Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0084/00842.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 40KB | 595 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00842}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Europe During The Middle Ages
Notes To Book I: Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Hallam, Henry}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{charles
france
roman
charlemagne
empire
family
franks
son
century
death}
$Date{}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Europe During The Middle Ages
Book:        Book I: The History Of France
Author:      Hallam, Henry

Notes To Book I: Part II

Note VII

     Pepin Heristal was styled Duke of Austrasia, but assumed the mayoralty of
Neustria after his great victory at Testry in 687, which humbled for a long
time the great rival branch of the monarchy.  But he fixed his residence at
Cologne, and his family seldom kept their court at Paris.  The Franks under
Pepin, his son and grandson, "seemed for a second time," says Sismondi, "to
have conquered Gaul; it is a new invasion of the language, the military
spirit, and the manners of Germany, though only recorded by historians as the
victory of the Austrasians over the Neustrians in a civil war.  The chiefs of
the Carlovingian family called themselves, like their predecessors, kings of
the Franks: they appear as legitimate successors of Clovis and his family; yet
all is changed in their spirit and their manners." (Vol. ii. p. 170.)

     This revival of a truly German spirit in the French monarchy had not been
sufficiently indicated by the historians of the eighteenth century. It began
with the fall of Brunehaut, which annihilated the scheme, not peculiar to
herself, but carried on by her with remarkable steadiness, of establishing a
despotism analogous to that of the empire.  The Roman policy expired with her;
Clotaire II. and Dagobert I. were merely kings of barbarians, exercising what
authority they might, but on no settled scheme of absolute power.  Their
successors were unworthy to be mentioned; though in Neustria, through their
mayors of the palace, the royal authority may have been apparently better
maintained than in the eastern portion of the kingdom.  The kingdoms of
Austrasia and Neustria rested on different bases.  In the former the Franks
were more numerous, less scattered, and, as far as we can perceive, had a more
considerable nobility.  They had received a less tincture of Roman policy.
They were nearer to the mother country, which had been, as the earth to
Antaeus, the source of perpetually recruited vigor.  Burgundy, a member
latterly of the Neustrian monarchy, had also a powerful aristocracy, but not
in so great a degree, probably, of Frank, or even barbarian descent.  The
battle of Testry was the second epoch, as the fall of Brunehaut had been the
first, in the restoration of a barbaric supremacy to the kingdom of Clovis;
and the benefices granted by Charles Martel were the third.  It required the
interference of the Holy See, in confirming the throne of the younger Pepin,
and still more the splendid qualities of Charlemagne, to keep up, even for a
time, the royal authority and the dominion of law.  It is highly important to
keep in our minds this distinction between Austrasia and Neustria, subsisting
for some ages, and, in fact, only replaced, speaking without exact
geographical precision, by that of Germany and France.

Note VIII

     The Merovingian period is so briefly touched in the text, as not, I fear,
to be very distinctly apprehended by every reader.  It may assist the memory
to sketch rather a better outline, distributing the period into the following
divisions: -

     I.  The reign of Clovis. - The Frank monarchy is established in Gaul; the
Romans and Visigoths are subdued; Christianity, in its Catholic form, is as
entirely recognized as under the empire; the Franks and Romans, without
greatly intermingling, preserve in the main their separate institutions.

     II.  The reigns of his four sons, till the death of Clotaire I., the
survivor, in 561. - A period of great aggrandizement to the monarchy. Burgundy
and Provence in Gaul itself, Thuringia, Suabia, and Bavaria on the other side
of the Rhine, are annexed to their dominions; while every crime disgraces the
royal line, and in none more than in Clotaire I.

     III.  A second partition among his four sons ensues: the four kingdoms of
Paris, Soissons, Orleans, and Austrasia revive; but a new partition of these
is required by the recent conquests, and Gontran of Orleans, without resigning
that kingdom, removes his residence to Burgundy.  The four kingdoms are
reduced to three by the death of Caribert of Paris; one, afterwards very
celebrated by the name Neustria, ^e between the Scheldt and the Loire, is
formed under Chilperic, comprehending those of Paris and Soissons.  Caribert
of Paris had taken Aquitaine, which at his death was divided among the three
survivors; Austrasia was the portion of Sigebert.  This generation was
fruitful of still more crimes than the last, redeemed by no golden glory of
conquest.  Fredegonde, the wife of Chilperic, diffuses a baleful light over
this period.  But while she tyrannizes with little control in the west of
France, her rival and sister in crime, Brunehaut, wife of Sigebert and mother
of Thierry II., his successor, has to encounter a powerful opposition from the
Austrasian aristocracy; and in this part of the monarchy a new feature
develops itself; the great proprietors, or nobility, act systematically with a
view to restrain the royal power.  Brunehaut, after many vicissitudes, and
after having seen her two sons on the thrones of Austrasia and Burgundy, falls
into the hands of Clotaire II., king of the other division, and is sentenced
to a cruel death.  Clotaire unites the three Frank kingdoms.

[Footnote e: Neustria, or Western France, is first mentioned in a diploma of
Childebert, with the date of 558.  But the genuineness of this has been
denied: the word never occurs in the history of Gregory of Tours, as I find by
the index; and M. Lehuerou seems to think that it was not much used till after
the death of Brunehaut, in 613.]

     IV.  Reigns of Clotaire II. and his son Dagobert I. - The royal power,
though shaken by the Austrasian aristocracy, is still effective. Dagobert, a
prince who seems to have rather excelled most of his family, and to whose
munificence several extant monuments of architecture and the arts are
referred, endeavors to stem the current.  He was the last of the Merovingians
who appears to have possessed any distinctive character; the Insensati follow.
After the reign of Dagobert most of the provinces beyond the Loire fall off,
as it may be said, from the monarchy, and hardly belong to it for a century.

     V.  The fifth period begins with the accession of Clovis II., son of
Dagobert, in 638, and terminates with Pepin Heristal's victory over the
Neustrians at Testry, in 687.  It is distinguished by the apparent equality of
the two remaining kingdoms, Burgundy having now fallen into that of Neustria,
and by the degradation of the royal line, in each alike, into puppets of the
mayors of the palace.  It is, in Austrasia, the triumph of the aristocracy,
among whom the bishops are still more prominent than before.  Ebroin holds the
mayoralty of Neustria with an unsteady command; but in Austrasia the
progenitors of Pepin Heristal grow up for two generations in wealth and power,
till he becomes the acknowledged chief of that part of the kingdom, bearing
the title of duke instead of mayor, and by the battle of Testry puts an end to
the independence of Neustria.

     VI.  From this time the family of Pepin is virtually sovereign in France,
though at every vacancy kings of the royal house are placed by them on the
throne.  Charles Martel, indeed, son of Pepin, is not acknowledged, even in
Austrasia, for a short time after his father's death, and Neustria attempts to
regain her independence; but he is soon called to power, defeats, like his
father, the western Franks, and becomes, in almost as great a degree as his
grandson, the founder of a new monarchy.  So completely is he recognized as
sovereign, though not with the name of king, that he divides France, as an
inheritance, among his three sons.  But soon one only, Pepin the Short, by
fortune or desert, becomes possessor of this goodly bequest.  In 752 the new
dynasty acquires a legal name by the coronation of Pepin.

Note IX

     The true cause, M. Michelet observes (Hist. de France, ii. 39), of the
Saxon wars, which had begun under Charles Martel, and were in some degree
defensive on the part of the Franks, was the ancient antipathy of race,
enhanced by the growing tendency to civilized habits among the latter.  This,
indeed, seems sufficient to account for the conflict, without any national
antipathy.  It was that which makes the Red Indian perceive an enemy in the
Anglo-American, and the Australian savage in the Englishman.  The Saxons, in
their deep forests and scantily cultivated plains, could not bear fixed
boundaries of land.  Their gau was indefinite; the mansus was certain; it
annihilated the barbarian's only method of combining liberty with possession
of land, - the right of shifting his occupancy. ^f It is not probable, from
subsequent events, that the Saxons held very tenaciously by their religion;
but when Christianity first offered itself, it came in the train of a
conqueror. Nor could Christianity, according at least to the ecclesiastical
system, be made compatible with such a state of society as the German in that
age. Hence the Saxons endeavored to burn the first churches, thus drawing
retaliation on their own idols.

[Footnote f: Michelet refers to Grimm, who is excellent authority.  The Saxons
are likely to have maintained the old customs of the age of Tacitus longer
than German tribes on the Rhine and Main.]

     The first apostles of Germany were English; and of these the most
remarkable was St. Boniface.  But this had been in the time of Charles Martel
and Pepin.  The labors of these missionaries were chiefly in Thuringia,
Franconia, and Bavaria, and were rewarded with great success. But we may here
consider them only in their results on the Frank monarchy. Those parts of
Germany had long been subject to Austrasia, but, except so far as they
furnished troops, scarcely formed an integrant portion of that kingdom.  The
subjection of a heathen tribe is totally different from that of a Christian
province.  With the Church came churches, and for churches there must be
towns, and for towns a magistracy, and for magistracy, law and the means of
enforcing it.  How different was the condition of Bavaria or Hesse in the
ninth century from that of the same countries in the seventh!  Not outlying
appendages to the Austrasian monarchy, hardly counted among its subjects, but
capable of standing by themselves, as co-ordinate members of the empire, an
equipoise to France herself, full of populous towns, wealthy nobles and
prelates, better organized and more flourishing states than their neighbors on
the left side of the Rhine. Charlemagne founded eight bishoprics in Saxony,
and distributed the country into dioceses.

Note X

     The project of substituting a Frank for a Byzantine sovereign was by no
means new in 800.  Gregory II., by a letter to Charles Martel in 741, had
offered to renounce his allegiance to the empire, placing Rome under the
protection of the French chief, with the title of consul or senator. The
immediate government he doubtless meant to keep in the hands of the Holy See.
He supplicated, at the same time, for assistance against the Lombards, which
was the principal motive for this offer.  Charles received the proposal with
pleasure, but his death ensued before he had time to take any steps towards
fulfilling so glorious a destiny.  When Charlemagne acquired the rank of
Patrician at Rome in 789, we may consider this as a part performance of
Gregory II.'s engagement, and the supreme authority was virtually in the hands
of the king of the Franks; but the renunciation of allegiance toward the Greek
empire had never positively taken place, and there are said to have been some
tokens of recognition of its nominal sovereignty almost to the end of the
century.

     It is contended by Sir F. Palgrave that Charlemagne was chosen by the
Romans as lawful successor of Constantine V., whom his mother Irene had
dethroned in 795, the usage of the empire having never admitted a female
sovereign.  And for this he quotes two ancient chronicles, one of which,
however, appears to have been copied from the other.  It is indeed true, which
he omits to mention, that Leo III. had a singular scheme of a marriage between
Charles and Irene, which would for a time have united the empire.  The
proposal was actually made, but prudently rejected by the Greek lady.

     It remains nevertheless to be shown by what right Leo III., cum omni
Christiano populo, that is, the priests and populace of degenerate Rome, could
dispose of the entire empire, or affect to place a stranger on the throne of
Constantinople; for if Charles were the successor of Constantine V., we must
draw this conclusion.  Rome, we should keep in mind, was not a jot more
invested with authority than any other city; the Greek capital had long taken
her place; and in every revolution of new Rome, the decrepit mother had
without hesitation obeyed.  Nor does it seem to me exceedingly material, if
the case be such, that Charlemagne was not styled emperor of the West, or
successor of Augustulus.  It is evident that his empire, relatively to that of
the Greeks, was western; and we do not find that either he or his family ever
claimed an exclusive right to the imperial title.  The pretension would have
been diametrically opposed both to prescriptive right and actual possession.
He wrote to the emperor Nicephorus, successor of Irene, as fraternitas vestra;
but it is believed that the Greeks never recognized the title of a western
barbarian.  In a later age, indeed, some presumed to reckon the emperor of
Constantinople among kings.  A writer of the fourteenth century says, in
French: - "Or devez savoir qu'il ne doit estre sur terre qu'un seul empereur,
combien que celui de Constantinople estime estre seul empereur; mais non est,
il n'est fors seulement qu'un roy." (Ducange, voc. Imperator, which is worth
consulting.) The kings of France and Castile, as well as our own Anglo-Saxon
monarchs in the tenth century, and even those of Bulgaria, sometimes assumed
the imperial title.  But the Anglo-Saxon preferred that of Basileus, which was
also a Byzantine appellation.

     The probable design of Charlemagne, in accepting the title of emperor,
was not only to extend his power as far as possible in Italy, but to invest it
with a sort of sacredness and prescriptive dignity in the eyes of his
barbarian subjects.  These had been accustomed to hear of emperors as
something superior to kings; they were themselves fond of pompous titles, and
the chancery of the new Augustus soon borrowed the splendid ceremonial of the
Byzantine court.  His councillors approached him on their knees, and kissed
his feet.  Yet it does not appear from history that his own royal power,
certainly very considerable before, was much enhanced after it became
imperial.  He still took the advice, and legislated with the consent, of his
leudes and bishops; in fact, he continued to be a German, not a Roman,
sovereign.  In the reign of his family this prevalence of the Teutonic element
in the Carlovingian polity became more and more evident; the bishops
themselves, barbarian in origin and in manners, cannot be reckoned in the
opposite scale.

     This was a second failure of the attempt, or at least the scheme, of
governing barbarians upon a Roman theory.  The first had been tried by the
sons of Clovis and the high-spirited Visigoth Brunehaut.  But the associations
of Roman authority with the imperial name were too striking to be lost
forever; they revived again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the
civil law, and gained strength with the Ghibelin faction in Italy.  Even in
France and England, as many think, they were by no means ineffectual; though
it was necessary to substitute the abstract principle of royalty for the Lex
Regia of the Roman empire.

Note XI

     A question of the utmost importance had been passed over in the elevation
of Charlemagne to the imperial title.  It was that of hereditary succession.
No allusion, as far as I have found, was made to this in the irregular act by
which the pope, with what he called the Roman people, transferred their
allegiance from Constantinople to Aix-la-Chapelle.  It was indeed certain that
the empire had not only passed for hereditary from the time of Augustus, but
ever since that of Diocletian had been partible among the imperial family at
the will of the possessor.  Yet the whole proceeding was so novel, and the
pretensions of the Holy See implied in it so indefinite, that some might doubt
whether Charles had acquired, along with the rank of imperator, its ancient
prerogatives.  There was also a momentous consideration, how far his Frank
subjects, accustomed latterly to be consulted on royal succession, with their
rights of election, within the limits of the family, positively recognized at
the accession of Pepin, and liable to become jealous of Roman theories of
government, would acquiesce in a simple devolution of the title on the eldest
born as his legal birthright.  In the first prospective arrangement,
accordingly, which Charles made for the succession, that at Thionville, in
806, a partition among his three sons was designed, with the largest share
reserved for the eldest.  But though Italy, by which he meant, as he tells us,
Lombardy, was given to one of the younger, care is taken by a description of
the boundaries to exclude Rome itself, as well as the whole exarchate of
Ravenna, become, by Pepin's donation, the patrimony of St. Peter; nor is there
the least allusion to the title of emperor.  Are we to believe that he
relinquished the eternal city to its bishop, though styling himself, in this
very instrument, Romani rector imperii, and having literally gained not
another inch of territory by that dignity?  It is surely more probable that he
reserved the sovereignty over Rome, to be annexed to the rank of emperor
whenever he should obtain that for his eldest son.  And on the death of this
son, and of his next brother, some years afterwards, the whole succession
devolving on Louis the Debonair, Charlemagne presented this prince to the
great Placitum of the nobles and bishops at Aix-la-Chapelle in 813, requesting
them to name him king and emperor.  No reference was made to the pope for his
approbation; and thus the German principle of sovereignty gained a decisive
victory over the Roman.  If some claim of the pope to intermeddle with the
empire was intimated at the coronation of Louis at Rheims by Stephen II. in
816, which does not seem certain, it could only have been through the pope's
knowledge of the personal submissiveness to ecclesiastical power which was the
misfortune of that prince.  He had certainly borne the imperial title from his
father's death.

     In the division projected by Louis in 817, to take place on his death,
and approved by an assembly at Aix, a considerable supremacy was reserved for
the future emperor; he was constituted, in effect, a sort of suzerain, without
whose consent the younger brothers could do nothing important.  Thus the
integrity of the empire was maintained, which had been lost in the scheme of
Charlemagne in 806.  But M. Fauriel (vol. iv. p. 83) reasonably suspects an
ecclesiastical influence in suggesting this measure of 817, which was an overt
act of the Roman, or imperial, against the barbarian party.  If the latter
consented to this in 817, it was probably either because they did not
understand it, or because they trusted to setting it aside.  And, as is well
known, the course of events soon did this for them.  "It is indisputable,"
says Ranke, "that the order of succession to the throne, which Louis the
Pious, in utter disregard of the warnings of his faithful adherents, and in
opposition to all German modes of thinking, established in the year 817, was
principally brought about by the influence of the clergy." (Hist. of
Reformation, Mrs. Austin's translation, vol. i. p. 9.) He attributes the
concurrence of that order, in the subsequent revolt against Louis, to the
endeavors he had made to deviate from the provisions of 819 in favor of his
youngest son, Charles the Bald.

Note XII

     The second period of Carlovingian history, or that which elapsed from the
reign of Charles the Bald to the accession of Hugh Capet, must be reckoned the
transitional state, through scenes of barbarous anarchy, from the artificial
scheme devised by Charlemagne, in which the Roman and German elements of civil
policy were rather in conflict than in union to a new state of society - the
feudal, which, though pregnant itself with great evil, was the means both of
preserving the frame of European policy from disintegration, and of
elaborating the moral and constitutional principles upon which it afterwards
rested.

     This period exhibits, upon the whole, a failure of the grand endeavor
made by Charlemagne for the regeneration of his empire.  This proceeded very
much from the common chances of hereditary succession, especially when not
counterbalanced by established powers independent of it.  Three of his name,
Charles the Bald, the Fat, and the Simple, had time to pull down what the
great legislator and conqueror had erected.  Encouraged by their pusillanimity
and weakness, the nobility strove to revive the spirit of the seventh century.
They entered into a coalition with the bishops, though Charles the Bald had
often sheltered himself behind the crosier; and they compelled his son, Louis
the Stammerer, not only to confirm their own privileges and those of the
Church, but to style himself "King, by the grace of God and election of the
people;" which, indeed, according to the established constitution, was no more
than truth, since the absolute right to succession was only in the family.
The inability of the crown to protect its subjects from their invaders
rendered this assumption of aristocratic independence absolutely necessary.
In this age of agony, Sismondi well says, the nation began to revive; new
social bodies sprang from the carcass of the great empire.  France, so
defenceless under the Bald and the Fat Charleses, bristled with castles before
930.  She renewed the fable of Deucalion; she sowed stones, and armed men rose
out of them. The lords surrounded themselves with vassals; and had not the
Norman incursions ceased before, they would have met with a much more
determined resistance than in the preceding century.  (Hist. des Francais,
iii. 2I8, 378; iv. 9)

     Notwithstanding the weakness of the throne, the promise of the Franks to
Pepin, that they would never elect a king out of any other family, though
broken on two or three occasions in the tenth century, seems to have retained
its hold upon the nation, so that an hereditary right in his house was felt as
a constitutional sentiment, until experience and necessity overcame it.  The
first interruption to this course was at the election of Eudes, on the death
of Charles the Fat, in 888.  Charles the Simple, son of Carloman, a prince
whose short and obscure reign over France had ended in 884, being himself the
only surviving branch, in a legitimate line, of the imperial house (for the
frequent deaths of those princes without male issue is a remarkable and
important circumstance), was an infant three years old.  The kingdom was
devastated by the Normans (whom it was just beginning to resist with somewhat
more energy than for the last half-century; and Eudes, a man of considerable
vigor, possessed several counties in the best parts of France.  The nation had
no alternative but to choose him for their king.  Yet, when Charles attained
the age of fifteen, a numerous party supported his claim to the throne, which
he would probably have substantiated, if the disparity of abilities between
the competitors had been less manifest.  Eudes, at his death, is said to have
recommended Charles to his own party; and it is certain that he succeeded
without opposition.  His own weak character, however, exposing him to fresh
rebellion, Robert, brother of Eudes, and his son-in-law Rodolph, became kings
of France; that is, we find their names in the royal list, and a part of the
kingdom acknowledged their sovereignty.  But the south stood off altogether,
and Charles preserved the allegiance of the northeastern provinces.  Robert,
in fact, who was killed one year after his partisans had proclaimed him, seems
to have no great pretensions, de facto any more than de jure, to be reckoned
at all; nor does any historian give the appellation of Robert II. to the son
of Hugh Capet.  The father of Hugh Capet, Hugh the Great, son of Robert and
nephew of Eudes, being Count of Paris and Orleans, who had bestowed the crown
on his brother-in-law Rodolph of Burgundy, instead of wearing it himself, paid
such deference to the prejudices of at least the majority of the nation in
favor of the house of Charlemagne, that he procured the election of Louis IV.,
son of Charles the Simple, a boy of thirteen years, and then an exile in
England; from which circumstances he has borne the name of Outremer.  And
though he did not reign without some opposition from his powerful vassal, he
died in possession of the crown, and transmitted it to be worn by his son
Lothaire, and his grandson Louis V.  It was on the death of this last young
man that Hugh Capet thought it time to set aside the rights of Charles, the
late king's uncle, and call himself king, with no more national consent than
the prelates and barons who depended on him might afford, principally, it
seems, through the adherence of Adalberon, archbishop of Rheims, a city in
which the kings were already wont to receive the crown.  Such is the national
importance which a merely local privilege may sometimes bestow.  Even the
voice of the capital, regular or tumultuous, which in so many revolutions has
determined the obedience of a nation, may be considered as little more than a
local superiority.

     A writer distinguished among living historians, M. Thierry, has found a
key to all the revolutions of two centuries in the antipathy of the Romans -
that is, the ancient inhabitants - to the Franks or Germans.  The latter were
represented by the house of Charlemagne; the former by that of Robert the
Brave, through its valiant descendants, Eudes, Robert, and Hugh the Great.
And this theory of races, to which M. Thierry is always partial, and recurs on
many occasions, has seemed to the judicious and impartial Guizot the most
satisfactory of all that have been devised to elucidate the Carlovingian
period, though he does not embrace it to its full extent.  (Hist. de la
Civilisation en France, Lecon 24.) Sismondi (vol. iii. p. 58) had said in
1821, what he had probably written as early as M. Thierry: "La guerre entre
Charles et ses deux freres fut celle des peuples romains, des Gaules qui
rejetaient le joug germanique; la querelle insignifiante des rois fut soutenue
avec ardeur, parce qu'elle s'unissait a la querelle des peuples; et tous ces
prejuges hostiles qui s'attachent toujours aux differences des langues et des
moeurs, donnerent de la constance et de l'acharnement aux combattans." This
relates, indeed, to an earlier period, but still to the same conflict of races
which M. Thierry has taken as the basis of the resistance made by the
Neustrian provinces to the later Carlovingians.  Thierry finds a similar
contest in the wars of Louis the Debonair.  In this he is compelled to suppose
that the Neustrian Franks fell in with the Gauls, among whom they lived.  But
it may well be doubted whether the distinction of Frank descent, and
consequently of national supremacy, was obliterated in the first part of the
ninth century.  The name of Franci was always applied to the whole people; the
kings are always reges Francorum; so that we might in some respects rather say
that the Gauls or Romans had been merged in the dominant races than the
reverse.  Wealth, also, and especially that springing from hereditary
benefices, was chiefly in the hands of the barbarians; they alone, as is
generally believed, so long as the distinction of personal law subsisted, were
summoned to county or national assemblies; they perhaps retained, in the reign
of Louis the Debonair, though we cannot speak decisively as to this, their
original language.  It has been observed that the famous oath in the Romance
language, pronounced by Louis of Germany at the treaty of Strasburg, in 842,
and addressed to the army of his brother Charles the Bald, bears more traces
of the southern, or Provencal, than of the northern dialect; and it is
probable that the inhabitants of the southern provinces, whatever might have
been the origin of their ancestors, spoke no other.  This would not be
conclusive as to the Neustrian Franks.  But this is a disputable question.

     A remarkable presumption of the superiority still retained by the Franks
as a nation, even in the south of France, may be drawn from the Placitum, at
Carcassonne, in 918.  (Vaissette, Hist. de Languedoc, vol. ii. Append. p. 56;
Meyer, Institutions Judiciaires, vol. i. p. 419.) In this we find named six
Roman, four Gothic, and eight Salian judges.  It is certain that these judges
could not have been taken relatively to the population of the three races in
that part of France.  Does it not seem most probable that the Franks were
still reckoned the predominant people? Probably, however, the personal
distinction, founded on difference of laws, expired earlier in Neustria; not
that the Franks fell into the Roman jurisprudence, but that the original
natives adopted the feudal customs.

     This specious theory of hostile races, in order to account for the
downfall of the Carlovingian, or Austrasian, dynasty, has not been unanimously
received, especially in the extent to which Thierry has urged it.  M. Gaudet,
the French editor of Richer (a contemporary historian, whose narrative of the
whole period, from the accession of Eudes to the death of Hugh Capet, is
published by Pertz in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, vol. iii., and
contains a great quantity of new and interesting facts, especially from A.D.
966 to 987), appeals to this writer in contradiction of the hypothesis of M.
Thierry.  The appeal, however, is not solely upon his authority, since the
leading circumstances were sufficiently known; and, to say the truth, I think
that more has been made of Richer's testimony in this particular view than it
will bear.  Richer belonged to a monastery at Rheims, and his father had been
a man of some rank in the confidence of Louis IV. and Lothaire.  He had,
therefore, been nursed in respect for the house of Charlemagne, though, with
deference to his editor, I do not perceive that he displays any repugnance to
the change of dynasty.

     Though the differences of origin and language, so far as they existed,
might be by no means unimportant in the great revolution near the close of the
tenth century, they cannot be relied upon as sufficiently explaining its
cause.  The partisans of either family were not exclusively of one blood.  The
house of Capet itself was not of Roman, but probably of Saxon descent.  The
difference of races had been much effaced after Charles the Bald, but it is to
be remembered that the great beneficiaries, the most wealthy and potent
families in Neustria or France, were of barbarian origin.  One people, so far
as we can distinguish them, was by far the more numerous; the other, of more
influence in political affairs. The personal distinction of law, however,
which had been the test of descent, appears not to have been preserved in the
north of France much after the ninth century; and the Roman, as has been said
above, had yielded to the barbaric element - to the feudal customs.  The
Romance language, on the other hand, had obtained a complete ascendency; and
that not only in Neustria, or the parts west of the Somme, but throughout
Picardy, Champagne, and part of Flanders.  But if we were to suppose that
these regions were still in some way more Teutonic in sentiment than Neustria,
we certainly could not say the same of those beyond the Loire. Aquitaine and
Languedoc, almost wholly Roman, to use the ancient word, or French, as they
might now be called, among whose vine-covered hills the barbarians of the
Lower Rhine had hardly formed a permanent settlement, or, having done so, had
early cast off the slough of their rude manners, had been the scenes of a long
resistance to the Merovingian dynasty.  The tyranny of Childeric and Clotaire,
the barbarism of the Frank invaders, had created an indelible hatred of their
yoke.  But they submitted without reluctance to the more civilized government
of Charlemagne, and displayed a spontaneous loyalty towards his line.  Never
did they recognize, at least without force, the Neustrian usurpers of the
tenth century, or date their legal instruments, in truth the chief sign of
subjection that they gave, by any other year than that of the Carlovingian
sovereign.  If Charles the Simple reaped little but this nominal allegiance
from his southern subjects, he had the satisfaction to reflect that they owned
no one else.

     But a rapacious aristocracy had pressed so hard on the weakness of
Charles the Bald and his descendants that, the kingdom being wholly parcelled
in great fiefs, they had not the resources left to reward self-interested
services as before, nor to resist a vassal far superior to themselves.  Laon
was much behind Paris in wealth and populousness, and yet even the two
capitals were inadequate representatives of the proportionate strength of the
king and the count.  Power, as simply taken, was wholly on one side; yet on
the other was prejudice, or rather an abstract sense of hereditary right, and
this sometimes became a source of power.  But the long greatness of one
family, its manifest influence over the succession to the throne, the
conspicuous men whom it produced in Eudes and Hugh the Great, had silently
prepared the way for a revolution, neither unnatural nor premature, nor in any
way dangerous to the public interests.  It is certainly probable that the
Neustrian French had come to feel a greater sympathy with the house of Capet
than with a line of kings who rarely visited their country, and whom they
could not but contemplate as in some adverse relation to their natural and
popular chiefs.  But the national voice was not greatly consulted in those
ages.  It is remarkable that several writers of the nineteenth century,
however they may sometimes place the true condition of the people in a vivid
light, are constantly relapsing into a democratic theory.  They do not by any
means underrate the oppressed and almost servile condition of the peasantry
and burgesses, when it is their aim to draw a picture of society; yet in
reasoning on a political revolution, such as the decline and fall of the
German dynasty, they ascribe to these degraded classes both the will and the
power to effect it.  The proud nationality which spurned a foreign line of
princes could not be felt by an impoverished and afflicted commonalty.  Yet
when M. Thierry alludes to the rumor that the family of Capet was sprung from
the commons (some said, as we read in Dante, from a butcher), he adds, -
"Cette opinion, qui se conserva durant plusierus siecles, ne fut pas nuisible
a sa cause," - as if there had been as effective a tiers-etat in 987 as 800
years afterward.  If, however, we are meant only to seek this sentiment among
the nobles of France, I fear that self-interest, personal attachments, and a
predominant desire of maintaining their independence against the crown, were
motives far more in operation than the wish to hear the king speak French
instead of German.

     It seems, upon the whole, that M. Thierry's hypothesis, countenanced as
it is by M. Guizot, will not afford a complete explanation of the history of
France between Charles the Fat and Hugh Capet.  The truth is, that the
accidents of personal character have more to do with the revolutions of
nations than either philosophical historians or democratic politicians like to
admit.  If Eudes and Hugh the Great had been born in the royal line, they
would have preserved far better the royal power.  If Charles the Simple had
not raised too high a favorite of mean extraction, he might have retained the
nobles of Lorraine and Champagne in their fidelity.  If Adalberon, archbishop
of Rheims, had been loyal to the house of Charlemagne, that of Capet would
not, at least so soon, have ascended the throne.  If Louis V. had lived some
years, and left a son to inherit the lineal right, the more precarious claim
of his uncle would not have undergone a disadvantageous competition with that
of a vigorous usurper. M. Gaudet has well shown, in his notice on Richer, that
the opposition of Adalberon to Charles of Lorraine was wholly on personal
grounds.  No hint is given of any national hostility; but whatever of national
approbation was given to the new family, and doubtless in Neustrian France it
was very prevalent, must rather be ascribed to their own reputation than to
any peculiar antipathy toward their competitor.  Hugh Capet, it is recorded,
never wore the crown, though styling himself king, and took care to procure,
in an assembly held in Paris, the election of his son Robert to succeed him;
an example which was followed for several reigns.

     A late Belgian writer, M. Gerard, in a spirited little work, "La Barbarie
Franque et la Civilisation Romaine" (Bruxelles, 1845), admitting the theory of
the conflict of races, indignantly repels the partisans of what has been
called the Roman element.  Thierry, Michelet, and even Guizot, are classed by
him as advocates of a corrupted race of degenerate provincials, who called
themselves Romans, endeavoring to set up their pretended civilization against
the free and generous spirit of the barbarians from whom Europe has derived
her proudest inheritance. Avoiding the aristocratic arrogance of
Boulainvilliers, and laughing justly at the pretensions of modern French
nobles, if any such there are, which I disbelieve, who vaunt their descent as
an order from the race of Franks, he bestows his admiration on the old
Austrasian portion of the monarchy, to which, as a Belgian, he belongs.  But
in his persuasion that the two races were in distinct opposition to each
other, and have continued so ever since, he hardly falls short of Michelet.

     I will just add to this long note a caution to the reader, that it
relates only to the second period of the Carlovingian kings, that from 888 to
987.  In the reigns of Louis the Debonair and Charles the Bald I do not deny
that the desire for the separation of the empire was felt on both sides.  But
this separation was consummated at Verdun in 843, except that, the kingdom of
Lorraine being not long afterward dismembered, a small portion of the modern
Belgium fell into that of France.