The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

“Thus, for example, the Burgundians, before their irruption to Gaul, were remarkable for their skill as artizans; and in the poems in which, not long after that event, they were described by Sidonius Apollinaris, we have the best attestation of their resemblance to the kind and simple-hearted German of our own days. Thus also the Gothic people, almost immediately after their settlement in Aquitaine, manifested a singular aptitude for a yet higher civilization. For, if St. Jerome was correctly informed, Ataulph their king seriously projected the substitution of a new Gothic for the old Roman empire; a scheme in which the character of Julius was to be ascribed to Alaric, that of Augustus being reserved for the projector himself. Euric, the successor of Ataulph, filled his court at Toulouse with rhetoricians, poets, and grammarians; and coveted (and not altogether in vain) the applause of the Italian critics for the pure Latinity of his despatches.

“The Franks, on the other hand, were a barbarous people, and their history is in fact a barbaric history. At their entrance into Gaul they were worshippers of Odin, and believed that the gates of the Walhalla rolled back spontaneously on their hinges to admit the warrior who had dyed, with the blood of his enemies, the battle-field on which he had himself fallen. From their settlements on the lower Rhine they had sometimes marched to the defence of the Romano-Gallic province, but more frequently and gladly to the invasion of it. Their appetite for rapine was insatiate, unrestrained, and irresistible. In war they were the prototypes of the Norman pirates of a later age, or of the West Indian buccaneers of more modern times. In peace they were the very counterpart of the North American Indians, as depicted by the early travellers in Canada; a comparison which almost every commentator on Tacitus has instituted and verified.”

Now I have great doubts about the superior civilization of the conquerors of Burgundy, Alsatia, and Franche-Comté; but these arise from a view, perhaps, peculiar to myself, of the nature of the Frank confederacies. I believe the word Frank to have distinguished the Germans who were independent of Rome from those who were in allegiance to the empire, and, consequently, that it might be borne by different divisions of the German stock, and by wholly unconnected alliances. More than this—if it separated the Romanized from the independent Germans, it separated, to a certain extent, the rude from the refined, the Pagan from the Christian. Now, of these two classes, the rude independent Pagans were the more likely conquerors of Burgundy and Franche-Comté; in which case the differences of their civilization is likely to have been inconsiderable. It is true that they may have been Christianized by time—but so were the Salians of Clovis. On the other hand, their contact with the undoubtedly Christian Goths of Dauphiné and Languedoc, had a truly civilizing tendency.

It was the Franks of Franche-Comté, and not the Salians of Clovis, amongst whom we find the dynasty of the Merovings: Ptolemy, at least, places the Μαροὑιγγοι in the country of the Burgundians, anterior to their passage of the Rhine and their conquest of the Gallic provinces beyond it. Hence, the true Meroving was the Burgundian princess Chlotilda, the wife of Clovis, rather than Clovis himself.

In Savoy the foreign intermixture has been but small; the population being, in the more mountainous parts at least, simply Romano-Keltic—and then more Keltic than Roman.

Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony carry us to the Ligurian and Iberian areas.

Between the second and third Punic wars the Ligyes of Gaul were reduced, rather later than the Ligurians of Italy. They seem from the first to have been a warlike nation. Æschylus, as has been seen, arms them against Hercules; and their brothers in the Apennines defended themselves with valour and obstinacy. The Salyes were their chief tribe. How far they extended inwards is uncertain. It is only safe to say that Provence was Ligurian, and Dauphiné Gallo-Ligurian before it became Romanized: and that the remainder of the ethnological history of the Ligurians of Gaul is nearly the same as that of the Gallic Iberians.

Next to the Spanish peninsula, the southern provinces of France were the most deeply tinctured with Arab influences of any part of Europe.

In the parts between the Loire and Garonne, Poitou, Santonge, Limoges, and Perigord, exhibit, in a modern form, the names of the ancient Pictones, Santones, Lemovici, and Petrocorii, all of which were Gallic, though, perhaps, not so typically Gallic as the Parisii, Carnutes, Turones, and Bituriges of the Isle of France, the Orleannois, Touraine, and Berri. In these parts the admixture of Roman and Keltic blood, has been less disturbed by subsequent admixture of Arabs and Goths than elsewhere; not that even here it is pure. The Franks of the Netherlands, Lorraine, and the Franks of Burgundy and Franche-Comté must have seriously tinctured the blood even in these parts. Champagne, too, may be in the same category.

French Flanders, Artois, and part of Picardy are just more Romano-Keltic and less German than the French provinces of Belgium. Normandy has its peculiar and characteristic Scandinavian elements.