The Toulousain, although it is altogether of the south, is a different sort of country from the Mediterranean slope. In the first place it is not a mere strip of land between sea and mountains, but a broad, fan-shaped arrangement of valleys running together in the general neighbourhood of Toulouse, and separated only by ridges or downs regular in outline and no great height. As on the Mediterranean side the ground is minutely and intensely cultivated; still one sees more trees and shrubs growing freely, although by no means as many as in Northern and Central France. The type of cultivation, too, is different. One no longer sees the olive, and the vineyards are outnumbered by grain fields. Furthermore, it is not the valleys alone that are cultivated, the flat or gently rolling summits of the downs are worked as well.
Although the people are the same, their houses are different from those of the Mediterranean in that their material is brick. Indeed, one sees no masses of rock in the Toulousain, and the bits of stone in the larger buildings are brought from outside the district.
In spite of these physical differences in their country, the men of the three regions have a distinctive character of their own. The north Frenchman will tell you that they are noisy and boastful, fond of jewellery and all sorts of display, better suited to politics than to soldiering. And yet both Joffre and Foch are from the Pyrenees. Certainly the Southern Frenchman’s skin is darker and his speech is not quite the same as that of the Northerner; it is nearer to the old Latin speech in that Gascon and Provençal alike have followed the Italians and Spaniards in keeping the grand broad vowels that make the southern tongues peculiarly adapted to song. In the early Middle Ages this tongue of theirs, the langue d’oc, was spoken as far north as Geneva on the east and Poitou on the west (the first troubadour that we know was Count of Poitiers, not far from the central Loire), but the royal province afterwards called Languedoc was much smaller, and included, roughly, only the land already marked off as the theatre of the Albigensian war.
Civilization was very old there. Before the beginnings of recorded history, when Rome was an obscure village, the shores of the Mediterranean were already covered with highly organized little city states, building solidly in stone, possessing law, plastic art, and intense local patriotism. The Gallic coast of the Mediterranean became one of the earliest Roman provinces. It had already been so for more than half a century when Cæsar, burdened with his debts but full of ambition, began those northward marches that were to make civilization not so much a Mediterranean as a European thing. The schoolboy remembers how throughout the Commentaries there is continually talk of calling drafts for the cavalry from “Tolosa et Narbone.” This country came to be called “The Province,” par excellence; the name survives in the modern word “Provence.”
Incidentally it is interesting to note that “Provincia” was not confined to the Mediterranean lands. Scarcely had the Romans occupied these than they went forward, over the gap of Carcassonne, the saddle between the Cévennes and the Pyrenees, where the railway and the canal go to-day. They took the upper Garonne country, then as now centreing about Toulouse as its chief town, and connected it for administration with the Mediterranean coastal plain from the Rhône to the Pyrenees.
This arrangement, after enduring for five hundred years under the Romans, reappears in the Dark Ages under the Counts of Toulouse, and, first under them and later under the Kings of France, lasts for eight hundred years more. It is astonishing to see how closely the Roman administrative division called “Narbonensis Prima” of B.C. 100 corresponds with the province of Languedoc of the French monarchy of A.D. 1790.
Everywhere she went Rome stamped upon the land its permanent form. But nowhere, outside of Italy itself, does she seem to have “Romanized” more thoroughly than in “Provincia.” To this day, “The valley banks of the Rhône ... have still a greater mass of imperial remains than the city [of Rome] itself,”[5] and the churches of Toulouse show the round arch and the small Roman bricks.
When the Empire became Christian, Toulouse still grouped itself, as it does to this day, around its municipal building, the “Capitol.” That building and the “Place du Capitole” continued central in the town. The churches of Toulouse are fitted in like after-thoughts in the town plan. They do not dominate everything as do the cathedrals of the old towns of Northern France, as Notre Dame must have dominated mediæval Paris. This difference in town-planning[6] seems to be accompanied by a greater measure of continuity in municipal institutions: mediæval Toulouse called her chief magistrates “consules.”
In the decline, when the Roman auxiliaries were fighting their aimless civil wars (much as if the “colonial troops” of to-day were to become dominant in armies and go about setting up their Europeanized leaders as chief executives), Toulouse was for a time the capital of one of their shifting sovereignties, that of the Visigoths, whose power, at its greatest, extended from the Loire and the Alps clear down to Gibraltar. After a few years, another little group of auxiliaries, the Franks, defeated the Visigoths, drove them out of south-western Gaul clear down to the Pyrenees, and took Toulouse. But although the Frankish chiefs would now and then raid Spain itself for plunder, they never cleared the Goths out of the coastal plain from the Rhône to the eastern Pyrenees. So matters stood when the first of the three great scourges of the Dark Ages, the Mohammedan Saracens, fell upon Europe.
In their first rush north from Spain, the Mohammedans swept the Mediterranean coastal plain. Narbonne resisted them, and saw its people duly massacred, but some of the cities seemed to have surrendered (as many of the Spanish towns had done) on condition that their laws should be respected. The “Visigothic” State was a flimsy affair. That part of Gaul which submitted to the Saracens corresponded almost exactly to that which the Goths had held. Carcassonne, Beziers, Agde, Maguelonne, Lodève, and Nismes had Mohammedan garrisons. East of the Rhône they went beyond the Gothic boundaries, and for three or four years, with the support of local rebels, held Arles and Avignon.