
old empire, a repentance which might delay, but could not avert a
calamitous ending, and an unexpected event was near at hand which would
hasten the coming of the end.

It was in the year A.D. 375 that the Huns, a terrible race of beings,
came out from that then mysterious but now historic region, lying
between China and Russia, and surged into Europe under the leadership
of Attila, sweeping before them as they came Goths, Vandals, and other
Teutonic races, as if with a predetermined purpose of forcing the
uncivilized Teuton into the lap of a perishing civilization in the
south. Then having accomplished this, after the defeat of Attila at
Chalons in A.D. 453, they disappeared forever as a race from the stage
of human events.

This is the time when Paris was saved by Genevieve, the poor
sheperdess, who, like an early Joan of Arc, awoke the people from the
apathy of despair, and led them to victory--and is rewarded by an
immortality as "Saint Genevieve," the patron saint of Paris. It would
seem that the vigilance of the gentle saint has either slept or been
unequal to the task of protecting her city at times!

It was the combined forces of the Goth and the Frank which drove this
scourge out of Europe. Meroveus, or Meroveg, the leader of the Franks
in this great achievement, once the terror of the Gallic people, was
now their deliverer. He had won the gratitude of all classes, from
bishops to slaves, throughout Gaul, and fate had thus opened wide a
door leading into the future of that land.

CHAPTER IV.

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 Faineant_ (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 Faineants_ 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.

CHAPTER V.

Against the dark background of European history, and with the broad
level of obscurity stretching over the ages at its feet, there rises
one shining pinnacle. Considered as man or sovereign, Charlemagne is
one of the most impressive figures in history. His seven feet of
stature clad in shining steel, his masterful grasp of the forces of his
time, his splendid intelligence, instinct even then with the modern
spirit, all combine to elevate him in solitary grandeur.

Charlemagne found France in disorder measureless, and apparently
insurmountable. Barbarian invasion without, and anarchy within; Saxon
paganism pressing in upon the north, and Asiatic Islamism upon the
south and west; a host of forces struggling for dominion in a nation
brutish, ignorant, and without cohesion.

It is the attribute of genius to discern opportunity where others see
nothing. Charlemagne saw rising out of this chaos a great resuscitated
Roman Empire, which should be at the same time a spiritual and
Christian empire as well. Saxons, Slavs, Huns, Lombards, Arabs, came
under his compelling grasp; these antagonistic races all held together
by the force of one terrible will, in unnatural combination with
France. No political liberties, no popular assemblies discussing
public measures; it is Charlemagne alone who fills the picture; it is
absolutism--marked by prudence, ability, and grandeur, but still,
absolutism.

The pope looked approvingly upon this son of the Church, by whose order
4,500 pagan heads could be cut off in one day, and a whole army
compelled to baptism in an afternoon. Here was a champion to be
propitiated. Charlemagne, on the other hand, saw in the Church the
most compliant and effective means to empire.

His fertile mind was conceiving a vast design by which he might reign
over a resuscitated Roman Empire. In the dual sovereignty of his
dream, the pope was to be the spiritual and he the temporal head.
Mutually dependent upon each other, the election of the pope would not
be valid without his consent. Nor would the emperor be emperor until
crowned by the pope. The Church might use him as a sword, but he would
wear the Church as a precious jewel in his crown.

It was a splendid dream, splendidly realized; the most imposing of
human successes, and the most impressive of human failures. It seems
designed as a lesson for the human race in the transitory nature of
power applied from without.

A pyramid of such colossal proportions could only be kept from falling
in pieces by another Colossus like himself. The vast fabric resting
upon one human will, passed with its creator; was gone like a shadow
when he was gone.

It will be remembered that the Roman Empire in its decay fell into two
parts, a Western and an Eastern empire. The dying embers of the
Western empire, which had been fanned into a feeble flame in the sixth
century by Justinian, Emperor of the East, were threatened with
complete extinguishment by the Lombards in the eighth; from which
calamity they were saved, as we have seen, by Pepin. So when the
Franks were again appealed to, Charlemagne saw his opportunity. With
plans fully matured he responded, and with the consent and acquiescence
of the pope he took formal possession of the whole of Italy, annexing
to his own dominions the crumbling wreck of a magnificent past. And
when Leo III. placed upon his head the crown, and pronounced
"Carolus-Magnus, by the grace of God Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire"
(A.D. 800), the authority of the pope was placed upon unassailable
heights, and France had become the centre of a world-wide dominion.

[Illustration: Coronation of Charlemagne. From the painting by Levy.]

Little did pope or emperor dream of what was to happen; that after a
brief and dazzling interlude the imperial crown would never be worn in
France; and that the popes would for centuries be insulted and treated
as contumacious vassals by German emperors. And France--France, the
centre of this dream of a magnificent unity--in less than fifty years,
with her native incohesiveness, and in the irony of fate, would have
broken into fifty-nine fragments, loosely held together by a feeble
Carlovingian king.

The plan of a dual sovereignty of pope and emperor might have been wise
had both been immortal! But it was the triple division of the empire
brought about by Charlemagne's three grandsons which overthrew the
entire scheme of its founder.

Upon the death of Charlemagne, in A.D. 814, the crown and the sceptre
of the empire passed to his son Louis (the later form of Clovis). This
feeble son of Charlemagne, known as Louis the Debonnaire, struggled
under the weight of the crumbling mass until his death in 840. Then
Charlemagne's three ambitious grandsons fought for the great
inheritance. Lothaire, who claimed the whole by right of
primogeniture, was defeated at the battle of Fontenay in Burgundy, and
by the treaty of Verdun in 843 the partition of the empire was
consummated; the title of emperor passing to Lothaire, the eldest,
along with Italy and a strip of territory extending to the North Sea,
all west of that being arbitrarily called France, and all east of it
Germany.

So the European drama was unfolding upon lines entirely unexpected.
Not only had the empire fallen apart into three grand divisions, but
France itself was disintegrating, was in fact a mass of rival states,
with counts, princes, marquises, and a score of other petty potentates
struggling for supremacy.

The rough outlines of something greater than France--the outlines of a
future Europe--were being drawn. It is easy to see now what was then
so incomprehensible: that from the chaos of barbarism left by the
Teuton flood, there were emerging in that ninth century a group of
states with definite outlines, and the larger organism of Europe was
coming into form. The treaty of Verdun (843) had roughly separated
_Italy_, _France_, and _Germany_. At the same time the Heptarchy in
Britain had been consolidated into _England_ under King Alfred; while
an obscure Scandinavian adventurer named Rurik, quite unobserved, was
bringing into political unity, and reigning at Kieff as Grand Duke over
what was to become _Russia_. _Spain_, quite apart from all this
movement, had entered upon those seven centuries of struggle with
Saracen and Moor, that struggle of unmatched devotion and tenacity of
purpose which is really the great epic of history.

Those ambitious and too powerful vassals were not the greatest evils
menacing the Carlovingian kings. It was the incessant invasions of a
race of barbarians coming out of the north, which was going to bury the
past under a ruin of a different sort. There seemed no defence from
these Northmen, as they were called, who swarmed like destroying
insects upon the coast, up the rivers, and over the lands; three times
sacked Paris, the scars to-day being visible in that impressive Roman
ruin, the _Palais des Thermes_, the home of the Caesars, and of the
Merovingian kings, which they partially burned.

Fortified castles with towers and moats and drawbridges sprang up all
over the kingdom for the protection of the rich. After seven invasions
all the old cities, Rouen, Nantes, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Orleans,
Beauvais, had been devastated, and France in coat of mail was hiding
behind stone walls.

In looking through the vista of centuries it is easy to read the
eternal purpose in the chain of cause and effect; and also to see that
events, no less than kings, have their pedigrees. The terrible child
of the Northman was the _Feudal System_; which was again the father of
those romantic and picturesque children, the _Crusades_; and these, the
creators of a European civilization, whose children we are!

Who can imagine the course of history with any one of these
removed--each an apparently inevitable step in the unfolding of a
mighty design, utterly incomprehensible at the time?

CHAPTER VI.

Someone has said that "the Lord must like common people, because he
made so many of them." The path for the common people in France at
this time led through heavy shadows. But a darker time was
approaching. A system of oppression was maturing which was soon to
envelop them in the obscurity of darkest night.

Those Scandinavian freebooters called Northmen, and later Normans, were
the scourge of the kingdom. Nothing was safe from their insolent
courage and rapacity.

The rich could intrench themselves in stone fortresses, with moats and
drawbridges, and be in comparative security, but the poor were utterly
defenceless against this perennial destroyer. The result was a compact
between the powerful and the weak, which was the beginning of the
feudal system. It was in effect an exchange of protection for service
and fealty.

You give us absolute control of your persons--your military service
when required, and a portion of your substance and the fruit of your
toil--and we will in exchange give you our fortified castles as a
refuge from the Northmen. Such was the offer. It was a choice between
vassalage, serfdom, or destruction outright.

Simple enough in its beginnings, this became a ramified system of
oppression, a curious network of authority, ingeniously controlling an
entire people. The conditions upon which was engrafted this compact
were of great antiquity, had indeed been brought across the Rhine by
the German conquerors; but the Northmen were the impelling cause of the
swift development of feudalism in France.

Charlemagne had felt grave apprehensions of evil from these robber
incursions, but could not have conceived of a result such as this, the
most oppressive system ever fastened upon a nation, and one which would
at the same time sap the foundations of royalty itself.

The theory was that the king was absolute owner of all the territory;
the great lords holding their titles from him on condition of military
service, their vassals pledging military service and obedience to them
again on similar terms, and sub-vassals again to them repeating the
pledge; and so on in descending chain, until at last the serf, that
wretched being whom none looks up to nor fears, is ground to powder
beneath the superimposed mass; no appeal from the authority, no escape
from the caprice or cruelty of his feudal lord. Could any scales
weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been
endured? Is it strange that, with every aspiration thwarted, hope
stifled, Europe sank into the long sleep of the Middle Ages?

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