Part 377

But People and King stood no longer side by side. The league of King and Commons against the Lords had proved less happy than the alliance in England of Commons and Lords against the King. Royalty emerged from the patient struggle alone in possession of sovereign power. It had used the communes and then abused them, breaking their charters—their liberties—their courage—their hopes—and widening the distance between class and class. The "estates" of the realm became a memory and a name. During five hundred years, while the Parliament of England grew in majesty and might, the States-General of France were assembled but thirteen times.

The Court.

When royalty, at last, invented the fatal enchantments of a "Court," then the blighting of all other powers was soon complete. It drew within its spell, from all the provinces of France, their nobles, their men of genius, their aspiring spirits, and assembled them to corrupt and debase them together—to make them its pensioners and hirelings, its sycophants, its jesters, its knaves.

Suppression of the Huguenots.

Neither Renaissance nor Reformation could undo the spell. Ideas from the one and a great faith from the other joined in league for the liberty of both, and the thoughtful among the people were rallied to them with craving eagerness. But bigotry and frivolity ruled the Court, and the Court proved stronger than France. Freedom of conscience, and every species of freedom with it, were destroyed; by massacre, by civil war, by oppressive government, by banishment, by corrupting bribes.

18th century. The "Ancien Régime."

And always the grandeur of the monarchy increased; its rule grew more absolute; its Court sucked the life-blood of the State more remorselessly. The People starved, that the King might be magnificent; they perished in a thousand battles, that his name might be "glorious;" they went into exile, carrying away the arts of France, that the piety of the King might not be shocked by their heresies. But always, too, there was growing in the world, around France and in France, a knowledge,—an understanding,—a modern spirit,—that rebelled against these infamies.

A. D. 1789-1799. Revolution. A. D. 1799-1815. Napoleon.

In due time there came an end. Court, and King, and Church, and all that even seemed to be a part of the evil old regime, were whirled into a red gulf of Revolution and disappeared. The people, unused to Liberty, were made drunken by it, and went mad. In breaking the gyves of feudalism they broke every other restraint, and wrecked society in all its forms. Then, in the stupor of their debauch, they gave themselves to a new despot—mean, conscienceless, detestable, but transcendent in the genius and the energy of his selfishness—who devoured them like a dragon, in the hunger of his insatiate ambition, and persuaded them to be proud of their fate.

A. D. 1815-1830. Bourbon Restoration. A. D. 1830-1848. Louis Phillippe A. D. 1848-1851. Second Republic. A. D. 1852-1870. Second Empire. A. D. 1870-. Third Republic.

Europe suppressed the intolerable adventurer, and France, for three-fourths of a century since, has been under an apprenticeship of experience, slowly learning the art of self-government by constitutional modes. Two monarchies, one republic, and a sham empire are the spoiled samples of her work. A third republic, now in hand, is promising better success. It rests with seeming stability on the support of the great class of peasant landowners, which the very miseries of her misgoverned past have created for France. Trained to pinching frugality by the hard conditions of the old regime; unspoiled by any ruinous philanthropy, like that of the English poor-laws; stimulated to land-buying by opportunities which came, first, from the impoverishment of extravagant nobles, and, later, from revolutionary confiscations; encouraged to the same acquisition by favorable laws of transfer and equal inheritance,—the landowning peasants of France constitute a Class powerful in numbers, invincible in conservatism, an profoundly interested in the preservation of social order.

End: A Logical Outline of French History-----------

FRANCE: A. D. 861. Origin of the duchy and of the house of Capet.

In 861, Charles the Bald, king of that part of the dismembered empire of Charlemagne which grew into the kingdom of France, was struggling with many difficulties: defending himself against the hostile ambition of his brother, Louis the German; striving to establish his authority in Brittany and Aquitaine; harried and harassed by Norse pirates; surrounded by domestic treachery and feudal restiveness. All of his many foes were more or less in league against him, and the soul of their combination appears to have been a certain bold adventurer—a stranger of uncertain origin, a Saxon, as some say—who bore the name of Robert the Strong. In this alien enemy, King Charles, who never lacked shrewdness, discovered a possible friend. He opened negotiations with Robert the Strong, and a bargain was soon made which transferred the sword and the energy of the potent mercenary to the service of the king. "Soon after, a Placitum or Great Council was held at Compiègne. In this assembly, and by the assent of the Optimates, the Seine and its islands, and that most important island Paris, and all the country between Seine and Loire, were granted to Robert, the Duchy of France, though not yet so called, moreover the Angevine Marches, or County of Outre-Maine, all to be held by Robert-le-Fort as barriers against Northmen and Bretons, and by which cessions the realm was to be defended. Only a portion of this dominion owned the obedience of Charles: the Bretons were in their own country, the Northmen in the country they were making their own; the grant therefore was a license to Robert to win as much as he could, and to keep his acquisitions should he succeed. … Robert kept the Northmen in check, yet only by incessant exertion. He inured the future kings of France, his two young sons, Eudes and Robert, to the tug of war, making them his companions in his enterprises. The banks of the Loire were particularly guarded by him, for here the principal attacks were directed." Robert the Strong fought valiantly, as he had contracted to do, for five years, or more, and then, in an unlucky battle with the Danes, one summer day in 866, he fell. "Thus died the first of the Capets." All the honors and possessions which he had received from the king were then transferred, not to his sons, but to one Hugh, Count of Burgundy, who became also Duke or Marquis of France and Count of Anjou. Twenty years later, however, the older son of Robert, Eudes, turns up in history again as Count of Paris, and nothing is known of the means by which the family, soon to become royal, had recovered its footing and its importance.

_Sir F. Palgrave, History of Normandy and England, book 1, chapter 3 (volume 1)._

FRANCE: A. D. 877-987. The end of the Carolingian monarchy and the rise of the Capetian.

Charles the Bald died in 877 and was succeeded by his son Louis, called "the Stammerer," who reigned only two years. His two sons, Louis and Carloman, were joint kings for a short space, struggling with the Northmen and losing the provinces out of which Duke Boson of Provence, brother-in-law of Charles the Bald, formed the kingdom of Arles. Louis died in 882 and Carloman two years afterwards; thereupon Charles, surnamed "the Fat," king of Lombardy and Germany, and also emperor (nephew of Charles the Bald), became likewise king of France, and briefly reunited under his feebly handled sceptre the greater part of the old empire of Charlemagne: When he died, in 888, a party of the nobles, tired of his race, met and elected Count Eudes (or Odo), the valiant Count of Paris, who had just defended his city with obstinate courage against the Northmen, to be their king. The sovereignty of Eudes was not acknowledged by the nation at large. His opponents found a Carling to set up against him, in the person of the boy Charles,—youngest son of Louis "the Stammerer," born after his father's death,—who appears in history as Charles "the Simple." Eudes, after some years of war, gave up to Charles a small domain, between the Seine and the Meuse, acknowledged his feudal superiority and agreed that the whole kingdom should be surrendered to him on his (Eudes') death. In accordance with this agreement, Charles the Simple became sole king in 898, when Eudes died, and the country which acknowledged his nominal sovereignty fell into a more distracted state than ever. The Northmen established themselves in permanent occupation of the country on the lower Seine, and Charles, in 911, made a formal cession of it to their duke, Rollo, thus creating the great duchy of Normandy. In 922 the nobles grew once more disgusted with the feebleness of their king and crowned Duke Robert, brother of the late king Eudes, driving Charles into his stronghold of Laon. The Normans came to Charles' help and his rival Robert was killed in a battle. {1159} But Charles was defeated, was inveigled into the hands of one of the rebel Lords.—Herbert of Venmandois—and kept a prisoner until he died, in 929. One Rodolf of Burgundy had been chosen king, meantime, and reigned until his death, in 936. Then legitimacy triumphed again, and a young son of Charles the Simple, who had been reared in England, was sent for and crowned. This king—Louis IV.—his son, Lothair, and his grandson, Louis V., kept possession of the shaking throne for half-a-century; but their actual kingdom was much of the time reduced to little more than the royal city of Laon and its immediate territories. When Louis died, in 987, leaving no nearer heir than his uncle, Charles, Duke of Lorraine, there was no longer any serious attempt to keep up the Carolingian line. Hugh, Duke of France—whose grandfather Robert, and whose grand-uncle Eudes had been crowned kings, before him, and whose father, "Hugh the Great," had been the king-maker of the period since—was now called to the throne and settled himself firmly in the seat which a long line of his descendants would hold. He was known as Hugh Capet to his contemporaries, and it is thought that he got the name from his wearing of the hood, cap, or cape of St. Martin—he being the abbot of St. Martin at Tours, in addition to his other high dignities.

_G. W. Kitchin, History of France, volume 1, book 2, part 2, chapter 5; book 3, chapter 1._

ALSO IN: _Sir F. Palgrave, History of Normandy and England, book 1, chapter 5 (volume l)._

_C. F. Keary, The Vikings in Western Christendom, chapters 11 and 13-15._

See, also, LAON.

FRANCE: A. D. 987. Accession of Hugh Capet. The kingdom of the early Capetians.

"On the accession of the third race [the Capetians], France, properly so called, only comprised the territory between the Somme and the Loire; it was bounded by the counties of Flanders and Vermandois on the north; by Normandy and Brittany on the west; by the Champagne on the east; by the duchy of Aquitaine on the south. The territory within these bounds was the duchy of France, the patrimonial possession of the Capets, and constituted the royal domain. The great fiefs of the crown, in addition to the duchy of France, were the duchy of Normandy, the duchy of Burgundy, nearly the whole of Flanders, formed into a county, the county of Champagne, the duchy of Aquitaine, and the county of Toulouse. … The sovereigns of these various states were the great vassals of the crown and peers of France; Lorraine and a portion of Flanders were dependent on the Germanic crown, while Brittany was a fief of the duchy of Normandy. … The county of Barcelona beyond the Alps was also one of the great fiefs of the crown of France."

_E. de Bonnechose, History of France: second epoch, book 1, chapter 2._

"With the exception of the Spanish March and of part of Flanders, all these states have long been fully incorporated with the French monarchy. But we must remember that, under the earlier French Kings, the connexion of most of these provinces with their nominal suzerain was even looser than the connexion of the German princes after the Peace of Westphalia with the Viennese Emperors. A great French Duke was as independent within his own dominions as an Elector of Saxony or Bavaria, and there were no common institutions, no Diet or assembly of any kind, to bring him into contact either with his liege lord or with his fellow-vassals. Aquitaine and Toulouse … seem almost to have forgotten that there was any King of the French at all, or at all events that they had anything to do with him. They did not often even pay him the compliment of waging war upon him, a mode of recognition of his existence which was constantly indulged in by their brethren of Normandy and Flanders."

_E. A. Freeman, The Franks and the Gauls (Historical Essays, 1st series, number 7)._

"When France was detached from the Empire in the ninth century, of all three imperial regions she was the one which seemed least likely to form a nation. There was no unity in the country west of the Scheldt, the Meuse, and the Rhone. Various principalities, duchies, or counties were here formed, but each of them was divided into secular fiefs and ecclesiastical territories. Over these fiefs and territories the authority of the duke or the count, which was supposed to represent that of the king, was exercised only in case these seigneurs had sufficient power, derived from their own personal estates. Destitute of domains and almost starving, the king, in official documents, asked what means he might find on which to live with some degree of decency. From time to time, amid this chaos, he discussed the theory of his authority. He was a lean and solemn phantom, straying about among living men who were very rude and energetic. The phantom kept constantly growing leaner, but royalty did not vanish. People were accustomed to its existence, and the men of those days could not conceive of a revolution. By the election of Hugh Capet, in 987, royalty became a reality, because the king, as Duke of Francia, had lands, money, and followers. It would be out of place to seek a plan of conduct and a methodical line of policy in the actions of the Capetians, for they employed simultaneously every sort of expedient. During more than three centuries they had male offspring; thus the chief merit of the dynasty was that it endured. As always happens, out of the practice developed a law; and this happy accident produced a lawful hereditary succession, which was a great element of strength. Moreover the king had a whole arsenal of rights: old rights of Carolingian royalty, preserving, the remembrance of imperial power, which the study of the Roman law was soon to resuscitate, transforming these apparitions into formidable realities; old rights conferred by the coronation, which were impossible to define, and hence incontestable; and rights of suzerainty, newer and more real, which were definitely determined and codified as feudalism developed and which, joined to the other rights mentioned above, made the king proprietor of France. These are the elements that Capetian royalty contributed to the play of fortuitous circumstances."

_E. Lavisse, General View of the Political History of Europe, chapter 3._

See, also, TWELVE PEERS OF FRANCE.

{1160}

FRANCE: A. D. 987-1327. The Feudal Period.

"The period in the history of France, of which we are about to write, began with the consecration of Hugues Capet, at Reims, the 3rd of July, 987, but it is a period which would but improperly take its name from the Capetians; for throughout this time royalty was, as it were, annihilated in France; the social bond was broken, and the country which extends from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, and from the English Channel to the Gulf of Lyon, was governed by a confederation of princes rarely under the influence of a common will, and united only by the Feudal System. While France was confederated under feudal administration, the legislative power was suspended. Hugues Capet and his successors, until the accession of St. Louis, had not the right of making laws; the nation had no diet, no regularly constituted assemblies whose authority it acknowledged. The Feudal System, tacitly adopted, and developed by custom, was solely acknowledged by the numerous sovereigns who divided the provinces among themselves. It replaced the social bond, the monarch, and the legislator. … The period … is therefore like a long interregnum, during which the royal authority was suspended, although the name of king was always preserved. He who bore this title in the midst of a republic of princes was only distinguished from them by some honorary prerogative, and he exercised over them scarcely any authority. Until very near the end of the 11th century, these princes were scarcely less numerous than the castles which covered France. No authority was acknowledged at a distance, and every fortress gave its lord rank among the sovereigns. The conquest of England by the Normans broke the equilibrium between the feudal lords; one of the confederate princes, become a king in 1066, gradually extended, until 1179, his domination over more than half of France; and although it was not he who bore the title of king of the French, it may be imagined that in time the rest of the country would also pass under his yoke. Philip the August and his son, during the forty-six last years of the same period, reconquered almost all the fiefs which the English kings had united, brought the other great vassals back to obedience, and changed the feudal confederation which had ruled France into a monarchy, which incorporated the Feudal System in its constitution."

_J. C. L. de Sismondi, France Under the Feudal System (translated by W. Bellingham), chapter 1._

"The feudal period, that is, the period when the feudal system was the dominant fact of our country, … is comprehended between Hugh Capet and Philippe de Valois, that is, it embraces the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. … At the end of the 10th century, royalty and the commons were not visible, or at all events scarcely visible. At the commencement of the 14th century, royalty was the head of the state, the commons were the body of the nation. The two forces to which the feudal system was to succumb had then attained, not, indeed, their entire development, but a decided preponderance. … With the 14th century, the character of war changed. Then began the foreign wars; no longer a vassal against suzerain, or vassal against vassal, but nation against nation, government against government. On the accession of Philippe de Valois, the great wars between the French and the English broke out—the claims of the kings of England, not upon any particular fief, but upon the whole land, and upon the throne of France—and they continued up to Louis XI. They were no longer feudal, but national wars; a certain proof that the feudal period stopped at this limit, that another society had already commenced."

_F. P. Guizot, History of Civilization, 2d course, lecture 1._

FRANCE: A. D. 996. Accession of King Robert II.

FRANCE: A. D. 1031. Accession of King Henry I.

FRANCE: A. D. 1060. Accession of King Philip I.

FRANCE: A. D. 1070-1125. Enfranchisement of Communes.