Book III. of the _Code de Commerce_, treating of bankruptcy. Finally,

from this period date the laws of the 3rd of May 1841, on expropriation for purposes of public utility, and of the 30th of June 1838, on the treatment of the insane, which is still in force. Judicial organization remained as it was, but the amount of the sum up to which civil tribunals of the first instance could judge without appeal was raised from 1000 francs to 1500, and the competency of the _juges de paix_ was widened.

_The Second Republic and the Second Empire._--From the point of view of constitutional law, the Second Republic and the Second Empire were each in a certain sense a return to the past. The former revived the tradition of the Assemblies of the Revolution; the latter was obviously and avowedly an imitation of the Consulate and the First Empire.

Republican constitution of 1848.

The provisional government set up by the revolution of the 24th of February 1848 proclaimed universal suffrage, and by this means was elected a Constituent Assembly, which sat till May 1849, and, after first organizing various forms of another provisional government, passed the Republican constitution of the 4th of November 1848. This constitution, which was preceded by a preface recalling the Declarations of Rights of the Revolution, gave the legislative power to a single permanent assembly, elected by direct universal suffrage, and entirely renewed every three years. The executive authority, with very extensive powers, was given to a president of the Republic, also elected by the universal and direct suffrage of the French citizens. The constitution was not very clear upon the point of whether it adopted parliamentary government in the strict sense, or whether the president, who was declared responsible, was free to choose his ministers and to retain or dismiss them at his own pleasure. This gave rise to an almost permanent dispute between the president, who claimed to have his own political opinions and to direct the government, and the Assembly, which wished to carry on the traditions of cabinet government and to make the ministers fully responsible to itself. Consequently, in January 1851, a solemn debate was held, which ended in the affirmation of the responsibility of ministers to the Assembly. On the other hand, the president, though very properly given great power by the constitution, was not immediately eligible for re-election on giving up his office. Now Louis Napoleon, who was elected president on the 10th of December 1848 by a huge majority, wished to be re-elected. Various propositions were submitted to the Assembly in July 1851 with a view to modifying the constitution; but they could not succeed, as the number of votes demanded by the constitution for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly was not reached. Moreover, the Legislative Assembly elected in May 1849 was very different from the Constituent Assembly of 1848. The latter was animated by that spirit of harmony and, in the main, of adhesion to the Republic which had followed on the February Revolution. The new assembly, on the contrary, was composed for the most part of representatives of the old parties, and had monarchist aspirations. By the unfortunate law of the 31st of May 1850 it even tried by a subterfuge to restrict the universal suffrage guaranteed by the constitution. It suspended the right of holding meetings, but, on the whole, respected the liberty of the press. It was especially impelled to these measures by the growing fear of socialism. The result was the _coup d'etat_ of the 2nd of December 1851. A detail of some constitutional importance is to be noticed in this period. The _conseil d'etat_, which had remained under the Restoration and the July Monarchy an administrative council and the supreme arbiter in administrative trials, acquired new importance under the Second Republic. The ordinary _conseillers d'etat_ (_en service ordinaire_) were elected by the Legislative Assembly, and consultation with the _conseil d'etat_ was often insisted on by the constitution or by law. This was the means of obtaining a certain modifying power as a substitute for the second chamber, which had not met with popular approval. During its short existence the Second Republic produced many important laws. It abolished the penalty of death for political crimes, and suppressed negro slavery in the colonies. The election of _conseillers generaux_ was thrown open to universal suffrage, and the municipal councils were allowed to elect the _maires_ and their colleagues. The law of the 15th of March 1850 established the liberty of secondary education, but it conferred certain privileges on the Catholic clergy, a clear sign of the spirit of social conservatism which was the leading motive for its enactment. Certain humanitarian laws were passed, applying to the working classes.

Constitution of Jan. 14, 1852.

Restoration of the Empire.

The empire liberal.

With the _coup d'etat_ of the 2nd of December 1851 began a new era of constitutional plebiscites and disguised absolutism. The proclamations of Napoleon on the 2nd of December contained a criticism of parliamentary government, and formulated the wish to restore to France the constitutional institutions of the Consulate and the Empire, just as she had preserved their civil, administrative and military institutions. Napoleon asked the people for the powers necessary to draw up a constitution on these principles; the plebiscite issued in a vast majority of votes in his favour, and the constitution of the 14th of January 1852 was the result. It bore a strong resemblance to the constitution of the First Empire after 1807. The executive power was conferred on Louis Napoleon for ten years, with the title of president of the Republic and very extended powers. Two assemblies were created. The conservative Senate, composed of _ex officio_ members (cardinals, marshals of France and admirals) and life members appointed by the head of the state, was charged with the task of seeing that the laws were constitutional, of opposing the promulgation of unconstitutional laws, and of receiving the petitions of citizens; it had also the duty of providing everything not already provided but necessary for the proper working of the constitution. The second assembly was the _Corps Legislatif_, elected by direct universal suffrage for six years, which passed the laws, the government having the initiative in legislation. This body was not altogether a _corps des muets_, as in the year VIII., but its powers were very limited; thus the general session assured to it by the constitution was only for three months, and it could only discuss and put to the vote amendments approved by the _conseil d'etat_; the ministers did not in any way come into contact with it and could not be members of it, being responsible only to the head of the state, and only the Senate having the right of accusing them before a high court of justice. The _conseil d'etat_ was composed in the same way and had the same authority as it had possessed from the year VIII. to 1814; and it was the members of it who supported projected laws before the Corps Legislatif. To this was added a Draconian press legislation; not only were press offences, many of which were mere expressions of opinion, judged not by a jury but by the correctional tribunals; but further, political papers could not be founded without an authorization, and were subject to a regular administrative discipline; they could be warned, suspended or suppressed without a trial, by a simple act of the administration. The constitution of January 1852 was still Republican in name, though less so than that of the year VIII. The period corresponding with the Consulate was also shorter in the case of Louis Napoleon. The year 1852 had not come to an end before a _senatus consulte_, that of the 10th of November, ratified by a plebiscite, re-established the imperial rank in favour of Napoleon III.; it also conferred on him certain new powers, especially with reference to the budget and foreign treaties; thus various cracks, which experience had revealed in the original structure of the Empire, were filled up. This period was called that of the _empire autoritaire_. Further features of it were the free appointment of the _maires_ by the emperor, the oath of fidelity to him imposed on all officials, and the legal organization of official candidatures for the elections. Two measures marked the highest point reached by this system: the _loi de surete generale_ of the 27th of February 1858, which allowed the government to intern in France or Algeria, or to exile certain French citizens, without a trial. The other was the _senatus consulte_ of the 17th of February 1858, which made the validity of candidatures for the Corps Legislatif subject to a preliminary oath of fidelity on the part of the candidate. But for various causes, which cannot be examined here, a series of measures was soon to be initiated which were gradually to lead back again to political liberty, and definitively to found what has been called the _empire liberal_. One by one the different rules and proceedings of parliamentary government as it had existed in France regained their force. The first step was the decree of the 24th of November 1860, which re-established for each ordinary session the address voted by the chambers in response to the speech from the throne. In 1867 this movement took a more decisive form. It led to a new constitution, that of the 21st of May 1870, which was again ratified by popular suffrage. While maintaining the Empire and the imperial dynasty, it organized parliamentary government practically in the form in which it had operated under the July Monarchy, with two legislative chambers, the Senate and the Corps Legislatif, the consent of both of which was necessary for legislation, and which, together with the emperor, had the initiative in this matter. The laws of the 11th of May 1868 and the 6th of June 1868 restored to a certain extent the liberty of the press and of holding meetings, though without abolishing offences of opinion, or again bringing press offences under the jurisdiction of a jury. Laws of the 22nd and 23rd of July 1870 gave the _conseils generaux_, whose powers had been somewhat widened, the right of electing their presidents, and provided that the _maires_ and their colleagues should be chosen from among the members of the municipal councils.

Economic and social reforms under the Second Empire.

Commercial treaties.

The legislation of the Second Empire led to a considerable number of reforms. Its chief aim was the development of commerce, industry and agriculture, and generally the material prosperity of the country. The Empire, though restricting liberty in political matters, increased it in economic matters. Such were the decrees and laws of 1852 and 1853 relating to land-banks (_etablissements de credit foncier_) and that of 1857 on trade-marks, those of 1863 and 1867 on commercial companies, that of 1858 on general stores (_magasins generaux_) and warrants, that of 1856 on drainage, that of 1865 on the _associations syndicales de proprietaires_, that of 1866 on the mercantile marine. The law of the 14th of June 1865 introduced into France the institution, borrowed from England, of cheques. But of still greater importance for economic development than all these laws were the treaties concluded by the emperor with foreign powers, in order to introduce, as far as possible, free exchange of commodities; the chief of these, which was the model of all the others, was that concluded with Great Britain on the 23rd of January 1860. Moreover, the law of the 25th of May 1864 admitted for the first time the right of strikes and lock-outs among workmen or employers, annulling articles 414 and following of the _Code Penal_, which had so far made them a penal offence, even when not accompanied by fraudulent practices, threats or violence, tending to hinder the liberty of labour. The superannuation fund (_caisse des retraites pour la vieillesse_), supported by voluntary payments from those participating in it, which had been created by the law of the 18th of June 1850, was reorganized and perfected, and a law of the 11th of July 1868 established, with the guarantee of the state, two funds for voluntary insurance, one in case of death, the other against accidents occurring in industrial or agricultural employment. A decree of 1863 established in principle the freedom of bakeries, and another in 1864 that of theatrical management.

Reforms in the criminal law.

Civil legislation.

Taxation and army.

Criminal law was the subject of important legislation. Two codes were promulgated on special points, the codes of military justice for the land forces (1857) and for the naval forces (1858). But the common law was also largely remodelled. A law of the 10th of June 1858, it is true, created certain new crimes, with a view to protecting the members of the imperial family, and that of the 17th of July 1856 increased the powers and independence of the _juges d'instruction_; but, on the other hand, useful improvements were introduced by laws of 1856 and 1865, and notably with regard to precautionary detention and provisional release with or without bail. A law of the 20th of May 1863 organized a simple and rapid procedure, copied from that followed in England before the police courts, for summary jurisdiction. A law of 1868 permitted the revision of criminal trials after the death of the condemned person. But the most far-reaching reforms took place in 1854, namely, the abolition of the total loss of civil rights which formerly accompanied condemnation to imprisonment for life, and the law of the 30th of May on penal servitude (_travaux forces_) which substituted transportation to the colonies for the system of continental convict prisons. Finally, in 1863, there was a revision of the _Code Penal_, which, in the process of lightening penalties, made a certain number of crimes into misdemeanours, and in consequence transferred the judgment of them from the assize courts to the correctional tribunals. In civil legislation may be noted the law of the 23rd of March 1855 on hypothecs (see CODE NAPOLEON); that of the 22nd of July 1857, which abolished seizure of the person (_contrainte par corps_) for civil and commercial debts; and finally, the law of the 14th of July 1866, on literary copyright. The system of taxation was hardly modified at all, except for the establishment of a tax on the income arising from investments (shares and bonds of companies) in 1857, and the tax on carriages (1862). On the 1st of February 1868 was promulgated an important military law, which, however, passed the Corps Legislatif with some difficulty. It asserted the principle of universal compulsory military service, at least, in time of war. It preserved, however, the system of drawing lots to determine the annual contingent to be incorporated into the standing army; the term of service was fixed at five years, and it was still permissible to send a substitute. But able-bodied men who were not included in the annual contingent formed a reserve force called the _garde nationale mobile_, each department organizing its own section. These _gardes mobiles_, though they were not effectively organized or exercised under the Empire, took part in the war of 1870-71.

Definitive establishment of the Republic.

_The Third Republic._--The Third Republic had at first a provisional government, unanimously acclaimed by the people of Paris. It was accepted by France, exercised full powers, and sustained by no means ingloriously a desperate struggle against the enemy; a certain number of its _decrets-lois_ are still in force. After the capitulation of Paris, a National Assembly was elected to treat with Germany. It was elected in accordance with the electoral law of 1849, which had been revived with a few modifications, and it met at Bordeaux to the number of 753 members on the 13th of February 1871. It was a sovereign assembly, since France had no longer a constitution, and for this very reason it claimed from the outset constituent powers; the Republican party at the time, however, contested this claim, the majority in the assembly being frankly monarchist, though divided as to the choice of a monarch. But for some time the National Assembly either could not or would not exercise this power, and up to 1875 affairs remained in a provisional state, legalized and regulated this time by the Assembly. This was an application, though unconscious, of a form of government which M. Grevy had proposed to the Constituent Assembly in 1848. There was a single assembly, with one man elected by it as head of the executive power (the first to be elected was M. Thiers, who received the title of president of the Republic in August 1871), who was responsible to the Assembly and governed with the help of ministers chosen by himself, who were also responsible to it. Thiers fell on the 24th of May 1873. His place was taken by Marshal MacMahon, on whom the Assembly later conferred, in November 1873, the position of president of the Republic for seven years, when the refusal of the comte de Chambord to accept the tricolour in place of the white flag of the Bourbons had made any attempt to restore the monarchy impossible. Henceforth the definitive adoption of the Republican form of government became inevitable, and the opinion of the country began to turn in this direction, as was shown by the elections of deputies which took place to fill up the gaps occurring in the Assembly. The Assembly, however, shrank from the inevitable solution, and when a discussion was begun in January 1875 on the projected constitutional laws prepared by the _commission des trente_, the only proposals made by the latter were for a more complete organization of the powers of one man, Marshal MacMahon. But on the 30th of January 1875 was adopted, by 353 votes to 352, an amendment by M. Wallon which provided for the election of an indefinite succession of presidents of the Republic; this amounted to a definitive recognition of the Republic. In this connexion it has often been said that the Republic was established by a majority of one. This is not an accurate statement, for it was only the case on the first reading of the law; the majority on the second and third readings increased until it became considerable. There was a strong movement in the direction of a reconciliation between the parties; and there had been a _rapprochement_ between the Republicans and the Right Centre. At the end of February were passed and promulgated two constitutional laws, that of the 25th of February 1875, on the organization of the public powers, and that of the 24th of February 1875, on the organization of the senate. In the middle of the year they were supplemented by a third, that of the 16th of July 1875, on the relations between the public powers.

The French Constitution.

Thus was built up the actual constitution of France. It differs fundamentally, both in form and contents, from previous constitutions. As to its form, instead of a single methodical text divided into an uninterrupted series of articles, it consisted of three distinct laws. As to matter, it is obviously a work of an essentially practical nature, the result of compromise and reciprocal concessions. It does not lay down any theoretical principles, and its provisions, which were arrived at with difficulty, confine themselves strictly to what is necessary to ensure the proper operation of the governmental machinery. The result is a compromise between Republican principles and the rules of constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. On this account it has been accused, though unjustly, of being too monarchical. Its duration, by far the longest of any French constitution since 1791, is a sign of its value and vitality. It is in fact a product of history, and not of imagination. Its composition is as follows. The legislative power was given to two elective chambers, having equal powers, the vote of both of which is necessary for legislation, and both having the right of initiating and amending laws. The constitution assures them an ordinary session of five months, which opens by right on the second Tuesday in January. One house, the Chamber of Deputies, is elected by direct universal suffrage and is entirely renewed every four years; the other, the Senate, consists of 300 members, divided by the law of the 27th of February 1875 into two categories; 75 of the senators were elected for life and irremovable, and the first of them were elected by the National Assembly, but afterwards it was the Senate itself which held elections to fill up vacancies. The 225 remaining senators were elected by the departments and by certain colonies, among which they were apportioned in proportion to the population; they are elected for nine years, a third of the house being renewed every three years. The electoral college in each department which nominated them included the deputies, the members of the general council of the department and of the councils of the arrondissements, and one delegate elected by each municipal council, whatever the importance of the commune. This was practically a system of election in two and, partly, three degrees, but with this distinguishing feature, that the electors of the second degree had not been chosen purely with a view to this election, but chiefly for the exercise of other functions. The most important elements in this electoral college were the delegates from the municipal councils, and by giving one delegate to each, to Paris just as to the smallest commune in France, the National Assembly intended to counterbalance the power of numbers, which governed the elections for the Chamber of Deputies, and, at the same time, to give a preponderance to the country districts. The 75 irremovable senators were another precaution against the danger from violent waves of public opinion. The executive power was entrusted to a president, elected for seven years (as Marshal MacMahon had been in 1873), by the Chamber and the Senate, combined into a single body under the name of National Assembly. He is always eligible for re-election, and is irresponsible except in case of high treason. His powers are of the widest, including the initiative in legislation jointly with the two chambers, the appointment to all civil and military offices, the disposition, and, if he wish it, the leadership of the armed forces, the right of pardon, the right of negotiating treaties with foreign powers, and, in principle, of ratifying them on his own authority, the consent of the two chambers being required only in certain cases defined by the constitution. The nomination of _conseillers d'etat_ for ordinary service, whom the National Assembly had made elective, as in 1848, and elected itself, was restored to the president of the Republic, together with the right of dismissing them. But these powers he can only exercise through the medium of a ministry, politically and jointly responsible to the chambers, and forming a council, over which the president usually presides.

The French Republic is essentially a parliamentary republic. The right of dissolving the Chamber of Deputies before the expiration of its term of office belongs to the president, but in order to do so he must have, besides a ministry which will take the responsibility for it, the preliminary sanction of the Senate. The Senate is at the same time a high court of justice, which can judge the president of the Republic and ministers accused of crimes committed by them in the exercise of their functions; in these two cases the prosecution is instituted by the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate can also be called upon to judge any person accused of an attempt upon the safety of the state, who is then seized by a decree of the president of the Republic, drawn up in the council of ministers. Possible revision of the constitution is provided for very simply: it has to be proposed as a law, and for its acceptance a resolution passed by each chamber separately, by an absolute majority, is necessary. The revision is then carried out by the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies to form a National Assembly. There have been two revisions since 1875. The first time, in 1879, it was simply a question of transferring the seat of the government and of the chambers back to Paris from Versailles, where it had been fixed by one of the constitutional laws. The second time, in 1884, more fundamental modifications were required. The most important point was to change the composition and election of the Senate. With a view to this, the new constitutional law of the 14th of August 1884 abolished the constitutional character of a certain number of articles of the law of the 24th of February 1875, thus making it possible to modify them by an ordinary law. This took place in the same year; the 75 senators for life were suppressed for the future by a process of extinction, and their seats divided among the most populous departments. Further, in the electoral college which elects the senators, there was allotted to the municipal councils a number of delegates proportionate to the number of members of the councils, which depends on the importance of the commune. The law of the 14th of August 1884 also modified the constitution in another important respect. The law of the 25th of February 1875 had admitted the possibility not only of a partial, but even of a total revision, which could affect and even change the form of the state. The law of the 14th of August 1884, however, declared that no proposition for a revision could be accepted which aimed at changing the republican form of government. The composition of the Chamber of Deputies was not fixed by the constitution, and consequently admitted more easily of variation. Since 1871 the mode of election has oscillated between the _scrutin de liste_ for the departments and the _scrutin uninominal_ for the arrondissements. The organic law of the 30th of November 1875 had established the latter system; in 1885 the _scrutin de liste_ was established by law, but in 1889 the _scrutin d'arrondissement_ was restored; and in this same year, on account of the ambitions of General Boulanger and the suggestion which was made for a sort of plebiscite in his favour, was passed the law on plural candidatures, which forbids anyone to become a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies in more than one district at a time.

Working of the constitution.

The system established by the constitution of 1875 has worked excellently in some of its departments; for instance, the mode of electing the president of the Republic. Between 1875 and 1906 there were seven elections, sometimes under tragic or very difficult conditions; the election has always taken place without delay or obstruction, and the choice has been of the best. The high court of justice, which has twice been called into requisition, in 1889 and in 1899-1900, has acted as an efficient check, in spite of the difficulties confronting such a tribunal when feeling runs high. Parliamentary government in the form set up by the constitution, besides the criticism to which this system is open in all countries where it is established, even in England, met with special difficulties in France. In the first place, the useful but rather secondary role assigned to the president of the Republic has by no means satisfied all those who have occupied this high office. Two presidents have resigned on the ground that their powers were insufficient. Another, even after re-election, had to withdraw in face of the opposition of the two chambers, being no longer able to obtain a parliamentary ministry. It is difficult, however, to accept the theory of an eminent American political writer, Mr John W. Burgess,[1] that in order to attain to a position of stable equilibrium, the French Republic ought to adopt the presidential system of the United States. In France this sharp division between the two powers has never been observed except in those periods when the representative assemblies were powerless, under the First and Second Empires. It is true that the apparent multiplicity of parties and their lack of discipline, together with the French procedure of _interpellations_ and the orders of the day by which they are concluded, make the formation of homogeneous and lasting cabinets difficult; but since the end of the 19th century there has been great progress in this respect. Another difficulty arose in 1896. The Senate, appealing to the letter of the constitution and relying on its elective character, claimed the right of forcing a ministry to resign by its vote, in the same way as the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate was victorious in the struggle, and forced the ministry presided over by M. Leon Bourgeois to resign; but the precedent is not decisive, for in order to gain its ends the Senate had recourse to the means of refusing to sanction the taxes, declining to consider the proposals for the supplies necessary for the Madagascar expedition so long as the ministry which it was attacking was in existence. The weakest point in the French parliamentary organism is perhaps the right of dissolution. It is difficult of application, for the reason that the president must obtain the preliminary consent of the Senate before exercising it; moreover, this valuable right has been discredited by its abuse by Marshal MacMahon in the campaign of the 16th of May 1877, on which occasion he exercised his right of dissolution against a chamber, the moderate but decidedly republican majority in which he was re-elected by the country.

Reforms under the Third Republic.

The religious congregations.

Education.

Separation of church and state.

The legislative reforms carried out under the Third Republic are very numerous. As to public law, it is only possible to mention here those of a really organic character, chief among which are those which safeguard and regulate the exercise of the liberties of the individual. The law of the 30th of June 1881, modified in 1901, established the right of holding meetings. Public meetings, whether for ordinary or electoral purposes, may be held without preliminary authorization; the law of 1881 prescribed a declaration made by a certain number of citizens enjoying full civil and political rights, which is now remitted. The only really restrictive provision is that which does not allow them to be held in the public highway, but only in an enclosed space. But this is made necessary by the customs of France. The law of the 21st of July 1881 on the press is one of the most liberal in the world. By it all offences committed by any kind of publication are submitted to a jury; the punishment for the mere expression of obnoxious opinions is abolished, the only punishment being for slander, libel, defamation, inciting to crime, and in certain cases the publication of false news. The law of the 1st of July 1901 established in France the right of forming associations. It recognizes the legality of all associations strictly so called, the objects of which are not contrary to law or to public order or morality. On condition of a simple declaration to the administrative authority, it grants them a civil status in a wide sense of the term. Religious congregations, on the contrary, which are not authorized by a law, are forbidden by this law. This was not a new principle, but the traditional rule in France both before and after the Revolution, except that under certain governments authorization by decree had sufficed. As a matter of fact the unauthorized congregations had been tolerated for a long time, although on various occasions, and especially in 1881, their partial dissolution had been proclaimed by decrees. The law of 1901 dissolved them all, and made it an offence to belong to such a congregation. The members of unauthorized congregations, and later, in 1904, even those of the authorized congregations, were disqualified from teaching in any kind of establishment. The liberty of primary education was confirmed and reorganized by the law of the 30th of October 1886, which simply deprived the clergy of the privileges granted them by the law of 1850, though the latter remains in force with regard to the liberty of secondary education. A law passed by the National Assembly (July 12, 1875) established the liberty of higher education. It even went beyond this, for it granted to students in private _facultes_ who aspired to state degrees the right of being examined before a board composed partly of private and partly of state professors. The law of the 18th of March 1880 abolished this privilege. Another law, that of the 22nd of March 1882, made primary education obligatory, though allowing parents to send their children either to private schools or to those of the state; the law of the 16th of June 1881 established secular (_laique_) education in the case of the latter. The Third Republic also organized secondary education for girls in lycees or special colleges (_colleges de fille_). Finally, a law of the 10th of July 1896 dealing with higher education and the faculties of the state reorganized the universities, which form distinct bodies, enjoying a fairly wide autonomy. A law of the 19th of December 1905, abrogating that of the 18th Germinal in the year X., which had sanctioned the Concordat, proclaimed the separation of the church from the state. It is based on the principle of the secular state (_etat laique_) which recognizes no form of religion, though respecting the right of every citizen to worship according to his beliefs, and it aimed at organizing associations of citizens, the object of which was to collect the funds and acquire the property necessary for the maintenance of worship, under the form of _associations cultuelles_, differing in certain respects from the associations sanctioned by the law of the 1st of July 1901, but having a wider scope. It also handed over to these regularly formed associations the property of the ecclesiastical establishments formerly in existence, while taking precautions to ensure their proper application, and allowed the associations the free use of the churches and places of worship belonging to the state, the departments or the communes. If no _association cultuelle_ was founded in a parish, the property of the former _fabrique_ should devolve to the commune. But this law was condemned by the papacy, as contrary to the church hierarchy; and almost nowhere were _associations cultuelles_ formed, except by Protestants and Jews, who complied with the law. After many incidents, but no church having been closed, a new law of the 2nd of January 1907 was enacted. It permits the public exercise of any cult, by means of ordinary associations regulated by the law of the 1st of July 1901, and even of public meetings summoned by individuals. Failing all associations, either _cultuelles_ or others, churches, with their ornaments and furniture, are left to the disposition of the faithful and ministers, for the purpose of exercising the cult; and, on certain conditions, the long use of them can be granted as a free gift to ministers of the cult.

Administrative changes.

Among the organic laws concerning administrative affairs there are two of primary importance; that of the 10th of August 1871, on the _conseils generaux_, considerably increased the powers and independence of these elective bodies, which have become important deliberative assemblies, their sessions being held in public. The law of 1871 created a new administrative organ for the departments, the _commission departmentale_, elected by the council-general of the department from among its own members and associated with the administration of the prefect. The other law is the municipal law of the 5th of April 1884, which effected a widespread decentralization; the _maires_ and their _adjoints_ are elected by the municipal council.

Reorganization of the army.

The war of 1870-71 necessarily led to a modification of the military organization. The law of the 25th of July 1872 established the principle of compulsory service for all, first in the standing army, the period of service in which was fixed at five years, then in the reserve, and finally in the territorial army. But the application of this principle was by no means absolute, only holding good in time of war. Each annual class was divided into two parts, by means of drawing lots, and in time of peace one of these parts had only a year of service with the active army. The previous exemptions, based either on the position of supporter of the family (as in the case of the son of a widow or aged father, &c.) or on equivalent services rendered to the state (as in the case of young ecclesiastics or members of the teaching profession), were preserved, but only held good for service in the active army in times of peace. Finally, the system of conditional engagement for a year allowed young men, for the purposes of study or apprenticeship to their profession, only to serve a year with the active army in time of peace. By this means it was sought to combine the advantages of an army of veterans with those of a numerous and truly national army. But the conditional volunteering (_volontariat conditionnel_) for a year was open to too great a number of people, and so brought the system into discredit. As those who profited by it had to be clothed and maintained at their own expense, and the sum which they had to furnish for this purpose was generally fixed at 1500 francs, it came to be considered the privilege of those who could pay this sum. A new law of the 15th of July 1889 lessened the difference between the two terms which it attempted to reconcile. It reduced the term of service in the active army to three years, and the exemptions, which were still preserved, merely reduced the period to a year in times of peace. The same reduction was also granted to those who were really pursuing important scientific, technical or professional studies; the system was so strict on this point that the number of those who profited by those exemptions did not amount to 2000 in a year. This was a compromise between two opposing principles; the democratic principle of equality, being the stronger, was bound to triumph. The law of the 21st of March 1905 reduced the term of service in the active army to two years, but made it equal for all, admitting of no exemption, but only certain facilities as to the age at which it had to be accomplished.

Justice and taxation.

In 1883 the judicial _personnel_ was reorganized and reduced in number. With the exception of a few modifications the main lines of judicial organization remained the same. In 1879 the conseil d'etat was also reorganized. The whole fabric of administrative jurisdiction was carefully organized, and almost entirely separated from the active administration.

The system of taxation has remained essentially unaltered; we may notice, however, the laws of 1897, 1898 and 1900, which abolished or lessened the duties on so called _hygienic_ drinks (wine, beer, cider), and the financial law of 1901, which rearranged and increased the transfer fees, and established a system of progressive taxation in the case of succession dues.

Labour legislation.

The labour laws, which generally partook of the nature both of public and of private law, are a sign of our times. Under the Third Republic they have been numerous, the most notable being: the law of the 21st of March 1884 on professional syndicates, which introduced the liberty of association in matters of this kind before it became part of the common law (see TRADE UNIONS); the law of the 9th of April 1898 on the liability for accidents incurred during work, and those which have completed it; that of the 22nd of December 1892 on conciliation and arbitration in the case of collective disputes between employers and workmen; that of the 29th of June 1893 on the hygiene and safeguarding of workers in industrial establishments, and the laws which regulate the work of children and women in factories; finally, that of the 15th of July 1893 on free medical attendance (see LABOUR LEGISLATION).

Criminal law.

As to criminal law, there have been more than fifty enactments, mostly involving important modifications, due to more scientific ideas of punishment, so that we may say that it has been almost entirely recast since the establishment of the Third Republic. The separate system applied in cases of preventive detention and imprisonment for short periods; liberation before the expiry of the term of sentence, subject to the condition that no fresh offence shall be committed within a given time; transportation to the colonies of habitual offenders; the remission of the penalty in the case of first offenders, and the lapsing of the penalty when a certain time has gone by without a fresh condemnation; greater facilities for the rehabilitation of condemned persons, which now became simply a matter for the courts, and occurred as a matter of course at the end of a certain time; such were the chief results of this legislation. Finally, the law of the 8th of December 1897 completely altered the form of the preliminary examination before the _juge d'instruction_, which had been the weakest point in the French criminal procedure, though it was still held in private; the new law made this examination really a hearing of both sides, and made the appearance of counsel for the defence practically compulsory.

As to private law, both civil and commercial, we could enumerate between 1871 and 1906 more than a hundred laws which have modified it, sometimes profoundly, and have for the most part done very useful work without attracting much attention. They are generally examined and drawn up by commissions of competent men, and pass both chambers almost without discussion. There have, however, been a few which aroused public interest and even deep feeling. Firstly, there was the law of the 27th of July 1884, and those which completed it; this law re-established divorce, which had been abolished since 1816, but only permitted it for certain definite causes determined by law. On the other hand, the law of the 6th of February 1893 increased the liberty and independence of a woman who was simply judicially separated, in order to encourage separation, as opposed to divorce, when the conditions allowed it. The law of the 25th of March 1896 on the succession of illegitimate children, who were recognized by the parents, treated them not in the same way as legitimate children, but gave them the title of heirs in the succession of their father and mother, together with much greater rights than they had possessed under the _Code Civil_. The law of the 24th of July 1899, on the protection of children who are ill-treated or morally neglected, also modified some of the provisions of the law as applied to the family, with a view to greater justice and humanity. Finally, on the occasion of the centenary of the _Code Civil_ (see CODE NAPOLEON), a commission, composed of members of the chambers, magistrates, professors of law, lawyers, political writers, and even novelists and dramatic authors, was given the task of revising the whole structure of the code.

See generally Adhemar Esmein, _Cours elementaire d'histoire du droit francais_ (6th ed., 1906); J. Brissand, _Cours d'histoire generale du droit francais public et prive_ (1904); Ernest Glasson, _Histoire du droit et des institutions en France_ (1887-1904); Paul Viollet, _Histoire des institutions politiques et administratives de la France_ (3rd ed., 1903); Fustel de Coulanges, _Histoire des institutions politiques de l'ancienne France_; Jacques Flach, _Les Origines de l'ancienne France_ (1875-1889); Achille Luchaire, _Histoire des institutions monarchiques de la France sous les premiers Capetiens_ (2nd ed., 1900); Hippolyte Taine, _Les Origines de la France contemporaine_ (1878-1894); Adhemar Esmein, _Elements de droit constitutionnel francais et compare_ (4th ed., 1906); Leon Duguit et Henry Monnier, _Les Constitutions et les principales lois politiques de la France depuis 1789_ (1898). (J. P. E.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law_ (Boston, 1896).

FRANCESCHI, JEAN BAPTISTE, BARON (1766-1813), French general, was born at Bastia on the 5th of December 1766 and entered the French service in 1793. He took part in the operations in Corsica in the following year, and received a wound at the siege of San Fiorenzo. After this he left the island and was appointed a field officer in the French Army of Italy, with which he served from 1795 to 1799. He served as a general officer in the campaign of Marengo, in the Naples campaign of 1805-1806, and in the Peninsular War from 1807 to 1809. He was created a baron by Napoleon. He commanded a Neapolitan brigade in the Russian War of 1812, and after the retreat from Moscow took refuge, with the remnant of his command, in Danzig, where in the course of the siege of 1813 he died on the 19th of March.

Two other generals of brigade in Napoleon's wars bore the name of Franceschi, and the three have often been mistaken for each other. The first was born at Lyons, JEAN BAPTISTE MARIE FRANCESCHI-DELONNE (1767-1810), who served throughout the Revolutionary campaign on the Rhine, took part in the campaign of Zuerich in 1799, and distinguished himself very greatly by his escape from, and subsequent return to, Genoa, when in 1800 Massena was closely besieged in that city. He became a cavalry colonel in 1803, was promoted general of brigade on the field of Austerlitz, and served in southern Italy and in Spain on the staff of King Joseph Bonaparte. During the Peninsular War he won great distinction as a cavalry general, and in 1810 Napoleon made him a baron. At this time he was a prisoner in the hands of the Spaniards, into whose hands he had fallen while bearing important despatches during the campaign of Talavera. He was harshly treated by his captors, and died at Carthagena on the 23rd of October 1810. The second was FRANCOIS FRANCESCHI-LOSIO (1770-1810), born at Milan, who entered the French Revolutionary army in 1795. He served through the Italian campaign of 1796-97, and subsequently, like Franceschi-Delonne, with Massena at Zuerich and at Genoa, and at the headquarters of King Joseph in Italy and Spain. He was killed in a duel by the Neapolitan colonel Filangieri in 1810.

FRANCESCHI, PIERO (or PIETRO) DE' (c. 1416-1492), Italian painter of the Umbrian school. This master is generally named Piero della Francesca (Peter, son of Frances), the tradition being that his father, a woollen-draper named Benedetto, had died before his birth. This is not correct, for the mother's name was Romana, and the father continued living during many years of Piero's career. The painter is also named Piero Borghese, from his birthplace, Borgo San Sepolcro, in Umbria. The true family name was, as above stated, Franceschi, and the family still exists under the name of Martini-Franceschi.

Piero first received a scientific education, and became an adept in mathematics and geometry. This early bent of mind and course of study influenced to a large extent his development as a painter. He had more science than either Paolo Uccello or Mantegna, both of them his contemporaries, the former older and the latter younger. Skilful in linear perspective, he fixed rectangular planes in perfect order and measured them, and thus got his figures in true proportional height. He preceded and excelled Domenico Ghirlandajo in projecting shadows, and rendered with considerable truth atmosphere, the harmony of colours, and the relief of objects. He was naturally therefore excellent in architectural painting, and, in point of technique, he advanced the practice of oil-colouring in Italy.

The earliest trace that we find of Piero as a painter is in 1439, when he was an apprentice of Domenico Veneziano, and assisted him in painting the chapel of S. Egidio, in S. Maria Novella of Florence. Towards 1450 he is said to have been with the same artist in Loreto; nothing of his, however, can now be identified in that locality. In 1451 he was by himself, painting in Rimini, where a fresco still remains. Prior to this he had executed some extensive frescoes in the Vatican; but these were destroyed when Raphael undertook on the same walls the "Liberation of St Peter" and other paintings. His most extensive extant series of frescoes is in the choir of S. Francesco in Arezzo,--the "History of the Cross," beginning with legendary subjects of the death and burial of Adam, and going on to the entry of Heraclius into Jerusalem after the overthrow of Chosroes. This series is, in relation to its period, remarkable for effect, movement, and mastery of the nude. The subject of the "Vision of Constantine" is particularly vigorous in chiaroscuro; and a preparatory design of the same composition was so highly effective that it used to be ascribed to Giorgione, and might even (according to one authority) have passed for the handiwork of Correggio or of Rembrandt. A noted fresco in Borgo San Sepolcro, the "Resurrection," may be later than this series; it is preserved in the Palazzo de' Conservatori. An important painting of the "Flagellation of Christ," in the cathedral of Urbino, is later still, probably towards 1470. Piero appears to have been much in his native town of Borgo San Sepolcro from about 1445, and more especially after 1454, when he finished the series in Arezzo. He grew rich there, and there he died, and in October 1492 was buried.

Two statements made by Vasari regarding "Piero della Francesca" are open to much controversy. He says that Piero became blind at the age of sixty, which cannot be true, as he continued painting some years later; but scepticism need perhaps hardly go to the extent of inferring that he was never blind at all. Vasari also says that Fra Luca Pacioli, a disciple of Piero in scientific matters, defrauded his memory by appropriating his researches without acknowledgment. This is hard upon the friar, who constantly shows a great reverence for his master in the sciences. One of Pacioli's books was published in 1509, and speaks of Piero as still living. Hence it has been propounded that Piero lived to the patriarchal age of ninety-four or upwards; but, as it is now stated that he was buried in 1492, we must infer that there is some mistake in relation to Pacioli's remark--perhaps the date of writing was several years earlier than that of publication. Piero was known to have left a manuscript of his own on perspective; this remained undiscovered for a long time, but eventually was found by E. Harzen in the Ambrosian library of Milan, ascribed to some supposititious "Pietro, Pittore di Bruges." The treatise shows a knowledge of perspective as dependent on the point of distance.

In the National Gallery, London, are three paintings attributed to Piero de' Franceschi. Another work, a profile of Isotta da Rimini, may safely be rejected. The "Baptism of Christ," which used to be the altar-piece of the Priory of the Baptist in Borgo San Sepolcro, is an important example; and still more so the "Nativity," with the Virgin kneeling, and five angels singing to musical instruments. This is a very interesting and characteristic specimen, and has indeed been praised somewhat beyond its deservings on aesthetic grounds.

Piero's earlier style was energetic but unrefined, and to the last he lacked selectness of form and feature. The types of his visages are peculiar, and the costumes (as especially in the Arezzo series) singular. He used to work assiduously from clay models swathed in real drapery. Luca Signorelli was his pupil, and probably to some extent Perugino; and his own influence, furthered by that of Signorelli, was potent over all Italy. Belonging as he does to the Umbrian school, he united with that style something of the Sienese and more of the Florentine mode.

Besides Vasari and Crowe & Cavalcaselle, the work by W.G. Waters, _Piero della Francesca_ (1899) should be consulted. (W. M. R.)

FRANCESCHINI, BALDASSARE (1611-1689), Italian painter of the Tuscan school, named, from Volterra the place of his birth, Il Volterrano, or (to distinguish him from Ricciarelli) Il Volterrano Giuniore, was the son of a sculptor in alabaster. At a very early age he learned from Cosimo Daddi some of the elements of art, and he started as an assistant to his father. This employment being evidently below the level of his talents, the marquises Inghirami placed him, at the age of sixteen, under the Florentine painter Matteo Rosselli. In the ensuing year he had advanced sufficiently to execute in Volterra some frescoes, skilful in foreshortening, followed by other frescoes for the Medici family in the Valle della Petraia. In 1652 the marchese Filippo Niccolini, being minded to employ Franceschini upon the frescoes for the cupola and back-wall of his chapel in S. Croce, Florence, despatched him to various parts of Italy to perfect his style. The painter, in a tour which lasted some months, took more especially to the qualities distinctive of the schools of Parma and Bologna, and in a measure to those of Pietro da Cortona, whose acquaintance he made in Rome. He then undertook the paintings commissioned by Niccolini, which constitute his most noted performance, the design being good, and the method masterly. Franceschini ranks higher in fresco than in oil painting. His works in the latter mode were not unfrequently left unfinished, although numerous specimens remain, the cabinet pictures being marked by much sprightliness of invention. Among his best oil paintings of large scale is the "St John the Evangelist" in the church of S. Chiara at Volterra. One of his latest works was the fresco of the cupola of the Annunziata, Florence, which occupied him for two years towards 1683, a production of much labour and energy. Franceschini died of apoplexy at Volterra on the 6th of January 1689. He is reckoned among those painters of the decline of art to whom the general name of "machinist" is applied.

He is not to be confounded with another Franceschini of the same class, and of rather later date, also of no small eminence in his time--the Cavaliere Marcantonio Franceschini (1648-1729), who was a Bolognese.

FRANCHE-COMTE, a province of France from 1674 to the Revolution. It was bounded on the E. by Switzerland, on the S. by Bresse and Bugey, on the N. by Lorraine, and on the W. by the duchy of Burgundy and by Bassigny, embracing to the E. of the Jura the valley of the Saone and most of that of the Doubs. Under the Romans it corresponded to _Maxima Sequanorum_, and after having formed part of the kingdom of Burgundy was in the early part of the middle ages split up into the four countships of Portois, Varais, Amons and Escuens. In the 10th century these four countships were united to form a whole, which came to be called the countship of Burgundy, and belonged at that time to the family of the counts of Macon.

The limits of the countship were definitely settled under Otto William, son of Albert or Adalbert, king of Italy (+1027), who on the death of his father-in-law, Henry (1002), tried to seize the duchy of Burgundy, but without success. The countship, which formed a fief dependent on the kingdom of Burgundy, passed to Renaud I., the second son of Otto William. When the kingdom of Burgundy was joined to the Germanic empire, he refused to pay homage to the emperor Henry III., whose suzerainty over him never existed except in theory. William I., surnamed the Great or Headstrong (1059-1087), still further added to the power of his house by marrying Etiennette, heiress of the count of Vienne, and by acquiring from his cousin Guy, when the latter became a monk at Cluny, the countship of Macon. One of his sons, Guy, became pope, under the name of Calixtus II. His grandson, Renaud III. (1097-1148), in his turn refused to pay homage to the emperor Lothair, who retaliated by confiscating his dominions and giving them to Conrad of Zaehringen. Renaud, however, succeeded in maintaining until his death his possession of the countships of Burgundy, Vienne and Macon. He left as sole heiress a daughter, Beatrix, whom his brother William III. imprisoned, in order to make an attempt on her inheritance; she was set free, however, by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who married her in 1156.

On the death of Beatrix (1185) the countship of Burgundy passed to Otto I. (1190-1200), the youngest but one of her sons, who had to dispute its possession with Stephen, count of Auxonne, the grandson of William III. Beatrix, the daughter and heiress of Otto I. (1200-1231), married Otto, duke of Meran (+1234), under whose government the inhabitants of Besancon, which had been since the time of Frederick Barbarossa an imperial city, formed themselves definitely into a _commune_. Alix, daughter of Beatrix and of Otto of Meran, and heiress to the countship of Burgundy, married Hugh of Chalon, son of John the Ancient or the Wise (d. 1248), and a descendant of William III. and consequently of William the Headstrong, thus bringing the countship back into the family of its former lords. His son Otto IV. (1279-1303) engaged in war against the bishop of Basel, and the German king Rudolph I., who supported the latter, entered Franche-Comte and besieged Besancon, but without success (1289). Otto, in fulfilment of the treaties of Ervennes and Vincennes (1291-1295) gave Jeanne, his daughter by Mahaut of Artois, in marriage to Philip, count of Poitiers, son of Philip the Fair. The latter took over the administration of the countship in spite of strong opposition from the nobles of the country, but their leader, John of Chalon-Arlay, was compelled to make his submission. Another of Otto's daughters married Charles IV., the Handsome, and both princesses, together with their sister-in-law Margaret of Burgundy, were concerned in the celebrated trial of the Tour de Nesle. Jeanne, however, continued to govern her countship when Philip her husband became king of France (Philip V., "the Long"). Jeanne, their daughter and heiress, married Odo IV., duke of Burgundy (1330-1347), and her sister Margaret became the wife of Louis II., count of Flanders. The countship returned to Margaret at the death of Odo IV., who was succeeded in his duchy by his grandson Philip of Rouvre.

The marriage of Philip the Bold with Margaret, daughter of Louis of Male, caused Franche-Comte to pass to the princes of the ducal house of Burgundy, who kept it up till the death of Charles the Bold (1477). On his death Louis XI. laid claim to the government of the countship as well as of the duchy, as trustee for the property of the princess Mary, who was closely related to him and destined to marry the dauphin (later Charles VIII.). French garrisons occupied the principal towns, and the lord of Craon was appointed governor of the country. In consequence of his severity there was a general rising, and at the same time Mary married Maximilian, archduke of Austria, to whom her father had formerly betrothed her (Aug. 1477). The French were expelled from the fortified towns and Craon beaten by the people of Dole. Charles of Amboise, who took his place, reconquered the province, and even Besancon submitted to the authority of the king of France, who promised to respect its privileges.

On the death of Louis XI. (1483), the estates of Franche-Comte recognized as sovereign his son Charles, who was betrothed to the little Margaret of Burgundy, daughter of Maximilian and Mary (d. 1482), but when Charles VIII. refused Margaret's hand in order to marry Anne of Brittany there was a fresh rising, and the French were again driven out. The treaty of Senlis (23rd May 1483) put an end to the struggle: Charles abandoned all his pretensions, and Maximilian was thus left in possession of Franche-Comte, the sovereignty of which he handed on to his son Philip and ultimately to the crown of Spain. He had, however, constituted his daughter Margaret sovereign-governess of Franche-Comte for life, and under the administration of this princess (who died in 1530), as under the rule of Charles V., the country enjoyed comparative independence, paying a "_don gratuit_" of 200,000 livres every three years, and being actually governed by the parliament of Dole, and by governors chosen from the nobility of the country. It was Franche-Comte which furnished Philip II. of Spain with one of his best counsellors, Cardinal Perrenot de Granvella.

In the 16th century the country was disturbed by the preaching of Protestant doctrines, which gained adherents especially in the district of Montbeliard, and later by the wars between France and Spain. In 1595 the armies of Henry IV. levied contributions on Besancon and other towns; but the people of Franche-Comte succeeded in obtaining special terms of neutrality in order to shelter themselves from injury from either of the parties in the war, and enjoyed a period of calm under the government of the infanta Isabella Clara Eugenie and the archduke Albert (1599-1621). But the country suffered greatly from the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, from the presence of the army of the Condes, which besieged Dole, from the devastation of the troops of Gallas, and later of those of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar. The peace of Westphalia (1648) confirmed Spain in the possession of Franche-Comte. In 1668 the French again entered it, and the conquest, of which the foundations had been laid by the intrigues of the abbot of Watteville and the French party constituted by him, was easily accomplished by Conde and Luxemburg, Louis XIV. directing the army in Franche-Comte for some time in person. None the less, the country was restored to Spain at the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668), but in 1674 Louis headed another expedition there. Besancon capitulated after a siege of twenty-seven days, and Dole and Salins also fell into the hands of the invaders.

In 1678 the treaty of Nijmwegen gave Franche-Comte to France (the principality of Montbeliard remaining in the possession of the house of Wuerttemberg, which had acquired it by marriage), and it was in celebration of this conquest that the Arc de Triomphe of the Portes Saint Denis and Saint Martin at Paris was erected. Franche-Comte became a military government (_gouvernement_). The estates ceased to meet, and the old "_don gratuit_" was replaced by a tax which became increasingly heavy. Louis made Besancon, which Vauban fortified, into the capital of the province, and transferred to it the parliament and the university, the seat of which had hitherto been Dole. For purposes of administration, the county was divided among the four great _bailliages_ of Besancon, Dole, Amont (chief town Vesoul) and Aval (chief town Salins). At the Revolution were formed from it the departments of Jura, Doubs and Haute-Saone.

See Dunod, _Histoire des Sequanois; Hist. du comte de Bourgogne_ (Dijon, 1735-1740); E. Clerc, _Essai sur l'histoire de la Franche-Comte_ (2nd ed., Besancon, 1870). (R. Po.)

FRANCHISE (from O. Fr. _franchise_, freedom, _franc_, free), in English law, a royal privilege or branch of the crown's prerogative subsisting in the hands of a subject. A franchise is an incorporeal hereditament, and arises either from royal grants or from prescription which presupposes a grant. Such franchises are bodies corporate, the right to hold a fair, market, ferry, free fishery, &c. The term is also applied to the right of voting at elections and the qualifications upon which that right is based (see REGISTRATION; REPRESENTATION; VOTE). In the United States the term is especially applied to the right or powers of partial appropriation of public property by exclusive use, or to a privilege of a public nature conferred on a corporation created for the purpose.

FRANCIA (c. 1450-1517), a Bolognese painter, whose real name was Francesco Raibolini, his father being Marco di Giacomo Raibolini, a carpenter, descended from an old and creditable family, was born at Bologna about 1450. He was apprenticed to a goldsmith currently named Francia, and from him probably he got the nickname whereby he is generally known; he moreover studied design under Marco Zoppo. The youth was thus originally a goldsmith, and also an engraver of dies and niellos, and in these arts he became extremely eminent. He was particularly famed for his dies for medals; he rose to be mint-master at Bologna, and retained that office till the end of his life. A famous medal of Pope Julius II. as liberator of Bologna is ascribed to his hand, but not with certainty. As a type-founder he made for Aldus Manutius the first italic type.

At a mature age--having first, it appears, become acquainted with Mantegna--he turned his attention to painting. His earliest known picture is dated 1494 (not 1490, as ordinarily stated). It shows so much mastery that one is compelled to believe that Raibolini must before then have practised painting for some few years. This work is now in the Bologna gallery,--the "Virgin enthroned, with Augustine and five other saints." It is an oil picture, and was originally painted for the church of S. Maria della Misericordia, at the desire of the Bentivoglio family, the rulers of Bologna. The same patrons employed him upon frescoes in their own palace; one of "Judith and Holophernes" is especially noted, its style recalling that of Mantegna. Francia probably studied likewise the works of Perugino; and he became a friend and ardent admirer of Raphael, to whom he addressed an enthusiastic sonnet. Raphael cordially responded to the Bolognese master's admiration, and said, in a letter dated in 1508, that few painters or none had produced Madonnas more beautiful, more devout, or better portrayed than those of Francia. If we may trust Vasari--but it is difficult to suppose that he was entirely correct--the exceeding value which Francia set on Raphael's art brought him to his grave. Raphael had consigned to Francia his famous picture of "St Cecilia," destined for the church of S. Giovanni in Monte, Bologna; and Francia, on inspecting it, took so much to heart his own inferiority, at the advanced age of about sixty-six, to the youthful Umbrian, that he sickened and shortly expired on the 6th of January 1517. A contemporary record, after attesting his pre-eminence as a goldsmith, jeweller and painter, states that he was "most handsome in person and highly eloquent."

Distanced though he may have been by Raphael, Francia is rightly regarded as the greatest painter of the earlier Bolognese school, and hardly to be surpassed as representing the art termed "antico-moderno," or of the "quattrocento." It has been well observed that his style is a medium between that of Perugino and that of Giovanni Bellini; he has somewhat more of spontaneous naturalism than the former, and of abstract dignity in feature and form than the latter. The magnificent portrait in the Louvre of a young man in black, of brooding thoughtfulness and saddened profundity of mood, would alone suffice to place Francia among the very great masters, if it could with confidence be attributed to his hand, but in all probability its real author was Franciabigio; it had erewhile passed under the name of Raphael, of Giorgione, or of Sebastian del Piombo. The National Gallery, London, contains two remarkably fine specimens of Francia, once combined together as principal picture and lunette,--the "Virgin" and "Child and St Anna" enthroned, surrounded by saints, and (in the lunette) the "Pieta," or lamentation of angels over the dead Saviour. They come from the Buonvisi chapel in the church of S. Frediano, Lucca, and were among the master's latest paintings. Other leading works are--in Munich, the "Virgin" sinking on her knees in adoration of the Divine Infant, who is lying in a garden within a rose trellis; in the Borghese gallery, Rome, a Peter Martyr; in Bologna, the frescoes in the church of St Cecilia, illustrating the life of the saint, all of them from the design of Raibolini, but not all executed by himself. His landscape backgrounds are of uncommon excellence. Francia had more than 200 scholars. Marcantonio Raimondi, the famous engraver, is the most renowned of them; next to him Amico Aspertini, and Francia's own son Giacomo, and his cousin Julio. Lorenzo Costa was much associated with Francia in pictorial work.

Among the authorities as to the life and work of Francia may be mentioned J.A. Calvi, _Memorie della vita di Francesco Raibolini_ (1812), and especially G.C. Williamson, _Francia_ (1900). (W. M. R.)

FRANCIA, JOSE GASPAR RODRIGUEZ (c. 1757-1840), dictator of Paraguay, was born probably about 1757. According to one account he was of French descent; but the truth seems to be that his father, Garcia Rodriguez Francia, was a native of S. Paulo in Brazil, and came to Paraguay to take charge of a plantation of black tobacco for the government. He studied theology at the college of Cordova de Tucuman, and is said to have been for some time a professor in that faculty; but he afterwards turned his attention to the law, and practised in Asuncion. Having attained a high reputation at once for ability and integrity, he was selected for various important offices. On the declaration of Paraguayan independence in 1811, he was appointed secretary to the national junta, and exercised an influence on affairs greatly out of proportion to his nominal position. When the congress or junta of 1813 changed the constitution and established a duumvirate, Dr Francia and the Gaucho general Yegres were elected to the office. In 1814 he secured his own election as dictator for three years, and at the end of that period he obtained the dictatorship for life. In the accounts which have been published of his administration we find a strange mixture of capacity and caprice, of far-sighted wisdom and reckless infatuation, strenuous endeavours after a high ideal and flagrant violations of the simplest principles of justice. He put a stop to the foreign commerce of the country, but carefully fostered its internal industries; was disposed to be hospitable to strangers from other lands, and kept them prisoners for years; lived a life of republican simplicity, and punished with Dionysian severity the slightest want of respect. As time went on he appears to have grown more arbitrary and despotic. Deeply imbued with the principles of the French Revolution, he was a stern antagonist of the church. He abolished the Inquisition, suppressed the college of theology, did away with the tithes, and inflicted endless indignities on the priests. He discouraged marriage both by precept and example, and left behind him several illegitimate children. For the extravagances of his later years the plea of insanity has been put forward. On the 20th of September 1840 he was seized with a fit and died.

The first and fullest account of Dr Francia was given to the world by two Swiss surgeons, Rengger and Longchamp, whom he had detained from 1819 to 1825--_Essai historique sur la revolution de Paraguay et la gouvernement dictatorial du docteur Francia_ (Paris, 1827). Their work was almost immediately translated into English under the title of _The Reign of Doctor Joseph G.R. De Francia in Paraguay_ (1827). About eleven years after there appeared at London _Letters on Paraguay_, by J.P. and W.P. Robertson, two young Scotsmen whose hopes of commercial success had been rudely destroyed by the dictator's interference. The account which they gave of his character and government was of the most unfavourable description, and they rehearsed and emphasized their accusations in _Francia's Reign of Terror_ (1839) and _Letters on South America_ (3 vols., 1843). From the very pages of his detractors Thomas Carlyle succeeded in extracting materials for a brilliant defence of the dictator "as a man or sovereign of iron energy and industry, of great and severe labour." It appeared in the _Foreign Quarterly Review_ for 1843, and is reprinted in his _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays_. Sir Richard F. Burton gives a graphic sketch of Francia's life and a favourable notice of his character in his _Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay_ (1870), while C.A. Washburn takes up a hostile position in his _History of Paraguay_ (1871).

FRANCIABIGIO (1482-1525), Florentine painter. The name of this artist is generally given as Mercantonio Franciabigio; it appears, however, that his only real ascertained name was Francesco di Cristofano; and that he was currently termed Francia Bigio, the two appellatives being distinct. He was born in Florence, and studied under Albertinelli for some months. In 1505 he formed the acquaintance of Andrea del Sarto; and after a while the two painters set up a shop in common in the Piazza del Grano. Franciabigio paid much attention to anatomy and perspective, and to the proportions of his figures, though these are often too squat and puffy in form. He had a large stock of artistic knowledge, and was at first noted for diligence. As years went on, and he received frequent commissions for all sorts of public painting for festive occasions, his diligence merged in something which may rather be called workmanly offhandedness. He was particularly proficient in fresco, and Vasari even says that he surpassed all his contemporaries in this method--a judgment which modern connoisseurship does not accept. In the court of the Servites (or cloister of the Annunziata) in Florence he painted in 1513 the "Marriage of the Virgin," as a portion of a series wherein Andrea del Sarto was chiefly concerned. The friars having uncovered this work before it was quite finished, Franciabigio was so incensed that, seizing a mason's hammer, he struck at the head of the Virgin, and some other heads; and the fresco, which would otherwise be his masterpiece in that method, remains thus mutilated. At the Scalzo, in another series of frescoes on which Andrea was likewise employed, he executed in 1518-1519 the "Departure of John the Baptist for the Desert," and the "Meeting of the Baptist with Jesus"; and, at the Medici palace at Poggio a Caiano, in 1521, the "Triumph of Cicero." Various works which have been ascribed to Raphael are now known or reasonably deemed to be by Franciabigio. Such are the "Madonna del Pozzo," in the Uffizi Gallery; the half figure of a "Young Man," in the Louvre (see also FRANCIA); and the famous picture in the Fuller-Maitland collection, a "Young Man with a Letter." These two works show a close analogy in style to another in the Pitti gallery, avowedly by Franciabigio, a "Youth at a Window," and to some others which bear this painter's recognized monogram. The series of portraits, taken collectively, placed beyond dispute the eminent and idiosyncratic genius of the master. Two other works of his, of some celebrity, are the "Calumny of Apelles," in the Pitti, and the "Bath of Bathsheba" (painted in 1523), in the Dresden gallery.

FRANCIS (Lat. _Franciscus_, Ital. _Francesco_, Span. _Francisco_, Fr. _Francois_, Ger. _Franz_), a masculine proper name meaning "Frenchman." As a Christian name it originated with St Francis of Assisi, whose baptismal name was Giovanni, but who was called Francesco by his father on returning from a journey in France. The saint's fame made the name exceedingly popular from his day onwards.

FRANCIS I. (1708-1765), Roman emperor and grand duke of Tuscany, second son of Leopold Joseph, duke of Lorraine, and his wife Elizabeth Charlotte, daughter of Philip, duke of Orleans, was born on the 8th of December 1708. He was connected with the Habsburgs through his grandmother Eleanore, daughter of the emperor Ferdinand III., and wife of Charles Leopold of Lorraine. The emperor Charles VI. favoured the family, who, besides being his cousins, had served the house of Austria with distinction. He had designed to marry his daughter Maria Theresa to Clement, the elder brother of Francis. On the death of Clement he adopted the younger brother as her husband. Francis was brought up at Vienna with Maria Theresa on the understanding that they were to be married, and a real affection arose between them. At the age of fifteen, when he was brought to Vienna, he was established in the Silesian duchy of Teschen, which had been mediatized and granted to his father by the emperor in 1722. He succeeded his father as duke of Lorraine in 1729, but the emperor, at the end of the Polish War of Succession, desiring to compensate his candidate Stanislaus Leszczynski for the loss of his crown in 1735, persuaded Francis to exchange Lorraine for the reversion of the grand duchy of Tuscany. On the 12th of February 1736 he was married to Maria Theresa, and they went for a short time to Florence, when he succeeded to the grand duchy in 1737 on the death of John Gaston, the last of the ruling house of Medici. His wife secured his election to the Empire on the 13th of September 1745, in succession to Charles VII., and she made him co-regent of her hereditary dominions. Francis was well content to leave the reality of power to his able wife. He had a natural fund of good sense and some business capacity, and was a useful assistant to Maria Theresa in the laborious task of governing the complicated Austrian dominions, but his functions appear to have been of a purely secretarial character. He died suddenly in his carriage while returning from the opera at Innsbruck on the 18th of August 1765.

See A. von Arneth, _Geschichte Maria Theresias_ (Vienna, 1863-1879).

FRANCIS II. (1768-1835), the last Roman emperor, and, as Francis I., first emperor of Austria, was the son of Leopold II., grand-duke of Tuscany, afterwards emperor, and of his wife Maria Louisa, daughter of Charles III. of Spain. He was born at Florence on the 12th of February 1768. In 1784 he was brought to Vienna to complete his education under the eye of his uncle the emperor Joseph II., who was childless. Joseph was repelled by the frigid and retiring character of his nephew, and is said to have treated him with an impatient contempt which confirmed his natural timidity; but after the marriage of Francis to Elizabeth of Wuerttemberg (1788) their relations improved. At the close of his uncle's reign he saw some service in the ill-conducted war with Turkey, and kept a careful diary of his experiences. The death of his wife in childbirth on the 18th of February 1790 was followed by the death of his uncle on the 20th; and Francis acted as regent with Prince Kaunitz until his father came from Florence. On the 19th of September he married his first cousin Maria Theresa, daughter of Ferdinand, king of Naples, by whom he was the father of his successor Ferdinand I., of Maria Louisa, wife of Napoleon, and of the archduke Francis, father of the emperor Francis Joseph. After her death (1807) he married Maria Ludovica Beatrix of Este (1808), and when she died he made a fourth marriage with Carolina Augusta of Bavaria (1816).

He succeeded to the Austrian dominions and the empire on the death of his father on the 1st of March 1792. The position was a trying one for a young prince twenty-four years of age. The dominions of the house of Austria, widely scattered in the Low Countries, Germany and Italy, were exposed to the attacks of the French revolutionary governments and of Napoleon. He was dragged into all the coalitions against France, and in the early days of his reign he had to guard against the ambition of Prussia, and the aggressions of Russia in Poland and Turkey. For long he had no adviser save such diplomatists as Prince Kaunitz and Thugut, who had been trained in the old Austrian diplomacy. His own best quality was an invincible patience supported by reliance on the loyalty of his subjects, and a sense of his duty to the state. (For the general events of this reign till 1815 see EUROPE, AUSTRIA, NAPOLEON, FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY WARS, &c.) The emperor's firmness averted what would have been an irreparable loss of position. Seeing that the Empire was in the last stage of dissolution, and that, even were it to survive, it would pass from the house of Habsburg to that of Bonaparte, he in 1804 assumed the title of hereditary emperor of Austria. The object of this prudent measure was double. In the first place, he guarded against the danger that his house should sink to a lower rank than the Russian or the French. In the second place, he gave some semblance of unity to his complex dominions in Germany, Bohemia, Hungary and Italy, by providing a common title for the supreme ruler. His action was justified when, in 1806, the establishment of the Confederation of the Rhine forced him to abdicate the empty title of Holy Roman emperor.

In 1805 he made an important change in the working of his administration. He had hitherto been assisted by a cabinet minister who was in direct relation with all the "chanceries" and boards which formed the executive government, and who acted as the channel of communication between them and the emperor, and was in fact a prime minister. In 1805 Napoleon insisted on the removal of Count Colloredo, who held the post. From that time forward the emperor Francis acted as his own prime minister, superintending every detail of his administration. In foreign affairs after 1809 he reposed full confidence in Prince Metternich. But Metternich himself declared at the close of his life that he had sometimes held Europe in the palm of his hand, but never Austria. Francis was sole master, and is entitled to whatever praise is due to his government. It follows that he must bear the blame for its errors. The history of the Austrian empire under his rule and since his death bears testimony to both his merits and his limitations. His indomitable patience and loyalty to his inherited task enabled him to triumph over Napoleon. By consenting to the marriage of his daughter, Marie Louise, to Napoleon in 1810, he gained a respite which he turned to good account. By following the guidance of Metternich in foreign affairs he was able to intervene with decisive effect in 1813. The settlement of Europe in 1815 left Austria stronger and more compact than she had been in 1792, and that this was the case was largely due to the emperor.

During the twenty years which preceded his death in 1835, Francis continued to oppose the revolutionary spirit. He had none of the mystical tendencies of the tsar Alexander I., and only adhered to the half fantastic Holy Alliance of 1815 out of pure politeness. But he was wholly in sympathy with the policy of "repression" which came, in popular view, to be identified with the Holy Alliance; and though Metternich was primarily responsible for the part played by Austria in the "policing" of Europe, Francis cannot but be held personally responsible for the cruel and impolitic severities, associated especially with the sinister name of the fortress prison of the Spielberg, which made so many martyrs to freedom. It is not surprising that Francis was denounced by Liberals throughout Europe as a tyrant and an obscurantist. But though at home, as abroad, he met all suggestions of innovation by a steady refusal to depart from old ways, he was always popular among the mass of his subjects, who called him "our good Kaiser Franz." In truth, if in the spirit of the traditional _Landesvater_ he chastised his disobedient children mercilessly, he was essentially a well-meaning ruler who forwarded the material and moral good of his subjects according to his lights. But he held that, by the will of God, the whole sovereign authority resided in his person, and could not be shared with others without a dereliction of duty on his part and disastrous consequences; and his capital error as a ruler of Austria was that he persisted in maintaining a system of administration which depended upon the indefatigable industry of a single man, and was entirely outgrown by the modern development of his subjects. Before his death, government in Austria was almost choked, and it broke down under a successor who had not his capacity for work. Like his ancestor Philip II. of Spain, Francis carried caution, and a disposition to sleep upon every possible proposal, to a great length. He died on the 2nd of March 1835.

See Baron J.A. Helfert, _Kaiser Franz und die oesterreichischen Befreiungs-Kriege_ (Vienna, 1867). Ample bibliographies will be found in Krones von Marchland's _Grundriss der oesterreichischen Geschichte_ (Berlin, 1882).

FRANCIS I. (1494-1547), king of France, son of Charles of Valois, count of Angouleme, and Louise of Savoy, was born at Cognac on the 12th of September 1494. The count of Angouleme, who was the great-grandson of King Charles V., died in 1496, and Louise watched over her son with passionate tenderness. On the accession of Louis XII. in 1498, Francis became heir-presumptive. Louis invested him with the duchy of Valois, and gave him as tutor Marshal de Gie, and, after Gie's disgrace in 1503, the sieur de Boisy, Artus Gouffier. Francois de Rochefort, abbot of St Mesmin, instructed Francis and his sister Marguerite in Latin and history; Louise herself taught them Italian and Spanish; and the library of the chateau at Amboise was well stocked with romances of the Round Table, which exalted the lad's imagination. Francis showed an even greater love for violent exercises, such as hunting, which was his ruling passion, and tennis, and for tournaments, masquerades and amusements of all kinds. His earliest gallantries are described by his sister in the 25th and 42nd stories of the _Heptameron_. In 1507 Francis was betrothed to Claude, the daughter of Louis XII., and in 1508 he came to court. In 1512 he gained his first military experience in Guienne, and in the following year he commanded the army of Picardy. He married Claude on the 18th of May 1514, and succeeded Louis XII. on the 1st of January 1515. Of noble bearing, and, in spite of a very long and large nose, extremely handsome, he was a sturdy and valiant knight, affable, courteous, a brilliant talker and a facile poet. He had a sprightly wit, some delicacy of feeling, and some generous impulses which made him amiable. These brilliant qualities, however, were all on the surface. At bottom the man was frivolous, profoundly selfish, unstable, and utterly incapable of consistency or application. The ambassadors remarked his negligence, and his ministers complained of it. Hunting, tennis, jewelry and his gallantry were the chief preoccupations of his life.

His character was at once authoritative and weak. He was determined to be master and to decide everything himself, but he allowed himself to be dominated and easily persuaded. Favourites, too, without governing entirely for him, played an important part in his reign. His capricious humour elevated and deposed them with the same disconcerting suddenness. In the early years of his reign the conduct of affairs was chiefly in the hands of Louise of Savoy, Chancellor Antoine Duprat, Secretary Florimond Robertet, and the two Gouffiers, Boisy and Bonnivet. The royal favour then elevated Anne de Montmorency and Philippe de Chabot, and in the last years of the reign Marshal d'Annebaud and Cardinal de Tournon. Women too had always a great influence over Francis--his sister, Marguerite d'Angouleme, and his mistresses. Whatever the number of these, he had only two titular mistresses--at the beginning of the reign Francoise de Chateaubriant, and from about 1526 to his death Anne de Pisseleu, whom he created duchesse d'Etampes and who entirely dominated him. It has not been proved that he was the lover of Diane de Poitiers, nor does the story of "La belle Ferronniere" appear to rest on any historical foundation.[1]

Circumstances alone gave a homogeneous character to the foreign policy of Francis. The struggle against the emperor Charles V. filled the greater part of the reign. In reality, the policy of Francis, save for some flashes of sagacity, was irresolute and vacillating. Attracted at first by Italy, dreaming of fair feats of prowess, he led the triumphal Marignano expedition, which gained him reputation as a knightly king and as the most powerful prince in Europe. In 1519, in spite of wise counsels, he stood candidate for the imperial crown. The election of Charles V. caused an inevitable rivalry between the two monarchs which accentuated still further the light and chivalrous temper of the king and the cold and politic character of the emperor. Francis's personal intervention in this struggle was seldom happy. He did not succeed in gaining the support of Henry VIII. of England at the interview of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520; his want of tact goaded the Constable de Bourbon to extreme measures in 1522-1523; and in the Italian campaign of 1525 he proved himself a mediocre, vacillating and foolhardy leader, and by his blundering led the army to the disaster of Pavia (the 25th of February 1525), where, however, he fought with great bravery. "Of all things," he wrote to his mother after the defeat, "nothing remains to me but honour and life, which is safe"--the authentic version of the legendary phrase "All is lost save honour." He strove to play the part of royal captive heroically, but the prison life galled him. He fell ill at Madrid and was on the point of death. For a moment he thought of abdicating rather than of ceding Burgundy. But this was too great a demand upon his fortitude, and he finally yielded and signed the treaty of Madrid, after having drawn up a secret protest. After Madrid he wavered unceasingly between two courses, either that of continuing hostilities, or the policy favoured by Montmorency of peace and understanding with the emperor. At times he had the sagacity to recognize the utility of alliances, as was shown by those he concluded with the Porte and with the Protestant princes of Germany. But he could never pledge himself frankly in one sense or the other, and this vacillation prevented him from attaining any decisive results. At his death, however, France was in possession of Savoy and Piedmont.

In his religious policy Francis showed the same instability. Drawn between various influences, that of Marguerite d'Angouleme, the du Bellays, and the duchesse d'Etampes, who was in favour of the Reformation or at least of toleration, and the contrary influence of the uncompromising Catholics, Duprat, and then Montmorency and de Tournon, he gave pledges successively to both parties. In the first years of the reign, following the counsels of Marguerite, he protected Jacques Lefevre of Etaples and Louis de Berquin, and showed some favour to the new doctrines. But the violence of the Reformers threw him into the arms of the opposite party. The affair of the Placards in 1534 irritated him beyond measure, and determined him to adopt a policy of severity. From that time, in spite of occasional indulgences shown to the Reformers, due to his desire to conciliate the Protestant powers, Francis gave a free hand to the party of repression, of which the most active and most pitiless member was Cardinal de Tournon; and the end of the reign was sullied by the massacre of the Waldenses (1545).

Francis introduced new methods into government. In his reign the monarchical authority became more imperious and more absolute. His was the government "_du bon plaisir_." By the unusual development he gave to the court he converted the nobility into a brilliant household of dependants. The Concordat brought the clergy into subjection, and enabled him to distribute benefices at his pleasure among the most docile of his courtiers. He governed in the midst of a group of favourites, who formed the _conseil des affaires_. The states-general did not meet, and the remonstrances of the parlement were scarcely tolerated. By centralizing the financial administration by the creation of the _Tresor de l'Epargne_, and by developing the military establishments, Francis still further strengthened the royal power. His government had the vices of his foreign policy. It was uncertain, irregular and disorderly. The finances were squandered in gratifying the king's unbridled prodigality, and the treasury was drained by his luxurious habits, by the innumerable gifts and pensions he distributed among his mistresses and courtiers, by his war expenses and by his magnificent buildings. His government, too, weighed heavily upon the people, and the king was less popular than is sometimes imagined.

Francis owes the greater measure of his glory to the artists and men of letters who vied in celebrating his praises. He was pre-eminently the king of the Renaissance. Of a quick and cultivated intelligence, he had a sincere love of letters and art. He holds a high place in the history of humanism by the foundation of the College de France; he did not found an actual college, but after much hesitation instituted in 1530, at the instance of Guillaume Bude (Budaeus), _Lecteurs royaux_, who in spite of the opposition of the Sorbonne were granted full liberty to teach Hebrew, Greek, Latin, mathematics, &c. The humanists Bude, Jacques Colin and Pierre Duchatel were the king's intimates, and Clement Marot was his favourite poet. Francis sent to Italy for artists and for works of art, but he protected his own countrymen also. Here, too, he showed his customary indecision, wavering between the two schools. At his court he installed Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Primaticcio and Rosso del Rosso, but in the buildings at Chambord, St Germain, Villers-Cotterets and Fontainebleau the French tradition triumphed over the Italian.

Francis died on the 31st of March 1547, of a disease of the urinary ducts according to some accounts, of syphilis according to others. By his first wife Claude (d. 1524) he had three sons and four daughters: Louise, who died in infancy; Charlotte, who died at the age of eight; Francis (d. 1536); Henry, who came to the throne as Henry II.; Madeleine, who became queen of Scotland; Charles (d. 1545); and Margaret, duchess of Savoy. In 1530 he married Eleanor, the sister of the emperor Charles V.

AUTHORITIES.--For the official acts of the reign, the _Catalogue des actes de Francois I^er_, published by the Academie des Sciences morales et politiques (Paris, 1887-1907), is a valuable guide. The _Bibliotheque Nationale_, the _National Archives_, &c., contain a mass of unpublished documents. Of the published documents, see N. Camuzat, _Meslanges historiques_ ... (Troyes, 1619); G. Ribier, _Lettres et memoires d'estat_ (Paris, 1666); _Letters de Marguerite d'Angouleme_, ed. by F. Genin (Paris, 1841 and 1842); the _Correspondence of Castillon and Marillac_ (ed. by Kaulek, Paris, 1885), of _Odet de Selve_ (ed. by Lefevre-Pontalis, Paris, 1888), and of _Guillaume Pellicier_ (ed. by Tausserat-Radel, Paris, 1900); _Captivite du roi Francois I^er_, and _Poesies de Francois I^er_ (both ed. by Champollion-Figeac, Paris, 1847, of doubtful authenticity); _Relations des ambassadeurs venitiens_, &c. Of the memoirs and chronicles, see the journal of Louise of Savoy in S. Guichenon's _Histoire de la maison de Savoie_, vol. iv. (ed. of 1778-1780); _Journal de Jean Barillon_, ed. by de Vaissiere (Paris, 1897-1899); _Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris_, ed. by Lalanne (Paris, 1854); _Cronique du roy Francois I^er_, ed. by Guiffrey (Paris, 1868); and the memoirs of Fleuranges, Montluc, Tavannes, Vieilleville, Brantome and especially Martin du Bellay (coll. Michaud and Poujoulat). Of the innumerable secondary authorities, see especially Paulin Paris, _Etudes sur le regne de Francois I^er_ (Paris, 1885), in which the apologetic tendency is excessive; and H. Lemonnier in vol. v. (Paris, 1903-1904) of E. Lavisse's _Histoire de France_, which gives a list of the principal secondary authorities. There is a more complete bibliographical study by V.L. Bourrilly in the _Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine_, vol. iv. (1902-1903). The printed sources have been catalogued by H. Hauser, _Les Sources de l'histoire de France, XVI^e siecle_, tome ii. (Paris, 1907). (J. I.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1]On this point see Paulin Paris, _Etudes sur le regne de Francois I^er_.

FRANCIS II. (1544-1560), king of France, eldest son of Henry II. and of Catherine de' Medici, was born at Fontainebleau on the 19th of January 1544. He married the famous Mary Stuart, daughter of James V. of Scotland, on the 25th of April 1558, and ascended the French throne on the 10th of July 1559. During his short reign the young king, a sickly youth and of feeble understanding, was the mere tool of his uncles Francis, duke of Guise, and Charles, cardinal of Lorraine, into whose hands he virtually delivered the reins of government. The exclusiveness with which they were favoured, and their high-handed proceedings, awakened the resentment of the princes of the blood, Anthony king of Navarre and Louis prince of Conde, who gave their countenance to a conspiracy (conspiracy of Amboise) with the Protestants against the house of Guise. It was, however, discovered shortly before the time fixed for its execution in March 1560, and an ambush having been prepared, most of the conspirators were either killed or taken prisoners. Its leadership and organization had been entrusted to Godfrey de Barri, lord of la Renaudie (d. 1560); and the prince of Conde, who was not present, disavowed all connexion with the plot. The duke of Guise was now named lieutenant-general of the kingdom, but his Catholic leanings were somewhat held in check by the chancellor Michel de l'Hopital, through whose mediation the edict of Romorantin, providing that all cases of heresy should be decided by the bishops, was passed in May 1560, in opposition to a proposal to introduce the Inquisition. At a meeting of the states-general held at Orleans in the December following, the prince of Conde, after being arrested, was condemned to death, and extreme measures were being enacted against the Huguenots; but the deliberations of the Assembly were broken off, and the prince was saved from execution, by the king's somewhat sudden death, on the 5th of the month, from an abscess in the ear.

PRINCIPAL AUTHORITIES.--"Lettres de Catherine de Medicis," edited by Hector de la Ferriere (1880 seq.), and "Negociations ... relatives au regne de Francois II," edited by Louis Paris (1841), both in the _Collection de documents inedits sur l'histoire de France_; notice of Francis, duke of Guise, in the _Nouvelle Collection des memoires pour servir a l'histoire de France_, edited by J.F. Michaud and J.J.F. Poujoulat, series i. vol. vi. (1836 seq.); _Memoires de Conde servant d'eclaircissement ... a l'histoire de M. de Thou_, vols. i and ii. (1743); Pierre de la Place, _Commentaires de l'estat de la religion et de la republique sous les rois Henri II, Francois II, Charles IX_ (1565); and Louis Regnier de la Planche, _Histoire de l'estat de France ... sous ... Francois II (Pantheon litteraire_, new edition, 1884). See also Ernest Lavisse, _Histoire de France_ (vol. vi. by J.H. Mariejol, 1904), which contains a bibliography.

FRANCIS I. (1777-1830), king of the Two Sicilies, was the son of Ferdinand IV. (I.) and Maria Carolina of Austria. He married Clementina, daughter of the emperor Leopold II. of Austria, in 1796, and at her death Isabella, daughter of Charles IV. of Spain. After the Bourbon family fled from Naples to Sicily in 1806, and Lord William Bentinck, the British resident, had established a constitution and deprived Ferdinand IV. of all power, Francis was appointed regent (1812). On the fall of Napoleon his father returned to Naples and suppressed the Sicilian constitution and autonomy, incorporating his two kingdoms into that of the Two Sicilies (1816); Francis then assumed the revived title of duke of Calabria. While still heir-apparent he professed liberal ideas, and on the outbreak of the revolution of 1820 he accepted the regency apparently in a friendly spirit towards the new constitution. But he was playing a double game and proved to be the accomplice of his father's treachery. On succeeding to the throne in 1825 he cast aside the mask of liberalism and showed himself as reactionary as his father. He took little part in the government, which he left in the hands of favourites and police officials, and lived with his mistresses, surrounded by soldiers, ever in dread of assassination. During his reign the only revolutionary movement was the outbreak on the Cilento (1828), savagely repressed by the marquis Delcarretto, an ex-Liberal turned reactionary.

See Nisco, _Il Reame di Napoli sotto Francesco I_ (Naples, 1893).

FRANCIS II. (1836-1894), king of the Two Sicilies, son of Ferdinand II. and Maria Cristina of Savoy, was the last of the Bourbon kings of Naples. His education had been much neglected and he proved a man of weak character, greatly influenced by his stepmother Maria Theresa of Austria, by the priests, and by the _Camarilla_, or reactionary court set. He ascended the throne on the death of his father (22nd of May 1859). As prime minister he at once appointed Carlo Filangieri, who, realizing the importance of the Franco-Piedmontese victories in Lombardy, advised Francis to accept the alliance with Piedmont proposed by Cavour. On the 7th of June a part of the Swiss Guard mutinied, and while the king mollified them by promising to redress their grievances, General Nunziante collected other troops, who surrounded the mutineers and shot them down. The incident resulted in the disbanding of the whole Swiss Guard, the strongest bulwark of the dynasty. Cavour again proposed an alliance to divide the papal states between Piedmont and Naples, the province of Rome excepted, but Francis rejected an idea which to him savoured of sacrilege. Filangieri strongly advocated a constitution as the only measure which might save the dynasty, and on the king's refusal he resigned. Meanwhile the revolutionary parties were conspiring for the overthrow of the Bourbons in Calabria and Sicily, and Garibaldi was preparing for a raid in the south. A conspiracy in Sicily was discovered and the plotters punished with brutal severity, but Rosalino Pilo and Francesco Crispi had organized the movement, and when Garibaldi landed at Marsala (May 1860) he conquered the island with astonishing ease. These events at last frightened Francis into granting a constitution, but its promulgation was followed by disorders in Naples and the resignation of ministers, and Liborio Romano became head of the government. The disintegration of the army and navy proceeded apace, and Cavour sent a Piedmontese squadron carrying troops on board to watch events. Garibaldi, who had crossed the straits of Messina, was advancing northwards and was everywhere received by the people as a liberator. Francis, after long hesitations and even an appeal to Garibaldi himself, left Naples (6th of September) with his wife Maria Sophia, the court, the diplomatic corps (the French and English ministers excepted), and went by sea to Gaeta, where a large part of the army was concentrated. The next day Garibaldi entered Naples, was enthusiastically welcomed, and formed a provisional government. King Victor Emmanuel had decided on the invasion of the papal states, and after occupying Romagna and the Marche entered the Neapolitan kingdom. Garibaldi's troops defeated the Neapolitan royalists on the Volturno (1st and 2nd of October), while the Piedmontese captured Capua. Only Gaeta, Messina, and Civitella del Tronto still held out, and the siege of the former by the Piedmontese began on the 6th of November 1860. Both Francis and Maria Sophia behaved with great coolness and courage, and even when the French fleet, whose presence had hitherto prevented an attack by sea, was withdrawn, they still resisted; it was not until the 12th of February 1861 that the fortress capitulated. Thus the kingdom of Naples was incorporated in that of Italy, and the royal pair from that time forth led a wandering life in Austria, France and Bavaria. Francis died on the 27th of December 1894 at Arco in Tirol. His widow survived him.

Francis II. was weak-minded, stupid and vacillating, but, although his short reign was stained with some cruel massacres and persecutions, he was less of a tyrant than his father. The courage and dignity he displayed during his reverses inspired pity and respect. But the fact that he protected brigandage in his former dominions and countenanced the most abominable crimes in the name of legitimism greatly diminished the sympathy which was felt for the fallen monarch.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--R. de Cesare, _La Fine d'un regno_, vol. ii. (Citta di Castello, 1900) gives a detailed account of the reign of Francis II., while H.R. Whitehouse's _Collapse of the Kingdom of Naples_ (New York, 1899) may be recommended to English readers; Nisco's _Francesco II_ (Naples, 1887) should also be consulted. See under NAPLES; GARIBALDI; BIXIO; CAVOUR; ITALY; FILANGIERI; &c. (L. V.*)

FRANCIS IV. (1779-1846) duke of Modena, was the son of the archduke Ferdinand, Austrian governor of Lombardy, who acquired the duchy of Modena through his wife Marie Beatrice, heiress of the house of Este as well as of many fiefs of the Malaspina, Pio da Carpi, Pico della Mirandola, Cibo, and other families. At the time of the French invasion (1796) Francis was sent to Vienna to be educated, and in 1809 was appointed governor of Galicia. Later he went to Sardinia, where the exiled King Victor Emmanuel I. and his wife Maria Theresa were living in retirement. The latter arranged a marriage between her daughter Marie Beatrice and Francis, and a secret family compact was made whereby if the king and his two brothers died without male issue, the Salic law would be changed so that Francis should succeed to the kingdom instead of Charles Albert of Carignano (N. Bianchi, _Storia della diplomazia europea in Italia_, i. 42-43). On the fall of Napoleon in 1814 Francis received the duchy of Modena, including Massa-Carrara and Lunigiana; his mother's advice was "to be above the law ... never to forgive the Republicans of 1796, nor to listen to the complaints of his subjects, whom nothing satisfies; the poorer they are the quieter they are" (Silingardi, "Ciro Menotti," in _Rivista europea_, Florence, 1880).

The duke was well received at Modena; inordinately ambitious, strong-willed, immensely rich, avaricious but not unintelligent, he soon proved one of the most reactionary despots in Italy. He still hoped to acquire either Piedmont or some other part of northern Italy, and he was in touch with the Sanfedisti and the Concistoro, reactionary Catholic associations opposed to the Carbonari, but not always friendly to Austria. Against the Carbonari and other Liberals he issued the severest edicts, and although there was no revolt at Modena in 1821 as in Piedmont and Naples, he immediately instituted judicial proceedings against the supposed conspirators. Some 350 persons were arrested and tortured, 56 being condemned to death (only a few of them were executed) and 237 to imprisonment; a large number, however, escaped, including Antonio Panizzi (afterwards director of the British Museum). The ferocious police official Besini who conducted the trials was afterwards murdered. The duke actually proposed to Prince Metternich, the Austrian chancellor, an agreement whereby the various Italian rulers were to arrest every Liberal in the country on a certain day, but the project fell through owing to opposition from the courts of Florence and Rome. At the congress of Verona Metternich made another attempt to secure the Piedmontese succession for Francis, but without success. The duke became ever more despotic; Modena swarmed with spies and informers, education was hampered, feudalism strengthened; for the duke hoped to consolidate his power by means of the nobility, and the least expression of liberalism, or even failure to denounce a Carbonaro, involved arrest and imprisonment. But strange to say, in 1830 we find Francis actually coquetting with revolution. Having lost all hope of acquiring the Piedmontese throne, he entered into negotiations with the French Orleanist party with a view to obtaining its support in his plans for extending his dominions. He was thus brought into touch with Ciro Menotti (1798-1831) and the Modenese Liberals; what the nature of the connexion was is still obscure, but it was certainly short-lived and merely served to betray the Carbonari. As soon as Francis learned that a conspiracy was on foot to gain possession of the town, he had Menotti and several other conspirators arrested on the night of the 3rd of February 1831, and sent the famous message to the governor of Reggio: "The conspirators are in my hands; send me the hangman" (there is some doubt as to the authenticity of the actual words). But the revolt broke out in other parts of the duchy and in Romagna, and Francis retired to Mantua with Menotti. A provisional government was formed at Modena which proclaimed that "Italy is one," but the duke returned a few weeks later with Austrian troops, and resistance was easily quelled. Then the political trials began; Menotti and two others were executed, and hundreds condemned to imprisonment. The population was now officially divided into four classes, viz. "very loyal, loyal, less loyal, and disloyal," and the reaction became worse than ever, the duke interfering in the minutest details of administration, such as hospitals, schools, and roads. New methods of procedure were introduced to deal with political trials, but the ministerial cabal by which the country was administered intrigued and squabbled to such an extent that it had to be dismissed.

On the 20th of February 1846 Francis died. Although he had many domestic virtues and charming manners, was charitable in times of famine, and was certainly the ablest of the Italian despots, Liberalism was in his eyes the most heinous of crimes, and his reign is one long record of barbarous persecution. (L. V.*)

FRANCIS V. (1819-1875), duke of Modena, son of Francis IV., succeeded his father in 1846. Although less cruel and also less intelligent than his father, he had an equally high opinion of his own authority. His reign began with disturbances at Fivizzano and Pontremoli, which Tuscany surrendered to him according to treaty but against the wishes of the inhabitants (1847), and at Massa and Carrara, where the troops shot down the people. Feeling his position insecure, the duke asked for and obtained an Austrian garrison, but on the outbreak of revolution throughout Italy and at Vienna in 1848, further disorders occurred in the duchy, and on the 20th of March he fled with his family to Mantua. A provisional government was formed, and volunteers were raised who fought with the Piedmontese against Austria. But after the Piedmontese defeat Francis returned to Modena, with Austrian assistance, in August and conferred many appointments on Austrian officers. Like his father, he interfered in the minutest details of administration, and instituted proceedings against all who were suspected of Liberalism. Not content with the severity of his judges, he overrode their sentences in favour of harsher punishments. The disturbances at Carrara were ruthlessly suppressed, and the prisons filled with politicals. In 1859 numbers of young Modenese fled across the frontier to join the Piedmontese army, as war with Austria seemed imminent; and after the Austrian defeat at Magenta the duke left Modena to lead his army in person against the Piedmontese, taking with him the contents of the state treasury and many valuable books, pictures, coins, tapestries and furniture from the palace. The events of 1859-1860 made his return impossible; and after a short spell of provisional government the duchy was united to Italy. He retired to Austria, and died at Munich in November 1875.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--N. Bianchi, _I Ducati Estensi_ (Turin, 1852); Galvani, _Memorie di S.A.R. Francesco IV_ (Modena, 1847); _Documenti riguardanti il governo degli Austro-Estensi in Modena_ (Modena, 1860); C. Tivaroni, _L'Italia durante il dominio austriaco_, i. 606-653 (Turin, 1892), and _L'Italia degli Italiani_, i. 114-125 (Turin, 1895); Silingardi, "Ciro Menotti," in the _Rivista europea_ (Florence, 1880); F.A. Gualterio, _Gli ultimi rivolgimenti italiani_ (Florence, 1850); Bayard de Volo, _Vita di Francesco V_ (4 vols., Modena, 1878-1885). (L. V.*)

FRANCIS OF ASSISI, ST. (1181 or 1182-1226), founder of the Franciscans (q.v.), was born in 1181 or 1182 at Assisi, one of the independent municipal towns of Umbria. He came from the upper middle class, his father, named Pietro Bernardone, being one of the larger merchants of the city. Bernardone's commercial enterprises made him travel abroad, and it was from the fact that the father was in France at the time of his son's birth that the latter was called Francesco. His education appears to have been of the slightest, even for those days. It is difficult to decide whether words of the early biographers imply that his youth was not free from irregularities; in any case, he was the recognized leader of the young men of the town in their revels; he was, however, always conspicuous for his charity to the poor. When he was twenty (1201) the neighbouring and rival city of Perugia attempted to restore by force of arms the nobles who had been expelled from Assisi by the burghers and the populace, and Francis took part in the battle fought in the plain that lies between the two cities; the men of Assisi were defeated and Francis was among the prisoners. He spent a year in prison at Perugia, and when peace was made at the end of 1202 he returned to Assisi and recommenced his old life.

Soon a serious and prolonged illness fell upon him, during which he entered into himself and became dissatisfied with his way of life. On his recovery he set out on a military expedition, but at the end of the first day's march he fell ill, and had to stay at Spoleto and return to Assisi. This disappointment brought on again the spiritual crisis he had experienced in his illness, and for a considerable time the conflict went on within him. One day he gave a banquet to his friends, and after it they sallied forth with torches, singing through the streets, Francis being crowned with garlands as the king of the revellers; after a time they missed him, and on retracing their steps they found him in a trance or reverie, a permanently altered man. He devoted himself to solitude, prayer and the service of the poor, and before long went on a pilgrimage to Rome. Finding the usual crowd of beggars before St Peter's, he exchanged his clothes with one of them, and experienced an overpowering joy in spending the day begging among the rest. The determining episode of his life followed soon after his return to Assisi; as he was riding he met a leper who begged an alms; Francis had always had a special horror of lepers, and turning his face he rode on; but immediately an heroic act of self-conquest was wrought in him; returning he alighted, gave the leper all the money he had about him, and kissed his hand. From that day he gave himself up to the service of the lepers and the hospitals. To the confusion of his father and brothers he went about dressed in rags, so that his old companions pelted him with mud. Things soon came to a climax with his father: in consequence of his profuse alms to the poor and to the restoration of the ruined church of St Damian, his father feared his property would be dissipated, so he took Francis before the bishop of Assisi to have him legally disinherited; but without waiting for the documents to be drawn up, Francis cast off his clothes and gave them back to his father, declaring that now he had better reason to say "Our Father which art in heaven," and having received a cloak from the bishop, he went off into the woods of Mount Subasio singing a French song; some brigands accosted him and he told them he was the herald of the great king (1206).

The next three years he spent in the neighbourhood of Assisi in abject poverty and want, ministering to the lepers and the outcasts of society. It was now that he began to frequent the ruined little chapel of St Mary of the Angels, known as the Portiuncula, where much of his time was passed in prayer. One day while Mass was being said therein, the words of the Gospel came to Francis as a call: "Everywhere on your road preach and say--The kingdom of God is at hand. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out devils. Freely have you received, freely give. Carry neither gold nor silver nor money in your girdles, nor bag, nor two coats, nor sandals, nor staff, for the workman is worthy of his hire" (Matt. x. 7-10). He at once felt that this was his vocation, and the next day, layman as he was, he went up to Assisi and began to preach to the poor (1209). Disciples joined him, and when they were twelve in number Francis said: "Let us go to our Mother, the holy Roman Church, and tell the pope what the Lord has begun to do through us, and carry it out with his sanction." They obtained the sanction of Innocent III., and returning to Assisi they gave themselves up to their life of apostolic preaching and work among the poor.

The character and development of the order are traced in the article FRANCISCANS; here the story of Francis's own life and the portrayal of his personality will be attempted. To delineate in a few words the character of the Poverello of Assisi is indeed a difficult task. There is such a many-sided richness, such a tenderness, such a poetry, such an originality, such a distinction revealed by the innumerable anecdotes in the memoirs of his disciples, that his personality is brought home to us as one of the most lovable and one of the strongest of men. It is probably true to say that no one has ever set himself so seriously to imitate the life of Christ and to carry out so literally Christ's work in Christ's own way. This was the secret of his love of poverty as manifested in the following beautiful prayer which he addressed to our Lord: "Poverty was in the crib and like a faithful squire she kept herself armed in the great combat Thou didst wage for our redemption. During Thy passion she alone did not forsake Thee. Mary Thy Mother stopped at the foot of the Cross, but poverty mounted it with Thee and clasped Thee in her embrace unto the end; and when Thou wast dying of thirst, as a watchful spouse she prepared for Thee the gall. Thou didst expire in the ardour of her embraces, nor did she leave Thee when dead, O Lord Jesus, for she allowed not Thy body to rest elsewhere than in a borrowed grave. O poorest Jesus, the grace I beg of Thee is to bestow on me the treasure of the highest poverty. Grant that the distinctive mark of our Order may be never to possess anything as its own under the sun for the glory of Thy name, and to have no other patrimony than begging" (in the _Legenda 3 Soc._). This enthusiastic love of poverty is certainly the keynote of St Francis's spirit; and so one of his disciples in an allegorical poem (translated into English as _The Lady of Poverty_ by Montgomery Carmichael, 1901), and Giotto in one of the frescoes at Assisi, celebrated the "holy nuptials of Francis with Lady Poverty."

Another striking feature of Francis's character was his constant joyousness; it was a precept in his rule, and one that he enforced strictly, that his friars should be always rejoicing in the Lord. He retained through life his early love of song, and during his last illness he passed much of his time in singing. His love of nature, animate and inanimate, was very keen and manifested itself in ways that appear somewhat naive. His preaching to the birds is a favourite representation of St Francis in art. All creatures he called his "brothers" or "sisters"--the chief example is the poem of the "Praises of the Creatures," wherein "brother Sun," "sister Moon," "brother Wind," and "sister Water" are called on to praise God. In his last illness he was cauterized, and on seeing the burning iron he addressed "brother Fire," reminding him how he had always loved him and asking him to deal kindly with him. It would be an anachronism to think of Francis as a philanthropist or a "social worker" or a revivalist preacher, though he fulfilled the best functions of all these. Before everything he was an ascetic and a mystic--an ascetic who, though gentle to others, wore out his body by self-denial, so much so that when he came to die he begged pardon of "brother Ass the body" for having unduly ill treated it: a mystic irradiated with the love of God, endowed in an extraordinary degree with the spirit of prayer, and pouring forth his heart by the hour in the tenderest affections to God and our Lord. St Francis was a deacon but not a priest.

From the return of Francis and his eleven companions from Rome to Assisi in 1209 or 1210, their work prospered in a wonderful manner. The effect of their preaching, and their example and their work among the poor, made itself felt throughout Umbria and brought about a great religious revival. Great numbers came to join the new order which responded so admirably to the needs of the time. In 1212 Francis invested St Clara (q.v.) with the Franciscan habit, and so instituted the "Second Order," that of the nuns. As the friars became more and more numerous their missionary labours extended wider and wider, spreading first over Italy, and then to other countries. Francis himself set out, probably in 1212, for the Holy Land to preach the Gospel to the Saracens, but he was shipwrecked and had to return. A year or two later he went into Spain to preach to the Moors, but had again to return without accomplishing his object (1215 probably). After another period of preaching in Italy and watching over the development of the order, Francis once again set out for the East (1219). This time he was successful; he made his way to Egypt, where the crusaders were besieging Damietta, got himself taken prisoner and was led before the sultan, to whom he openly preached the Gospel. The sultan sent him back to the Christian camp, and he passed on to the Holy Land. Here he remained until September 1220. During his absence were manifested the beginnings of the troubles in the order that were to attain to such magnitude after his death. The circumstances under which, at an extraordinary general chapter convoked by him shortly after his return, he resigned the office of minister-general (September 1220) are explained in the article FRANCISCANS: here, as illustrating the spirit of the man, it is in place to cite the words in which his abdication was couched: "Lord, I give Thee back this family which Thou didst entrust to me. Thou knowest, most sweet Jesus, that I have no more the power and the qualities to continue to take care of it. I entrust it, therefore, to the ministers. Let them be responsible before Thee at the Day of Judgment, if any brother by their negligence, or their bad example, or by a too severe punishment, shall go astray." These words seem to contain the mere truth: Francis's peculiar religious genius was probably not adapted for the government of an enormous society spread over the world, as the Friars Minor had now become.

The chief works of the next years were the revision and final redaction of the Rule and the formation or organization of the "Third Order" or "Brothers and Sisters of Penance," a vast confraternity of lay men and women who tried to carry out, without withdrawing from the world, the fundamental principles of Franciscan life (see TERTIARIES).

If for no other reason than the prominent place they hold in art, it would not be right to pass by the Stigmata without a special mention. The story is well known; two years before his death Francis went up Mount Alverno in the Apennines with some of his disciples, and after forty days of fasting and prayer and contemplation, on the morning of the 14th of September 1224 (to use Sabatier's words), "he had a vision: in the warm rays of the rising sun he discerned suddenly a strange figure. A seraph with wings extended flew towards him from the horizon and inundated him with pleasure unutterable. At the centre of the vision appeared a cross, and the seraph was nailed to it. When the vision disappeared Francis felt sharp pains mingling with the delights of the first moment. Disturbed to the centre of his being he anxiously sought the meaning of it all, and then he saw on his body the Stigmata of the Crucified." The early authorities represent the Stigmata not as bleeding wounds, the holes as it were of the nails, but as fleshy excrescences resembling in form and colour the nails, the head on the palm of the hand, and on the back as it were a nail hammered down. In the first edition of the _Vie_, Sabatier rejected the Stigmata; but he changed his mind, and in the later editions he accepts their objective reality as an historically established fact; in an appendix he collects the evidence: there exists what is according to all probability an autograph of Br. Leo, the saint's favourite disciple and companion on Mount Alverno at the time, which describes the circumstances of the stigmatization; Elias of Cortona (q.v.), the acting superior, wrote on the day after his death a circular letter wherein he uses language clearly implying that he had himself seen the Stigmata, and there is a considerable amount of contemporary authentic second hand evidence. On the strength of this body of evidence Sabatier rejects all theories of fraud or hallucination, whatever may be the explanation of the phenomena.

Francis was so exhausted by the sojourn on Mount Alverno that he had to be carried back to Assisi. The remaining months of his life were passed in great bodily weakness and suffering, and he became almost blind. However, he worked on with his wonted cheerfulness and joyousness. At last, on the 3rd of October 1226, he died in the Portiuncula at the age of forty-five. Two years later he was canonized by Gregory IX., whom, as Cardinal Hugolino of Ostia, he had chosen to be the protector of his order.

The works of St Francis consist of the Rule (in two redactions), the Testament, spiritual admonitions, canticles and a few letters. They were first edited by Wadding in 1623. Two critical editions were published in 1904, one by the Franciscans of Quaracchi near Florence, the other (in a longer and a shorter form) by Professor H. Boehmer of Bonn. Sabatier and Goetz (see below) have investigated the authenticity of the several works; and the four lists, while exhibiting slight variations, are in substantial accord. Besides the works, properly so called, there is a considerable amount of traditional matter--anecdotes, sayings, sermons--preserved in the biographies and in the _Fioretti_;[1] a great deal of this matter is no doubt substantially authentic, but it is not possible to subject it to any critical sifting.

_Note on Sources._--The sources for the life of St Francis and early Franciscan history are very numerous, and an immense literature has grown up around them. Any attempt to indicate even a selection of this literature would here be impossible and also futile; for the discovery of new documents has by no means ceased, and the criticism of the materials is still in full progress, nor can it be said that final results have yet emerged from the discussion. Students will find the chief materials in the following collections: _Archiv fuer Litteratur und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters_ (ed. by Ehrle and Denifle, 1885, &c.); publications of the Franciscans of Quaracchi (list to be obtained from Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau); and the two series edited by Paul Sabatier, _Collection d'etudes et de documents sur l'histoire religieuse et litteraire du moyen age_ (5 vols. published up to 1906) and _Opuscules de critique historique_ (12 fascicules): the easiest and most consecutive way of following the controversy is by the aid of the "Bulletin Hagiographique" in _Analecta Bollandiana_. Relatively popular accounts of the most important sources are supplied in the introductory chapters of Sabatier's _Vie de S. Francois_ and _Speculum perfectionis_, and Lempp's _Frere Elie de Cortone_.

Concerning the life of St Francis and the beginnings of the order, the chief documents that come under discussion are: the two _Lives_ by Thomas of Celano (1228 and 1248 respectively; Eng. trans. with introduction by A.G. Ferrers Howell, 1908), of which the only critical edition is that of Friar Ed. d'Alencon (1906); the so-called _Legenda trium sociorum_; the _Speculum perfectionis_, discovered by Paul Sabatier and edited in 1898 (Eng. trans. by Sebastian Evans, _Mirror of Perfection_, 1899). Sabatier's theory as to the nature of these documents was, in brief, that the _Speculum perfectionis_ was the first of all the Lives of the saint, written in 1227 by Br. Leo, his favourite and most intimate disciple, and that the _Legenda 3 Soc._ is what it claims to be--the handiwork of Leo and the two other most intimate companions of Francis, compiled in 1246; these are the most authentic and the only true accounts, Thomas of Celano's Lives being written precisely in opposition to them, in the interests of the majority of the order that favoured mitigations of the Rule especially in regard to poverty. For ten years the domain of Franciscan origins was explored and discussed by a number of scholars; and then the whole ground was reviewed by Professor W. Goetz of Munich in a study entitled _Die Quellen zur Geschichte des hl. Franz von Assisi_ (1904). His conclusions are substantially the same as those of Pere van Ortroy, the Bollandist, and Friar Lemmens, an Observant Franciscan, and are the direct contrary of Sabatier's: the _Legenda 3 Soc._ is a forgery; the _Speculum perfectionis_ is a compilation made in the 14th century, also in large measure a forgery, but containing an element (not to be precisely determined) derived from Br. Leo; on the other hand, Thomas of Celano's two Lives are free from the "tendencies" ascribed to them by Sabatier, and that of 1248 was written with the collaboration of Leo and the other companions; thus the best sources of information are those portions of the _Speculum_ that can with certainty be carried back to Br. Leo, and the Lives by Thomas of Celano, especially the second _Life_. Goetz's criticism of the documents is characterized by exceeding carefulness and sobriety. Of course he does not suppose that his conclusions are in all respects final; but his investigations show that the time has not yet come when a biography of St Francis could be produced answering to the demands of modern historical criticism. The official life of St Francis is St Bonaventura's _Legenda_, published in a convenient form by the Franciscans of Quaracchi (1898); Goetz's estimate of it (op. cit.) is much more favourable than Sabatier's.

Paul Sabatier's fascinating and in many ways sympathetic _Vie de S. Francois_ (1894; 33rd ed., 1906; Eng. trans, by L.S. Houghton, 1901) will probably for a long time to come be accepted by the ordinary reader as a substantially correct portrait of St Francis; and yet Goetz declares that the most competent and independent critics have without any exception pronounced that Sabatier has depicted St Francis a great deal too much from the standpoint of modern religiosity, and has exaggerated his attitude in face of the church (op. cit. p. 5). In articles in the _Hist. Vierteljahrsschrift_ (1902, 1903) Goetz has shown that Sabatier's presentation of St Francis's relations with the ecclesiastical authority in general, and with Cardinal Hugolino (Gregory IX.) in particular, is largely based on misconception; that the development of the order was not forced on Francis against his will; and that the differences in the order did not during Francis's lifetime attain to such a magnitude as to cause him during his last years the suffering depicted by Sabatier. This from a Protestant historian like Goetz is most valuable criticism. In truth Sabatier's St Francis is an anachronism--a man at heart, a modern pietistic French Protestant of the most liberal type, with a veneer of 13th century Catholicism.

Of lives of St Francis in English may be mentioned those by Mrs Oliphant (2nd ed., 1871) and by Canon Knox Little (1897). For general information and references to the literature of the subject, see Otto Zoeckler, _Askese und Moenchtum_ (1897), ii. 470-493, and his article in Herzog's _Realencyklopaedie_ (ed. 3), "Franz von Assisi" (1899); also Max Heimbucher, _Orden und Kongregationen_ (1896), i. Sec. 38. The chapter on St Francis in Emile Gebhart's _Italie mystique_ (ed. 3, 1899) is very remarkable; indeed, though this writer is as little ecclesiastically-minded as Sabatier himself, his general picture of the state of religion in Italy at the time is far truer; here also Sabatier has given way to the usual temptation of biographers to exalt their hero by depreciating everybody else. (E. C. B.)

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _The Little Flowers of St Francis._

FRANCIS OF MAYRONE [FRANCISCUS DE MAYRONIS] (d. 1325), scholastic philosopher, was born at Mayrone in Provence. He entered the Franciscan order and subsequently went to Paris, where he was a pupil of Duns Scotus. At the Sorbonne he acquired a great reputation for ability in discussion, and was known as the _Doctor Illuminatus_ and _Magister Acutus_. He became a professor of philosophy, and took part in the discussions on the nature of Universals. Following Duns Scotus, he adopted the Platonic theory of ideas, and denied that Aristotle had made any contribution to metaphysical speculation. It is a curious commentary on the theories of Duns Scotus that one pupil, Francis, should have taken this course, while another pupil, Occam, should have used his arguments in a diametrically opposite direction and ended in extreme Nominalism.

His works were collected and published at Venice in 1520 under the title _Praeclarissima ac multum subtilia scripta Illuminati Doctoris Francisci de Mayronis, &c._

FRANCIS OF PAOLA (or PAULA), ST, founder of the Minims, a religious order in the Catholic Church, was born of humble parentage at Paola in Calabria in 1416, or according to the Bollandists 1438. As a boy he entered a Franciscan friary, but left it and went to live as a hermit in a cave on the seashore near Paola. Soon disciples joined him, and with the bishop's approval he built a church and monastery. At first they called themselves "Hermits of St Francis"; but the object they proposed to themselves was to go beyond even the strict Franciscans in fasts and bodily austerities of all kinds, in poverty and in humility; and therefore, as the Franciscans were the Minors (_minores_, less), the new order took the name of Minims (_minimi_, least). By 1474 a number of houses had been established in southern Italy and Sicily, and the order was recognized and approved by the pope. In 1482 Louis XI. of France, being on his deathbed and hearing the reports of the holiness of Francis, sent to ask him to come and attend him, and at the pope's command he travelled to Paris. On this occasion Philip de Comines in his _Memoirs_ says: "I never saw any man living so holily, nor out of whose mouth the Holy Ghost did more manifestly speak." He remained with Louis till his death, and Louis' successor, Charles VIII., held him in such high esteem that he kept him in Paris, and enabled him to found various houses of his order in France; in Spain and Germany, too, houses were founded during Francis's lifetime. He never left France, and died in 1507 in the monastery of his order at Plessis-les-Tours.

The Rule was so strict that the popes long hesitated to confirm it in its entirety; not until 1506 was it finally sanctioned. The most special feature is an additional vow to keep a perpetual Lent of the strictest kind, not only flesh meat but fish and all animal products--eggs, milk, butter, cheese, dripping--being forbidden, so that the diet was confined to bread, vegetables, fruit and oil, and water was the only drink. Thus in matter of diet the Minims surpassed in austerity all orders in the West, and probably all permanently organized orders in the East. The strongly ascetical spirit of the Minims manifested itself in the title borne by the superiors of the houses--not abbot (father), or prior, or guardian, or minister, or rector, but corrector; and the general superior is the corrector general. Notwithstanding its extreme severity the order prospered. At the death of the founder it had five provinces--Italy, France, Tours, Germany, Spain. Later there were as many as 450 monasteries, and some missions in India. There never was a Minim house in England or Ireland. It ranks as one of the Mendicant orders. In 1909 there were some twenty monasteries, mostly in Sicily, but one in Rome (S. Andrea delle Fratte), and one in Naples, in Marseilles and in Cracow. There have been Minim nuns (only one convent has survived, till recently at Marseilles) and Minim Tertiaries, in imitation of the Franciscan Tertiaries. The habit of the Minims is black.

See Helyot, _Hist. des ordres religieux_ (1714), vii. c. 56; Max Heimbucher, _Orden und Kongregationen_ (1896), i. Sec. 52; the article "Franz von Paula" in Wetzer und Welte, _Kirchenlexicon_ (ed. 2), and in Herzog, _Realencyklopaedie_ (ed. 3); Catholic _Dictionary_, art. "Minims." (E. C. B.)

FRANCIS (FRANCOIS) OF SALES, ST (1567-1622), bishop of Geneva and doctor of the Church (1877), was born at the castle of Sales, near Annecy, Savoy. His father, also Francois, comte de Sales, but better known as M. de Boisy, a nobleman and soldier, had been employed in various affairs of state, but in 1560, at the age of thirty-eight, settled down on his ancestral estates and married Francoise de Sionnay, a Savoyard like himself, and an heiress. St Francis, the first child of this union, was born in August 1567 when his mother was in her fifteenth year. M. de Boisy was renowned for his experience and sound judgment, and both parents were distinguished by piety, love of peace, charity to the poor, qualities which early showed themselves in their eldest son.

He received his education first at La Roche, in the Arve valley, then at the college of Annecy, founded by Eustace Chappius, ambassador in England of Charles V., in 1549. At the age of thirteen or fourteen he went to the Jesuit College of Clermont at Paris, where he stayed till the summer of 1588, and where he laid the foundations of his profound knowledge, while perfecting himself in the exercises of a young nobleman and practising a life of exemplary virtue. At this time also he developed an ardent love of France, a country which was politically in antagonism with his own, though so closely linked to it geographically, socially and by language. At the end of 1588 he went to Padua, to take his degree in canon and civil law, a necessary prelude in Savoy at that time to distinction in a civil career. His heart, however, especially from the date of his receiving the tonsure (1578), was already turned towards the Church, and he gave his attention even more to theology, under the great masters Antonio Possevino, S.J., and Gesualdo, afterwards general of the Friars Minor, than to his legal course. "At Padua," he said to a friend, "I studied law to please my father, and theology to please myself." In that licentious university Francis found the greatest difficulty in resisting attacks on his virtue, and once at least had to draw his sword to defend his personal safety against a band of ruffians. The gentleness for which he was already renowned was not that of a weak, but of a strong character. He returned to Savoy in 1592, and, while seeking the occasion to overcome his father's resistance to his resolution of embracing the ecclesiastical profession, took the diploma of advocate to the senate. Meantime, without his knowledge, his friends procured for him the post of provost of the chapter of Geneva, an honour which reconciled M. de Boisy to the sacrifice of more ambitious hopes. After a year of zealous work as preacher and director he was sent by the bishop, Claude de Granier, to try and win back the province of Chablais, which had embraced Calvinism when usurped by Bern in 1535, and had retained it even after its restitution to Savoy in 1564. At first the people refused to listen to him, for he was represented to them as an instrument of Satan, and all who had dealings with him were threatened with the vengeance of the consistory. He therefore wrote out his message on sheets which were passed from hand to hand, and these, with the spectacle of his virtues and disinterestedness, soon produced a strong effect. The sheets just spoken of still exist in the Chigi library at Rome, and were published, though with many alterations, in 1672, under the title of _Les Controverses_. This must be considered the first work of St Francis.

The re-erection of a wayside cross in Annemasse, at the gates of Geneva, amid an enormous concourse of converts, an event which closed the three years of his apostolate, led to the composition of the _Defense ... de la Croix_, published in 1600. An illness brought on by toil and privation forced him to leave his work to others for nearly a year, but in August 1598 he returned to his field of labour, and in October of that year practically the whole country was Catholic again. Up to that time preaching and conference had been the only weapons employed. The stories of the use of soldiers to produce simulated conversions are incorrect.[1] Possibly the lamentable events of the campaigns of 1589 in Gex and Chablais have been applied to the period 1594-1598. In October of this last year, however, the duke of Savoy, who came then to assist in person at the great religious feasts which celebrated the return of the country to unity of faith, expatriated such of the leading men as obstinately refused even to listen to the Catholic arguments. He also forbade Calvinist ministers to reside in the Chablais, and substituted Catholic for Huguenot officials. St Francis concurred in these measures, and, three years later, even requested that those who, as he said, "follow their heresy, rather as a party than a religion," should be ordered either to conform or to leave their country, with leave to sell their goods. His conduct, judged not by a modern standard, but by the ideas of his age, will be found compatible with the highest Christian charity, as that of the duke with sound political prudence. At this time he was nominated to the pope as coadjutor of Geneva,[2] and after a visit to Rome he assisted Bishop de Granier in the administration of the newly converted countries and of the diocese at large.

In 1602 he made his second visit to the French capital, when his transcendent qualities brought him into the closest relations with the court of Henry IV., and made him the spiritual father of that circle of select souls who centred round Madame Acarie. Among the celebrated personages who became his life friends from this time were Pierre de Berulle, founder of the French Oratorians, Guillaume Duval, the scholar, and the duc de Bellegarde, the latter a special favourite of the king, who begged to be allowed to share the Saint's friendship. At this time also his gift as a preacher became fully recognized, and de Sanzea, afterwards bishop of Bethlehem, records that Duval exhorted all his students of the Sorbonne to listen to him and to imitate this, "the true and excellent method of preaching." His principles are expressed in the admirable letter to Andre Fremyot of October 1604.

De Granier died in September 1602, and the new bishop entered on the administration of his vast diocese, which, as a contemporary says, "he found brick and left marble." His first efforts were directed to securing a virtuous and well-instructed clergy, with its consequence of a people worthy of their pastors. All his time was spent in preaching, confessing, visiting the sick, relieving the poor. His zeal was not confined to his diocese. In concert with Jeanne Francoise Fremyot (1572-1641), widow of the baron de Chantal, whose acquaintance he made while preaching through Lent at Dijon in 1604, he founded the order of the Visitation, in favour of "strong souls with weak bodies," as he said, deterred from entering the orders already existing, by their inability to undertake severe corporal austerities. The institution rapidly spread, counting twenty houses before his death and eighty before that of St Jeanne. The care of his diocese and of his new foundation were not enough for his ardent charity, and in 1609 he published his famous _Introduction to a Devout Life_, a work which was at once translated into the chief European languages and of which he himself published five editions. In 1616 appeared his _Treatise on the Love of God_, which teaches that perfection of the spiritual life to which the former work is meant to be the "Introduction."

The important Lents of 1617 and 1618 at Grenoble were a prelude to a still more important apostolate in Paris, "the theatre of the world," as St Vincent de Paul calls it. This third visit to the great city lasted from the autumn of 1618 to that of 1619; the direct object of it was to assist in negotiating the marriage of the prince of Piedmont with Chretienne of France, but nearly all his time was spent in preaching and works of mercy, spiritual or corporal. He was regarded as a living saint. St Vincent scarcely left him, and has given the most extraordinary testimonies (as yet unpublished) of his heroic virtues. Mere Angelique Arnaud, who at this time put herself under his direction and wished to join the Order of the Visitation, attracted by its humility and sweetness, may be named as the most interesting of his innumerable penitents of this period. He returned to Savoy, and after three years more of unwearying labour died at Lyons on the 28th of December 1622. A universal outburst of veneration followed; indeed his cult had already begun, and after an episcopal inquiry the pontifical commission in view of his beatification was instituted by decree of the 21st of July 1626, a celerity unique in the annals of the Congregation of Rites. The depositions of witnesses were returned to Rome in 1632, but meantime the forms of the Roman chancery had been changed by Urban VIII., and the advocates could not at once continue their work. Eventually a new commission was issued in 1656, and on its report, into which were inserted nineteen of the former depositions, the "servant of God" was beatified in 1661. The canonization took place in 1665.

Besides the works which we have named, there were published posthumously his _Entretiens_, i.e. a selection of the lectures given to the Visitation, reported by the sisters who heard them, some of his sermons, a large number of his letters, various short treatises of devotion. The first edition of his united or so-called "Complete" works was published at Toulouse in 1637. Others followed in 1641, 1647, 1652, 1663, 1669, 1685. The _Lettres_ and _Opuscules_ were republished in 1768.

The only modern editions of the complete works which it is worth while to name are those of Blaise (1821), Vires (1856-1858), Migne (1861), and the critical edition published by the Visitation of Annecy, of which the 14th volume appeared in 1905.

The biography of St Francis de Sales was written immediately after his death by the celebrated P. de La Riviere and Dom John de St Francois (Goulu), as well as by two other authors of less importance. The saint's nephew and successor, Charles Auguste de Sales, brought out a more extended life, Latin and French, in 1635. The lives of Giarda (1650), Maupas du Tour (1657) and Cotolendi (1687) add little to Charles Auguste. Marsollier's longer life, in two volumes (1700), is quite untrustworthy; still more so that by Loyau d'Amboise (1833), which is rather a romance than a biography. The lives by Hamon (1856) and Perennes (1860), without adding much to preceding biographies, are serious and edifying. A complete life, founded on the lately discovered process of 1626 and the new letters, was being prepared by the author of the present article at the time of his death. With the Lives must be mentioned the _Esprit du B.F. de Sales_ by Camus, bishop of Belley, who, amid innumerable errors, gives various interesting traits and sayings of his saintly friend. Among the very numerous modern studies may be named an essay by Leigh Hunt entitled "The Gentleman Saint" (_The Seer_, pt. ii. No. 41); a remarkable _causerie_ by Sainte-Beuve (_Lundis_, 3rd Jan. 1853); _Le Reveil du sentiment religieux en France au XVII^e siecle_, by Strowski (Paris, 1898); _Four Essays on S. F. de S._ and _Three Essays on S. F. de S. as Preacher_, by Canon H.B. Mackey. (H. B. M.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] This, at least, is the account given by Catholic authorities. Less favourable is the view taken by non-Catholic historians, which seems in some measure to be confirmed by St Francis himself. According to this, Duke Charles Emmanuel of Savoy, who succeeded his more tolerant father in 1580, was determined to reduce the Chablais to the Catholic religion, by peaceful means if possible, by force if necessary. After two years of preaching Francis wrote to the duke (_Oeuvres compl._ ii. p. 551): "During 27 months I have scattered the seed of the Word of God in this miserable land; shall I say among thorns or on stony ground? Certainly, save for the conversion of the seigneur d'Avully and the advocate Poncet, I have little to boast of." In the winter of 1596-1597 Francis was at Turin, and at his suggestion the duke decided on a regular plan for the coercion of the refractory Protestants. This plan anticipated that employed later by Louis XIV. against the Huguenots in France. The Calvinist ministers were expelled; Protestant books were confiscated and destroyed; the acts of Protestant lawyers and officials were declared invalid. The country was flooded with Jesuits and friars, whose arguments were reinforced by quartering troops, veterans of the Indian wars in Mexico, on the refractory inhabitants. Those whose stubborn persistence in error survived all these inducements to repent were sent into exile. See the article "Franz von Sales" by J. Ehni in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopaedie_ (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1899). (W. A. P.)

[2] With the title of Nicopolis _in partibus_.--ED.

FRANCIS, SIR PHILIP (1740-1818), English politician and pamphleteer, the supposed author of the _Letters of Junius_, and the chief antagonist of Warren Hastings, was born in Dublin on the 22nd of October 1740. He was the only son of Dr Philip Francis (c. 1708-1773), a man of some literary celebrity in his time, known by his translations of Horace, Aeschines and Demosthenes. He received the rudiments of an excellent education at a free school in Dublin, and afterwards spent a year or two (1751-1752) under his father's roof at Skeyton rectory, Norfolk, and elsewhere, and for a short time he had Gibbon as a fellow-pupil. In March 1753 he entered St Paul's school, London, where he remained for three years and a half, becoming a proficient classical scholar. In 1756, immediately on his leaving school, he was appointed to a junior clerkship in the secretary of state's office by Henry Fox (afterwards Lord Holland), with whose family Dr Francis was at that time on intimate terms; and this post he retained under the succeeding administration. In 1758 he was employed as secretary to General Bligh in the expedition against Cherbourg; and in the same capacity he accompanied the earl of Kinnoul on his special embassy to the court of Portugal in 1760.

In 1761 he became personally known to Pitt, who, recognizing his ability and discretion, once and again made use of his services as private amanuensis. In 1762 he was appointed to a principal clerkship in the war office, where he formed an intimate friendship with Christopher D'Oyly, the secretary of state's deputy, whose dismissal from office in 1772 was hotly resented by "Junius"; and in the same year he married Miss Macrabie, the daughter of a retired London merchant. His official duties brought him into direct relations with many who were well versed in the politics of the time. In 1763 the great constitutional questions arising out of the arrest of Wilkes began to be sharply canvassed. It was natural that Francis, who from a very early age had been in the habit of writing occasionally to the newspapers, should be eager to take an active part in the discussion, though his position as a government official made it necessary that his intervention should be carefully disguised. He is known to have written to the _Public Ledger_ and _Public Advertiser_, as an advocate of the popular cause, on many occasions about and after the year 1763; he frequently attended debates in both Houses of Parliament, especially when American questions were being discussed; and between 1769 and 1771 he is also known to have been favourable to the scheme for the overthrow of the Grafton government and afterwards of that of Lord North, and for persuading or forcing Lord Chatham into power. In January 1769 the first of the _Letters of Junius_ appeared, and the series was continued till January 21, 1772. They had been preceded by others under various signatures such as, "Candor," "Father of Candor," "Anti-Sejanus," "Lucius," "Nemesis," which have all been attributed, some of them certainly in error, to one and the same hand. The authorship of the _Letters of Junius_ has been assigned to Francis on a variety of grounds (see JUNIUS).

In March 1772 Francis finally left the war office, and in July of the same year he left England for a tour through France, Germany and Italy, which lasted until the following December. On his return he was contemplating emigration to New England, when in June 1773 Lord North, on the recommendation of Lord Barrington, appointed him a member of the newly constituted supreme council of Bengal at a salary of L10,000 per annum. Along with his colleagues Monson and Clavering he reached Calcutta in October 1774, and a long struggle with Warren Hastings, the governor-general, immediately began. These three, actuated probably by petty personal motives, combined to form a majority of the council in harassing opposition to the governor-general's policy; and they even accused him of corruption, mainly on the evidence of Nuncomar. The death of Monson in 1776, and of Clavering in the following year, made Hastings again supreme in the council. But a dispute with Francis, more than usually embittered, led in August 1780 to a minute being delivered to the council board by Hastings, in which he stated that "he judged of the public conduct of Mr Francis by his experience of his private, which he had found to be void of truth and honour." A duel was the consequence, in which Francis received a dangerous wound (see HASTINGS, WARREN). Though his recovery was rapid and complete, he did not choose to prolong his stay abroad. He arrived in England in October 1781, and was received with little favour.

Little is known of the nature of his occupations during the next two years, except that he was untiring in his efforts to procure first the recall, and afterwards the impeachment of his hitherto triumphant adversary. In 1783 Fox produced his India Bill, which led to the overthrow of the coalition government. In 1784 Francis was returned by the borough of Yarmouth, Isle of Wight; and although he took an opportunity to disclaim every feeling of personal animosity towards Hastings, this did not prevent him, on the return of the latter in 1785, from doing all in his power to bring forward and support the charges which ultimately led to the impeachment resolutions of 1787. Although excluded by a majority of the House from the list of the managers of that impeachment, Francis was none the less its most energetic promoter, supplying his friends Burke and Sheridan with all the materials for their eloquent orations and burning invectives. At the general election of 1790 he was returned member for Bletchingley. He sympathized warmly and actively with the French revolutionary doctrines, expostulating with Burke on his vehement denunciation of the same. In 1793 he supported Grey's motion for a return to the old constitutional system of representation, and so earned the title to be regarded as one of the earliest promoters of the cause of parliamentary reform; and he was one of the founders of the "Society of the Friends of the People." The acquittal of Hastings in April 1795 disappointed Francis of the governor-generalship, and in 1798 he had to submit to the additional mortification of a defeat in the general election. He was once more successful, however, in 1802, when he sat for Appleby, and it seemed as if the great ambitions of his life were about to be realized when the Whig party came into power in 1806. His disappointment was great when the governor-generalship was, owing to party exigencies, conferred on Sir Gilbert Elliot (Lord Minto); he declined, it is said, soon afterwards the government of the Cape, but accepted a K.C.B. Though re-elected for Appleby in 1806, he failed to secure a seat in the following year; and the remainder of his life was spent in comparative privacy.

Among the later productions of his pen were, besides the _Plan of a Reform in the Election of the House of Commons_, pamphlets entitled _Proceedings in the House of Commons on the Slave Trade_ (1796), _Reflections on the Abundance of Paper in Circulation and the Scarcity of Specie_ (1810), _Historical Questions Exhibited_ (1818), and a _Letter to Earl Grey on the Policy of Great Britain and the Allies towards Norway_ (1814). His first wife, by whom he had six children, died in 1806, and in 1814 he married his second wife, Emma Watkins, who long survived him, and who left voluminous manuscripts relating to his biography. Francis died on the 23rd of December 1818. In his domestic relations he was exemplary, and he lived on terms of mutual affection with a wide circle of friends. He was, however, full of vindictiveness, dissimulation and treachery, and there can be little doubt that in his historic conflict with Warren Hastings unworthy personal motives played a leading part.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.--For the evidence identifying Francis with Junius see the article Junius, and the authorities there cited. See also _Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, with Correspondence and Journals_, by Joseph Parkes and Herman Merivale (2 vols., London, 1867); _The Francis Letters_, edited by Beata Francis and Eliza Keary (2 vols., London, 1901); Sir J.F. Stephen, _The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir E. Impey_ (2 vols., London, 1885); Lord Macaulay's _Essay_ on "Warren Hastings"; G.B. Malleson, _Life of Warren Hastings_ (London, 1894); G.W. Forrest, _The Administration of Warren Hastings, 1772-1785_ (Calcutta, 1892); Sir Leslie Stephen's article on Francis in _Dict. of Nat. Biog._ vol. xx.

FRANCIS JOSEPH I. (1830- ), emperor of Austria, king of Bohemia, and apostolic king of Hungary, was the eldest son of the archduke Francis Charles, second son of the reigning emperor Francis I., being born on the 18th of August 1830. His mother, the archduchess Sophia, was daughter of Maximilian I., king of Bavaria. She was a woman of great ability and strong character, and during the years which followed the death of the emperor Francis was probably the most influential personage at the Austrian court; for the emperor Ferdinand, who succeeded in 1835, was physically and mentally incapable of performing the duties of his office; as he was childless, Francis Joseph was in the direct line of succession. During the disturbances of 1848, Francis Joseph spent some time in Italy, where, under Radetzky, at the battle of St Lucia, he had his first experience of warfare. At the end of that year, after the rising of Vienna and capture of the city by Windischgraetz, it was clearly desirable that there should be a more vigorous ruler at the head of the empire, and Ferdinand, now that the young archduke was of age, was able to carry out the abdication which he and his wife had long desired. All the preparations were made with the utmost secrecy; on the 2nd of December 1848, in the archiepiscopal palace at Olmuetz, whither the court had fled from Vienna, the emperor abdicated. His brother resigned his rights of succession to his son, and Francis Joseph was proclaimed emperor. Ferdinand retired to Prague, where he died in 1875.

The history of the Dual Monarchy during his reign is told under the heading of AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, and here it is only necessary to deal with its personal aspects. The young emperor was during the first years of his reign completely in the hands of Prince Felix Schwarzenberg, to whom, with Windischgraetz and Radetzky, he owed it that Austria had emerged from the revolution apparently stronger than it had been before. The first task was to reduce Hungary to obedience, for the Magyars refused to acknowledge the validity of the abdication in so far as it concerned Hungary, on the ground that such an act would only be valid with the consent of the Hungarian parliament. A further motive for their attitude was that Francis Joseph, unlike his predecessor, had not taken the oath to observe the Hungarian constitution, which it was the avowed object of Schwarzenberg to overthrow. In the war which followed the emperor himself took part, but it was not brought to a successful conclusion till the help of the Russians had been called in. Hungary, deprived of her ancient constitution, became an integral part of the Austrian empire. The new reign began, therefore, under sinister omens, with the suppression of liberty in Italy, Hungary and Germany. In 1853 a Hungarian named Lebenyi attempted to assassinate the emperor, and succeeded in inflicting a serious wound with a knife. With the death of Schwarzenberg in 1852 the personal government of the emperor really began, and with it that long series of experiments of which Austria has been the subject. Generally it may be said that throughout his long reign Francis Joseph remained the real ruler of his dominions; he not only kept in his hands the appointment and dismissal of his ministers, but himself directed their policy, and owing to the great knowledge of affairs, the unremitting diligence and clearness of apprehension, to which all who transacted business with him have borne testimony, he was able to keep a very real control even of the details of government.

The recognition of the separate status of Hungary, and the restoration of the Magyar constitution in 1866, necessarily made some change in his position, and so far as concerns Hungary he fully accepted the doctrine that ministers are responsible to parliament. In the other half of the monarchy (the so-called Cisleithan) this was not possible, and the authority and influence of the emperor were even increased by the contrast with the weaknesses and failures of the parliamentary system. The most noticeable features in his reign were the repeated and sudden changes of policy, which, while they arose from the extreme difficulty of finding any system by which the Habsburg monarchy could be governed, were due also to the personal idiosyncrasies of the emperor. First we have the attempt at the autocratic centralization of the whole monarchy under Bach; the personal influence of the emperor is seen in the conclusion of the Concordat with Rome, by which in 1855 the work of Joseph II. was undone and the power of the papacy for a while restored. The foreign policy of this period brought about the complete isolation of Austria, and the "ingratitude" towards Russia, as shown during the period of the Crimean War, which has become proverbial, caused a permanent estrangement between the two great Eastern empires and the imperial families. The system led inevitably to bankruptcy and ruin; the war of 1859, by bringing it to an end, saved the monarchy. After the first defeat Francis Joseph hastened to Italy; he commanded in person at Solferino, and by a meeting with Napoleon arranged the terms of the peace of Villafranca. The next six years, both in home and foreign policy, were marked by great vacillation. In order to meet the universal discontent and the financial difficulties constitutional government was introduced; a parliament was established in which all races of the empire were represented, and in place of centralized despotism was established Liberal centralization under Schmerling and the German Liberals. But the Magyars refused to send representatives to the central parliament; the Slavs, resenting the Germanizing policy of the government, withdrew; and the emperor had really withdrawn his confidence from Schmerling long before the constitution was suspended in 1865 as a first step to a reconciliation with Hungary. In the complicated German affairs the emperor in vain sought for a minister on whose knowledge and advice he could depend. He was guided in turn by the inconsistent advice of Schmerling, Rechberg, Mensdorff, not to mention more obscure counsellors, and it is not surprising that Austria was repeatedly outmatched and outwitted by Prussia. In 1863, at the _Fuerstentag_ in Frankfort, the emperor made an attempt by his personal influence to solve the German question. He invited all the German sovereigns to meet him in conference, and laid before them a plan for the reconstruction of the confederation. The momentary effect was immense; for some of the halo of the Holy Empire still clung round the head of the house of Habsburg, and Francis Joseph was welcomed to the ancient free city with enthusiasm. In spite of this, however, and of the skill with which he presided over the debates, the conference came to nothing owing to the refusal of the king of Prussia to attend.

The German question was settled definitively by the battle of Koeniggraetz in 1866; and the emperor Francis Joseph, with characteristic Habsburg opportunism, was quick to accommodate himself to the new circumstances. Above all, he recognized the necessity for reconciling the Magyars to the monarchy; for it was their discontent that had mainly contributed to the collapse of the Austrian power. He had already, in 1859, as the result of a visit to Budapest, made certain modifications in the Bach system by way of concession to Magyar sentiment, and in 1861 he had had an interview with Deak, during which, though unconvinced by that statesman's arguments, he had at least assured himself of his loyalty. He now made Beust, Bismarck's Saxon antagonist, the head of his government, as the result of whose negotiations with Deak the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 was agreed upon. A law was passed by the Hungarian diet regularizing the abdication of Ferdinand; at the beginning of June Francis Joseph signed the inaugural diploma and took the oath in Magyar to observe the constitution; on the 8th he was solemnly crowned king of Hungary. The traditional coronation gift of 100,000 florins he assigned to the widows and orphans of those who had fallen in the war against Austria in 1849.

Once having accepted the principle of constitutional government, the emperor-king adhered to it loyally, in spite of the discouragement caused by party struggles embittered by racial antagonisms. If in the Cisleithan half of the monarchy parliamentary government broke down, this was through no fault of the emperor, who worked hard to find a _modus vivendi_ between the factions, and did not shrink from introducing manhood suffrage in the attempt to establish a stable parliamentary system. This expedient, indeed, probably also conveyed a veiled threat to the Magyar chauvinists, who, discontented with the restrictions placed upon Hungarian independence under the Compromise, were agitating for the complete separation of Austria and Hungary under a personal union only; for universal suffrage in Hungary would mean the subordination of the Magyar minority to the hitherto subject races. For nearly forty years after the acceptance of the Compromise the attitude of the emperor-king towards the Magyar constitution had been scrupulously correct. The agitation for the completely separate organization of the Hungarian army, and for the substitution of Magyar for German in words of command in Hungarian regiments, broke down the patience of the emperor, tenacious of his prerogative as supreme "war lord" of the common army. A Hungarian deputation which came to Vienna in September 1905 to urge the Magyar claims was received ungraciously by the emperor, who did not offer his hand to the members, addressed them in German, and referred them brusquely to the chancellor, Count Goluchowski. This incident caused a considerable sensation, and was the prelude to a long crisis in Hungarian affairs, during which the emperor-king, while quick to repair the unfortunate impression produced by his momentary pique, held inflexibly to his resolve in the matter of the common army.

In his relations with the Slavs the emperor displayed the same conciliatory disposition as in the case of the Magyars; but though he more than once held out hopes that he would be crowned at Prague as king of Bohemia, the project was always abandoned. In this, indeed, as in other cases, it may be said that the emperor was guided less by any abstract principles than by a common-sense appreciation of the needs and possibilities of the moment. Whatever his natural prejudices or natural resentments, he never allowed these to influence his policy. The German empire and the Italian kingdom had been built up out of the ruins of immemorial Habsburg ambitions; yet he refused to be drawn into an alliance with France in 1869 and 1870, and became the mainstay of the Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy. His reputation as a consistent moderating influence in European policy and one of the chief guarantors of European peace was indeed rudely shaken in October 1908, the year in which he celebrated his sixty years' jubilee as emperor, by the issue of the imperial recript annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Habsburg dominions, in violation of the terms of the treaty of Berlin. But his opportunism was again justified by the result. Europe lost an ideal; but Austria gained two provinces.

In his private life the emperor was the victim of terrible catastrophes--his wife, his brother and his only son having been destroyed by sudden and violent deaths. He married in 1854 Elizabeth, daughter of Maximilian Joseph, duke of Bavaria, who belonged to the younger and non-royal branch of the house of Wittelsbach. The empress, who shared the remarkable beauty common to all her family, took little part in the public life of Austria. After the first years of married life she was seldom seen in Vienna, and spent much of her time in travelling. She built a castle of great beauty and magnificence, called the Achilleion, in the island of Corfu, where she often o resided. In 1867 she accompanied the emperor to Budapest, and took much interest in the reconciliation with the Magyars. She became a good Hungarian scholar, and spent much time in Hungary. An admirable horsewoman, in later years she repeatedly visited England and Irland for the hunting season. In 1897 she was assassinated at Geneva by an Italian anarchist; previous attempts had been made on her and on her husband during a visit to Trieste.

There was one son of the marriage, the crown prince Rudolph (1857-1889). A man of much ability and promise, he was a good linguist, and showed great interest in natural history. He published two works, _Fifteen Days on the Danube_ and _A Journey in the East_, and also promoted illustrated work giving a full description of the whole Austro-Hungarian monarchy; he personally shared the labours of the editorial work. In 1881 he merried Stephanie, daughter of the king of the Belgians. On 30th January 1889 he commited suicide at Mayerling, a country house near Vienna. He left one daughter, Elizabeth, who was betrothed to Count Alfred Windischgraetz in 1901. In 1900 his widow, the crown princess Stephanie, married Count Lonyay; by this she sacrificed her rank and position within the Austrian monarchy. Besides the crown prince the empress gave birth to three daughters, of whom two survive: Gisela (born 1857), who married a son of the prince regent of Bavaria; and Marie Valerie (born 1868), who married the archduke Franz Salvator of Tuscany.

See J. Emmer. _Kaisser Franz Joseph_ (2 vols., Vienna, 1898); J. Schnitzer, _Franz Joseph I. und seine Zeit_ (2 vols., _ib._, 1899); _Viribis unitis. Das Buch vom Kaiser_, with introduction by J.A. v. Halfert, ed. M. Herzig (_ib._, 1898); R. Rostok, _Die Regierungszeit des K. u. K. Franz Joseph I._ (3rd ed. _ib._, 1903).