History of France

“ A finer subject could not offer itself to a Frenchman than the long reign in which France, seeming, at a bound, to emerge from a base condition of manners, of public morals, of government, and of policy, stood forth resplendent in letters, arts, arms, statecraft, and social refinement. ”

“ The application of these remarks to the history of France, will enable us to explain some interesting phenomena in the literature of that country. During the whole of the Middle Ages, and I may say till the end of the sixteenth century, France, though fertile in annalists and chroniclers, had not produced a single historian, because she had not produced a single man who presumed to doubt what was generally believed. ”

“ For France takes her history so much more violently than you do in England. France is tossed about by it, while England stands and is hammered on the anvil of Time, as it were, and remains just the same shape as before. ”

“ Though great advances were made in France during this reign, it was still far from that state of civilization which it attained a century afterwards. It contained about fifteen million of inhabitants, and Paris about one hundred and fifty thousand. The nobles were numerous and powerful, and engrossed the wealth of the nation. The people were not exactly slaves, but were reduced to great dependence, were uneducated, degraded, and enjoyed but few political or social privileges. They were oppressed by the government, by the nobles, and by the clergy. ”

“ His reign commemorates the triumph in France, of despotic principles, the complete suppression of popular interests, and almost the absorption of national interests in his own personal aggrandizement. It commemorates the ascendency of fashion, and the great refinement of material life. The camp and the court of Louis XIV. ingulphed all that is interesting in the history of France during the greater part of the seventeenth century. He reigned seventy-two years, and, in his various wars, a million of men are supposed to have fallen victims to his vain-glorious ambition. ”

“ But France is a nation in the fullest sense. Its history is therefore different from the history of Austria, of Burgundy, of Switzerland, or even of Italy. As a state which had become wholly distinct from the Empire, which was commonly the rival and enemy of the Empire, which largely grew at the expense of the Empire, above all, as a state which won for itself a most distinct national being, France fully deserves a chapter, and not a mere section. Still that chapter is in some sort an appendage to that which deals with the Imperial kingdoms of the West. ”

“ Unless deliberately ignoring the History of France before 1792, surely no one will contend that a King on the Throne of France will prove a step in advance from complexity to simplicity in settling the internal and foreign difficulties of Europe, unable as we are, to do without France. As to political farceurs, suspicious minds and interested partisans of the Imperial or Republican confraternities, we do not expect to see them accept our views. Calamities never teach wisdom to fools. ”

“ France, rushing ill-prepared, though with overweening confidence, on the great problems of the eighteenth century, shattered not her own hopes alone, but nearly at the same moment the Puritan Republic, breaking the last slight link that bound it to feudal Europe, and placing modern society firmly and tranquilly on its new foundation. ”

“ Philosophers, poets, prelates, generals, and statesmen, during his reign, were regarded only as his satellites. He was the central orb around which every other light revolved, and to contribute to his glory all were supposed to be born. He was, most emphatically, the state. He was France. A man, therefore, who, in the eye of contemporaries, was so grand, so rich, so powerful, and so absolute, claims a special notice. It is the province of history to record great influences, whether they come from the people, from great popular ideas, from literature and science, or from a single man. ”

“ For more than eighty years modern France has been prosecuting laboriously and in open day the work which had been slowly forming within the dark womb of olden France. In the almighty hands of eternal God a people’s history is interrupted and recommenced never. ”

“ France, at length, with its Parisian culture and drawing-room habits, with its unceasing analysis of characters and of works, with its ever ready irony at detecting weaknesses, with its skilled finesse in discriminating shades of thought—all have ploughed over the same ground, and we now begin to comprehend that no region of history exists in which this deep sub-soil should not be reached if we would secure adequate crops between the furrows. ”

“ For France there may be in store new sf revolutions, and fresh overturnings. Not anchored as is England, in an historic past which she reverences, and with a singularly gifted and emotional people who are the sport of the current of the hour, who can predict her future! But whatever that future may be, no American can be indifferent to the fate of a nation to whom we owe so much. ”

“ As one reviews the history of France since the establishment of the first republic in 1792, it appears as if revolutionary changes of government had been very frequent. As a matter of fact, the various revolutions produced far less change in the system of government than is usually supposed. ”

“ Not only had the empire fallen apart into three grand divisions, but France itself was disintegrating, was in fact a mass of rival states, with counts, princes, marquises, and a score of other petty potentates struggling for supremacy. ”

“ When the nineteenth century opened France was no longer a monarchy, but a republic; and her armies were to occupy in turn every European capital, from Madrid to Moscow. In order to understand the marvelous transformations produced by the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, we must consider somewhat carefully the conditions in France which led to a great reform of her institutions in 1789, and to the founding of a republic four years later. ”

“ The scholars, the poets, the artists have all done their part,—the nuns, the aristocrats, the working-people theirs. While England has been harassed with strikes and class recriminations, France has never known in her entire history such absolute social harmony and unity, such universal and concentrated will. ”

“ France differed from all the other monarchies of the Continent in possessing a public which blended all classes and was dominated by none; a public comprehending thousands of men who were familiar with the great interests of society, and who, whether noble or not noble, possessed the wealth and the intelligence that made them rightly desire a share in power. ”

“ France recovered her pristine vigor, and let all Europe see that power concentrated in the person of the sovereign is the source of the glory and greatness of monarchies, and the foundation upon which their preservation rests. ”

“ But in the following passage, which I am tempted to transcribe by the curious light it throws on the genesis of the present literary history of France, I can more entirely subscribe to the opinions expressed:—
“The active, busy, bustling politicians of the hour have succeeded in thrusting everything else out of place, and themselves into it. One dynasty has been overthrown, and another established; old laws have been abrogated, and hundreds of new{274} ones formed; hereditary nobles have been disinherited, and little men made great. ”

“ Are France or England for that less the good result of Monarchy? To-day France is the France of French Monarchy, the only difference being that under the First Napoleon the Allies entered Paris on the 6th of July, 1815, and that the fallen Emperor saddled France with the Treaty of Paris (1815) ; the Third Napoleon lost Alsace less Belfort; and that the Third Republic lost a large slice of Lorraine through not coming to terms with Prussia before the capitulation of Metz, French History begins not either from 1870 or 1792; and if men, strangers to History, cannot educate, let them be educated! ”

“ The tenth and eleventh centuries saw the consolidation of the provincial nationalities of France, the growing up of those strong local states which play so conspicuous a part in later mediæval French history, and which, centuries after their absorption into the royal domain, continued to be centres of keen local feeling, and are not 83crushed out of existence even by modern patriotism and the levelling-up of the Revolution. Equally important with their political influence was their influence on arts, language, and literature. ”

“ The French surpass every other nation, indeed all the other nations of Europe put together, in the amount and excellence of their memoirs, Whence comes this manifest superiority? The important Collection relating to the History of France, commencing as early as the thirteenth century, forms a basis of civil history, more authentic, circumstantial, and satisfactory to an intelligent inquirer than is to be found among any other people ”

“ France, the rival of England, was not probably permanently injured by the Revolution; for, if millions of lives were sacrificed, and millions of property were swept away, still important civil and social privileges were given to the great mass of the people, and odious feudal laws and customs were broken forever. ”

“ The civilisation of Europe, he held, was most intelligibly exhibited in that of France, where, more than in other countries, intellectual and social development have moved hand in hand, where general ideas and doctrines have always accompanied great events and public revolutions. The key to the meaning of French history he found in the tendency towards national and political unity. From the tenth to the fourteenth century four great forces met in co-operation or in conflict—royalty, the feudal system, the communes, the Church. Feudalism fell; a great monarchy arose upon its ruins. ”

“ KINGDOM OF FRANCE.—In 841 Rouen fell into the hands of the Normans, and Paris lay open to their attacks. In 861 Charles the Bald invested a brave soldier, Robert the Strong, whose descent is not known, with the county of Paris, that he might resist the invaders. He held the country between the Seine and the Loire, under the name of the Duchy of France. The other Francia, east of the Rhine, continued to be an important part of Germany, the district called Franconia. ”

“ Of all European nations, France is the one to which we come nearest. Besides its republican form of government—the directness of its history, the unity of its actions, the sharpness that marks its internal development, are all characteristics that find their parallel her best, and vice versa. ”

“ One element is used as the basis, to which are added other component parts, of varying qualities, and the result we call England, or Germany, or France. The steps by which it is accomplished, the blending and fusing of the elements, require centuries, and the process makes what we call—history. ”

“ One or two of her leaders have suffered themselves to be carried somewhat too far by the spirit of adventure; the nation has never had, what may be called, geographical ambition. France does not disdain to conquer the world by the dispersion of her ideas, but she desires nothing more. That which constitutes the beauty of our history, to those who take an elevated view of it, is the twofold object, pursued simultaneously by the Sovereign and the nation, of concentrating France, and spreading French ideas. ”

“ France has doubtless played a great part in the history ot humanity. The French nation has had a great share in the work of civilization, in social progress. Amongst European peoples, the people of France have left a very deep, a very luminous track across the path of History. ”

“ It was the special peculiarity of France that an extraordinary diversity of laws continued without sensible alteration while the central authority of the monarchy was constantly strengthening itself, while rapid approaches were being made to complete administrative unity, and while a fervid national spirit had been developed among the people. ”

“ But general influences were at work in the world at large, stimulating activities of all kinds,--industry, trade, speculation, combination, invention, experiment, science, philosophy,--and whatever improvement occurred in the material condition and social state of the common people of France may find its explanation in these. There was an augmentation of life in the air of the eighteenth century, and France took some invigoration from it, despite the many maladies in its social system and the oppressions of government under which it bent. ”

“ I caused documents and registers to be produced to me; I questioned private individuals without being known to them; I employed all possible means of 36trying the truth of my conclusions, and I remained fully convinced that the government was completely national, and founded in the will of the people; that France had, at no period of her history, been more powerful, more flourishing, better governed, or more happy; the roads had never been better maintained; agriculture had increased by a tenth, a ninth, perhaps an eighth in its productions. ”

“ Yet some knowledge of these is required if we are to understand the power exerted by each in the forcible settlement of European questions.
The course of the reform movement in France is related below; the institutions of France are described in the first volume of this History. It remains only to give some account of those internal developments and changes that affected the activity of France as a European power.
In the institutions of France there is little change to record. ”