The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of France Part 2

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.

The vast fabric pa.s.sed with himself; was gone like a shadow when he was gone. The unity of the Empire was buried in the grave of its founder.

In twenty-nine years (by the treaty of Verdun) three kingdoms emerged from the crumbling ma.s.s. France, Italy, Germany, already separated by race repulsions, had taken up each a distinct national existence, the Imperial crown remaining with Germany.

And France--France, the centre of this dream of unity, with her native incohesiveness, and in the irony of fate, had broken into no less than 59 fragments, loosely held together by one Carlovingian King.

CHAPTER V.

I think that it was Lincoln who said that "the Lord must like common people, because he had 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 their 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, with every aspiration thwarted, hope stifled, that 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, that by the time this nominal head of the entire system was reached, there was 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, 150 petty ones!

In 911 A.D. 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.

With marvellous facility this people took on the language and manners of their neighbors, and in a century and a half were prepared to instruct the Britons in a higher civilization.

I think it is one hundred years of respectability that is required by a certain aristocratic club for admission to its membership. The blood does not acquire the proper shade of azure until it has flowed in the full light of day for at least three generations. Decidedly, William the Conqueror, first Norman King of England, could not have been admitted to this club.

A century before his birth, his ancestors had lived by looting their neighbors. They were highwaymen, robbers, by profession. And, to increase his ineligibility, his mother, a pretty Norman peasant girl, daughter of a tanner, had ensnared the affections of that pleasant Duke of Normandy, known as "Robert the Devil."

William, the fruit of this unconsecrated union, became in time Duke of Normandy. With that reversion to ancestral types to which scientists tell us we are all liable, he seems to have looked across the Channel toward England, with an awakening of his robber-instincts. In a few weeks, Harold, the last King of the Saxons, lay dead at his feet, and William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England.

Then was presented the curious anomaly of an English sovereign who was also ruler of a French province; an English king who was va.s.sal to the King of France. A door was thus opened (1066 A.D.) through which entered entangling complications and countless woes in the future.

If Charlemagne had worn the Church as a precious jewel in his crown in the ninth century, the Church now in the eleventh century wore all the European states, a tiara of jewels in her mitre. The centre of dominion had pa.s.sed from the Empire of Germany to Rome, when Henry IV.

prostrated himself barefooted before Gregory VII. at Canossa in 1072.

The Church was at its zenith. As a political system it was unrivalled; but its triumphs brought little joy to the earnest souls still clinging to the ideals of primitive Christianity. But what availed it for Abelard to lead an intellectual revolt against corrupted beliefs in the North, or the Albigenses a spiritual one in the South? He was silenced and immured for life, while the unhappy inhabitants of Languedoc were ma.s.sacred and almost exterminated, and an inquisition, established at Toulouse, made sure that heretical germs should not again spread from that infected centre.

But however imperfect the religious sentiment of the time, however it may have departed from the simple precepts of its founder, its power to sway the hearts and lives of the people may be judged from the extraordinary movement started in France in the twelfth century.

How inconceivable, in this practical age, that Europe should three times have emptied her choicest and best into Asia for a sentiment!

Business suspended, private interests sacrificed or forgotten, life, treasure, all eagerly given--for what? That a small bit of territory, a thousand miles away, be torn from profaning infidels, because of its sacred a.s.sociations, because it was the birthplace of a religion whose meaning seems to have escaped them--a religion which they wore on their battle-flags, but not in their hearts. How would a barefooted, rope-girdled monk, however inspired and eloquent, fare to-day in New York, or London, or Paris?

History has no stranger chapter than that of the Crusades. When Peter the Hermit pictured the desecration of the Holy Land by Mohammedans, all cla.s.ses in France, from King to serf, were for the first time moved by a common sentiment, and poured life and treasure with pa.s.sionate zeal into those streams which three times inundated Palestine.

The order of Knights Templar had been created, and a splendid ideal of manhood held up before the French nation, and now the knightly ideal, side by side with the Christian and the romantic ideal, entered into the life of the people. Romance, song, poetry, eloquence came into being from a sort of spiritual baptism, and France began to wear the mantle of beauty which was to be her chief glory in the future.

But future France was not clad in coat of mail in the twelfth century.

She was lying helpless, beneath the ma.s.s of feudal trappings. Her time was not yet.

CHAPTER VI.

Like all oppressive systems, feudalism bore within itself the seeds of its own destruction. When the King, shorn of prerogative and of dignity, made alliance with the people lying in helpless misery beneath the mailed surface, the system was rudely shaken. When artisans flocked to the free cities enjoying especial immunities and privileges from the King, and by skill and industry ama.s.sed fortunes, the _commune_ and the _bourgeoisie_ were created, and feudalism was stricken to its centre. When spendthrift n.o.bles and needy barons mortgaged their estates, the end was not far off. And when in 1302 the "_tiers etat_" entered the States-General as a legitimate order of the Government, the very foundations were crumbling, and it needed but the final _coup de grace_ given by Charles VII. in the fifteenth century, when he established a standing army under the control of the King.

When this was done, the feudal system was relegated to the region of the obsolete.

It was well for that sovereign that he could do something to save his name from the obloquy attached to it on account of his base desertion of Joan of Arc, to whom he owed his throne and his kingdom.

From the moment when a French province was attached to the crown of England, the dream of that nation was the conquest of France.

Generations came and went, one dynasty replaced another, and still the struggle continued; France sometimes seeming near to dominion over England, and England always believing it was her destiny to bring France under the rule of an English sovereign.

A glamour of romance is thrown over history by the royal marriages which occur in dazzling profusion. It seems to have been the custom, whenever a peace was concluded in Europe, to cement it with a royal marriage, and to throw in a princess as a sacrifice,--one of the conditions of almost every treaty being that a royal daughter, or sister, or niece, should be tossed across the Channel, or into Germany, or Italy, or Spain, an unwilling bride thrown into the arms of a reluctant bridegroom; with the result that in the succeeding generation there was a plentiful sprinkling of heirs with claims, more or less shadowy, to the neighboring thrones. This was the source, or rather pretext, for most of the wars between France and England for four hundred years.

In the early part of the fifteenth century the great crisis arrived.

With that lack of unity which seemed a fatal Gallic inheritance, France broke into civil war, while an invading English army was in the heart of her kingdom. England's dream was near realization.

An insane King, a vicious intriguing Queen-Regent, the Duke of Burgundy madly jealous of the Duke of Orleans, and both ready to sacrifice France in the rage of disappointed ambition,--such were the elements.

England's opportunity had come.

The depraved Queen Isabella, acting for her insane husband, held conference with Henry V., and actually concluded a treaty bestowing the regency upon the English King. There was the usual douceur of a princess thrown in, and Katharine, the daughter of Isabella, and sister to the Dauphin (the future King Charles VII.), was espoused by King Henry V. of England, who set up a royal court at Vincennes.

The fortunes of the kingdom had never been so desperate. The people saw in these insolent traitorous dukes their natural enemy; in the King, their friend and protector. Had not monarchy given them life and hope? It was to them sacred next to Heaven. They rose in an outburst of patriotism. The young Dauphin was hastily and informally crowned, and thousands flocked to his standard. It was the King and the people against the great va.s.sals, the last struggle of an expiring feudalism.

Desperation lent fury to the conflict which was, upon both sides, a fight for existence; the Queen-mother in unnatural alliance with the Duke of Burgundy, who was resolved to rule or ruin.

He soon saw that defeat was inevitable, and, preferring infamy, threw himself into the hands of the English, offering to turn the kingdom over to the infant King Henry VI. (Henry V. having died).

Charles abandoned hope; how could he struggle against such a combination? He was considering whether he should find refuge in Spain or in Scotland, when the tide of events was turned by the strangest romance in history.

It must ever remain a mystery that a peasant girl, a child in years and in experience, should have believed herself called to such a mission; conferring only with her heavenly guides or "voices," that she should have sought the King, inspired him with faith in her, and in himself and his cause, reanimated the courage of the army, and led it herself to victory absolute and complete; and then, compelling the half-reluctant, half-doubting Charles to go with her to Rheims, where she had him anointed and consecrated, this simple child in that day bestowed upon him a kingdom, and upon France a King!

Was there ever a stranger chapter in history! Alas, if it could have ended here, and she could have gone back to her mother and her spinning and her simple pleasures, as she was always longing to do when her work should be done. But no! we see her falling into the hands of the defeated and revengeful English--this child, who had wrested from them a kingdom already in their grasp. She was turned over to the French ecclesiastical court to be tried. A sorceress and a blasphemer they p.r.o.nounce her, and pa.s.s her on to the secular authorities, and her sentence is--death.

We see the poor defenceless girl, bewildered, terrified, wringing her hands and declaring her innocence as she rides to execution. G.o.d and man had abandoned her. No heavenly voice spoke, no miracle intervened as her young limbs were tied to the stake and the f.a.gots and straw piled up about her. The torch was applied, and her pure soul mounted heavenward in a column of flames.

Rugged men wept. A Burgundian general said, as he turned gloomily away, "We have murdered a saint."