The idea of this book is well known. M. de Carné has been struck with what constitutes the peculiar genius of the French nation, its unity. He has wished to ascertain and trace the origin of that unity; and has found it summed up in a few proper names, and has condensed in the history of a small number of statesmen that of the nation.
Nothing could be more proper. We are the republican of any nation that God has made, and we are so because the French nation is more strictly one than any other, and more than any other needs a chief. Abandoned ourselves, and obliged, willingly or unwillingly, to take each a personal part in the common action, we are worth very little; but we are admirable when we are commanded. I do not know if Shakespeare is right when he calls France the Soldier of God, but what appears to me certain is that we are much better soldiers than citizens. In France the citizen is a stupid lout who, three-fourths of the time, lets himself be led, and miserably led, either by a journal or a spouting chief of a club; he abdicates himself and consents to be led blindly by the passions of others. He cries "Harrah for Revolution!" when he thinks he is only crying "Hurrah for Reform!" and makes a revolution without intending it, and makes it to the profit of his enemies. The soldier, on the contrary, finds in obedience the element of his spontaneity, of his intelligence, I had almost said, of his liberty. He was but a peasant, very dull and lubberly when he was free; put upon him the coat of passive obedience, and he acquires abilities which seem to belong only to liberty. He is prompt, he is sagacious, he is intelligent; faithful to his commander when his commander guides him, full of activity and spontaneity, if by chance the commander fails him. Why is this? Why is the English citizen so intelligent in commercial and political life, so hampered under the red coat? Why is the French peasant so stupid when he is taken from his plough, so much at his ease when in uniform? To this I know no answer, unless it be, that God has so made us. In France, the soldier is more himself when under discipline than the citizen in his liberty. It is not, then, surprising that the history of a people, I will not say so royalist, but so monarchical in the etymological sense of the word, should be summed up in the proper names of a few men.
The Abbé Suger, St. Louis, Du Guesclin, Joan of Arc, Louis XI., Henry IV., Richelieu, Mazarin: such are the personages whom M. de Carné has selected, and who he shows have gradually effected the development of French unity. It is in the succession of these names that we can follow with him that development.
However, it is not necessary to believe, and M. de Carné does not pretend it, that these men made French unity. It has been made by itself. France was really one in fact before being made so by the government and laws. From the tenth century, when all Gaul was parcelled out, when the large provinces all belonged to masters independent in fact, save for the nominal law of vassalage, hardly acknowledged, this divided nation felt herself already one, felt herself already a nation. She has been one ever since, in reacting against the yoke of the Austrasian dynasty of the Carlovingians, she commenced to reject from her midst the Germanic race, language, and institutions. She had her language—we find it distinctly in the oath of 843; she had her capital—that little mud city which began to pass the arm of the Seine and to spread itself from the island over on the right bank, was already the centre of French life. She had her dynasty—that kinglet possessor of a narrow domain, which he disputed with great feudatories more powerful than he, was already and for all the king of France. She was already herself advancing to the time when the grandson of Robert the Strong would make himself obeyed from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, the langue d' Oyl would become the common tongue of Christendom, and all the fiefs from Flanders to the Mediterranean would hold from the great tower of the Louvre.
Thus it seems to me that one of the most important facts in our history, though little remarked, is the first armed manifestation of France under Louis the Fat. At the time the Emperor Henry V. penetrated into Champagne with a German army, the king, who, according to his own expression, had grown old at the siege of Montlhéry, in a few weeks found himself at the head of three hundred thousand men, united as a thick cloud of grasshoppers, who cover the banks of the rivers, the mountains, and plains. A few weeks more, and the great vassals, the Count of Flanders, the Duke of Aquitaine, the Count of Brittany, brought him new reinforcements, and his army, raised to four hundred thousand men, was double that of the emperor, which was itself enormous for the middle ages. The political bond, however, which united those different countries which are to-day called France, was very feeble. These vassals, present at the camp of Louis the Fat, rendered him scarcely a ceremonial homage. What bond could unite so many different populations for the defence of a territory which, at that epoch, had scarcely a name, if it was not community of origin and a common aversion to the Germanic domination? The French nation was then one, even at that epoch, when the king was king of only five of our present departments at most. She made herself one by herself and her blood, before being made so by kings and laws.
In all we have been ourselves, and more ourselves than we think. We are neither Franks nor Visigoths; we are Gallo-Romans. We are Gauls civilized by Rome, and baptized by the church. The influence of the Frank domination has been more superficial than was believed in the last century; the name remains to us, but what else remains? In the language, which is the great symbol of nationality, the Germanic element, whether in words or in forms of speech, has evidently been only secondary; and it has left no traces in the national character. In institutions the Germanic element dominated for a time, for the simple reason that it possessed the political power; but it was the labor of the middle ages, and we can say their glory, to efface it.
In fact, the struggle against feudalism and feudal institutions was, to speak truly, a national struggle. There were traces of German domination during four centuries which it was necessary to efface. The day when France demanded of the house of Robert the Strong a chief, king or not, but a chief to oppose to the Rhenish sovereignty of the Carlovingians, that day she commenced, without knowing it, the struggle against the institutions which grew out of the Germanic [{199}] conquest. That struggle was continued under St. Louis, the epoch of the great radiation of French power, when the Mediterranean was almost our domain; when we established colonies even on the coasts of Africa; when our missionaries penetrated even to Thibet; when the sons of Genghis Khan were in diplomatic relations with us, and when even in Italy they spoke by preference our language as "the most delightful" and the most generally understood of any in the world.
In this work the church came to our aid. The great struggle of the papacy was also against the pride of the Germanic supremacy. It was against the feudalism planted in the church, against feudatory bishops who bore armor, and carried the falcon on their wrist, who held their dioceses as fiefs, and received their investiture from the German suzerain, and against the kings their patrons, that St. Gregory VII. wielded the papal power. It was against the institutions of Germanic barbarism, against the feudal aristocracy, against tests by fire and water, against private wars and judicial combats, that the church, and especially the papacy, never ceased to struggle. There was, then, during a whole century a perfect accord between the kings of France and the pontiffs of Rome, between the independence of the commons and the franchises of the religious orders, between the authority of the legists and that of the councils.
And for these institutions introduced by the Germanic conquests, and which we in accord with the church combated, what have we in accord with the church substituted? The institutions proper to our race, proper to our traditions as a civilized people, proper to our manners as Christians. For feudalism the idea of direct power such as Rome had taught, and such as Charlemagne comprehended and attempted to revive; in other words, for suzerainty sovereignty; for the jurisdiction of lords was substituted in spirituals that of ecclesiastical judges, in temporals that of royal justices; consequently, for feudal law the canon law of Christian, and the civil law of imperial Rome. For the right of private battle we substituted the possession of arms remitted to the sovereign alone, as in Rome and in all civilized countries. For duels and judicial trials by fire and water we substituted trials by witness, according to the Roman law and the law of the church and of all civilized nations. In a word, we effaced the traces of Germanic paganism and barbarism, to become in our laws once more what we were by blood, Gallo-Romans; what we were by our faith, Christians; what we still are by our reminiscences, civilized men. Such was the work of our race from Robert the Strong to St. Louis, of the popes from Gregory VII. to Gregory IX., of our commons from the first communal revolt to the enfranchisement of the serfs under Louis le Hutin, of the church from the day when she proclaimed the truce of God, and constituted to sustain it a sort of universal Landwehr, to that in which she canonized, in the person of St. Louis, the type, not of the feudal chief, but of the Christian king. Only from this union of all forces in reference to a single end, essentially national, legitimate, and Christian, there was one unhappy exception, that of the nobility, the heir, whether by blood or position, of the Germanic traditions, investitures, and institutions, and who became a sort of common enemy. They were found, in spite of their patriotism, standing apart from the nation, and unpopular in spite of the many ties which bound them to the people. The church, royalty, even the legists had their place in the popular affection, but the nobility had none. They were suspected by the government and abandoned by it to the suspicions of the people. Hence they were so much the further removed from the political tendency of the nation as they were nearer to its political action, and all the less disposed to co-operate in the work of national elaboration as they were more open to the seductions of foreign [{200}] politics. Hence they could make the war of the Annagnacs in the fourteenth century, the war of the Public Good in the fifteenth, the religious wars of the sixteenth, and of the Fronde in the seventeenth; but it was never theirs to exercise that popular, regular, pacific action, the action of patronage and defence, exercised by the aristocracy of England. They had only the choice, on the one hand, of a selfish, unpopular revolt against the king—a revolt resting on the enemies of France for its support, or on the other, of service to the crown, a service which they gloriously and courageously rendered indeed, but which was a service of perfect obedience, in which there was nothing to be gained for their order, in which indeed they could reap glory, but not power. Never has there been a real aristocracy in France—there has been only an obedient or an insubordinate feudal nobility.