This civilisation, as is well known, was not by any means immediately destroyed by the Barbarian invasions. The Barbarians admired and imitated Roman institutions and manners, especially the Visigoths, who were less savage than either the Vandals, the Huns, or the Franks.
Their first king, Ataulphe—whose capital was at Toulouse—was more Roman than the Romans; Theoderick II. read Virgil and Horace; and Euric made a code of laws copied from the Theodosian code. The Burgundian chief, Gondebaud, received as a high honour the Roman title of "Patrician," and in his wars with Clovis he "affected quite a Roman repugnance to him and his Franks, on whom he disdainfully bestows the epithet of Barbarians."
It was not till the sixth century, under the rule of the Franks, that the decadence of literature truly began.[8] This decadence is lamented by the famous Gregory of Tours. "The majority of men sigh and sing, 'Woe to our age'; the study of letters has been lost among us, and the people have no longer a man capable of recording the events of the times." It is for this reason that he resolves to undertake the task of historian.
The downward movement which he bemoans continued under the Merovingians and the Carlovingians—only temporarily arrested by Charlemagne's revival of learning—and the country was reduced to something little removed from pure barbarism, though the people still clung to classic customs: the cultus of fountains and woods, practice of auguries and so forth.
In the tenth century the Lingua Romana was spoken in Gaul. The end of the decomposing process had come. The idiom had ceased to be merely corrupt Latin, it was Romance, a definite language on a Latin foundation, but full of words and forms belonging to the numberless races that had inhabited or influenced the south of Gaul.
And now with the final destruction of the old order and language began the process of constructing the new; the first movement of the Romance-literature, the literature which for two centuries was to dominate Europe and to form and found the ideals of life that we call modern.
The transition stages are marked in the history of the Church. In the ninth century Charlemagne enjoins on the clergy that they shall translate into Romance for the benefit of the people their Latin exhortations, showing that at this date the classic tongue had ceased to be generally understood, at least in the North. In the South it appears to have lingered longer, for at Charlemagne's Council of Arles of about the same date no such order is given, presumably because it was unnecessary.
Later, however, in the Churches of the South the clergy allowed songs and responses in pure Romance to be introduced, and this concession M. Fauriel regards as the beginning of the movement.
He gives an amusing account of one of the earliest specimens of Provençal literature, a dramatic version of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins.
The foolish virgins arriving too late, appeal in vain to the wise for oil. They refuse, but recommend a good oil-dealer who may perhaps supply them. But he, too, will not assent to their prayer, and alas! the Bridegroom arrives before they have had time to come to an arrangement. He likewise turns away from the foolish ones, saying He does not know them; and—in a singularly un-Christian spirit—condemns them to be at once plunged into the deepest depths of hell.