A Short History of France Part 2

If the Pyrenees were pa.s.sed the very existence of Christendom was threatened. Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, averted this danger when he stayed the infidel flood at the battle of Tours, A.D. 732.

The Merovingian kings, if not devout, were faithful sons of the Church, and when the pope appealed to the last Merovingian king to protect him from the Lombards, near the end of the eighth century, Pepin, then Maire du Palais, but holding supreme power, twice crossed the Alps with an army, wrested five cities and a large extent of territory from the enemies of the pope, which, upon parting, he tossed as a gift into the lap of the Church. And this, known as the _Donation of Pepin_, was the beginning of the temporal power of the popes in Italy. So when Pepin resolved to a.s.sume the crown, Pope Zacharias in grat.i.tude sanctioned the audacious act, by sending his representative to place the symbol of power upon the head of this faithful son and usurper! (A.D. 751.)

But this was only the stepping-stone for a greater elevation. When Pope Adrian I. again needed protection from the Lombard, a greater than Pepin was wearing the crown his father had audaciously s.n.a.t.c.hed.

CHAPTER V.

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

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

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

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

His fertile mind was conceiving a vast design by which he might reign over a resuscitated Roman Empire. In the dual sovereignty of his dream, the pope was to be the spiritual and he the temporal head.

Mutually dependent upon each other, the election of the pope would not be valid without his consent. Nor would the emperor be emperor until crowned by the pope. The Church might use him as a sword, but he would wear the Church as a precious jewel in his crown.

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

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

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

(A.D. 800), the authority of the pope was placed upon una.s.sailable heights, and France had become the centre of a world-wide dominion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Coronation of Charlemagne. From the painting by Levy.]

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

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

Upon the death of Charlemagne, in A.D. 814, the crown and the sceptre of the empire pa.s.sed to his son Louis (the later form of Clovis). This feeble son of Charlemagne, known as Louis the Debonnaire, struggled under the weight of the crumbling ma.s.s until his death in 840. Then Charlemagne's three ambitious grandsons fought for the great inheritance. Lothaire, who claimed the whole by right of primogeniture, was defeated at the battle of Fontenay in Burgundy, and by the treaty of Verdun in 843 the part.i.tion of the empire was consummated; the t.i.tle of emperor pa.s.sing to Lothaire, the eldest, along with Italy and a strip of territory extending to the North Sea, all west of that being arbitrarily called France, and all east of it Germany.

So the European drama was unfolding upon lines entirely unexpected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is easy to conceive that, under such a system, where all the affairs of the realm were adjusted by individual rulers with unlimited power, and where the great barons could make war upon each other without authorization from the king, by the time this nominal head of the entire system was reached there remained nothing for him to do. In fact, there was not left one vestige of kingly authority, and Carlovingian rulers were almost as insignificant as their Merovingian predecessors. France had, instead of one great sovereign, one hundred and fifty petty ones!

In A.D. 911 the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as Normandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and submission to the laws of the realm. Rollo, the disreputable robber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France, his suzerain, and Christian baptism transformed him into respectable, law-abiding Robert, Duke of Normandy.

So, the enemy had become a va.s.sal. The pirate of the North Sea had taken his place among the Christian chivalry of Europe, as one of the twelve peers of France. It was less than a century since the death of Charlemagne, and the office of king had grown almost as helpless as in the period of the _Rois Faineants_. Under the stress of the continuous invasions, by perfectly natural process the central authority had pa.s.sed to the feudal magnates. Many of the feudal states had actually organized into independent governing bodies. The struggle with the Northmen ended, France, dismembered, exhausted, was lying prostrate. A king stripped of every kingly attribute at one extreme of the social system, and a people trampled into the very dust by feudal oppression at the other. Owners of nothing, not even of themselves, they might not fish in the streams, nor hunt in the forests, unless the privilege was bestowed; and with their lives spent in fighting the incessant private wars of their lords, there seemed no room for them in the world, nor for hope in their hearts. With the king effaced, and the people effaced, there remained only bands of feudal barons trying to efface each other!

As in the last days of the Merovingians, light came from an unexpected quarter. The tide turned toward centralization. Robert the Strong, a man of obscure family, who had laid down his life in a very heroic resistance to the Northmen, had won the t.i.tles "Count of Paris" and "Duke of France," which he bequeathed, with the estates attached to them, to his successors.

Somewhat after the manner of the Pepins, this powerful and resourceful family by sheer native ability grasped one after another the sources of power in the state; and in the year 987 the dynasty established by Pepin disappeared, and Hugh Capet, Count of Paris and Abbot, was declared by the Pope of Rome to be "King of France, in virtue of his great deeds." It was the ecclesiastical office of this descendant of Robert the Strong which gave the name to the dynasty that had come to save France a second time from disintegration. Because he was the wearer of the _Chape_, or _Cope_, the name _Chapet_, or _Capet_, became that of the line.

There now commenced a struggle between the antagonistic principles of royalty and aristocracy; a conflict which was going to last nearly five centuries, covering that dreary twilight known as the Dark Ages--a time when, had it not been for the Christian Church and for the torch of the Saracen in Spain, the light of civilization would really have been extinguished, and the slender thread of connection with a great past have been broken.

In the helpless misery existing in France at this time, the Church saw its opportunity. To that silent, humble, forgotten mult.i.tude without life or hope in the world, she offered refuge, peace, consolation, and thus forever bound to her the poor of Christendom; by this means establishing in the end an ecclesiastical dominion to which kings and peerage would be compelled to bow.

If one would know how kings submitted to the authority of the Church at this time, let him read the story of the good King Robert, second in the Capetian line, who for marrying the gentle Bertha, his cousin fourth removed, suffered the punishment of excommunication; was treated as a moral leper in his own palace; cut off from contact with human kind and from sound of human voice; the dishes from which he ate, the clothes he wore, destroyed, until repentant and heart-broken they consented to part and to break the bond of their union forever.

It was the despair in the heart of the nation which gave intensity to the religious instinct at this time. And when pestilence came, and neither rich nor poor could escape, conscience-stricken barons also trembled. A belief began to prevail that the end of the world was at hand. Did not the Book of Revelation say that one thousand years from the birth of Christ the great dragon was to be let loose and the earth was to be destroyed?

As the hour of doom approached, labor ceased, the fields were untouched, and when to pestilence and despair was added famine, then men's hearts failed them even under coats of mail. The Church came to the rescue with the "Truce of G.o.d," which, in the hope of appeasing an avenging G.o.d, forbade private wars during certain periods in the ecclesiastical year. Repentant barons, with a similar hope, made peace with their neighbors, and their swords rusted as they built monasteries and chapels; or some not yet obtaining peace, and perhaps restless with their occupation gone, made pilgrimages to Rome, to pray at the graves of Peter and Paul, and still others even to Jerusalem, that the breath from Calvary might whiten their sin-steeped souls.

It is interesting to note that among these penitent pilgrims, sixty years before the first Crusade, was that Duke of Normandy known as "Robert the Devil," whose pagan ancestor only a century before had been the terror of European civilization, and whose son, thirty years later, was to wear the crown of England.

In this way were the currents setting steadily toward the Holy Sepulchre as the panacea for human woes which were sent by an avenging G.o.d. These were the first stirrings of the breath of the coming storm which in eight successive waves was soon to sweep over Europe. The way was preparing for the great event of the Middle Ages.

Whatever its motives, the abstaining from slaughter, and the building of cathedrals and monasteries and abbeys, was weaving a mantle of beauty for France, which she still proudly wears. And the greatest of the builders was the Duke of Normandy; and it is to his dukedom the art student turns for the most perfect blending of grace and grandeur, characteristic of the early style. The marvel to which this is intended to draw attention is the preeminent position swiftly attained in France by this brilliant race, in every department of living. It would seem that France did not adopt this terrible child from the north, but that he adopted France, and changed and gave color to her whole future. It was a tempestuous element, but it was new life, and it is impossible to conceive of what that country would have been without this stimulating, brilliant infusion into its national life.

With such marvellous facility did this people adopt the speech and manners of their neighbors, that in the year 1066 they were prepared to instruct the Britons in the ways of a more polished civilization. Only a century before the birth of William the Conqueror, his ancestors had lived by looting. They were highwaymen and robbers by profession. His mother, a Norman peasant girl, daughter of a tanner, won the love of that gay duke known as "Robert the Devil." William, the child of this unconsecrated union, upon the death of his father succeeded to the dukedom. One of the steps in the rapid climb of this family of Rollo had been a marriage connecting them with the royal family of England.

King Edward, William's remote cousin, died without an heir. Here was an opportunity. With sixty thousand Norman adventurers like himself, William started with the desperate purpose of invading England and wresting the crown from his cousin Harold.

It was not the first time the Northman had invaded England. But never before had he come bringing a higher civilization, and under the banner of the Church! In a few weeks Harold, last king of the Saxons, was dead, and William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England.