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VOLUME XI

FRANCISCANS to GIBSON

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VOLUME XI SLICE I
Franciscans to French Language

Articles in This Slice

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FRANCISCANS (otherwise called Friars Minor, or Minorites; also the Seraphic Order; and in England Grey Friars, from the colour of the habit, which, however, is now brown rather than grey), a religious order founded by St Francis of Assisi (q.v.). It was in 1206 that St Francis left his father’s house and devoted himself to a life of poverty and to the service of the poor, the sick and the lepers; and in 1209 that he felt the call to add preaching to his other ministrations, and to lead a life in the closest imitation of Christ’s life. Within a few weeks disciples began to join themselves to him; the condition was that they should dispose of all their possessions. When their number was twelve Francis led the little flock to Rome to obtain the pope’s sanction for their undertaking. Innocent III. received them kindly, but with some misgivings as to the feasibility of the proposed manner of life; these difficulties were overcome, and the pope accorded a provisional approval by word of mouth: they were to become clerics and to elect a superior. Francis was elected and made a promise of obedience to the pope, and the others promised obedience to Francis.

This formal inauguration of the institute was in 1209 or (as seems more probable) 1210. Francis and his associates were first known as “Penitents of Assisi,” and then Francis chose the title of “Minors.” On their return to Assisi they obtained from the Benedictine abbey on Mount Subasio the use of the little chapel of St Mary of the Angels, called the Portiuncula, in the plain below Assisi, which became the cradle and headquarters of the order. Around the Portiuncula they built themselves huts of branches and twigs, but they had no fixed abode; they wandered in pairs over the country, dressed in the ordinary clothes of the peasants, working in the fields to earn their daily bread, sleeping in barns or in the hedgerows or in the porches of the churches, mixing with the labourers and the poor, with the lepers and the outcasts, ever joyous—the “joculatores” or “jongleurs” of God—ever carrying out their mission of preaching to the lowly and to the wretched religion and repentance and the kingdom of God. The key-note of the movement was the imitation of the public life of Christ, especially the poverty of Christ. Francis and his disciples were to aim at possessing nothing, absolutely nothing, so far as was compatible with life; they were to earn their bread from day to day by the work of their hands, and only when they could not do so were they to beg; they were to make no provision for the morrow, lay by no store, accumulate no capital, possess no land; their clothes should be the poorest and their dwellings the meanest; they were forbidden to receive or to handle money. On the other hand they were bound only to the fast observed in those days by pious Christians, and were allowed to eat meat—the rule said they should eat whatever was set before them; no austerities were imposed, beyond those inseparable from the manner of life they lived.

Thus the institute in its original conception was quite different from the monastic institute, Benedictine or Canon Regular. It was a confraternity rather than an order, and there was no formal novitiate, no organization. But the number of brothers increased with extraordinary rapidity, and the field of work soon extended itself beyond the neighbourhood of Assisi and even beyond Umbria—within three or four years there were settlements in Perugia, Cortona, Pisa, Florence and elsewhere, and missions to the Saracens and Moors were attempted by Francis himself. About 1217 Franciscan missions set out for Germany, France, Spain, Hungary and the Holy Land; and in 1219 a number of provinces were formed, each governed by a provincial minister. These developments, whereby the little band of Umbrian apostles had grown into an institute spread all over Europe and even penetrating to the East, and numbering thousands of members, rendered impossible the continuance of the original free organization whereby Francis’s word and example were the sufficient practical rule of life for all: it was necessary as a condition of efficiency and even of existence and permanence that some kind of organization should be provided. From an early date yearly meetings or chapters had been held at the Portiuncula, at first attended by the whole body of friars; but as the institute extended this became unworkable, and after 1219 the chapter consisted only of the officials, provincial ministers and others. During Francis’s absence in the East (1219-1220) a deliberate movement was initiated by the two vicars whom he had left in charge of the order, towards assimilating it to the monastic orders. Francis hurried back, bringing with him Elias of Cortona, the provincial minister of Syria, and immediately summoned an extraordinary general chapter (September 1220). Before it met he had an interview on the situation with Cardinal Hugolino of Ostia (afterwards Gregory IX.), the great friend and supporter of both Francis and Dominic, and he went to Honorius III. at Orvieto and begged that Hugolino should be appointed the official protector of the order. The request was granted, and a bull was issued formally approving the order of Friars Minor, and decreeing that before admission every one must pass a year’s novitiate, and that after profession it was not lawful to leave the order. By this bull the Friars Minor were constituted an order in the technical sense of the word. When the chapter assembled, Francis, no doubt from a genuine feeling that he was not able to govern a great world-wide order, practically abdicated the post of minister-general by appointing a vicar, and the policy of turning the Friars Minor into a great religious order was consistently pursued, especially by Elias, who a year later became Francis’s vicar.

St Francis’s attitude towards this change is of primary importance for the interpretation of Franciscan history. There can be little doubt that his affections never altered from his first love, and that he looked back regretfully on the “Umbrian idyll” that had passed away; on the other hand, there seems to be no reason for doubting that he saw that the methods of the early days were now no longer possible, and that he acquiesced in the inevitable. This seems to be Professor Goetz’s view, who holds that Sabatier’s picture of Francis’s agonized sadness at witnessing the destruction of his great creation going on under his eyes, has no counterpart in fact, and who rejects the view that the changes were forced on Francis against his better judgment by Hugolino and Elias (see “Note on Sources” at end of article [Francis of Assisi]; also [Elias of Cortona]); Goetz holds that the only conflict was the inevitable one between an unrealizable ideal and its practical working among average men. But there does seem to be evidence that Francis deplored tendencies towards a departure from the severe simplicity of life and from the strict observance of poverty which he considered the ground-idea of his institute. In the final redaction of his Rule made in 1223 and in his Testament, made after it, he again clearly asserts his mind on these subjects, especially on poverty; and in the Testament he forbids any glosses in the interpretation of the Rule, declaring that it is to be taken simply as it stands. Sabatier’s view as to the difference between the “First Rule” and that of 1223 is part of his general theory, and is, to say the least, a grave exaggeration. No doubt the First Rule, which is fully four times as long, gives a better picture of St Francis’s mind and character; the later Rule has been formed from the earlier by the elimination of the frequent scripture texts and the edificatory element; but the greater portion of it stood almost verbally in the earlier.

On Francis’s death in 1226 the government of the order rested in the hands of Elias until the chapter of 1227. At this chapter Elias was not elected minister-general; the building of the great basilica and monastery at Assisi was so manifest a violation of St Francis’s ideas and precepts that it produced a reaction, and John Parenti became St Francis’s first successor. He held fast to St Francis’s ideas, but was not a strong man. At the chapter of 1230 a discussion arose concerning the binding force of St Francis’s Testament, and the interpretation of certain portions of the Rule, especially concerning poverty, and it was determined to submit the questions to Pope Gregory IX., who had been St Francis’s friend and had helped in the final redaction of the Rule. He issued a bull, Quo elongati, which declared that as the Testament had not received the sanction of the general chapter it was not binding on the order, and also allowed trustees to hold and administer money for the order. John Parenti and those who wished to maintain St Francis’s institute intact were greatly disturbed by these relaxations; but a majority of the chapter of 1232, by a sort of coup d’etat, proclaimed Elias minister-general, and John retired, though in those days the office was for life. Under Elias the order entered on a period of extraordinary extension and prosperity: the number of friars in all parts of the world increased wonderfully, new provinces were formed, new missions to the heathen organized, the Franciscans entered the universities and vied with the Dominicans as teachers of theology and canon law, and as a body they became influential in church and state. With all this side of Elias’s policy the great bulk of the order sympathized; but his rule was despotic and tyrannical and his private life was lax—at least according to any Franciscan standard, for no charge of grave irregularity was ever brought against him. And so a widespread movement against his government arose, the backbone of which was the university element at Paris and Oxford, and at a dramatic scene in a chapter held in the presence of Gregory IX. Elias was deposed (1239).

The story of these first years after St Francis’s death is best told by Ed. Lempp, Frère Élie de Cortone (1901) (but see the warning at the end of the article [Elias of Cortona]).

At this time the Franciscans were divided into three parties: there were the Zealots, or Spirituals, who called for a literal observance of St Francis’s Rule and Testament; they deplored all the developments since 1219, and protested against turning the institute into an order, the frequentation of the universities and the pursuit of learning; in a word, they wished to restore the life to what it had been during the first few years—the hermitages and the huts of twigs, and the care of the lepers and the nomadic preaching. The Zealots were few in number but of great consequence from the fact that to them belonged most of the first disciples and the most intimate companions of St Francis. They had been grievously persecuted under Elias—Br. Leo and others had been scourged, several had been imprisoned, one while trying to escape was accidentally killed, and Br. Bernard, the “first disciple,” passed a year in hiding in the forests and mountains hunted like a wild beast. At the other extreme was a party of relaxation, that abandoned any serious effort to practise Franciscan poverty and simplicity of life. Between these two stood the great middle party of moderates, who desired indeed that the Franciscans should be really poor and simple in their manner of life, and really pious, but on the other hand approved of the development of the Order on the lines of other orders, of the acquisition of influence, of the cultivation of theology and other sciences, and of the frequenting of the universities.

The questions of principle at issue in these controversies is reasonably and clearly stated, from the modern Capuchin standpoint, in the “Introductory Essay” to The Friars and how they came to England, by Fr. Cuthbert (1903).

The moderate party was by far the largest, and embraced nearly all the friars of France, England and Germany. It was the Moderates and not the Zealots that brought about Elias’s deposition, and the next general ministers belonged to this party. Further relaxations of the law of poverty, however, caused a reaction, and John of Parma, one of the Zealots, became minister-general, 1247-1257. Under him the more extreme of the Zealots took up and exaggerated the theories of the Eternal Gospel of the Calabrian Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore (Floris); some of their writings were condemned as heretical, and John of Parma, who was implicated in these apocalyptic tendencies, had to resign. He was succeeded by St Bonaventura (1257-1274), one of the best type of the middle party. He was a man of high character, a theologian, a mystic, a holy man and a strong ruler. He set himself with determination to effect a working compromise, and proceeded with firmness against the extremists on both sides. But controversy and recrimination and persecution had stiffened the more ardent among the Zealots into obstinate fanatics—some of them threw themselves into a movement that may best be briefly described as a recrudescence of Montanism (see Émile Gebhart’s Italie mystique, 1899, cc. v. and vi.), and developed into a number of sects, some on the fringe of Catholic Christianity and others beyond its pale. But the majority of the Zealot party, or Spirituals, did not go so far, and adopted as the principle of Franciscan poverty the formula “a poor and scanty use” (usus pauper et tenuis) of earthly goods, as opposed to the “moderate use” advocated by the less strict party. The question thus posed came before the Council of Vienne, 1312, and was determined, on the whole, decidedly in favour of the stricter view. Some of the French Zealots were not satisfied and formed a semi-schismatical body in Provence; twenty-five of them were tried before the Inquisition, and four were burned alive at Marseilles as obstinate heretics, 1318. After this the schism in the Order subsided. But the disintegrating forces produced by the Great Schism and by the other disorders of the 14th century caused among the Franciscans the same relaxations and corruptions, and also the same reactions and reform movements, as among the other orders.

The chief of these reforms was that of the Observants, which began at Foligno about 1370. The Observant reform was on the basis of the “poor and scanty use” of worldly goods, but it was organized as an order and its members freely pursued theological studies; thus it did not represent the position of the original Zealot party, nor was it the continuation of it. The Observant reform spread widely throughout Italy and into France, Spain and Germany. The great promoters of the movement were St Bernardine of Siena and St John Capistran. The council of Constance, 1415, allowed the French Observant friaries to be ruled by a vicar of their own, under the minister-general, and the same privilege was soon accorded to other countries. By the end of the middle ages the Observants had some 1400 houses divided into 50 provinces. This movement produced a “half-reform” among the Conventuals or friars of the mitigated observance; it also called forth a number of lesser imitations or congregations of strict observance.

After many attempts had been made to bring about a working union among the many observances, in 1517 Leo X. divided the Franciscan order into two distinct and independent bodies, each with its own minister-general, its own provinces and provincials and its own general chapter: (1) The Conventuals, who were authorized to use the various papal dispensations in regard to the observance of poverty, and were allowed to possess property and fixed income, corporately, like the monastic orders; (2) The Observants, who were bound to as close an observance of St Francis’s Rule in regard to poverty and all else as was practically possible.

At this time a great number of the Conventuals went over to the Observants, who have ever since been by far the more numerous and influential branch of the order. Among the Observants in the course of the sixteenth century arose various reforms, each striving to approach more and more nearly to St Francis’s ideal; the chief of these reforms were the Alcantarines in Spain (St Peter of Alcantara, St Teresa’s friend, d. 1562), the Riformati in Italy and the Recollects in France: all of these were semi-independent congregations. The Capuchins (q.v.), established c. 1525, who claim to be the reform which approaches nearest in its conception to the original type, became a distinct order of Franciscans in 1619. Finally Leo XIII. grouped the Franciscans into three bodies or orders—the Conventuals; the Observants, embracing all branches of the strict observance, except the Capuchins; and the Capuchins—which together constitute the “First Order.” For the “Second Order,” or the nuns, see [Clara, St], and [Clares, Poor]; and for the “Third Order” see [Tertiaries]. Many of the Tertiaries live a fully monastic life in community under the usual vows, and are formed into Congregations of Regular Tertiaries, both men and women. They have been and are still very numerous, and give themselves up to education, to the care of the sick and of orphans and to good works of all kinds.

No order has had so stormy an internal history as the Franciscans; yet in spite of all the troubles and dissensions and strivings that have marred Franciscan history, the Friars Minor of every kind have in each age faithfully and zealously carried on St Francis’s great work of ministering to the spiritual needs of the poor. Always recruited in large measure from among the poor, they have ever been the order of the poor, and in their preaching and missions and ministrations they have ever laid themselves out to meet the needs of the poor. Another great work of the Franciscans throughout the whole course of their history has been their missions to the Mahommedans, both in western Asia and in North Africa, and to the heathens in China, Japan and India, and North and South America; a great number of the friars were martyred. The news of the martyrdom of five of his friars in Morocco was one of the joys of St Francis’s closing years. Many of these missions exist to this day. In the Universities, too, the Franciscans made themselves felt alongside of the Dominicans, and created a rival school of theology, wherein, as contrasted with the Aristotelianism of the Dominican school, the Platonism of the early Christian doctors has been perpetuated.

The Franciscans came to England in 1224 and immediately made foundations in Canterbury, London and Oxford; by the middle of the century there were fifty friaries and over 1200 friars in England; at the Dissolution there were some 66 Franciscan friaries, whereof some six belonged to the Observants (for list see Catholic Dictionary and F. A. Gasquet’s English Monastic Life, 1904). Though nearly all the English houses belonged to what has been called the “middle party,” as a matter of fact they practised great poverty, and the commissioners of Henry VIII. often remark that the Franciscan Friary was the poorest of the religious houses of a town. The English province was one of the most remarkable in the order, especially in intellectual achievement; it produced Friar Roger Bacon, and, with the single exception of St Bonaventure, all the greatest doctors of the Franciscan theological school—Alexander Hales, Duns Scotus and Occam.

The Franciscans have always been the most numerous by far of the religious orders; it is estimated that about the period of the Reformation the Friars Minor must have numbered nearly 100,000. At the present day the statistics are roughly (including lay-brothers): Observants, 15,000, Conventuals, 1500; to these should be added 9500 Capuchins, making the total number of Franciscan friars about 26,000. There are various houses of Observants and Capuchins in England and Ireland; and the old Irish Conventuals survived the penal times and still exist.

There have been four Franciscan popes: Nicholas IV. (1288-1292), Sixtus IV. (1471-1484), Sixtus V. (1585-1590), Clement XIV. (1769-1774); the three last were Conventuals.

The great source for Franciscan history is Wadding’s Annales; it has been many times continued, and now extends in 25 vols. fol. to the year 1622. The story is also told by Helyot, Hist. des ordres religieux (1714), vol. vii. Abridgments, with references to recent literature, will be found in Max Heimbucher, Orden und Kongregationen (1896), i. §§ 37-51; in Wetzer und Welte, Kirchenlexicon (2nd ed.), articles “Armut (III.),” “Franciscaner orden” (this article contains the best account of the inner history and the polity of the order up to 1886); in Herzog, Realencyklopädie (3rd ed.), articles “Franz von Assisi” (fullest references to literature up to 1899), “Fraticellen.” Of modern critical studies on Franciscan origins, K. Müller’s Anfänge des Minoritenordens und der Bussbruderschaften (1885), and various articles by F. Ehrle in Archiv für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters and Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie, deserve special mention. Eccleston’s charming chronicle of “The Coming of the Friars Minor into England” has been translated into English by the Capuchin Fr. Cuthbert, who has prefixed an Introductory Essay giving by far the best account in English of “the Spirit and Genius of the Franciscan Friars” (The Friars and how they came to England, 1903). Fuller information on the English Franciscans will be found in A. G. Little’s Grey Friars in Oxford (Oxford Hist. Soc., 1892).

(E. C. B.)

FRANCK. The name of Franck has been given indiscriminately but improperly to painters of the school of Antwerp who belong to the families of Francken (q.v.) and Vrancx (q.v.). One artist truly entitled to be called Franck is Gabriel, who entered the gild of Antwerp in 1605, became its president in 1636 and died in 1639. But his works cannot now be traced.

FRANCK, CÉSAR (1822-1890), French musical composer, a Belgian by birth, who came of German stock, was born at Liége on the 10th of December 1822. Though one of the most remarkable of modern composers, César Franck laboured for many years in comparative obscurity. After some preliminary studies at Liége he came to Paris in 1837 and entered the conservatoire. He at once obtained the first prize for piano, transposing a fugue at sight to the astonishment of the professors, for he was only fifteen. He won the prize for the organ in 1841, after which he settled down in the French capital as teacher of the piano. His earliest compositions date from this period, and include four trios for piano and strings, besides several piano pieces. Ruth, a biblical cantata was produced with success at the Conservatoire in 1846. An opera entitled Le Valet de ferme was written about this time, but has never been performed. For many years Franck led a retired life, devoting himself to teaching and to his duties as organist, first at Saint-Jean-Saint-François, then at Ste Clotilde, where he acquired a great reputation as an improviser. He also wrote a mass, heard in 1861, and a quantity of motets, organ pieces and other works of a religious character.

Franck was appointed professor of the organ at the Paris conservatoire, in succession to Benoist, his old master, in 1872, and the following year he was naturalized a Frenchman. Until then he was esteemed as a clever and conscientious musician, but he was now about to prove his title to something more. A revival of his early oratorio, Ruth, had brought his name again before the public, and this was followed by the production of Rédemption, a work for solo, chorus and orchestra, given under the direction of M. Colonne on the 10th of April 1873. The unconventionality of the music rather disconcerted the general public, but the work nevertheless made its mark, and Franck became the central figure of an enthusiastic circle of pupils and adherents whose devotion atoned for the comparative indifference of the masses. His creative power now manifested itself in a series of works of varied kinds, and the name of Franck began gradually to emerge from its obscurity. The following is an enumeration of his subsequent compositions: Rebecca (1881), a biblical idyll for solo, chorus and orchestra; Les Béatitudes, an oratorio composed between 1870 and 1880, perhaps his greatest work; the symphonic poems, Les Éolides (1876), Le Chasseur maudit (1883), Les Djinns (1884), for piano and orchestra; Psyche (1888), for orchestra and chorus; symphonic variations for piano and orchestra (1885); symphony in D (1889); quintet for piano and strings (1880); sonata for piano and violin (1886); string quartet (1889); prelude, choral and fugue for piano (1884); prelude, aria and finale for piano (1889); various songs, notably “La Procession” and “Les Cloches du Soir.” Franck also composed two four-act operas, Hulda and Ghiselle, both of which were produced at Monte Carlo after his death, which took place in Paris on the 8th of November 1890. The second of these was left by the master in an unfinished state, and the instrumentation was completed by several of his pupils.

César Franck’s influence on younger French composers has been very great. Yet his music is German in character rather than French. A more sincere, modest, self-respecting composer probably never existed. In the centre of the brilliant French capital he was able to lead a laborious existence consecrated to his threefold career of organist, teacher and composer. He never sought to gain the suffrages of the public by unworthy concessions, but kept straight on his path, ever mindful of an ideal to be reached and never swerving therefrom. A statue was erected to the memory of César Franck in Paris on the 22nd of October 1904, the occasion producing a panegyric from Alfred Bruneau, in which he speaks of the composer’s works as “cathedrals in sound.”

FRANCK, or Frank [latinized Francus], SEBASTIAN (c. 1499-c. 1543), German freethinker, was born about 1499 at Donauwörth, whence he constantly styled himself Franck von Wörd. He entered the university of Ingoldstadt (March 26, 1515), and proceeded thence to the Dominican College, incorporated with the university, at Heidelberg. Here he met his subsequent antagonists, Bucer and Frecht, with whom he seems to have attended the Augsburg conference (October 1518) at which Luther declared himself a true son of the Church. He afterwards reckoned the Leipzig disputation (June-July 1519) and the burning of the papal bull (December 1520) as the beginning of the Reformation. Having taken priest’s orders, he held in 1524 a cure in the neighbourhood of Augsburg, but soon (1525) went over to the Reformed party at Nuremberg and became preacher at Gustenfelden. His first work (finished September 1527) was a German translation with additions (1528) of the first part of the Diallage, or Conciliatio locorum Scripturae, directed against Sacramentarians and Anabaptists by Andrew Althamer, then deacon of St Sebald’s at Nuremberg. On the 17th of March 1528 he married Ottilie Beham, a gifted lady, whose brothers, pupils of Albrecht Dürer, had got into trouble through Anabaptist leanings. In the same year he wrote a very popular treatise against drunkenness. In 1529 he produced a free version (Klagbrief der armen Dürftigen in England) of the famous Supplycacyon of the Beggers, written abroad (1528?) by Simon Fish. Franck, in his preface, says the original was in English; elsewhere he says it was in Latin; the theory that his German was really the original is unwarrantable. Advance in his religious ideas led him to seek the freer atmosphere of Strassburg in the autumn of 1529. To his translation (1530) of a Latin Chronicle and Description of Turkey, by a Transylvanian captive, which had been prefaced by Luther, he added an appendix holding up the Turks as in many respects an example to Christians, and presenting, in lieu of the restrictions of Lutheran, Zwinglian and Anabaptist sects, the vision of an invisible spiritual church, universal in its scope. To this ideal he remained faithful. At Strassburg began his intimacy with Caspar Schwenkfeld, a congenial spirit. Here, too, he published, in 1531, his most important work, the Chronica, Zeitbuch und Geschichtsbibel, largely a compilation on the basis of the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), and in its treatment of social and religious questions connected with the Reformation, exhibiting a strong sympathy with heretics, and an unexampled fairness to all kinds of freedom in opinion. It is too much to call him “the first of German historians”; he is a forerunner of Gottfried Arnold, with more vigour and directness of purpose. Driven from Strassburg by the authorities, after a short imprisonment in December 1531, he tried to make a living in 1532 as a soapboiler at Esslingen, removing in 1533 for a better market to Ulm, where (October 28, 1534) he was admitted as a burgess.

His Weltbuch, a supplement to his Chronica, was printed at Tübingen in 1534; the publication, in the same year, of his Paradoxa at Ulm brought him into trouble with the authorities. An order for his banishment was withdrawn on his promise to submit future works for censure. Not interpreting this as applying to works printed outside Ulm, he published in 1538 at Augsburg his Guldin Arch (with pagan parallels to Christian sentiments) and at Frankfort his Germaniae chronicon, with the result that he had to leave Ulm in January 1539. He seems henceforth to have had no settled abode. At Basel he found work as a printer, and here, probably, it was that he died in the winter of 1542-1543. He had published in 1539 his Kriegbüchlein des Friedens (pseudonymous), his Schrifftliche und ganz gründliche Auslegung des 64 Psalms, and his Das verbütschierte mit sieben Siegeln verschlossene Buch (a biblical index, exhibiting the dissonance of Scripture); in 1541 his Spruchwörter (a collection of proverbs, several times reprinted with variations); in 1542 a new edition of his Paradoxa; and some smaller works.

Franck combined the humanist’s passion for freedom with the mystic’s devotion to the religion of the spirit. His breadth of human sympathy led him to positions which the comparative study of religions has made familiar, but for which his age was unprepared. Luther contemptuously dismissed him as a “devil’s mouth.” Pastor Frecht of Nuremberg pursued him with bitter zeal. But his courage did not fail him, and in his last year, in a public Latin letter, he exhorted his friend John Campanus to maintain freedom of thought in face of the charge of heresy.

See Hegler, in Hauck’s Realencyklopädie (1899); C. A. Hase, Sebastian Franck von Wörd (1869); J. F. Smith, in Theological Review (April 1874); E. Tausch, Sebastian Franck von Donauwörth und seine Lehrer (1893).

(A. Go.*)

FRANCKE, AUGUST HERMANN (1663-1727), German Protestant divine, was born on the 22nd of March 1663 at Lübeck. He was educated at the gymnasium in Gotha, and afterwards at the universities of Erfurt, Kiel, where he came under the influence of the pietist Christian Kortholt (1633-1694), and Leipzig. During his student career he made a special study of Hebrew and Greek; and in order to learn Hebrew more thoroughly, he for some time put himself under the instructions of Rabbi Ezra Edzardi at Hamburg. He graduated at Leipzig, where in 1685 he became a Privatdozent. A year later, by the help of his friend P. Anton, and with the approval and encouragement of P. J. Spener, he founded the Collegium Philobiblicum, at which a number of graduates were accustomed to meet for the systematic study of the Bible, philologically and practically. He next passed some months at Lüneburg as assistant or curate to the learned superintendent, C. H. Sandhagen (1639-1697), and there his religious life was remarkably quickened and deepened. On leaving Lüneburg he spent some time in Hamburg, where he became a teacher in a private school, and made the acquaintance of Nikolaus Lange (1659-1720). After a long visit to Spener, who was at that time a court preacher in Dresden, he returned to Leipzig in the spring of 1689, and began to give Bible lectures of an exegetical and practical kind, at the same time resuming the Collegium Philobiblicum of earlier days. He soon became popular as a lecturer; but the peculiarities of his teaching almost immediately aroused a violent opposition on the part of the university authorities; and before the end of the year he was interdicted from lecturing on the ground of his alleged pietism. Thus it was that Francke’s name first came to be publicly associated with that of Spener, and with pietism. Prohibited from lecturing in Leipzig, Francke in 1690 found work at Erfurt as “deacon” of one of the city churches. Here his evangelistic fervour attracted multitudes to his preaching, including Roman Catholics, but at the same time excited the anger of his opponents; and the result of their opposition was that after a ministry of fifteen months he was commanded by the civil authorities (27th of September 1691) to leave Erfurt within forty-eight hours. The same year witnessed the expulsion of Spener from Dresden.

In December, through Spener’s influence, Francke accepted an invitation to fill the chair of Greek and oriental languages in the new university of Halle, which was at that time being organized by the elector Frederick III. of Brandenburg; and at the same time, the chair having no salary attached to it, he was appointed pastor of Glaucha in the immediate neighbourhood of the town. He afterwards became professor of theology. Here, for the next thirty-six years, until his death on the 8th of June 1727, he continued to discharge the twofold office of pastor and professor with rare energy and success. At the very outset of his labours he had been profoundly impressed with a sense of his responsibility towards the numerous outcast children who were growing up around him in ignorance and crime. After a number of tentative plans, he resolved in 1695 to institute what is often called a “ragged school,” supported by public charity. A single room was at first sufficient, but within a year it was found necessary to purchase a house, to which another was added in 1697. In 1698 there were 100 orphans under his charge to be clothed and fed, besides 500 children who were taught as day scholars. The schools grew in importance and are still known as the Francke’sche Stiftungen. The education given was strictly religious. Hebrew was included, while the Greek and Latin classics were neglected; the Homilies of Macarius took the place of Thucydides. The same principle was consistently applied in his university teaching. Even as professor of Greek he had given great prominence in his lectures to the study of the Scriptures; but he found a much more congenial sphere when, in 1698, he was appointed to the chair of theology. Yet his first courses of lectures in that department were readings and expositions of the Old and New Testament; and to this, as also to hermeneutics, he always attached special importance, believing that for theology a sound exegesis was the one indispensable requisite. “Theologus nascitur in scripturis,” he used to say; but during his occupancy of the theological chair he lectured at various times upon other branches of theology also. Amongst his colleagues were Paul Anton (1661-1730), Joachim J. Breithaupt (1658-1732) and Joachim Lange (1670-1744),—men like-minded with himself. Through their influence upon the students, Halle became a centre from which pietism (q.v.) became very widely diffused over Germany.

His principal contributions to theological literature were: Manuductio ad lectionem Scripturae Sacrae (1693); Praelectiones hermeneuticae (1717); Commentatio de scopo librorum Veteris et Novi Testamenti (1724); and Lectiones paraeneticae (1726-1736). The Manuductio was translated into English in 1813, under the title A Guide to the Reading and Study of the Holy Scriptures. An account of his orphanage, entitled Segensvolle Fussstapfen, &c. (1709), which subsequently passed through several editions, has also been partially translated, under the title The Footsteps of Divine Providence: or, The bountiful Hand of Heaven defraying the Expenses of Faith. See H. E. F. Guericke’s A. H. Francke (1827), which has been translated into English (The Life of A. H. Francke, 1837); Gustave Kramer’s Beiträge zur Geschichte A. H. Francke’s (1861), and Neue Beiträge (1875); A. Stein, A. H. Francke (3rd ed., 1894); article in Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyklopädie (ed. 1899); Knuth, Die Francke’schen Stiftungen (2nd ed., 1903).

FRANCKEN. Eleven painters of this family cultivated their art in Antwerp during the 16th and 17th centuries. Several of these were related to each other, whilst many bore the same Christian name in succession. Hence unavoidable confusion in the subsequent classification of paintings not widely differing in style or execution. When Franz Francken the first found a rival in Franz Francken the second, he described himself as the “elder,” in contradistinction to his son, who signed himself the “younger.” But when Franz the second was threatened with competition from Franz the third, he took the name of “the elder,” whilst Franz the third adopted that of Franz “the younger.”

It is possible, though not by any means easy, to sift the works of these artists. The eldest of the Franckens, Nicholas of Herenthals, died at Antwerp in 1596, with nothing but the reputation of having been a painter. None of his works remain. He bequeathed his art to three children. Jerom Francken, the eldest son, after leaving his father’s house, studied under Franz Floris, whom he afterwards served as an assistant, and wandered, about 1560, to Paris. In 1566 he was one of the masters employed to decorate the palace of Fontainebleau, and in 1574 he obtained the appointment of court painter from Henry III., who had just returned from Poland and visited Titian at Venice. In 1603, when Van Mander wrote his biography of Flemish artists, Jerom Francken was still in Paris living in the then aristocratic Faubourg St Germain. Among his earliest works we should distinguish a “Nativity” in the Dresden museum, executed in co-operation with Franz Floris. Another of his important pieces is the “Abdication of Charles V.” in the Amsterdam museum. Equally interesting is a “Portrait of a Falconer,” dated 1558, in the Brunswick gallery. In style these pieces all recall Franz Floris. Franz, the second son of Nicholas of Herenthals, is to be kept in memory as Franz Francken the first. He was born about 1544, matriculated at Antwerp in 1567, and died there in 1616. He, too, studied under Floris, and never settled abroad, or lost the hard and gaudy style which he inherited from his master. Several of his pictures are in the museum of Antwerp; one dated 1597 in the Dresden museum represents “Christ on the Road to Golgotha,” and is signed by him as D. õ (Den ouden) F. Franck. Ambrose, the third son of Nicholas of Herenthals, has bequeathed to us more specimens of his skill than Jerom or Franz the first. He first started as a partner with Jerom at Fontainebleau, then he returned to Antwerp, where he passed for his gild in 1573, and he lived at Antwerp till 1618. His best works are the “Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes” and the “Martyrdom of St Crispin,” both large and ambitious compositions in the Antwerp museum. In both these pieces a fair amount of power is displayed, but marred by want of atmosphere and shadow or by hardness of line and gaudiness of tone. There is not a trace in the three painters named of the influence of the revival which took place under the lead of Rubens. Franz Francken the first trained three sons to his profession, the eldest of whom, though he practised as a master of gild at Antwerp from 1600 to 1610, left no visible trace of his labours behind. Jerom the second took service with his uncle Ambrose. He was born in 1578, passed for his gild in 1607, and in 1620 produced that curious picture of “Horatius Cocles defending the Sublician Bridge” which still hangs in the Antwerp museum. The third son of Franz Francken the first is Franz Francken the second, who signed himself in pictures till 1616 “the younger,” from 1630 till his death “the elder” F. Francken. These pictures are usually of a small size, and are found in considerable numbers in continental collections. Franz Francken the second was born in 1581. In 1605 he entered the gild, of which he subsequently became the president, and in 1642 he died. His earliest composition is the “Crucifixion” in the Belvedere at Vienna, dated 1606. His latest compositions as “the younger” F. Francken are the “Adoration of the Virgin” (1616) in the gallery of Amsterdam, and the “Woman taken in Adultery” (1628) in Dresden. From 1616 to 1630 many of his pieces are signed F. Francken; then come the “Seven Works of Charity” (1630) at Munich, signed “the elder F. F.,” the “Prodigal Son” (1633) at the Louvre, and other almost countless examples. It is in F. Francken the second’s style that we first have evidence of the struggle which necessarily arose when the old customs, hardened by Van Orley and Floris, or Breughel and De Vos, were swept away by Rubens. But F. Francken the second, as before observed, always clung to small surfaces; and though he gained some of the freedom of the moderns, he lost but little of the dryness or gaudiness of the earlier Italo-Flemish revivalists. F. Francken the third, the last of his name who deserves to be recorded, passed in the Antwerp gild in 1639 and died at Antwerp in 1667. His practice was chiefly confined to adding figures to the architectural or landscape pieces of other artists. As Franz Pourbus sometimes put in the portrait figures for Franz Francken the second, so Franz Francken the third often introduced the necessary personages into the works of Pieter Neefs the younger (museums of St Petersburg, Dresden and the Hague). In a “Moses striking the Rock,” dated 1654, of the Augsburg gallery, this last of the Franckens signs D. õ (Den ouden) F. Franck. In the pictures of this artist we most clearly discern the effects of Rubens’s example.

FRANCO-GERMAN WAR (1870-1871). The victories of Prussia in 1866 over the Austrians and their German allies (see [Seven Weeks’ War]) rendered it evident to the statesmen and soldiers of France that a struggle between the two nations could only be a question of time. Army reforms were at once undertaken, and measures were initiated in France to place the armament and equipment of the troops on a level with the requirements of the times. The chassepot, a new breech-loading rifle, immensely superior to the Prussian needle-gun, was issued; the artillery trains were thoroughly overhauled, and a new machine-gun, the mitrailleuse, from which much was expected, introduced. Wide schemes of reorganization (due mainly to Marshal Niel) were set in motion, and, since these required time to mature, recourse was had to foreign alliances in the hope of delaying the impending rupture. In the first week of June 1870, General Lebrun, as a confidential agent of the emperor Napoleon III., was sent to Vienna to concert a plan of joint operations with Austria against Prussia. Italy was also to be included in the alliance, and it was agreed that in case of hostilities the French armies should concentrate in northern Bavaria, where the Austrians and Italians were to join them, and the whole immense army thus formed should march via Jena on Berlin. To what extent Austria and Italy committed themselves to this scheme remains uncertain, but that the emperor Napoleon believed in their bona fides is beyond doubt.

Whether the plan was betrayed to Prussia is also uncertain, and almost immaterial, for Moltke’s plans were based on an accurate estimate of the time it would take Austria to mobilize and on the effect of a series of victories on French soil. At any rate Moltke was not taken into Bismarck’s confidence in the affair of Ems in July 1870, and it is to be presumed that the chancellor had already satisfied himself that the schemes of operations prepared by the chief of the General Staff fully provided against all eventualities. These schemes were founded on Clausewitz’s view of the objects to be pursued in a war against France—in the first place the defeat of the French field armies and in the second the occupation of Paris. On these lines plans for the strategic deployment of the Prussian army were prepared by the General Staff and kept up to date year by year as fresh circumstances (e.g. the co-operation of the minor German armies) arose and new means of communication came into existence. The campaign was actually opened on a revise of 1868-1869, to which was added, on the 6th of May 1870, a secret memorandum for the General Staff.

Under the German organization then existing the preliminary to all active operations was of necessity full and complete mobilization. Then followed transport by road and rail to the line selected for the “strategic deployment,” and it was essential that no part of these operations should be disturbed by action on the part of the enemy. But no such delay imposed itself of necessity upon the French, and a vigorous offensive was so much Strategic deployment of the German armies. in harmony with their traditions that the German plan had to be framed so as to meet such emergencies. On the whole, Moltke concluded that the enemy could not undertake this offensive before the eighth day after mobilization. At that date about five French army corps (150,000 men) could be collected near Metz, and two corps (70,000) near Strassburg; and as it was six days’ march from Metz to the Rhine, no serious attack could be delivered before the fourteenth day, by which day it could be met by superior forces near Kirchheimbolanden. Since, however, the transport of the bulk of the Prussian forces could not begin till the ninth day, their ultimate line of detrainment need not be fixed until the French plans were disclosed, and, as it was important to strike at the earliest moment possible, the deployment was provisionally fixed to be beyond the Rhine on the line Wittlich-Neunkirchen-Landau. Of the thirteen North German corps three had to be left behind to guard the eastern frontier and the coast, one other, the VIII., was practically on the ground already and could concentrate by road, and the remaining nine were distributed to the nine through railway lines available. These ten corps were grouped in three armies, and as the French might violate Belgian neutrality or endeavour to break into southern Germany, two corps (Prussian Guard and Saxon XII. corps) were temporarily held back at a central position around Mainz, whence they could move rapidly up or down the Rhine valley. If Belgian neutrality remained unmolested, the reserve would join the III. army on the left wing, giving it a two to one superiority over its adversary; all three armies would then wheel to the right and combine in an effort to force the French army into a decisive battle on the Saar on or about the twenty-third day. As in this wheel the army on the right formed the pivot and was required only to stand fast, two corps only were allotted to it; two corps for the present formed the III. army, and the remaining five were assigned to the II. army in the centre.

When (16th-17th July) the South German states decided to throw in their lot with the rest, their three corps were allotted to the III. army, the Guards and Saxons to the II. army, whilst the three corps originally left behind were finally distributed one to each army, so that up to the investment of Metz the order of battle was as follows:

On the French side no such plan of operations was in existence when on the night of the 15th of July Krieg mobil was telegraphed all over Prussia. An outline scheme had indeed been prepared as a basis for agreement with Austria and Positions of the French forces. Italy, but practically no details were fixed, and the troops were without transport and supplies. Nevertheless, since speed was the essence of the contract, the troops were hurried up without waiting for their reserves, and delivered, as Moltke had foreseen, just where the lie of the railways and convenience of temporary supply dictated, and the Prussian Intelligence Department was able to inform Moltke on the 22nd of July (seventh day of mobilization) that the French stood from right to left in the following order, on or near the frontier:

If therefore they began a forward movement on the 23rd (eighth day) the case foreseen by Moltke had arisen, and it became necessary to detrain the II. army upon the Rhine. Without waiting for further confirmation of this intelligence, Moltke, with the consent of the king, altered the arrangements accordingly, a decision which, though foreseen, exercised the gravest influence on the course of events. As it happened this decision was premature, for the French could not yet move. Supply trains had to be organized by requisition from the inhabitants, and even arms and ammunition procured for such reserves as had succeeded in joining. Nevertheless, by almost superhuman exertions on the part of the railways and administrative services, all essential deficiencies were made good, and by the 28th of July (13th day) the troops had received all that was absolutely indispensable and might well have been led against the enemy, who, thanks to Moltke’s premature action, were for the moment at a very serious disadvantage. But the French generals were unequal to their responsibilities. It is now clear that, had the great Napoleon and his marshals been in command, they would have made light of the want of cooking pots, cholera belts, &c., and, by a series of rapid marches, would have concentrated odds of at least three to one upon the heads of the Prussian columns as they struggled through the defiles of the Hardt, and won a victory whose political results might well have proved decisive.

To meet this pressing danger, which came to his knowledge during the course of the 29th, Moltke sent a confidential staff officer, Colonel v. Verdy du Vernois, to the III. army to impress upon the crown prince the necessity of an immediate advance to distract the enemy’s attention from the I. and II. armies; but, like the French generals, the crown prince pleaded that he could not move until his trains were complete. Fortunately for the Germans, the French intelligence service not only failed to inform the staff of this extraordinary opportunity, but it allowed itself to be hypnotized by the most amazing rumours. In imagination they saw armies of 100,000 men behind every forest, and, to guard against these dangers, the French troops were marched and counter-marched along the frontiers in the vain hope of discovering an ideal defensive position which should afford full scope to the power of their new weapons.

As these delays were exerting a most unfavourable effect on public opinion not only in France but throughout Europe, the emperor decided on the 1st of August to initiate a movement towards the Saar, chiefly as a guarantee of good faith to the Austrians and Italians.

On this day the French corps held the following positions from right to left:

The French 2nd corps was directed to advance on the following morning direct on Saarbrücken, supported on the flanks by two divisions from the 5th and 3rd corps. The order was duly carried out, and the Prussians (one battalion, two squadrons and a Action of Saarbrücken. battery), seeing the overwhelming numbers opposed to them, fell back fighting and vanished to the northward, having given a very excellent example of steadiness and discipline to their enemy.[1] The latter contented themselves by occupying Saarbrücken and its suburb St Johann, and here, as far as the troops were concerned, the incident closed. Its effect, however, proved far-reaching. The Prussian staff could not conceive that nothing lay behind this display of five whole divisions, and immediately took steps to meet the expected danger. In their excitement, although they had announced the beginning of the action to the king’s headquarters at Mainz, they forgot to notify the close and its results, so that Moltke was not in possession of the facts till noon on the 3rd of August. Meanwhile, Steinmetz, left without instructions and fearing for the safety of the II. army, the heads of whose columns were still in the defiles of the Hardt, moved the I. army from the neighbourhood of Merzig obliquely to his left front, so as to strike the flank of the French army if it continued its march towards Kaiserslautern, in which direction it appeared to be heading.

Whilst this order was in process of execution, Moltke, aware that the II. army was behind time in its march, issued instructions to Steinmetz for the 4th of August which entailed a withdrawal to the rear, the idea being that both Moltke, Prince Frederick Charles and Steinmetz. armies should, if the French advanced, fight a defensive battle in a selected position farther back. Steinmetz obeyed, though bitterly resenting the idea of retreat. This movement, further, drew his left across the roads reserved for the right column of the II. army, and on receipt of a peremptory order from Prince Frederick Charles to evacuate the road, Steinmetz telegraphed for instructions direct to the king, over Moltke’s head. In reply he received a telegram from Moltke, ordering him to clear the road at once, and couched in terms which he considered as a severe reprimand. An explanatory letter, meant to soften the rebuke, was delayed in transmission and did not reach him till too late to modify the orders he had already issued. It must be remembered that Steinmetz at the front was in a better position to judge the apparent situation than was Moltke at Mainz, and that all through the day of the 5th of August he had received intelligence indicating a change of attitude in the French army.

The news of the German victory at Weissenburg on the 4th (see below) had in fact completely paralysed the French headquarters, and orders were issued by them during the course of the 5th to concentrate the whole army of the Battle of Spicheren. Rhine on the selected position of Cadenbronn. As a preliminary, Frossard’s corps withdrew from Saarbrücken and began to entrench a position on the Spicheren heights, 3000 yds. to the southward. Steinmetz, therefore, being quite unaware of the scheme for a great battle on the Saar about the 12th of August, felt that the situation would best be met, and the letter of his instructions strictly obeyed, by moving his whole command forward to the line of the Saar, and orders to this effect were issued on the evening of the 5th. In pursuance of these orders, the advance guard of the 14th division (Lieutenant General von Kameke) reached Saarbrücken about 9 A.M. on the 6th, where the Germans found to their amazement that the bridges were intact. To secure this advantage was the obvious duty of the commander on the spot, and he at once ordered his troops to occupy a line of low heights beyond the town to serve as a bridge-head. As the leading troops deployed on the heights Frossard’s guns on the Spicheren Plateau opened fire, and the advanced guard battery replied. The sound of these guns unchained the whole fighting instinct carefully developed by a long course of Prussian manœuvre training. Everywhere, generals and troops hurried towards the cannon thunder. Kameke, even more in the dark than Steinmetz as to Moltke’s intentions and the strength of his adversaries, attacked at once, precisely as he would have done at manœuvres, and in half an hour his men were committed beyond recall. As each fresh unit reached the field it was hurried into action where its services were most needed, and each fresh general as he arrived took a new view of the combat and issued new orders. On the other side, Frossard, knowing the strength of his position, called on his neighbours for support, and determined to hold his ground. Victory seemed certain. There were sufficient troops within easy reach to have ensured a crushing numerical superiority. But the other generals had not been trained to mutual support, and thought only of their own immediate security, and their staffs were too inexperienced to act upon even good intentions; and, finding himself in the course of the afternoon left to his own devices, Frossard began gradually to withdraw, even before the pressure of the 13th German division on his left flank (about 8 P.M.) compelled his retirement. When darkness ended the battle the Prussians were scarcely aware of their victory. Steinmetz, who had reached the field about 6 P.M., rode back to his headquarters without issuing any orders, while the troops bivouacked where they stood, the units of three army corps being mixed up in almost inextricable confusion. But whereas out of 42,900 Prussians with 120 guns, who in the morning lay within striking distance of the enemy, no fewer than 27,000, with 78 guns were actually engaged; of the French, out of 64,000 with 210 guns only 24,000 with 90 guns took part in the action.

Meanwhile on the German left wing the III. army had begun its advance. Early on the 4th of August it crossed the frontier and fell upon a French detachment under Abel Douay, which had been placed near Weissenburg, partly to Action of Weissenburg. cover the Pigeonnier pass, but principally to consume the supplies accumulated in the little dismantled fortress, as these could not easily be moved. Against this force of under 4000 men of all arms, the Germans brought into action successively portions of three corps, in all over 25,000 men with 90 guns. After six hours’ fighting, in which the Germans lost some 1500 men, the gallant remnant of the French withdrew deliberately and in good order, notwithstanding the death of their leader at the critical moment. The Germans were so elated by their victory over the enemy, whose strength they naturally overestimated, that they forgot to send cavalry in pursuit, and thus entirely lost touch with the enemy.

Next day the advance was resumed, the two Bavarian corps moving via Mattstall through the foothills of the Vosges, the V. corps on their left towards Preuschdorf, and the XI. farther to the left again, through the wooded plain of the Rhine valley. The 4th cavalry division scouted in advance, and army headquarters moved to Sulz. About noon the advanced patrols discovered MacMahon’s corps in position on the left bank of the Sauer (see [Wörth]: Battle of). As his army was dispersed over a wide area, the crown prince determined to devote the 6th to concentrating the troops, and, probably to avoid alarming the enemy, ordered the cavalry to stand fast.

At night the outposts of the I. Bavarians and V. corps on the Sauer saw the fires of the French encampment and heard the noise of railway traffic, and rightly conjectured the approach of reinforcements. MacMahon had in fact determined to stand in the very formidable position he had selected, and he counted on receiving support both from the 7th corps (two divisions of which were being railed up from Colmar) and from the 5th corps, which lay around Bitche. It was also quite possible, and the soundest strategy, to withdraw the bulk of the troops then facing the German I. and II. armies to his support, and these would reach him by the 8th. He was therefore justified in accepting battle, though it was to his interest to delay it as long as possible.

At dawn on the 6th of August the commander of the V. corps outposts noticed certain movements in the French lines, and to clear up the situation brought his guns into action. As at Spicheren, the sound of the guns set the whole Battle of Wörth. machinery of battle in motion. The French artillery immediately accepted the Prussian challenge. The I. Bavarians, having been ordered to be ready to move if they heard artillery fire, immediately advanced against the French left, encountering presently such a stubborn resistance that parts of their line began to give way. The Prussians of the V. corps felt that they could not abandon their allies, and von Kirchbach, calling on the XI. corps for support, attacked with the troops at hand. When the crown prince tried to break off the fight it was too late. Both sides were feeding troops into the firing line, as and where they could lay hands on them. Up to 2 P.M. the French fairly held their own, but shortly afterwards their right yielded to the overwhelming pressure of the XI. corps, and by 3.30 it was in full retreat. The centre held on for another hour, but in its turn was compelled to yield, and by 4.30 all organized resistance was at an end. The débris of the French army was hotly pursued by the German divisional squadrons towards Reichshofen, where serious panic showed itself. When at this stage the supports sent by de Failly from Bitche came on the ground they saw the hopelessness of intervention, and retired whence they had come. Fortunately for the French, the German 4th cavalry division, on which the pursuit should have devolved, had been forgotten by the German staff, and did not reach the front before darkness fell. Out of a total of 82,000 within reach of the battlefield, the Germans succeeded in bringing into action 77,500. The French, who might have had 50,000 on the field, deployed only 37,000, and these suffered a collective loss of no less than 20,100; some regiments losing up to 90% and still retaining some semblance of discipline and order.

Under cover of darkness the remnants of the French army escaped. When at length the 4th cavalry division had succeeded in forcing a way through the confusion of the battlefield, all touch with the enemy had been lost, and being without firearms the troopers were checked by the French stragglers in the woods and the villages, and thus failed to establish the true line of retreat of the French. Ultimately the latter, having gained the railway near Lunéville, disappeared from the German front altogether, and all trace of them was lost until they were discovered, about the 26th of August, forming part of the army of Châlons, whither they had been conveyed by rail via Paris. This is a remarkable example of the strategical value of railways to an army operating in its own country.

In the absence of all resistance, the III. army now proceeded to carry out the original programme of marches laid down in Moltke’s memorandum of the 6th of May, and marching on a broad front through a fertile district it reached the line of the Moselle in excellent order about the 17th of August, where it halted to await the result of the great battle of Gravelotte-St Privat.

We return now to the I. army at Saarbrücken. Its position on the morning of the 7th of August gave cause for the gravest anxiety. At daylight a dense fog lay over the country, and through the mist sounds of heavy firing came Movements on the Saar. from the direction of Forbach, where French stragglers had rallied during the night. The confusion on the battlefield was appalling, and the troops in no condition to go forward. Except the 3rd, 5th and 6th cavalry divisions no closed troops were within a day’s march; hence Steinmetz decided to spend the day in reorganizing his infantry, under cover of his available cavalry. But the German cavalry and staff were quite new to their task. The 6th cavalry division, which had bivouacked on the battlefield, sent on only one brigade towards Forbach, retaining the remainder in reserve. The 5th, thinking that the 6th had already undertaken all that was necessary, withdrew behind the Saar, and the 3rd, also behind the Saar, reported that the country in its front was unsuited to cavalry movements, and only sent out a few officers’ patrols. These were well led, but were too few in number, and their reports were consequently unconvincing.

In the course of the day Steinmetz became very uneasy, and ultimately he decided to concentrate his army by retiring the VII. and VIII. corps behind the river on to the I. (which had arrived near Saarlouis), thus clearing the Saarbrücken-Metz road for the use of the II. army. But at this moment Prince Frederick Charles suddenly modified his views. During the 6th of August his scouts had reported considerable French forces near Bitche (these were the 5th, de Failly’s corps), and early in the morning of the 7th he received a telegram from Moltke informing him that MacMahon’s beaten army was retreating on the same place (the troops observed were in fact those which had marched to MacMahon’s assistance). The prince forthwith deflected the march of the Guards, IV. and X. corps, towards Rohrbach, whilst the IX. and XII. closed up to supporting distance behind them. Thus, as Steinmetz moved away to the west and north, Frederick Charles was diverging to the south and east, and a great gap was opening in the very centre of the German front. This was closed only by the III. corps, still on the battle-field, and by portions of the X. near Saargemünd,[2] whilst within striking distance lay 130,000 French troops, prevented only by the incapacity of their chiefs from delivering a decisive counter-stroke.

Fortunately for the Prussians, Moltke at Mainz took a different view. Receiving absolutely no intelligence from the front during the 7th, he telegraphed orders to the I. and II. armies (10.25 P.M.) to halt on the 8th, and impressed on Steinmetz the necessity of employing his cavalry to clear up the situation. The I. army had already begun the marches ordered by Steinmetz. It was now led back practically to its old bivouacs amongst the unburied dead. Prince Frederick Charles only conformed to Moltke’s order with the III. and X. corps; the remainder executed their concentration towards the south and east.

During the night of the 7th of August Moltke decided that the French army must be in retreat towards the Moselle and forthwith busied himself with the preparation of fresh tables of march for the two armies, his object being to swing up the left wing to outflank the enemy from the south. This work, and the transfer of headquarters to Homburg, needed time, hence no fresh orders were issued to either army, and neither commander would incur the responsibility of moving without any. The I. army therefore spent a fourth night in bivouac on the battlefield. But Constantin von Alvensleben, commanding the III. corps, a man of very different stamp from his colleagues, hearing at first hand that the French had evacuated St Avold, set his corps in motion early in the morning of the 10th August down the St Avold-Metz road, reached St Avold and obtained conclusive evidence that the French were retreating.

During the 9th the orders for the advance to the Moselle were issued. These were based, not on an exact knowledge of where the French army actually stood, but on the opinion Advance to the Moselle. Moltke had formed as to where it ought to have been on military grounds solely, overlooking the fact that the French staff were not free to form military decisions but were compelled to bow to political expediency.

Actually on the 7th of August the emperor had decided to attack the Germans on the 8th with the whole Rhine Army, but this decision was upset by alarmist reports from the beaten army of MacMahon. He then decided to retreat to the Moselle, as Moltke had foreseen, and there to draw to himself the remnants of MacMahon’s army (now near Lunéville). At the same time he assigned the executive command over the whole Rhine Army to Marshal Bazaine. This retreat was begun during the course of the 8th and 9th of August; but on the night of the 9th urgent telegrams from Paris induced the emperor to suspend the movement, and during the 10th the whole army took up a strong position on the French Nied.

Meanwhile the II. German army had received its orders to march in a line of army corps on a broad front in the general direction of Pont-à-Mousson, well to the south of Metz. The I. army was to follow by short marches in échelon on the right; only the III. corps was directed on Falkenberg, a day’s march farther towards Metz along the St Avold-Metz road. The movement was begun on the 10th, and towards evening the French army was located on the right front of the III. corps. This entirely upset Moltke’s hypothesis, and called for a complete modification of his plans, as the III. corps alone could not be expected to resist the impact of Bazaine’s five corps. The III. corps therefore received orders to stand fast for the moment, and the remainder of the II. army was instructed to wheel to the right and concentrate for a great battle to the east of Metz on the 16th or 17th.

Before, however, these orders had been received the sudden retreat of the French completely changed the situation. The Germans therefore continued their movement towards the Moselle. On the 13th the French took up a fresh position 5 m. to the east of Metz, where they were located by the cavalry and the advanced guards of the I. army.

Again Moltke ordered the I. army to observe and hold the enemy, whilst the II. was to swing round to the north. The cavalry was to scout beyond the Moselle and intercept all communication with the heart of France (see Metz). Battle of Colombey-Borny. By this time the whole German army had imbibed the idea that the French were in full retreat and endeavouring to evade a decisive struggle. When therefore during the morning of the 14th their outposts observed signs of retreat in the French position, their impatience could no longer be restrained; as at Wörth and Spicheren, an outpost commander brought up his guns, and at the sound of their fire, every unit within reach spontaneously got under arms (battle of Colombey-Borny). In a short time, with or without orders, the I., VII., VIII. and IX. corps were in full march to the battle-field. But the French too turned back to fight, and an obstinate engagement ensued, at the close of which the Germans barely held the ground and the French withdrew under cover of the Metz forts.

Still, though the fighting had been indecisive, the conviction of victory remained with the Germans, and the idea of a French retreat became an obsession. To this idea Moltke gave expression in his orders issued early on the 15th, in which he laid down that the “fruits of the victory” of the previous evening could only be reaped by a vigorous pursuit towards the passages of the Meuse, where it was hoped the French might yet be overtaken. This order, however, did not allow for the hopeless inability of the French staff to regulate the movement of congested masses of men, horses and vehicles, such as were now accumulated in the streets and environs of Metz. Whilst Bazaine had come to no definite decision whether to stand and fight or continue to retreat, and was merely drifting under the impressions of the moment, the Prussian leaders, in particular Prince Frederick Charles, saw in imagination the French columns in rapid orderly movement towards the west, and calculated that at best they could not be overtaken short of Verdun.

In this order of ideas the whole of the II. army, followed on its right rear by two-thirds of the I. army (the I. corps being detached to observe the eastern side of the fortress), were pushed on towards the Moselle, the cavalry far in advance towards the Meuse, whilst only the 5th cavalry division was ordered to scout towards the Metz-Verdun road, and even that was disseminated over far too wide an area.

Later in the day (15th) Frederick Charles sent orders to the III. corps, which was on the right flank of his long line of columns and approaching the Moselle at Corny and Novéant, to march via Gorze to Mars-la-Tour on the Metz-Verdun road; to the X. corps, strung out along the road from Thiaucourt to Pont-à-Mousson, to move to Jarny; and for the remainder to push on westward to seize the Meuse crossings. No definite information as to the French army reached him in time to modify these instructions.

Meanwhile the 5th (Rheinbaben’s) cavalry division, at about 3 P.M. in the afternoon, had come into contact with the French cavalry in the vicinity of Mars-la-Tour, and gleaned intelligence enough to show that no French infantry had as yet reached Rezonville. The commander of the X. corps at Thiaucourt, informed of this, became anxious for the security of his flank during the next day’s march and decided to push out a strong flanking detachment under von Caprivi, to support von Rheinbaben and maintain touch with the III. corps marching on his right rear.

Von Alvensleben, to whom the 6th cavalry division had meanwhile been assigned, seems to have received no local intelligence whatsoever; and at daybreak on the 16th he began his march in two columns, the 6th division on Mars-la-Tour, the 5th Battle of Vionville-Mars-la-Tour. towards the Rezonville-Vionville plateau. And shortly after 9.15 A.M. he suddenly discovered the truth. The entire French army lay on his right flank, and his nearest supports were almost a day’s march distant. In this crisis he made up his mind at once to attack with every available man, and to continue to attack, in the conviction that his audacity would serve to conceal his weakness. All day long, therefore, the Brandenburgers of the III. corps, supported ultimately by the X. corps and part of the IX., attacked again and again. The enemy was thrice their strength, but very differently led, and made no adequate use of his superiority (battle of Vionville-Mars-la Tour).

Meanwhile Prince Frederick Charles, at Pont-à-Mousson, was still confident in the French retreat to the Meuse, and had even issued orders for the 17th on that assumption. Firing had been heard since 9.15 A.M., and about noon Alvensleben’s first report had reached him, but it was not till after 2 that he realized the situation. Then, mounting his horse, he covered the 15 m. to Flavigny over crowded and difficult roads within the hour, and on his arrival abundantly atoned for his strategic errors by his unconquerable determination and tactical skill. When darkness put a stop to the fighting, he considered the position. Cancelling all previous orders, he called all troops within reach to the battle-field and resigned himself to wait for them. The situation was indeed critical. The whole French army of five corps, only half of which had been engaged, lay in front of him. His own army lay scattered over an area of 30 m. by 20, and only some 20,000 fresh troops—of the IX. corps—could The 17th of August. reach the field during the forenoon of the 17th. He did not then know that Moltke had already intervened and had ordered the VII., VIII. and II. corps[3] to his assistance. Daylight revealed the extreme exhaustion of both men and horses. The men lay around in hopeless confusion amongst the killed and wounded, each where sleep had overtaken him, and thus the extent of the actual losses, heavy enough, could not be estimated. Across the valley, bugle sounds revealed the French already alert, and presently a long line of skirmishers approached the Prussian position. But they halted just beyond rifle range, and it was soon evident that they were only intended to cover a further withdrawal. Presently came the welcome intelligence that the reinforcements were well on their way.

About noon the king and Moltke drove up to the ground, and there was an animated discussion as to what the French would do next. Aware of their withdrawal from his immediate front, Prince Frederick Charles reverted to his previous idea and insisted that they were in full retreat towards the north, and that their entrenchments near Point du Jour and St Hubert (see map in article [Metz]) were at most a rearguard position. Moltke was inclined to the same view, but considered the alternative possibility of a withdrawal towards Metz, and about 2 P.M. orders were issued to meet these divergent opinions. The whole army was to be drawn up at 6 A.M. on the 18th in an échelon facing north, so as to be ready for action in either direction. The king and Moltke then drove to Pont-à-Mousson, and the troops bivouacked in a state of readiness. The rest of the 17th was spent in restoring order in the shattered III. and X. corps, and by nightfall both corps were reported fit for action. Strangely enough, there were no organized cavalry reconnaissances, and no intelligence of importance was collected during the night of the 17th-18th.

Early on the 18th the troops began to move into position in the following order from left to right: XII. (Saxons), Guards, IX., VIII. and VII. The X. and III. were retained in reserve.

The idea of the French retreat was still uppermost in the prince’s mind, and the whole army therefore moved north. But between 10 and 11 A.M. part of the truth—viz. that the French had their backs to Metz and stood in battle order Battle of Gravelotte-Saint Privat. from St Hubert northwards—became evident, and the II. army, pivoting on the I., wheeled to the right and moved eastward. Suddenly the IX. corps fell right on the centre of the French line (Amanvillers), and a most desperate encounter began, superior control, as before, ceasing after the guns had opened fire. Prince Frederick Charles, however, a little farther north, again asserted his tactical ability, and about 7 P.M. he brought into position no less than five army corps for the final attack. The sudden collapse of French resistance, due to the frontal attack of the Guards (St Privat) and the turning movement of the Saxons (Roncourt), rendered the use of this mass unnecessary, but the resolution to use it was there. On the German right (I. army), about Gravelotte, all superior leading ceased quite early in the afternoon, and at night the French still showed an unbroken front. Until midnight, when the prince’s victory was reported, the suspense at headquarters was terrible. The I. army was exhausted, no steps had been taken to ensure support from the III. army, and the IV. corps (II. army) lay inactive 30 m. away.

This seems a fitting place to discuss the much-disputed point of Bazaine’s conduct in allowing himself to be driven back into Metz when fortune had thrown into his hands the great opportunity of the 16th and 17th of August. He Bazaine in Metz. had been appointed to command on the 10th, but the presence of the emperor, who only left the front early on the 16th, and their dislike of Bazaine, exercised a disturbing influence on the headquarters staff officers. During the retreat to Metz the marshal had satisfied himself as to the inability of his corps commanders to handle their troops, and also as to the ill-will of the staff. In the circumstances he felt that a battle in the open field could only end in disaster; and, since it was proved that the Germans could outmarch him, his army was sure to be overtaken and annihilated if he ventured beyond the shelter of the fortress. But near Metz he could at least inflict very severe punishment on his assailants, and in any case his presence in Metz would neutralize a far superior force of the enemy for weeks or months. What use the French government might choose to make of the breathing space thus secured was their business, not his; and subsequent events showed that, had they not forced MacMahon’s hand, the existence of the latter’s nucleus army of trained troops might have prevented the investment of Paris. Bazaine was condemned by court-martial after the war, but if the case were reheard to-day it is certain that no charge of treachery could be sustained.

On the German side the victory at St Privat was at once followed up by the headquarters. Early on the 19th the investment of Bazaine’s army in Metz was commenced. A new army, the Army of the Meuse (often called the IV.), was as soon as possible formed of all troops not required for the maintenance of the investment, and marched off under the command of the crown prince of Saxony to discover and destroy the remainder of the French field army, which at this moment was known to be at Châlons.

The operations which led to the capture of MacMahon’s army in Sedan call for little explanation. Given seven corps, each capable of averaging 15 m. a day for a week in succession, opposed to four corps only, shaken by defeat Campaign of Sedan. and unable as a whole to cover more than 5 m. a day, the result could hardly be doubtful. But Moltke’s method of conducting operations left his opponent many openings which could only be closed by excessive demands on the marching power of the men. Trusting only to his cavalry screen to secure information, he was always without any definite fixed point about which to manœuvre, for whilst the reports of the screen and orders based thereon were being transmitted, the enemy was free to move, and generally their movements were dictated by political expediency, not by calculable military motives.

Thus whilst the German army, on a front of nearly 50 m., was marching due west on Paris, MacMahon, under political pressure, was moving parallel to them, but on a northerly route, to attempt the relief of Metz.

So unexpected was this move and so uncertain the information which called attention to it, that Moltke did not venture to change at once the direction of march of the whole army, but he directed the Army of the Meuse northward on Damvillers and ordered Prince Frederick Charles to detach two corps from the forces investing Metz to reinforce it. For the moment, therefore, MacMahon’s move had succeeded, and the opportunity existed for Bazaine to break out. But at the critical moment the hopeless want of real efficiency in MacMahon’s army compelled the latter so to delay his advance that it became evident to the Germans that there was no longer any necessity for the III. army to maintain the direction towards Paris, and that the probable point of contact between the Meuse army and the French lay nearer to the right wing of the III. army than to Prince Frederick Charles’s investing force before Metz.

The detachment from the II. army was therefore countermanded, and the whole III. army changed front to the north, while the Meuse army headed the French off from the east. The latter came into contact with the head of the French columns, during the 29th, about Nouart, and on the 30th at Buzancy (battle of Beaumont); and the French, yielding to the force of numbers combined with superior moral, were driven north-westward upon Sedan (q.v.), right across the front of the III. army, which was now rapidly coming up from the south.

During the 31st the retreat practically became a rout, and the morning of the 1st of September found the French crowded around the little fortress of Sedan, with only one line of retreat to the north-west still open. By 11 A.M. the XI. corps (III. army) had already closed that line, and about noon the Saxons (Army of the Meuse) moving round between the town and the Belgian frontier joined hands with the XI., and the circle of investment was complete. The battle of Sedan was closed about 4.15 P.M. by the hoisting of the white flag. Terms were agreed upon during the night, and the whole French army, with the emperor, passed into captivity.

(F. N. M.)

Thus in five weeks one of the French field armies was imprisoned in Metz, the other destroyed, and the Germans were free to march upon Paris. This seemed easy. There could be no organized opposition to their progress,[4] and Paris, Later operations. if not so defenceless as in 1814, was more populous. Starvation was the best method of attacking an overcrowded fortress, and the Parisians were not thought to be proof against the deprivation of their accustomed luxuries. Even Moltke hoped that by the end of October he would be “shooting hares at Creisau,” and with this confidence the German III. and IV. armies left the vicinity of Sedan on the 4th of September. The march called for no more than good staff arrangements, and the two armies arrived before Paris a fortnight later and gradually encircled the place—the III. army on the south, the IV. on the north side—in the last days of September. Headquarters were established at Versailles. Meanwhile the Third Empire had fallen, giving place on the 4th of September to a republican Government of National Defence, which made its appeal to, and evoked, the spirit of 1792. Henceforward the French nation, which had left the conduct of the war to the regular army and had been little more than an excited spectator, took the burden upon itself.

The regular army, indeed, still contained more than 500,000 men (chiefly recruits and reservists), and 50,000 sailors, marines, douaniers, &c., were also available. But the Garde Mobile, framed by Marshal Niel in 1868, doubled this figure, and the addition of the Garde Nationale, called into existence on the 15th of September, and including all able-bodied men of from 31 to 60 years of age, more than trebled it. The German staff had of course to reckon on the Garde Mobile, and did so beforehand, but they wholly underestimated both its effective members and its willingness, while, possessing themselves a system in which all the military elements of the German nation stood close behind the troops of the active army, they ignored the potentialities of the Garde Nationale.

Meanwhile, both as a contrast to the events that centred on Paris and because in point of time they were decided for the most part in the weeks immediately following Sedan, we must briefly allude to the sieges conducted by the Germans—Paris (q.v.), Metz (q.v.) and Belfort (q.v.) excepted. Old and ruined as many of them were, the French fortresses possessed considerable importance in the eyes of the Germans. Strassburg, in particular, the key of Alsace, the standing menace to South Germany and the most conspicuous of the spoils of Louis XIV.’s Raubkriege, was an obvious target. Operations were begun on the 9th of August, three days after Wörth, General v. Werder’s corps (Baden troops and Prussian Landwehr) making the siege. The French commandant, General Uhrich, surrendered after a stubborn resistance on the 28th of September. Of the smaller fortresses many, being practically unarmed and without garrisons, capitulated at once. Toul, defended by Major Huck with 2000 mobiles, resisted for forty days, and drew upon itself the efforts of 13,000 men and 100 guns. Verdun, commanded by General Guérin de Waldersbach, held out till after the fall of Metz. Some of the fortresses lying to the north of the Prussian line of advance on Paris, e.g. Mézières, resisted up to January 1871, though of course this was very largely due to the diminution of pressure caused by the appearance of new French field armies in October. On the 9th of September a strange incident took place at the surrender of Laon. A powder magazine was blown up by the soldiers in charge and 300 French and a few German soldiers were killed by the explosion. But as the Germans advanced, their lines of communication were thoroughly organized, and the belt of country between Paris and the Prussian frontier subdued and garrisoned. Most of these fortresses were small town enceintes, dating from Vauban’s time, and open, under the new conditions of warfare, to concentric bombardment from positions formerly out of range, upon which the besieger could place as many guns as he chose to employ. In addition they were usually deficient in armament and stores and garrisoned by newly-raised troops. Belfort, where the defenders strained every nerve to keep the besiegers out of bombarding range, and Paris formed the only exceptions to this general rule.

The policy of the new French government was defined by Jules Favre on the 6th of September. “It is for the king of Prussia, who has declared that he is making war on the Empire and not on France, to stay his hand; we The “Défense Nationale.” shall not cede an inch of our territory or a stone of our fortresses.” These proud words, so often ridiculed as empty bombast, were the prelude of a national effort which re-established France in the eyes of Europe as a great power, even though provinces and fortresses were ceded in the peace that that effort proved unable to avert. They were translated into action by Léon Gambetta, who escaped from Paris in a balloon on the 7th of October, and established the headquarters of the defence at Tours, where already the “Delegation” of the central government—which had decided to remain in Paris—had concentrated the machinery of government. Thenceforward Gambetta and his principal assistant de Freycinet directed the whole war in the open country, co-ordinating it, as best they could with the precarious means of communication at their disposal, with Trochu’s military operations in and round the capital. His critics—Gambetta’s personality was such as to ensure him numerous enemies among the higher civil and military officials, over whom, in the interests of La Patrie, he rode rough-shod—have acknowledged the fact, which is patent enough in any case, that nothing but Gambetta’s driving energy enabled France in a few weeks to create and to equip twelve army corps, representing thirty-six divisions (600,000 rifles and 1400 guns), after all her organized regular field troops had been destroyed or neutralized. But it is claimed that by undue interference with the generals at the front, by presuming to dictate their plans of campaign, and by forcing them to act when the troops were unready, Gambetta and de Freycinet nullified the efforts of themselves and the rest of the nation and subjected France to a humiliating treaty of peace. We cannot here discuss the justice or injustice of such a general condemnation, or even whether in individual instances Gambetta trespassed too far into the special domain of the soldier. But even the brief narrative given below must at least suggest to the reader the existence amongst the generals and higher officials of a dead weight of passive resistance to the Delegation’s orders, of unnecessary distrust of the qualities of the improvised troops, and above all of the utter fear of responsibility that twenty years of literal obedience had bred. The closest study of the war cannot lead to any other conclusion than this, that whether or not Gambetta as a strategist took the right course in general or in particular cases, no one else would have taken any course whatever.

On the approach of the enemy Paris hastened its preparations for defence to the utmost, while in the provinces, out of reach of the German cavalry, new army corps were rapidly organized out of the few constituted regular units not involved in the previous catastrophes, the depot troops and the mobile national guard. The first-fruits of these efforts were seen in Beauce, where early in October important masses of French troops prepared not only to bar the further progress of the invader but actually to relieve Paris. The so-called “fog of war”—the armed inhabitants, francs-tireurs, sedentary national guard and volunteers—prevented the German cavalry from venturing far out from the infantry camps around Paris, and behind this screen the new 15th army corps assembled on the Loire. But an untimely demonstration of force alarmed the Germans, all of whom, from Moltke downwards, had hitherto disbelieved in the existence of the French new formations, and the still unready 15th corps found itself the target of an expedition of the I. Bavarian corps, which drove the defenders out of Orleans after a sharp struggle, while at the same time another expedition swept the western part of Beauce, sacked Châteaudun as a punishment for its brave defence, and returned via Chartres, which was occupied.

After these events the French forces disappeared from German eyes for some weeks. D’Aurelle de Paladines, the commander of the “Army of the Loire” (15th and 16th corps), improvised a camp of instruction at Salbris in Sologne, several marches out of reach, and subjected his raw troops to a stern régime of drill and discipline. At the same time an “Army of the West” began to gather on the side of Le Mans. This army was almost imaginary, yet rumours of its existence and numbers led the German commanders into the gravest errors, for they soon came to suspect that the main army lay on that side and not on the Loire, and this mistaken impression governed the German dispositions up to the very eve of the decisive events around Orleans in December. Thus when at last D’Aurelle took the offensive from Tours (whither he had transported his forces, now 100,000 strong) against the position of the I. Bavarian corps near Orleans, he found his task easy. The Bavarians, outnumbered and unsupported, were defeated with heavy losses in the battle of Coulmiers (November 9), and, had it not been for the inexperience, want of combination, and other technical weaknesses of the French, they would have been annihilated. What the results of such a victory as Coulmiers might have been, had it been won by a fully organized, smoothly working army of the same strength, it is difficult to overestimate. As it was, the retirement of the Bavarians rang the alarm bell all along the line of the German positions, and that was all.

Then once again, instead of following up its success, the French army disappeared from view. The victory had emboldened the “fog of war” to make renewed efforts, and resistance to the pressure of the German cavalry grew day by day. The Bavarians were reinforced by two Prussian divisions and by all available cavalry commands, and constituted as an “army detachment” under the grand-duke Friedrich Franz of Mecklenburg-Schwerin to deal with the Army of the Loire, the strength of which was far from being accurately known. Meantime the capitulation of Metz on the 28th of October had set free the veterans of Prince Frederick Charles, the best troops in the German army, for field operations. The latter were at first misdirected to the upper Seine, and yet another opportunity arose for the French to raise the siege of Paris. But D’Aurelle utilized the time he had gained in strengthening the army and in imparting drill and discipline to the new units which gathered round the original nucleus of the 15th and 16th corps. All this was, however, unknown and even unsuspected at the German headquarters, and the invaders, feeling the approaching crisis, became more than uneasy as to their prospects of maintaining the siege of Paris.

At this moment, in the middle of November, the general situation was as follows: the German III. and Meuse armies, investing Paris, had had to throw off important detachments to protect the enterprise, which they had The Orleans campaign. undertaken on the assumption that no further field armies of the enemy were to be encountered. The maintenance of their communications with Germany, relatively unimportant when the struggle took place in the circumstances of field warfare, had become supremely necessary, now that the army had come to a standstill and undertaken a great siege, which required heavy guns and constant replenishment of ammunition and stores. The rapidity of the German invasion had left no time for the proper organization and full garrisoning of these communications, which were now threatened, not merely by the Army of the Loire, but by other forces assembling on the area protected by Langres and Belfort. The latter, under General Cambriels, were held in check and no more by the Baden troops and reserve units (XIV. German corps) under General Werder, and eventually without arousing attention they were able to send 40,000 men to the Army of the Loire. This army, still around Orleans, thus came to number perhaps 150,000 men, and opposed to it, about the 14th of November, the Germans had only the Army Detachment of about 40,000, the II. army being still distant. It was under these conditions that the famous Orleans campaign took place. After many vicissitudes of fortune, and with many misunderstandings between Prince Frederick Charles, Moltke and the grand-duke, the Germans were ultimately victorious, thanks principally to the brilliant fighting of the X. corps at Beaune-la-Rolande (28th of November), which was followed by the battle of Loigny-Poupry on the 2nd of December and the second capture of Orleans after heavy fighting on the 4th of December.

The result of the capture of Orleans was the severance of the two wings of the French army, henceforward commanded respectively by Chanzy and Bourbaki. The latter fell back at once and hastily, though not closely pursued, to Bourges. But Chanzy, opposing the Detachment between Beaugency and the Forest of Marchenoir, was of sterner metal, and in the five days’ general engagement around Beaugency (December 7-11) the Germans gained little or no real advantage. Indeed their solitary material success, the capture of Beaugency, was due chiefly to the fact that the French there were subjected to conflicting orders from the military and the governmental authorities. Chanzy then abandoned little but the field of battle, and on the grand-duke’s representations Prince Frederick Charles, leaving a mere screen to impose upon Bourbaki (who allowed himself to be deceived and remained inactive), hurried thither with the II. army. After that Chanzy was rapidly driven north-westward, though always presenting a stubborn front. The Delegation left Tours and betook itself to Bordeaux, whence it directed the government for the rest of the war. But all this continuous marching and fighting, and the growing severity of the weather, compelled Prince Frederick Charles to call a halt for a few days. About the 19th of December, therefore, the Germans (II. army and Detachment) were closed up in the region of Chartres, Orleans, Auxerre and Fontainebleau, Chanzy along the river Sarthe about Le Mans and Bourbaki still passive towards Bourges.

During this, as during other halts, the French government and its generals occupied themselves with fresh plans of campaign, the former with an eager desire for results, the latter (Chanzy excepted) with many misgivings. Ultimately, and fatally, it was decided that Bourbaki, whom nothing could move towards Orleans, should depart for the south-east, with a view to relieving Belfort and striking perpendicularly against the long line of the Germans’ communications. This movement, bold to the point of extreme rashness judged by any theoretical rules of strategy, seems to have been suggested by de Freycinet. As the execution of it fell actually into incapable hands, it is difficult to judge what would have been the result had a Chanzy or a Faidherbe been in command of the French. At any rate it was vicious in so far as immediate advantages were sacrificed to hopes of ultimate success which Gambetta and de Freycinet did wrong to base on Bourbaki’s powers of generalship. Late in December, for good or evil, Bourbaki marched off into Franche-Comté and ceased to be a factor in the Loire campaign. A mere calculation of time and space sufficed to show the German headquarters that the moment had arrived to demolish the stubborn Chanzy.

Prince Frederick Charles resumed the interrupted offensive, pushing westward with four corps and four cavalry divisions which converged on Le Mans. There on the 10th, 11th and 12th of January 1871 a stubbornly contested Le Mans. battle ended with the retreat of the French, who owed their defeat solely to the misbehaviour of the Breton mobiles. These, after deserting their post on the battlefield at a mere threat of the enemy’s infantry, fled in disorder and infected with their terrors the men in the reserve camps of instruction, which broke up in turn. But Chanzy, resolute as ever, drew off his field army intact towards Laval, where a freshly raised corps joined him. The prince’s army was far too exhausted to deliver another effective blow, and the main body of it gradually drew back into better quarters, while the grand duke departed for the north to aid in opposing Faidherbe. Some idea of the strain to which the invaders had been subjected may be gathered from the fact that army corps, originally 30,000 strong, were in some cases reduced to 10,000 and even fewer bayonets. And at this moment Bourbaki was at the head of 120,000 men! Indeed, so threatening seemed the situation on the Loire, though the French south of that river between Gien and Blois were mere isolated brigades, that the prince hurried back from Le Mans to Orleans to take personal command. A fresh French corps, bearing the number 25, and being the twenty-first actually raised during the war, appeared in the field towards Blois. Chanzy was again at the head of 156,000 men. He was about to take the offensive against the 40,000 Germans left near Le Mans when to his bitter disappointment he received the news of the armistice. “We have still France,” he had said to his staff, undeterred by the news of the capitulation of Paris, but now he had to submit, for even if his improvised army was still cheerful, there were many significant tokens that the people at large had sunk into apathy and hoped to avoid worse terms of peace by discontinuing the contest at once.

So ended the critical period of the “Défense nationale.” It may be taken to have lasted from the day of Coulmiers to the last day of Le Mans, and its central point was the battle of Beaune-la-Rolande. Its characteristics were, on the German side, inadequacy of the system of strategy practised, which became palpable as soon as the organs of reconnaissance met with serious resistance, misjudgment of and indeed contempt for the fighting powers of “new formations,” and the rise of a spirit of ferocity in the man in the ranks, born of his resentment at the continuance of the war and the ceaseless sniping of the franc-tireur’s rifle and the peasant’s shot-gun. On the French side the continual efforts of the statesmen to stimulate the generals to decisive efforts, coupled with actual suggestions as to the plans of the campaign to be followed (in default, be it said, of the generals themselves producing such plans), and the professional soldiers’ distrust of half-trained troops, acted and reacted upon one another in such a way as to neutralize the powerful, if disconnected and erratic, forces that the war and the Republic had unchained. As for the soldiers themselves, their most conspicuous qualities were their uncomplaining endurance of fatigues and wet bivouacs, and in action their capacity for a single great effort and no more. But they were unreliable in the hands of the veteran regular general, because they were heterogeneous in recruiting, and unequal in experience and military qualities, and the French staff in those days was wholly incapable of moving masses of troops with the rapidity demanded by the enemy’s methods of war, so that on the whole it is difficult to know whether to wonder more at their missing success or at their so nearly achieving it.

The decision, as we have said, was fought out on the Loire and the Sarthe. Nevertheless the glorious story of the “Défense nationale” includes two other important campaigns—that of Faidherbe in the north and that of Bourbaki in the east.

In the north the organization of the new formations was begun by Dr Testelin and General Farre. Bourbaki held the command for a short time in November before proceeding to Tours, but the active command in field Faidherbe’s campaign. operations came into the hands of Faidherbe, a general whose natural powers, so far from being cramped by years of peace routine and court repression, had been developed by a career of pioneer warfare and colonial administration. General Farre was his capable chief of staff. Troops were raised from fugitives from Metz and Sedan, as well as from depot troops and the Garde Mobile, and several minor successes were won by the national troops in the Seine valley, for here, as on the side of the Loire, mere detachments of the investing army round Paris were almost powerless. But the capitulation of Metz came too soon for the full development of these sources of military strength, and the German I. army under Manteuffel, released from duty at Metz, marched north-eastward, capturing the minor fortresses on its way. Before Faidherbe assumed command, Farre had fought several severe actions near Amiens, but, greatly outnumbered, had been defeated and forced to retire behind the Somme. Another French general, Briand, had also engaged the enemy without success near Rouen. Faidherbe assumed the command on the 3rd of December, and promptly moved forward. A general engagement on the little river Hallue (December 23), east-north-east of Amiens, was fought with no decisive results, but Faidherbe, feeling that his troops were only capable of winning victories in the first rush, drew them off on the 24th. His next effort, at Bapaûme (January 2-3, 1871), was more successful, but its effects were counterbalanced by the surrender of the fortress of Péronne (January 9) and the consequent establishment of the Germans on the line of the Somme. Meanwhile the Rouen troops had been contained by a strong German detachment, and there was no further chance of succouring Paris from the north. But Faidherbe, like Chanzy, was far from despair, and in spite of the deficiencies of his troops in equipment (50,000 pairs of shoes, supplied by English contractors, proved to have paper soles), he risked a third great battle at St Quentin (January 19). This time he was severely defeated, though his loss in killed and wounded was about equal to that of the Germans, who were commanded by Goeben. Still the attempt of the Germans to surround him failed and he drew off his forces with his artillery and trains unharmed. The Germans, who had been greatly impressed by the solidity of his army, did not pursue him far, and Faidherbe was preparing for a fresh effort when he received orders to suspend hostilities.

The last episode is Bourbaki’s campaign in the east, with its mournful close at Pontarlier. Before the crisis of the last week of November, the French forces under General Crémer, Cambriels’ successor, had been so far successful in minor enterprises that, as mentioned above, the right wing of the Loire army, severed from the left by the battle of Orleans and subsequently held inactive at Bourges and Nevers, was ordered to Franche Comté to take the offensive against the XIV. corps and other German troops there, to relieve Belfort and to strike a blow across the invaders’ line of communications. But there were many delays in execution. The staff work, which was at no time satisfactory in the French armies of 1870, was complicated by the snow, the bad state of the roads, and the mountainous nature of the country, and Bourbaki, a brave general of division in action, but irresolute and pretentious as a commander in chief, was not the man to cope with the situation. Only the furious courage and patient endurance of hardships of the rank and file, and the good qualities of some of the generals, such as Clinchant, Crémer and Billot, and junior staff officers such as Major Brugère (afterwards generalissimo of the French army), secured what success was attained.

Werder, the German commander, warned of the imposing concentration of the French, evacuated Dijon and Dôle just in time to avoid the blow and rapidly drew together his forces behind the Ognon above Vesoul. A furious The campaign in the East. attack on one of his divisions at Villersexel (January 9) cost him 2000 prisoners as well as his killed and wounded, and Bourbaki, heading for Belfort, was actually nearer to the fortress than the Germans. But at the crisis more time was wasted, Werder (who had almost lost hope of maintaining himself and had received both encouragement and stringent instructions to do so) slipped in front of the French, and took up a long weak line of defence on the river Lisaine, almost within cannon shot of Belfort. The cumbrous French army moved up and attacked him there with 150,000 against 60,000 (January 15-17, 1871). It was at last repulsed, thanks chiefly to Bourbaki’s inability to handle his forces, and, to the bitter disappointment of officers and men alike, he ordered a retreat, leaving Belfort to its fate.

Ere this, so urgent was the necessity of assisting Werder, Manteuffel had been placed at the head of a new Army of the South. Bringing two corps from the I. army opposing Faidherbe and calling up a third from the armies around Paris, and a fourth from the II. army, Manteuffel hurried southward by Langres to the Saône. Then, hearing of Werder’s victory on the Lisaine, he deflected the march so as to cut off Bourbaki’s retreat, drawing off the left flank guard of the latter (commanded with much éclat and little real effect by Garibaldi) by a sharp feint attack on Dijon. The pressure of Werder in front and Manteuffel in flank gradually forced the now thoroughly disheartened French forces towards the Swiss frontier, and Bourbaki, realizing at once the ruin of his army and his own incapacity to re-establish its efficiency, shot himself, though not fatally, on the 26th of January. Clinchant, his successor, acted promptly enough to remove the immediate danger, but on the 29th he was informed of the armistice without at the same time being told that Belfort and the eastern theatre of war had been on Jules Favre’s demand expressly excepted from its operation.[5] Thus the French, the leaders distracted by doubts and the worn-out soldiers fully aware that the war was practically over, stood still, while Manteuffel completed his preparations for hemming them in. On the 1st of February General Clinchant led his troops into Switzerland, where they were disarmed, interned and well cared for by the authorities of the neutral state. The rearguard fought a last action with the advancing Germans before passing the frontier. On the 16th, by order of the French government, Belfort capitulated, but it was not until the 11th of March that the Germans took possession of Bitche, the little fortress on the Vosges, where in the early days of the war de Failly had illustrated so signally the want of concerted action and the neglect of opportunities which had throughout proved the bane of the French armies.

The losses of the Germans during the whole war were 28,000 dead and 101,000 wounded and disabled, those of the French, 156,000 dead (17,000 of whom died, of sickness and wounds, as prisoners in German hands) and 143,000 wounded and disabled. 720,000 men surrendered to the Germans or to the authorities of neutral states, and at the close of the war there were still 250,000 troops on foot, with further resources not immediately available to the number of 280,000 more. In this connexion, and as evidence of the respective numerical yields of the German system working normally and of the French improvised for the emergency, we quote from Berndt (Zahl im Kriege) the following comparative figures:—

The date of the armistice was the 28th of January, and that of the ratification of the treaty of Frankfurt the 23rd of May 1871.

Bibliography.—The literature of the war is ever increasing in volume, and the following list only includes a very short selection made amongst the most important works.

General.—German official history, Der deutsch-französische Krieg (Berlin, 1872-1881; English and French translations); monographs of the German general staff (Kriegsgesch. Einzelschriften); Moltke, Gesch. des deutsch-französ. Krieges (Berlin, 1891; English translation) and Gesammelte Schriften des G. F. M. Grafen v. Moltke (Berlin, 1900-  ); French official history, La Guerre de 1870-1871 (Paris, 1902-  ) (the fullest and most accurate account); P. Lehautcourt (General Palat), Hist. de la guerre de 1870-1871 (Paris, 1901-1907); v. Verdy du Vernois, Studien über den Krieg ... auf Grundlage 1870-1871 (Berlin, 1892-1896); G. Cardinal von Widdern, Kritische Tage 1870-1871 (French translation, Journées critiques). Events preceding the war are dealt with in v. Bernhardi, Zwischen zwei Kriegen; Baron Stoffel, Rapports militaires 1866-1870 (Paris, 1871; English translation); G. Lehmann, Die Mobilmachung 1870-1871 (Berlin, 1905).

For the war in Lorraine: Prince Kraft of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen, Briefe über Strategie (English translation, Letters on Strategy); F. Foch, Conduite de la guerre, pt. ii.; H. Bonnal, Manœuvre de Saint Privat (Paris, 1904-1906); Maistre, Spicheren (Paris, 1908); v. Schell, Die Operationen der I. Armee unter Gen. von Steinmetz (Berlin, 1872; English translation); F. Hoenig, Taktik der Zukunft (English translation), and 24 Stunden Moltke’schen Strategie (Berlin, 1892; English and French translations).

For the war in Alsace and Champagne: H. Kunz, Schlacht von Wörth (Berlin, 1891), and later works by the same author; H. Bonnal, Fröschweiler (Paris, 1899); Hahnke, Die Operationen des III. Armee bis Sedan (Berlin, 1873; French translation).

For the war in the Provinces: v. der Goltz, Léon Gambetta und seine Armeen (Berlin, 1877); Die Operationen der II. Armee an die Loire (Berlin, 1875); Die sieben Tage von Le Mans (Berlin, 1873); Kunz, Die Zusammensetzung der französ. Provinzialheeren; de Freycinet, La Guerre en province (Paris, 1871); L. A. Hale, The People’s War (London, 1904); Hoenig, Volkskrieg an die Loire (Berlin, 1892); Blume, Operationen v. Sedan bis zum Ende d. Kriegs (Berlin, 1872; English translation); v. Schell, Die Operationen der I. Armee unter Gen. v. Goeben (Berlin, 1873; English translation); Count Wartensleben, Feldzug der Nordarmee unter Gen. v. Manteuffel (Berlin, 1872), Operationen der Sudarmee (Berlin, 1872; English translation); Faidherbe, Campagne de l’armée du nord (Paris, 1872).

For the sieges: Frobenius, Kriegsgesch. Beispiele d. Festungskriegs aus d. deutsch.-franz. Kg. (Berlin, 1899-1900); Goetze, Tätigkeit der deutschen Ingenieuren (Berlin, 1871; English translation).

The most useful bibliography is that of General Palat (“P. Lehautcourt”).

(C. F. A.)

[1] This was the celebrated “baptême de feu” of the prince imperial.

[2] The II. corps had not yet arrived from Germany.

[3] Of the I. army the I. corps was retained on the east side of Metz. The II. corps belonged to the II. army, but had not yet reached the front.

[4] The 13th corps (Vinoy), which had followed MacMahon’s army at some distance, was not involved in the catastrophe of Sedan, and by good luck as well as good management evaded the German pursuit and returned safely to Paris.

[5] Jules Favre, it appears, neglected to inform Gambetta of the exception.

FRANÇOIS DE NEUFCHÂTEAU, NICOLAS LOUIS, Count (1750-1828), French statesman and poet, was born at Saffais near Rozières in Lorraine on the 17th of April 1750, the son of a school-teacher. He studied at the Jesuit college of Neufchâteau in the Vosges, and at the age of fourteen published a volume of poetry which obtained the approbation of Rousseau and of Voltaire. Neufchâteau conferred on him its name, and he was elected member of some of the principal academies of France. In 1783 he was named procureur-général to the council of Santo Domingo. He had previously been engaged on a translation of Ariosto, which he finished before his return to France five years afterwards, but it perished during the shipwreck which occurred during his voyage home. After the Revolution he was elected deputy suppléant to the National Assembly, was charged with the organization of the Department of the Vosges, and was elected later to the Legislative Assembly, of which he first became secretary and then president. In 1793 he was imprisoned on account of the political sentiments, in reality very innocent, of his drama Pamela ou la vertu récompensée (Théâtre de la Nation, 1st August 1793), but was set free a few days afterwards at the revolution of the 9th Thermidor. In 1797 he became minister of the interior, in which office he distinguished himself by the thoroughness of his administration in all departments. It is to him that France owes its system of inland navigation. He inaugurated the museum of the Louvre, and was one of the promoters of the first universal exhibition of industrial products. From 1804 to 1806 he was president of the Senate, and in that capacity the duty devolved upon him of soliciting Napoleon to assume the title of emperor. In 1808 he received the dignity of count. Retiring from public life in 1814, he occupied himself chiefly in the study of agriculture, until his death on the 10th of January 1828.

François de Neufchâteau had very multifarious accomplishments, and interested himself in a great variety of subjects, but his fame rests chiefly on what he did as a statesman for the encouragement and development of the industries of France. His maturer poetical productions did not fulfil the promise of those of his early years, for though some of his verses have a superficial elegance, his poetry generally lacks force and originality. He had considerable qualifications as a grammarian and critic, as is witnessed by his editions of the Provinciales and Pensées of Pascal (Paris, 1822 and 1826) and Gil Blas (Paris, 1820). His principal poetical works are Poésies diverses (1765); Ode sur les parlements (1771); Nouveaux Contes moraux (1781); Les Vosges (1796); Fables et contes (1814); and Les Tropes, ou les figures de mots (1817). He was also the author of a large number of works on agriculture.

See Recueil des lettres, circulaires, discours et autres actes publics émanés du Çte. François pendant ses deux exercices du ministère de l’intérieur (Paris, An. vii.-viii., 2 vols.); Notice biographique sur M. le comte François de Neufchâteau (1828), by A. F. de Sillery; H. Bonnelier, Mémoires sur François de Neufchâteau (Paris, 1829); J. Lamoureux, Notice historique et littéraire sur la vie et les écrits de François de Neufchâteau (Paris, 1843); E. Meaume, Étude historique et biographique sur les Lorrains révolutionnaires: Palissot, Grégoire, François de Neufchâteau (Nancy, 1882); Ch. Simian, François de Neufchâteau et les expositions (Paris, 1889).

FRANCONIA (Ger. Franken), the name of one of the stem-duchies of medieval Germany. It stretched along the valley of the Main from the Rhine to Bohemia, and was bounded on the north by Saxony and Thuringia, and on the south by Swabia and Bavaria. It also included a district around Mainz, Spires and Worms, on the left bank of the Rhine. The word Franconia, first used in a Latin charter of 1053, was applied like the words France, Francia and Franken, to a portion of the land occupied by the Franks.

About the close of the 5th century this territory was conquered by Clovis, king of the Salian Franks, was afterwards incorporated with the kingdom of Austrasia, and at a later period came under the rule of Charlemagne. After the treaty of Verdun in 843 it became the centre of the East Frankish or German kingdom, and in theory remained so for a long period, and was for a time the most important of the duchies which arose on the ruins of the Carolingian empire. The land was divided into counties, or gauen, which were ruled by counts, prominent among whom were members of the families of Conradine and Babenberg, by whose feuds it was frequently devastated. Conrad, a member of the former family, who took the title of “duke in Franconia” about the year 900, was chosen German king in 911 as the representative of the foremost of the German races. Conrad handed over the chief authority in Franconia to his brother Eberhard, who remained on good terms with Conrad’s successor Henry I. the Fowler, but rose against the succeeding king, Otto the Great, and was killed in battle in 939, when his territories were divided. The influence of Franconia began to decline under the kings of the Saxon house. It lacked political unity, had no opportunities for extension, and soon became divided into Rhenish Franconia (Francia rhenensis, Ger. Rheinfranken) and Eastern Franconia (Francia orientalis, Ger. Ostfranken). The most influential family in Rhenish Franconia was that of the Salians, the head of which early in the 10th century was Conrad the Red, duke of Lorraine, and son-in-law of Otto the Great. This Conrad, his son Otto and his grandson Conrad are sometimes called dukes of Franconia, and in 1024 his great-grandson Conrad, also duke of Franconia, was elected German king as Conrad II. and founded the line of Franconian or Salian emperors. Rhenish Franconia gradually became a land of free towns and lesser nobles, and under the earlier Franconian emperors sections passed to the count palatine of the Rhine, the archbishop of Mainz, the bishops of Worms and Spires and other clerical and lay nobles; and the name Franconia, or Francia orientalis as it was then called, was confined to the eastern portion of the duchy. Clerical authority was becoming predominant in this region. A series of charters dating from 822 to 1025 had granted considerable powers to the bishops of Würzburg, who, by the time of the emperor Henry II., possessed judicial authority over the whole of eastern Franconia. The duchy was nominally retained by the emperors in their own hands until 1115, when the emperor Henry V., wishing to curb the episcopal influence in this neighbourhood, appointed his nephew Conrad of Hohenstaufen as duke of Franconia. Conrad’s son Frederick took the title of duke of Rothenburg instead of duke of Franconia, but in 1196, on the death of Conrad of Hohenstaufen, son of the emperor Frederick I., the title fell into disuse. Meanwhile the bishop of Würzburg had regained his former power in the duchy, and this was confirmed in 1168 by the emperor Frederick I.

The title remained in abeyance until the early years of the 15th century, when it was assumed by John II., bishop of Würzburg, and retained by his successors until the bishopric was secularized in 1802. The greater part of the lands were united with Bavaria, and the name Franconia again fell into abeyance. It was revived in 1837, when Louis I., king of Bavaria, gave to three northern portions of his kingdom the names of Upper, Middle and Lower Franconia. In 1633 Bernhard, duke of Saxe-Weimar, hoping to create a principality for himself out of the ecclesiastical lands, had taken the title of duke of Franconia, but his hopes were destroyed by his defeat at Nördlingen in 1634. When Germany was divided into circles by the emperor Maximilian I. in 1500, the name Franconia was given to that circle which included the eastern part of the old duchy. The lands formerly comprised in the duchy of Franconia are now divided between the kingdoms of Bavaria and Württemberg, the grand-duchies of Baden and Hesse, and the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau.

See J. G. ab Eckhart, Commentarii de rebus Franciae orientalis et episcopatus Wirceburgensis (Würzburg, 1729); F. Stein, Geschichte Frankens (Schweinfurt, 1885-1886); T. Henner, Die herzogliche Gewalt der Bischöfe von Würzburg (Würzburg, 1874).

FRANCS-ARCHERS. The institution of the francs-archers was the first attempt at the formation of regular infantry in France. They were created by the ordinance of Montils-les-Tours on the 28th of August 1448, which prescribed that in each parish an archer should be chosen from among the most apt in the use of arms; this archer to be exempt from the taille and certain obligations, to practise shooting with the bow on Sundays and feast-days, and to hold himself ready to march fully equipped at the first signal. Under Charles VII. the francs-archers distinguished themselves in numerous battles with the English, and assisted the king to drive them from France. During the succeeding reigns the institution languished, and finally disappeared in the middle of the 16th century. The francs-archers were also called francs-taupins.

See Daniel, Histoire de la milice française (1721); and E. Boutaric, Institutions militaires de la France avant les armées permanentes (1863).

FRANCS-TIREURS (“Free-Shooters”), irregular troops, almost exclusively infantry, employed by the French in the war of 1870-1871. They were originally rifle clubs or unofficial military societies formed in the east of France at the time of the Luxemburg crisis of 1867. The members were chiefly concerned with the practice of rifle-shooting, and were expected in war to act as light troops. As under the then system of conscription the greater part of the nation’s military energy was allowed to run to waste, the francs-tireurs were not only popular, but efficient workers in their sphere of action. As they wore no uniforms, were armed with the best existing rifles and elected their own officers, the government made repeated attempts to bring the societies, which were at once a valuable asset to the armed strength of France and a possible menace to internal order, under military discipline. This was strenuously resisted by the societies, to their sorrow as it turned out, for the Germans treated captured francs-tireurs as irresponsible non-combatants found with arms in their hands and usually exacted the death penalty. In July 1870, at the outbreak of the war, the societies were brought under the control of the minister of war and organized for field service, but it was not until the 4th of November—by which time the levée en masse was in force—that they were placed under the orders of the generals in the field. After that they were sometimes organized in large bodies and incorporated in the mass of the armies, but more usually they continued to work in small bands, blowing up culverts on the invaders’ lines of communication, cutting off small reconnoitring parties, surprising small posts, &c. It is now acknowledged, even by the Germans, that though the francs-tireurs did relatively little active mischief, they paralysed large detachments of the enemy, contested every step of his advance (as in the Loire campaign), and prevented him from gaining information, and that their soldierly qualities improved with experience. Their most celebrated feats were the blowing up of the Moselle railway bridge at Fontenoy on the 22nd of January 1871 (see Les Chasseurs des Vosges by Lieut.-Colonel St Étienne, Toul, 1906), and the heroic defence of Châteaudun by Lipowski’s Paris corps and the francs-tireurs of Cannes and Nantes (October 18, 1870). It cannot be denied that the original members of the rifle clubs were joined by many bad characters, but the patriotism of the majority was unquestionable, for little mercy was shown by the Germans to those francs-tireurs who fell into their hands. The severity of the German reprisals is itself the best testimony to the fear and anxiety inspired by the presence of active bands of francs-tireurs on the flanks and in rear of the invaders.

FRANEKER, a town in the province of Friesland, Holland, 5 m. E. of Harlingen on the railway and canal to Leeuwarden. Pop. (1900) 7187. It was at one time a favourite residence of the Frisian nobility, many of whom had their castles here, and it possessed a celebrated university, founded by the Frisian estates in 1585. This was suppressed by Napoleon I. in 1811, and the endowments were diverted four years later to the support of an athenaeum, and afterwards of a gymnasium, with which a physiological cabinet and a botanical garden are connected. Franeker also possesses a town hall (1591), which contains a planetarium, made by one Eise Eisinga in 1774-1881. The fine observatory was founded about 1780. The church of St Martin (1420) contains several fine tombs of the 15th-17th centuries. The industries of the town include silk-weaving, woollen-spinning, shipbuilding and pottery-making. It is also a considerable market for agricultural produce.

FRANK, JAKOB (1726-1791), a Jewish theologian, who founded in Poland, in the middle of the 18th century, a sect which emanated from Judaism but ended by merging with Christianity. The sect was the outcome of the Messianic mysticism of Sabbetai Zebi. It was an antinomian movement in which the authority of the Jewish law was held to be superseded by personal freedom. The Jewish authorities, alarmed at the moral laxity which resulted from the emotional rites of the Frankists, did their utmost to suppress the sect. But the latter, posing as an anti-Talmudic protest in behalf of a spiritual religion, won a certain amount of public sympathy. There was, however, no deep sincerity in the tenets of the Frankists, for though in 1759 they were baptized en masse, amid much pomp, the Church soon became convinced that Frank was not a genuine convert. He was imprisoned on a charge of heresy, but on his release in 1763 the empress Maria Theresa patronized him, regarding him as a propagandist of Christianity among the Jews. He thenceforth lived in state as baron of Offenbach, and on his death (1791) his daughter Eva succeeded him as head of the sect. The Frankists gradually merged in the general Christian body, the movement leaving no permanent trace in the synagogue.

(I. A.)

FRANK-ALMOIGN (libera eleemosyna, free alms), in the English law of real property, a species of spiritual tenure, whereby a religious corporation, aggregate or sole, holds lands of the donor to them and their successors for ever. It was a tenure dating from Saxon times, held not on the ordinary feudal conditions, but discharged of all services except the trinoda necessitas. But “they which hold in frank-almoign are bound of right before God to make orisons, prayers, masses and other divine services for the souls of their grantor or feoffor, and for the souls of their heirs which are dead, and for the prosperity and good life and good health of their heirs which are alive. And therefore they shall do no fealty to their lord, because that this divine service is better for them before God than any doing of fealty” (Litt. s. 135). It was the tenure by which the greater number of the monasteries and religious houses held their lands; it was expressly exempted from the statute 12 Car. II. c. 24 (1660), by which the other ancient tenures were abolished, and it is the tenure by which the parochial clergy and many ecclesiastical and eleemosynary foundations hold their lands at the present day. As a form of donation, however, it came to an end by the passing of the statute Quia Emptores, for by that statute no new tenure of frank-almoign could be created, except by the crown.

See Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, where the history of frank-almoign is given at length.

FRANKEL, ZECHARIAS (1801-1875), Jewish theologian, one of the founders of the Breslau school of “historical Judaism.” This school attempts to harmonize critical treatment of the documents of religion with fidelity to traditional beliefs and observances. For a time at least, the compromise succeeded in staying the disintegrating effects of the liberal movement in Judaism. Frankel was the author of several valuable works, among them Septuagint Studies, an Introduction to the Mishnah (1859), and a similar work on the Palestinian Talmud (1870). He also edited the Monatsschrift, devoted to Jewish learning on modern lines. But his chief claim to fame rests on his headship of the Breslau Seminary. This was founded in 1854 for the training of rabbis who should combine their rabbinic studies with secular courses at the university. The whole character of the rabbinate has been modified under the influence of this, the first seminary of the kind.

(I. A.)

FRANKENBERG, a manufacturing town of Germany, in the kingdom of Saxony, on the Zschopau, 7 m. N.E. of Chemnitz, on the railway Niederwiesa-Rosswein. Pop. (1905) 13,303. The principal buildings are the large Evangelical parish church, restored in 1874-1875, and the town-hall. Its industries include I extensive woollen, cotton and silk weaving, dyeing, the manufacture of brushes, furniture and cigars, iron-founding and machine building. It is well provided with schools, including one of weaving.

FRANKENHAUSEN, a town of Germany, in the principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, on an artificial arm of the Wipper, a tributary of the Saale, 36 m. N.N.E. of Gotha. Pop. (1905) 6534. It consists of an old and a new town, the latter mostly rebuilt since a destructive fire in 1833, and has an old château of the princes of Schwarzburg, three Protestant churches, a seminary for teachers, a hospital and a modern town-hall. Its industries include the manufacture of sugar, cigars and buttons, and there are brine springs, with baths, in the vicinity. At Frankenhausen a battle was fought on the 15th of May 1525, in which the insurgent peasants under Thomas Münzer were defeated by the allied princes of Saxony and Hesse.

FRANKENSTEIN, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Silesia, on the Pausebach, 35 m. S. by W. of Breslau. Pop. (1905) 7890. It is still surrounded by its medieval walls, has two Evangelical and three Roman Catholic churches, among the latter the parish church with a curious overhanging tower, and a monastery. The industries include the manufacture of artificial manures, bricks, beer and straw hats. There are also mills for grinding the magnesite found in the neighbourhood.

FRANKENTHAL, a town of Germany, in the Bavarian Palatinate, on the Isenach, connected with the Rhine by a canal 3 m. in length, 6 m. N.W. from Mannheim, and on the railways Neunkirchen-Worms and Frankenthal-Grosskarlbach. Pop. (1905) 18,191. It has two Evangelical and a Roman Catholic church, a fine medieval town-hall, two interesting old gates, remains of its former environing walls, several public monuments, including one to the veterans of the Napoleonic wars, and a museum. Its industries include the manufacture of machinery, casks, corks, soap, dolls and furniture, iron-founding and bell-founding—the famous “Kaiserglocke” of the Cologne cathedral was cast here. Frankenthal was formerly famous for its porcelain factory, established here in 1755 by Paul Anton Hannong of Strassburg, who sold it in 1762 to the elector palatine Charles Theodore. Its fame is mainly due to the modellers Konrad Link (1732-1802) and Johann Peter Melchior (d. 1796) (who worked at Frankenthal between 1779 and 1793). The best products of this factory are figures and groups representing contemporary life, or allegorical subjects in the rococo taste of the period, and they are surpassed only by those of the more famous factory at Meissen. In 1795 the factory was sold to Peter von Reccum, who removed it to Grünstadt.

Frankenthal (Franconodal) is mentioned as a village in the 8th century. A house of Augustinian canons established here in 1119 by Erkenbert, chamberlain of Worms, was suppressed in 1562 by the elector palatine Frederick III., who gave its possessions to Protestant refugees from the Netherlands. In 1577 this colony received town rights from the elector John Casimir, whose successor fortified the place. From 1623 until 1652, save for two years, it was occupied by the Spaniards, and in 1688-1689 it was stormed and burned by the French, the fortifications being razed. In 1697 it was reconstituted as a town, and under the elector Charles Theodore it became the capital of the Palatinate. From 1798 to 1814 it was incorporated in the French department of Mont Tonnerre.

See Wille, Stadt u. Festung Frankenthal während des dreissigjährigen Krieges (Heidelberg, 1877); Hildenbrand, Gesch. der Stadt Frankenthal (1893). For the porcelain see Heuser, Frankenthaler Gruppen und Figuren (Spires, 1899).

FRANKENWALD, a mountainous district of Germany, forming the geological connexion between the Fichtelgebirge and the Thuringian Forest. It is a broad well-wooded plateau, running for about 30 m. in a north-westerly direction, descending gently on the north and eastern sides towards the Saale, but more precipitously to the Bavarian plain in the west, and attaining its highest elevation in the Kieferle near Steinheid (2900 ft.). Along the centre lies the watershed between the basins of the Main and the Saale, belonging to the systems of the Rhine and Elbe respectively. The principal tributaries of the Main from the Frankenwald are the Rodach and Hasslach, and of the Saale, the Selbitz.

See H. Schmid, Führer durch den Frankenwald (Bamberg, 1894); Meyer, Thüringen und der Frankenwald (15th ed., Leipzig, 1900), and Gümbel, Geognostische Beschreibung des Fichtelgebirges mit dem Frankenwald (Gotha, 1879).

FRANKFORT, a city and the county-seat of Clinton county, Indiana, U.S.A., 40 m. N.W. of Indianapolis. Pop. (1890) 5919; (1900) 7100 (144 foreign-born); (1910) 8634. Frankfort is served by the Chicago, Indianapolis & Louisville, the Lake Erie & Western, the Vandalia, and the Toledo, St Louis & Western railways, and by the Indianapolis & North-Western Traction Interurban railway (electric). The city is a division point on the Toledo, St Louis & Western railway, which has large shops here. Frankfort is a trade centre for an agricultural and lumbering region; among its manufactures are handles, agricultural implements and foundry products. The first settlement in the neighbourhood was made in 1826; in 1830 the town was founded, and in 1875 it was chartered as a city. The city limits were considerably extended immediately after 1900.

FRANKFORT, the capital city of Kentucky, U.S.A., and the county-seat of Franklin county, on the Kentucky river, about 55 m. E. of Louisville. Pop. (1890) 7892; (1900) 9487, of whom 3316 were negroes; (1910 census) 10,465. The city is served by the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Louisville & Nashville, and the Frankfort & Cincinnati railways, by the Central Kentucky Traction Co. (electric), and by steamboat lines to Cincinnati, Louisville and other river ports. It is built among picturesque hills on both sides of the river, and is in the midst of the famous Kentucky “blue grass region” and of a rich lumber-producing region. The most prominent building is the Capitol, about 400 ft. long and 185 ft. wide, built of granite and white limestone in the Italian Renaissance style, with 70 large Ionic columns, and a dome 205 ft. above the terrace line, supported by 24 other columns. The Capitol was built in 1905-1907 at a cost of more than $2,000,000; in it are housed the state library and the library of the Kentucky State Historical Society. At Frankfort, also, are the state arsenal, the state penitentiary and the state home for feeble-minded children, and just outside the city limits is the state coloured normal school. The old capitol (first occupied in 1829) is still standing. In Franklin cemetery rest the remains of Daniel Boone and of Theodore O’Hara (1820-1867), a lawyer, soldier, journalist and poet, who served in the U.S. army in 1846-1848 during the Mexican War, took part in filibustering expeditions to Cuba, served in the Confederate army, and is best known as the author of “The Bivouac of the Dead,” a poem written for the burial in Frankfort of some soldiers who had lost their lives at Buena Vista. Here also are the graves of Richard M. Johnson, vice-president of the United States in 1837-1841, and the sculptor Joel T. Hart (1810-1877). The city has a considerable trade with the surrounding country, in which large quantities of tobacco and hemp are produced; its manufactures include lumber, brooms, chairs, shoes, hemp twine, canned vegetables and glass bottles. The total value of the city’s factory product in 1905 was $1,747,338, being 31.6% more than in 1900. Frankfort (said to have been named after Stephen Frank, one of an early pioneer party ambushed here by Indians) was founded in 1786 by General James Wilkinson, then deeply interested in trade with the Spanish at New Orleans, and in the midst of his Spanish intrigues. In 1792 the city was made the capital of the state. In 1862, during the famous campaign in Kentucky of General Braxton Bragg (Confederate) and General D. C. Buell (Federal), Frankfort was occupied for a short time by Bragg, who, just before being forced out by Buell, took part in the inauguration of Richard J. Hawes, chosen governor by the Confederates of the state. Hawes, however, never discharged the duties of his office. During the bitter contest for the governorship in 1900 between William Goebel (Democrat) and William S. Taylor (Republican), each of whom claimed the election, Goebel was assassinated at Frankfort. (See also [Kentucky].) Frankfort received a city charter in 1839.

FRANKFORT-ON-MAIN (Ger. Frankfurt am Main), a city of Germany, in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, principally on the right bank of the Main, 24 m. above its confluence with the Rhine at Mainz, and 16 m. N. from Darmstadt. Always a place of great trading importance, long the place of election for the German kings, and until 1866, together with Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck, one of the four free cities of Germany, it still retains its position as one of the leading commercial centres of the German empire. Its situation in the broad and fertile valley of the Main, the northern horizon formed by the soft outlines of the Taunus range, is one of great natural beauty, the surrounding country being richly clad with orchard and forest.

Frankfort is one of the most interesting, as it is also one of the wealthiest, of German cities. Apart from its commercial importance, its position, close to the fashionable watering-places of Homburg, Nauheim and Wiesbaden, has rendered it “cosmopolitan” in the best sense of the term. The various stages in the development of the city are clearly indicated in its general plan and the surviving names of many of its streets. The line of the original 12th century walls and moat is marked by the streets of which the names end in -graben, from the Hirschgraben on the W. to the Wollgraben on the E. The space enclosed by these and by the river on the S. is known as the “old town” (Altstadt). The so-called “new town” (Neustadt), added in 1333, extends to the Anlagen, the beautiful gardens and promenades laid out (1806-1812) on the site of the 17th century fortifications, of which they faithfully preserve the general ground plan. Of the medieval fortifications the picturesque Eschenheimer Tor, a round tower 155 ft. high, dating from 1400 to 1428, the Rententurm (1456) on the Main and the Kuhhirtenturm (c. 1490) in Sachsenhausen, are the sole remains. Since the demolition of the fortifications the city has greatly expanded. Sachsenhausen on the south bank of the river, formerly the seat of a commandery of the Teutonic Order (by treaty with Austria in 1842 all property and rights of the order in Frankfort territory were sold to the city, except the church and house), is now a quarter of the city. In other directions also the expansion has been rapid; the village of Bornheim was incorporated in Frankfort in 1877, the former Hessian town of Bockenheim in 1895, and the suburbs of Niederrad, Oberrad and Seckbach in 1900.

The main development of the city has been to the north of the river, which is crossed by numerous bridges and flanked by fine quays and promenades. The Altstadt, though several broad streets have been opened through it, still preserves many of its narrow alleys and other medieval features. The Judengasse (Ghetto), down to 1806 the sole Jews’ quarter, has been pulled down, with the exception of the ancestral house of the Rothschild family—No. 148—which has been restored and retains its ancient façade. As the Altstadt is mainly occupied by artisans and petty tradesmen, so the Neustadt is the principal business quarter of the city, containing the chief public buildings and the principal hotels. The main arteries of the city are the Zeil, a broad street running from the Friedberger Anlage to the Rossmarkt and thence continued, by the Kaiserstrasse, through the fine new quarter built after 1872, to the magnificent principal railway station; and the Steinweg and Goethestrasse, which lead by the Bockenheimer Tor to the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, a broad boulevard intersecting the fashionable residential suburb to the N.W.

Churches.—The principal ecclesiastical building in Frankfort is the cathedral (Dom). Built of red sandstone, with a massive tower terminating in a richly ornamented cupola and 300 ft. in height, it is the most conspicuous object in the city. This building, in which the Roman emperors were formerly elected and, since 1562, crowned, was founded in 852 by King Louis the German, and was later known as the Salvator Kirche. After its reconstruction (1235-1239), it was dedicated to St Bartholomew. From this period date the nave and the side aisles; the choir was completed in 1315-1338 and the long transepts in 1346-1354. The cloisters were rebuilt in 1348-1447, and the electoral chapel, on the south of the choir, was completed in 1355. The tower was begun in 1415, but remained unfinished. On the 15th of August 1867 the tower and roof were destroyed by fire and considerable damage was done to the rest of the edifice. The restoration was immediately taken in hand, and the whole work was finished in 1881, including the completion of the tower, according to the plans of the 15th century architect, Hans von Ingelheim. In the interior is the tomb of the German king Günther of Schwarzburg, who died in Frankfort in 1349, and that of Rudolph, the last knight of Sachsenhausen, who died in 1371. Among the other Roman Catholic churches are the Leonhardskirche, the Liebfrauenkirche (church of Our Lady) and the Deutschordenskirche (14th century) in Sachsenhausen. The Leonhardskirche (restored in 1882) was begun in 1219, it is said on the site of the palace of Charlemagne. It was originally a three-aisled basilica, but is now a five-aisled Hallenkirche; the choir was added in 1314. It has two Romanesque towers. The Liebfrauenkirche is first mentioned in 1314 as a collegiate church; the nave was consecrated in 1340. The choir was added in 1506-1509 and the whole church thoroughly restored in the second half of the 18th century, when the tower was built (1770). Of the Protestant churches the oldest is the Nikolaikirche, which dates from the 13th century; the fine cast-iron spire erected in 1843 had to be taken down in 1901. The Paulskirche, the principal Evangelical (Lutheran) church, built between 1786 and 1833, is a red sandstone edifice of no architectural pretensions, but interesting as the seat of the national parliament of 1848-1849. The Katharinenkirche, built 1678-1681 on the site of an older building, is famous in Frankfort history as the place where the first Protestant sermon was preached in 1522. Among the more noteworthy of the newer Protestant churches are the Peterskirche (1892-1895) in the North German Renaissance style, with a tower 256 ft. high, standing north from the Zeil, the Christuskirche (1883) and the Lutherkirche (1889-1893). An English church, in Early English Gothic style, situated adjacent to the Bockenheimer Landstrasse, was completed and consecrated in 1906.

Of the five synagogues, the chief (or Hauptsynagoge), lying in the Börnestrasse, is an attractive building of red sandstone in the Moorish-Byzantine style.

Public Buildings.—Of the secular buildings in Frankfort, the Römer, for almost five hundred years the Rathaus (town hall) of the city, is of prime historical interest. It lies on the Römerberg, a square flanked by curious medieval houses. It is first mentioned in 1322, was bought with the adjacent hostelry in 1405 by the city and rearranged as a town hall, and has since, from time to time, been enlarged by the purchase of adjoining patrician houses, forming a complex of buildings of various styles and dates surmounted by a clock tower. The façade was rebuilt (1896-1898) in late Gothic style. It was here, in the Wahlzimmer (or election-chamber) that the electors or their plenipotentiaries chose the German kings, and here in the Kaisersaal (emperors’ hall) that the coronation festival was held, at which the new king or emperor dined with the electors after having shown himself from the balcony to the people. The Kaisersaal retained its antique appearance until 1843, when, as also again in 1904, it was restored and redecorated; it is now furnished with a series of modern paintings representing the German kings and Roman emperors from Charlemagne to Francis II., in all fifty-two, and a statue of the first German emperor, William I. New municipal buildings adjoining the “Römer” on the north side were erected in 1900-1903 in German Renaissance style, with a handsome tower 220 ft. high; beneath it is a public wine-cellar, and on the first storey a grand municipal hall. The palace of the princes of Thurn and Taxis in the Eschenheimer Gasse was built (1732-1741) from the designs of Robert de Cotte, chief architect to Louis XIV. of France. From 1806 to 1810 it was the residence of Karl von Dalberg, prince-primate of the Confederation of the Rhine, with whose dominions Frankfort had been incorporated by Napoleon. From 1816 to 1866 it was the seat of the German federal diet. It is now annexed to the principal post office (built 1892-1894), which lies close to it on the Zeil. The Saalhof, built on the site of the palace erected by Louis the Pious in 822, overlooking the Main, has a chapel of the 12th century, the substructure dating from Carolingian times. This is the oldest building in Frankfort. The façade of the Saalhof in the Saalgasse dates from 1604, the southern wing with the two gables from 1715 to 1717. Of numerous other medieval buildings may be mentioned the Leinwandhaus (linendrapers’ hall), a 15th century building reconstructed in 1892 as a municipal museum. In the Grosser Hirschgraben is the Goethehaus, a 16th century building which came into the possession of the Goethe family in 1733. Here Goethe lived from his birth in 1749 until 1775. In 1863 the house was acquired by the Freies deutsche Hochstift and was opened to the public. It has been restored, from Goethe’s account of it in Dichtung und Wahrheit, as nearly as possible to its condition in the poet’s day, and is now connected with a Goethemuseum (1897), with archives and a library of 25,000 volumes representative of the Goethe period of German literature.

Literary and Scientific Institutions.—Few cities of the same size as Frankfort are so richly endowed with literary, scientific and artistic institutions, or possess so many handsome buildings appropriated to their service. The opera-house, erected near the Bockenheimer Tor in 1873-1880, is a magnificent edifice in the style of the Italian Renaissance and ranks among the finest theatres in Europe. There are also a theatre (Schauspielhaus) in modern Renaissance style (1899-1902), devoted especially to drama, a splendid concert hall (Saalbau), opened in 1861, and numerous minor places of theatrical entertainment. The public picture gallery in the Saalhof possesses works by Hans Holbein, Grünewald, Van Dyck, Teniers, Van der Neer, Hans von Kulmbach, Lucas Cranach and other masters. The Städel Art Institute (Städel’sches Kunstinstitut) in Sachsenhausen, founded by the banker J. F. Städel in 1816, contains a picture gallery and a cabinet of engravings extremely rich in works of German art. The municipal library, with 300,000 volumes, boasts among its rarer treasures a Gutenberg Bible printed at Mainz between 1450 and 1455, another on parchment dated 1462, the Institutiones Justiniani (Mainz, 1468), the Theuerdank, with woodcuts by Hans Schäufelein, and numerous valuable autographs. It also contains a fine collection of coins. The Bethmann Museum owes its celebrity principally to Dannecker’s “Ariadne,” but it also possesses the original plaster model of Thorwaldsen’s “Entrance of Alexander the Great into Babylon.” There may also be mentioned the Industrial Art Exhibition of the Polytechnic Association and two conservatories of music. Among the scientific institutions the first place belongs to the Senckenberg’sches naturhistorische Museum, containing valuable collections of birds and shells. Next must be mentioned the Kunstgewerbe (museum of arts and crafts) and the Musical Museum, with valuable MSS. and portraits. Besides the municipal library (Stadtbibliothek) mentioned above there are three others of importance, the Rothschild, the Senckenberg and the Jewish library (with a well-appointed reading-room). There are numerous high-grade schools, musical and other learned societies and excellent hospitals. The last include the large municipal infirmary and the Senckenberg’sches Stift, a hospital and almshouses founded by a doctor, Johann C. Senckenberg (d. 1772). The Royal Institute for experimental therapeutics (Königl. Institut für experimentelle Therapie), moved to Frankfort in 1899, attracts numerous foreign students, and is especially concerned with the study of bacteriology and serums.

Bridges.—Seven bridges (of which two are railway) cross the Main. The most interesting of these is the Alte Mainbrücke, a red sandstone structure of fourteen arches, 815 ft. long, dating from the 14th century. On it are a mill, a statue of Charlemagne and an iron crucifix surmounted by a gilded cock. The latter commemorates, according to tradition, the fowl which was the first living being to cross the bridge and thus fell a prey to the devil, who in hope of a nobler victim had sold his assistance to the architect. Antiquaries, however, assert that it probably marks the spot where criminals were in olden times flung into the river. Other bridges are the Obermainbrücke of five iron arches, opened in 1878; an iron foot (suspension) bridge, the Untermainbrücke; the Wilhelmsbrücke, a fine structure, which from 1849 to 1890 served as a railway bridge and was then opened as a road bridge; and two new iron bridges at Gutleuthof and Niederrad (below the city), which carry the railway traffic from the south to the north bank of the Main, where all lines converge in a central station of the Prussian state railways. This station, which was built in 1883-1888 and has replaced the three stations belonging to private companies, which formerly stood in juxtaposition on the Anlagen (or promenades) near the Mainzer Tor, lies some half-mile to the west. The intervening ground upon which the railway lines and buildings stood was sold for building sites, the sum obtained being more than sufficient to cover the cost of the majestic central terminus (the third largest in the world), which, in addition to spacious and handsome halls for passenger accommodation, has three glass-covered spans of 180 ft. width each. Yet the exigencies of traffic demand further extensions, and another large station was in 1909 in process of construction at the east end of the city, devised to receive the local traffic of lines running eastward, while a through station for the north to south traffic was projected on a site farther west of the central terminus.

Frankfort lies at the junction of lines of railway connecting it directly with all the important cities of south and central Germany. Here cross and unite the lines from Berlin to Basel, from Cologne to Würzburg and Vienna, from Hamburg and Cassel, and from Dresden and Leipzig to France and Switzerland. The river Main has been dredged so as to afford heavy barge traffic with the towns of the upper Main and with the Rhine, and cargo boats load and unload alongside its busy quays. A well-devised system of electric tramways provides for local communication within the city and with the outlying suburbs.

Trade, Commerce and Industries.—Frankfort has always been more of a commercial than an industrial town, and though of late years it has somewhat lost its pre-eminent position as a banking centre it has counterbalanced the loss in increased industrial development. The suburbs of Sachsenhausen and Bockenheim have particularly developed considerable industrial activity, especially in publishing and printing, brewing and the manufacture of quinine. Other sources of employment are the cutting of hair for making hats, the production of fancy goods, type, machinery, soap and perfumery, ready-made clothing, chemicals, electro-technical apparatus, jewelry and metal wares. Market gardening is extensively carried on in the neighbourhood and cider largely manufactured. There are two great fairs held in the town,—the Ostermesse, or spring fair, and the Herbstmesse, or autumn fair. The former, which was the original nucleus of all the commercial prosperity of the city, begins on the second Wednesday before Easter; and the latter on the second Wednesday before the 8th of September. They last three weeks, and the last day save one, called the Nickelchestag, is distinguished by the influx of people from the neighbouring country. The trade in leather is of great and growing importance. A horse fair has been held twice a year since 1862 under the patronage of the agricultural society; and the wool market was reinstituted in 1872 by the German Trade Society (Deutscher Handelsverein). Frankfort has long been famous as one of the principal banking centres of Europe, and is now only second to Berlin, in this respect, among German cities, and it is remarkable for the large business that is done in government stock. In the 17th century the town was the seat of a great book-trade; but it has long been distanced in this department by Leipzig. The Frankfurter Journal was founded in 1615, the Postzeitung in 1616, the Neue Frankfurter Zeitung in 1859, and the Frankfurter Presse in 1866.

Of memorial monuments the largest and most elaborate in Frankfort is that erected in 1858 in honour of the early German printers. It was modelled by Ed. von der Launitz and executed by Herr von Kreis. The statues of Gutenberg, Fust and Schöffer form a group on the top; an ornamented frieze presents medallions of a number of famous printers; below these are figures representing the towns of Mainz, Strassburg, Venice and Frankfort; and on the corners of the pedestal are allegorical statues of theology, poetry, science and industry. The statue of Goethe (1844) in the Goetheplatz is by Ludwig von Schwanthaler. The Schiller statue, erected in 1863, is the work of a Frankfort artist, Johann Dielmann. A monument in the Bockenheim Anlage, dated 1837, preserves the memory of Guiollett, the burgomaster, to whom the town is mainly indebted for the beautiful promenades which occupy the site of the old fortifications; and similar monuments have been reared to Senckenberg (1863), Schopenhauer, Klemens Brentano the poet and Samuel Thomas Sömmerring (1755-1830), the anatomist and inventor of an electric telegraph. In the Opernplatz is an equestrian statue of the emperor Wilhelm I. by Buscher.

Cemeteries.—The new cemetery (opened in 1828) contains the graves of Arthur Schopenhauer and Feuerbach, of Passavant the biographer of Raphael, Ballenberger the artist, Hessemer the architect, Sömmerring, and Johann Friedrich Böhmer the historian. The Bethmann vault attracts attention by three bas-reliefs from the chisel of Thorwaldsen; and the Reichenbach mausoleum is a vast pile designed by Hessemer at the command of William II. of Hesse, and adorned with sculptures by Zwerger and von der Lausitz. In the Jewish section, which is walled off from the rest of the burying-ground, the most remarkable tombs are those of the Rothschild family.

Parks.—In addition to the park in the south-western district, Frankfort possesses two delightful pleasure grounds, which attract large numbers of visitors, the Palmengarten in the west and the zoological garden in the east of the city. The former is remarkable for the collection of palms purchased in 1868 from the deposed duke Adolph of Nassau.

Government.—The present municipal constitution of the city dates from 1867 and presents some points of difference from the ordinary Prussian system. Bismarck was desirous of giving the city, in view of its former freedom, a more liberal constitution than is usual in ordinary cases. Formerly fifty-four representatives were elected, but provision was made (in the constitution) for increasing the number, and they at present number sixty-four, elected for six years. Every two years a third of the number retire, but they are eligible for re-election. These sixty-four representatives elect twenty town-councillors, ten of whom receive a salary and ten do not. The chief burgomaster (Oberbürgermeister) is nominated by the emperor for twelve years, and the second burgomaster must receive the emperor’s approval.

Since 1885 the city has been supplied with water of excellent quality from the Stadtwald, Goldstein and Hinkelstein, and the favourable sanitary condition of the town is seen in the low death rate.

Population.—The population of Frankfort has steadily increased since the beginning of the 19th century; it amounted in 1817 to 41,458; (1840) 55,269; (1864) 77,372; (1871) 59,265; (1875) 103,136; (1890) 179,985; and (1905), including the incorporated suburban districts, 334,951, of whom 175,909 were Protestants, 88,457 Roman Catholics and 21,974 Jews.

History.—Excavations around the cathedral have incontestably proved that Frankfort-on-Main (Trajectum ad Moenum) was a settlement in Roman times and was probably founded in the 1st century of the Christian era. It may thus be accounted one of the earliest German—the so-called “Roman”—towns. Numerous places in the valley of the Main are mentioned in chronicles anterior to the time that Frankfort is first noticed. Disregarding popular tradition, which connects the origin of the town with a legend that Charlemagne, when retreating before the Saxons, was safely conducted across the river by a doe, it may be asserted that the first genuine historical notice of the town occurs in 793, when Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, tells us that he spent the winter in the villa Frankonovurd. Next year there is mention more than once of a royal palace here, and the early importance of the place is indicated by the fact that in this year it was chosen as the seat of the ecclesiastical council by which image-worship was condemned. The name Frankfort is also found in several official documents of Charlemagne’s reign; and from the notices that occur in the early chronicles and charters it would appear that the place was the most populous at least of the numerous villages of the Main district. During the Carolingian period it was the seat of no fewer than 16 imperial councils or colloquies. The town was probably at first built on an island in the river. It was originally governed by the royal officer or actor dominicus, and down even to the close of the Empire it remained a purely imperial or royal town. It gradually acquired various privileges, and by the close of the 14th century the only mark of dependence was the payment of a yearly tax. Louis the Pious dwelt more frequently at Frankfort than his father Charlemagne had done, and about 823 he built himself a new palace, the basis of the later Saalhof. In 822 and 823 two great diets were held in the palace, and at the former there were present deputies from the eastern Slavs, the Avars and the Normans. The place continued to be a favourite residence with Louis the German, who died there in 876, and was the capital of the East Frankish kingdom. By the rest of the Carolingian kings it was less frequently visited, and this neglect was naturally greater during the period of the Saxon and Salic emperors from 919 to 1137. Diets, however, were held in the town in 951, 1015, 1069 and 1109, and councils in 1000 and 1006. From a privilege of Henry IV., in 1074, granting the city of Worms freedom from tax in their trade with several royal cities, it appears that Frankfort was even then a place of some commercial importance.

Under the Hohenstaufens many brilliant diets were held within its walls. That of 1147 saw, also, the first election of a German king at Frankfort, in the person of Henry, son of Conrad III. But as the father outlived the son, it was Frederick I., Barbarossa, who was actually the first reigning king to be elected here (in 1152). With the beginning of the 13th century the municipal constitution appears to have taken definite shape. The chief official was the royal bailiff (Schultheiss), who is first mentioned in 1193, and whose powers were subsequently enlarged by the abolition, in 1219, of the office of the royal Vogt or advocatus. About this time a body of Schöffen (scabini, jurats), fourteen in number, was formed to assist in the control of municipal affairs, and with their appointment the first step was taken towards civic representative government. Soon, however, the activity of the Schöffen became specifically confined to the determination of legal disputes, and in their place a new body (Collegium) of counsellors—Ratmannen—also fourteen in number, was appointed for the general administration of local matters. In 1311, the two burgomasters, now chiefs of the municipality, take the place of the royal Schultheiss. In the 13th century, the Frankfort Fair, which is first mentioned in 1150, and the origin of which must have been long anterior to that date, is referred to as being largely frequented. No fewer than 10 new churches were erected in the years from 1220 to 1270. It was about the same period, probably in 1240, that the Jews first settled in the town. In the contest which Louis the Bavarian maintained with the papacy Frankfort sided with the emperor, and it was consequently placed under an interdict for 20 years from 1329 to 1349. On Louis’ death it refused to accept the papal conditions of pardon, and only yielded to Charles IV., the papal nominee, when Günther of Schwarzburg thought it more prudent to abdicate in his favour. Charles granted the city a full amnesty, and confirmed its liberties and privileges.

By the famous Golden Bull of 1356 Frankfort was declared the seat of the imperial elections, and it still preserves an official contemporaneous copy of the original document as the most precious of the eight imperial bulls in its possession. From the date of the bull to the close of the Empire Frankfort retained the position of “Wahlstadt,” and only five of the two-and-twenty monarchs who ruled during that period were elected elsewhere. In 1388-1389 Frankfort assisted the South German towns in their wars with the princes and nobles (the Städtekrieg), and in a consequent battle with the troops of the Palatinate, the town banner was lost and carried to Kronberg, where it was long preserved as a trophy. On peace being concluded in 1391, the town had to pay 12,562 florins, and this brought it into great financial difficulties. In the course of the next 50 years debt was contracted to the amount of 126,772 florins. The diet at Worms in 1495 chose Frankfort as the seat of the newly instituted imperial chamber, or “Reichskammergericht,” and it was not till 1527 that the chamber was removed to Spires. At the Reformation Frankfort heartily joined the Protestant party, and in consequence it was hardly treated both by the emperor Charles V. and by the archbishop of Mainz. It refused to subscribe the Augsburg Recess, but at the same time it was not till 1536 that it was persuaded to join the League of Schmalkalden. On the failure of this confederation it opened its gates to the imperial general Büren on the 29th of December 1546, although he had passed by the city, which he considered too strong for the forces under his command. The emperor was merciful enough to leave it in possession of its privileges, but he inflicted a fine of 80,000 gold gulden, and until October 1547 the citizens had to endure the presence of from 8000 to 10,000 soldiers. This resulted in a pestilence which not only lessened the population, but threatened to give the death-blow to the great annual fairs; and at the close of the war it was found that it had cost the city no less than 228,931 gulden. In 1552 Frankfort was invested for three weeks by Maurice of Saxony, who was still in arms against the emperor Charles V., but it continued to hold out till peace was concluded between the principal combatants. Between 1612 and 1616 occurred the great Fettmilch insurrection, perhaps the most remarkable episode in the internal history of Frankfort. The magistracy had been acquiring more and more the character of an oligarchy; all power was practically in the hands of a few closely-related families; and the gravest peculation and malversation took place without hindrance. The ordinary citizens were roused to assert their rights, and they found a leader in Vincenz Fettmilch, who carried the contest to dangerous excesses, but lacked ability to bring it to a successful issue. An imperial commission was ultimately appointed, and the three principal culprits and several of their associates were executed in 1616. It was not till 1801 that the last mouldering head of the Fettmilch company dropped unnoticed from the Rententurm, the old tower near the bridge. In the words of Dr Kriegk, Geschichte von Frankfurt, (1871), the insurrection completely destroyed the political power of the gilds, gave new strength to the supremacy of the patriciate, and brought no further advantage to the rest of the citizens than a few improvements in the organization and administration of the magistracy. The Jews, who had been attacked by the popular party, were solemnly reinstated by imperial command in all their previous privileges, and received full compensation for their losses.

During the Thirty Years’ War Frankfort did not escape. In 1631 Gustavus Adolphus garrisoned it with 600 men, who remained in possession till they were expelled four years later by the imperial general Lamboy. In 1792 the citizens had to pay 2,000,000 gulden to the French general Custine; and in 1796 Kléber exacted 8,000,000 francs. The independence of Frankfort was brought to an end in 1806, on the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine; and in 1810 it was made the capital of the grand-duchy of Frankfort, which had an area of 3215 sq. m. with 302,100 inhabitants, and was divided into the four districts of Frankfort, Aschaffenburg, Fulda and Hanau. On the reconstitution of Germany in 1815 it again became a free city, and in the following year it was declared the seat of the German Confederation. In April 1833 occurred what is known as the Frankfort Insurrection (Frankfurter Attentat), in which a number of insurgents led by Georg Bunsen attempted to break up the diet. The city joined the German Zollverein in 1836. During the revolutionary period of 1848 the people of Frankfort, where the united German parliament held its sessions, took a chief part in political movements, and the streets of the town were more than once the scene of conflict. In the war of 1866 they were on the Austrian side. On the 16th of July the Prussian troops, under General Vogel von Falkenstein, entered the town, and on the 18th of October it was formally incorporated with the Prussian state. A fine of 6,000,000 florins was exacted. In 1871 the treaty which concluded the Franco-German War was signed in the Swan Hotel by Prince Bismarck and Jules Favre, and it is consequently known as the peace of Frankfort.

Authorities.—F. Rittweger, Frankfurt im Jahre 1848 (1898); R. Jung, Das historische Archiv der Stadt Frankfurt (1897); A. Horne, Geschichte von Frankfurt (4th ed., 1903); H. Grotefend, Quellen zur Frankfürter Geschichte (Frankfort, 1884-1888); J. C. von Fichard, Die Entstehung der Reichsstadt Frankfurt (Frankfort, 1819); G. L. Kriegk, Geschichte von Frankfurt (Frankfort, 1871); J. F. Böhmer, Urkundenbuch der Reichsstadt Frankfurt (new ed., 1901); B. Weber, Zur Reformationsgeschichte der freien Reichsstadt Frankfurt (1895); O. Speyer, Die Frankfurter Revolution 1612-1616 (1883); and L. Woerl, Guide to Frankfort (Leipzig, 1898).

FRANKFORT-ON-ODER, a town of Germany, in the Prussian province of Brandenburg, 50 m. S.E. from Berlin on the main line of railway to Breslau and at the junction of lines to Cüstrin, Posen and Grossenhain. Pop. (1905) 64,943. The town proper lies on the left bank of the river Oder and is connected by a stone bridge (replacing the old historical wooden structure) 900 ft. long, with the suburb of Damm. The town is agreeably situated and has broad and handsome streets, among them the “Linden,” a spacious avenue. Above, on the western side, and partly lying on the site of the old ramparts, is the residential quarter, consisting mainly of villas and commanding a fine prospect of the Oder valley. Between this suburb and the town lies the park, in which is a monument to the poet Ewald Christian von Kleist, who died here of wounds received in the battle of Kunersdorf. Among the more important public buildings must be noticed the Evangelical Marienkirche (Oberkirche), a handsome brick edifice of the 13th century with five aisles, the Roman Catholic church, the Rathhaus dating from 1607, and bearing on its southern gable the device of a member of the Hanseatic League, the government offices and the theatre. The university of Frankfort, founded in 1506 by Joachim I., elector of Brandenburg, was removed to Breslau in 1811, and the academical buildings are now occupied by a school. To compensate it for the loss of its university, Frankfort-on-Oder was long the seat of the court of appeal for the province, but of this it was deprived in 1879. There are several handsome public monuments, notably that to Duke Leopold of Brunswick, who was drowned in the Oder while attempting to save life, on the 27th of April 1785. The town has a large garrison, consisting of nearly all arms. Its industries are considerable, including the manufacture of machinery, metal ware, chemicals, paper, leather and sugar. Situated on the high road from Berlin to Silesia, and having an extensive system of water communication by means of the Oder and its canals to the Vistula and the Elbe, and being an important railway centre, it has a lively export trade, which is further fostered by its three annual fairs, held respectively at Reminiscere (the second Sunday in Lent), St Margaret’s day and at Martinmas. In the neighbourhood are extensive coal fields.

Frankfort-on-the-Oder owes its origin and name to a settlement of Franconian merchants here, in the 13th century, on land conquered by the margrave of Brandenburg from the Wends. In 1253 it was raised to the rank of a town by the margrave John I. and borrowed from Berlin the Magdeburg civic constitution. In 1379 it received from King Sigismund, then margrave of Brandenburg, the right to free navigation of the Oder; and from 1368 to about 1450 it belonged to the Hanseatic League. The university, which is referred to above, was opened by the elector Joachim I. in 1506, was removed in 1516 to Kottbus and restored again to Frankfort in 1539, at which date the Reformation was introduced. It was dispersed during the Thirty Years’ War and again restored by the Great Elector, but finally transferred to Breslau in 1811.

Frankfort has suffered much from the vicissitudes of war. In the 15th century it successfully withstood sieges by the Hussites (1429 and 1432), by the Poles (1450) and by the duke of Sagan (1477). In the Thirty Years’ War it was successively taken by Gustavus Adolphus (1631), by Wallenstein (1633), by the elector of Brandenburg (1634), and again by the Swedes, who held it from 1640 to 1644. During the Seven Years’ War it was taken by the Russians (1759). In 1812 it was occupied by the French, who remained till March 1813, when the Russians marched in.

See K. R. Hausen, Geschichte der Universität und Stadt Frankfurt (1806), and Bieder und Gurnik, Bilder aus der Geschichte der Stadt Frankfurt-an-der-Oder (1898).

FRANKINCENSE,[1] or Olibanum[2] (Gr. λιβανωτός, later θύος; Lat., tus or thus; Heb., lebonah;[3] Ar., lubān;[4] Turk., ghyunluk; Hind., ganda-birosa[5]), a gum-resin obtained from certain species of trees of the genus Boswellia, and natural order Burseraceae. The members of the genus are possessed of the following characters:—Bark often papyraceous; leaves deciduous, compound, alternate and imparipinnate, with leaflets serrate or entire; flowers in racemes or panicles, white, green, yellowish or pink, having a small persistent, 5-dentate calyx, 5 petals, 10 stamens, a sessile 3 to 5-chambered ovary, a long style, and a 3-lobed stigma; fruit trigonal or pentagonal; and seed compressed. Sir George Birdwood (Trans. Lin. Soc. xxvii., 1871) distinguishes five species of Boswellia: (A) B. thurifera, Colebr. (B. glabra and B. serrata, Roxb.), indigenous to the mountainous tracts of central India and the Coromandel coast, and B. papyrifera (Plösslea floribunda, Endl.) of Abyssinia, which, though both thuriferous, are not known to yield any of the olibanum of commerce; and (B) B. Frereana (see [Elemi], vol. x. p. 259), B. Bhua-Dajiana, and B. Carterii, the “Yegaar,” “Mohr Add,” and “Mohr Madow” of the Somali country, in East Africa, the last species including a variety, the “Maghrayt d’Sheehaz” of Hadramaut, Arabia, all of which are sources of true frankincense or olibanum. The trees on the Somali coast are described by Captain G. B. Kempthorne as growing, without soil, out of polished marble rocks, to which they are attached by a thick oval mass of substance resembling a mixture of lime and mortar: the purer the marble the finer appears to be the growth of the tree. The young trees, he states, furnish the most valuable gum, the older yielding merely a clear glutinous fluid resembling copal varnish.[6] To obtain the frankincense a deep incision is made in the trunk of the tree, and below it a narrow strip of bark 5 in. in length is peeled off. When the milk-like juice (“spuma pinguis,” Pliny) which exudes has hardened by exposure to the atmosphere, the incision is deepened. In about three months the resin has attained the required degree of consistency. The season for gathering lasts from May until the first rains in September. The large clear globules are scraped off into baskets, and the inferior quality that has run down the tree is collected separately. The coast of south Arabia is yearly visited by parties of Somalis, who pay the Arabs for the privilege of collecting frankincense.[7] In the interior of the country about the plain of Dhofār,[8] during the south-west monsoon, frankincense and other gums are gathered by the Beni Gurrah Bedouins, and might be obtained by them in much larger quantities; their lawlessness, however, and the lack of a safe place of exchange or sale are obstacles to the development of trade. (See C. Y. Ward, The Gulf of Aden Pilot, p. 117, 1863.) Much as formerly in the region of Sakhalites in Arabia (the tract between Ras Makalla and Ras Agab),[9] described by Arrian, so now on the sea-coast of the Somali country, the frankincense when collected is stored in heaps at various stations. Thence, packed in sheep- and goat-skins, in quantities of 20 to 40 ℔, it is carried on camels to Berbera, for shipment either to Aden, Makalla and other Arabian ports, or directly to Bombay.[10] At Bombay, like gum-acacia, it is assorted, and is then packed for re-exportation to Europe, China and elsewhere.[11] Arrian relates that it was an import of Barbarike on the Sinthus (Indus). The idea held by several writers, including Niebuhr, that frankincense was a product of India, would seem to have originated in a confusion of that drug with benzoin and other odoriferous substances, and also in the sale of imported frankincense with the native products of India. The gum resin of Boswellia thurifera was described by Colebrooke (in Asiatick Researches, ix. 381), and after him by Dr J. Fleming (Ib. xi. 158), as true frankincense, or olibanum; from this, however, it differs in its softness, and tendency to melt into a mass[12] (Birdwood, loc. cit., p. 146). It is sold in the village bazaars of Khandeish in India under the name of Dup-Salai, i.e. incense of the “Salai tree”; and according to Mr F. Porter Smith, M.B. (Contrib. towards the Mat. Med. and Nat. Hist, of China, p. 162, Shanghai, 1871), is used as incense in China. The last authority also mentions olibanum as a reputed natural product of China. Bernhard von Breydenbach,[13] Ausonius, Florus and others, arguing, it would seem, from its Hebrew and Greek names, concluded that olibanum came from Mount Lebanon; and Chardin (Voyage en Perse, &c., 1711) makes the statement that the frankincense tree grows in the mountains of Persia, particularly Caramania.

Frankincense, or olibanum, occurs in commerce in semi-opaque, round, ovate or oblong tears or irregular lumps, which are covered externally with a white dust, the result of their friction against one another. It has an amorphous internal structure, a dull fracture; is of a yellow to yellowish-brown hue, the purer varieties being almost colourless, or possessing a greenish tinge, and has a somewhat bitter aromatic taste, and a balsamic odour, which is developed by heating. Immersed in alcohol it becomes opaque, and with water it yields an emulsion. It contains about 72% of resin soluble in alcohol (Kurbatow); a large proportion of gum soluble in water, and apparently identical with gum arabic; and a small quantity of a colourless inflammable essential oil, one of the constituents of which is the body oliben, C10H16. Frankincense burns with a bright white flame, leaving an ash consisting mainly of calcium carbonate, the remainder being calcium phosphate, and the sulphate, chloride and carbonate of potassium (Braconnot).[14] Good frankincense, Pliny tells us, is recognized by its whiteness, size, brittleness and ready inflammability. That which occurs in globular drops is, he says, termed “male frankincense”; the most esteemed, he further remarks, is in breast-shaped drops, formed each by the union of two tears.[15] The best frankincense, as we learn from Arrian,[16] was formerly exported from the neighbourhood of Cape Elephant in Africa (the modern Ras Fiel); and A. von Kremer, in his description of the commerce of the Red Sea (Aegypten, &c., p. 185, ii. Theil, Leipzig, 1863), observes that the African frankincense, called by the Arabs “asli,” is of twice the value of the Arabian “luban.” Captain S. B. Miles (loc. cit., p. 64) states that the best kind of frankincense, known to the Somali as “bedwi” or “sheheri,” comes from the trees “Mohr Add” and “Mohr Madow” (vide supra), and from a taller species of Boswellia, the “Boido,” and is sent to Bombay for exportation to Europe; and that an inferior “mayeti,” the produce of the “Yegaar,” is exported chiefly to Jeddah and Yemen ports.[17] The latter may possibly be what Niebuhr alludes to as “Indian frankincense.”[18] Garcias da Horta, in asserting the Arabian origin of the drug, remarks that the term “Indian” is often applied by the Arabs to a dark-coloured variety.[19]

According to Pliny (Nat. Hist. xiv. 1; cf. Ovid, Fasti i. 337 sq.), frankincense was not sacrificially employed in Trojan times. It was used by the ancient Egyptians in their religious rites, but, as Herodotus tells us (ii. 86), not in embalming. It constituted a fourth part of the Jewish incense of the sanctuary (Ex. xxx. 34), and is frequently mentioned in the Pentateuch. With other spices it was stored in a great chamber of the house of God at Jerusalem (1 Chron. ix. 29, Neh. xiii. 5-9). On the sacrificial use and import of frankincense and similar substances see [Incense].

In the Red Sea regions frankincense is valued not only for its sweet odour when burnt, but as a masticatory; and blazing lumps of it are not infrequently used for illumination instead of oil lamps. Its fumes are an excellent insectifuge. As a medicine it was in former times in high repute. Pliny (Nat. Hist. xxv. 82) mentions it as an antidote to hemlock. Avicenna (ed. Plempii, lib. ii. p. 161, Lovanii, 1658, fol.) recommends it for tumours, ulcers of the head and ears, affections of the breast, vomiting, dysentery and fevers. In the East frankincense has been found efficacious as an external application in carbuncles, blind boils and gangrenous sores, and as an internal agent is given in gonorrhoea. In China it was an old internal remedy for leprosy and struma, and is accredited with stimulant, tonic, sedative, astringent and vulnerary properties. It is not used in modern medicine, being destitute of any special virtues. (See Waring, Pharm. of India, p. 443, &c.; and F. Porter Smith, op. cit., p. 162.)

Common frankincense or thus, Abietis resina, is the term applied to a resin which exudes from fissures in the bark of the Norway spruce fir, Abies excelsa, D.C.; when melted in hot water and strained it constitutes “Burgundy pitch,” Pix abietina. The concreted turpentine obtained in the United States by making incisions in the trunk of a species of pine, Pinus australis, is also so designated. It is commercially known as “scrape,” and is similar to the French “galipot” or “barras.” Common frankincense is an ingredient in some ointments and plasters, and on account of its pleasant odour when burned has been used in incense as a substitute for olibanum. (See Flückiger and Hanbury, Pharmacographia.) The “black frankincense oil” of the Turks is stated by Hanbury (Science Papers, p. 142, 1876) to be liquid storax.

(F. H. B.)

[1] Stephen Skinner, M.D. (Etymologicon linguae Anglicanae, Lond., 1671), gives the derivation: “Frankincense, Thus, q.d. Incensum (i.e. Thus Libere) seu Liberaliter, ut in sacris officiis par est, adolendum.”

[2] “Sic olibanum dixere pro thure ex Graeco ὁ λίβανος” (Salmasius, C. S. Plinianae exercitationes, t. ii. p. 926, b. F., Traj. ad Rhen., 1689 fol.). So also Fuchs (Op. didact. pars. ii. p. 42, 1604 fol.), “Officinis non sine risu eruditorum, Graeco articulo adjecto, Olibanus vocatur.” The term olibano was used in ecclesiastical Latin as early as the pontificate of Benedict IX., in the 11th century. (See Ferd. Ughellus, Italia sacra, tom. i. 108, D., Ven., 1717 fol.)

[3] So designated from its whiteness (J. G. Stuckius, Sacror. et sacrific. gent. descrip., p. 79, Lugd. Bat., 1695, fol.; Kitto, Cycl. Bibl. Lit. ii. p. 806, 1870); cf. Laben, the Somali name for cream (R. F. Burton, First Footsteps in E. Africa, p. 178, 1856).

[4] Written Louan by Garcias da Horta (Aromat. et simpl. medicament. hist., C. Clusii Atrebatis Exoticorum lib. sept., p. 157, 1605, fol.), and stated to have been derived by the Arabs from the Greek name, the term less commonly used by them being Conder: cf. Sanskrit Kunda. According to Colebrooke (in Asiatick Res. ix. p. 379, 1807), the Hindu writers on Materia Medica use for the resin of Boswellia thurifera the designation Cunduru.

[5] A term applied also to the resinous exudation of Pinus longifolia (see Dr E. J. Waring, Pharmacopoeia of India, p. 52, Lond., 1868).

[6] See “Appendix,” vol. i. p. 419 of Sir W. C. Harris’s Highland of Aethiopia (2nd ed., Lond., 1844); and Trans. Bombay Geog. Soc. xiii. (1857), p. 136.

[7] Cruttenden, Trans. Bombay Geog. Soc. vii. (1846), p. 121; S. B. Miles, J. Geog. Soc. (1872).

[8] Or Dhafār. The incense of “Dofar” is alluded to by Camoens, Os Lusiadas, x. 201.

[9] H. J. Carter, “Comparative Geog. of the South-East Coast of Arabia,” in J. Bombay Branch of R. Asiatic Soc. iii. (Jan. 1851), p. 296; and Müller, Geog. Graeci Minores, i. p. 278 (Paris, 1855).

[10] J. Vaughan, Pharm. Journ. xii. (1853) pp. 227-229; and Ward, op. cit. p. 97.

[11] Pereira, Elem. of Mat. Med. ii. pt. 2, p. 380 (4th ed., 1847).

[12] “Boswellia thurifera,” ... says Waring (Pharm. of India, p. 52), “has been thought to yield East Indian olibanum, but there is no reliable evidence of its so doing.”

[13] “Libanus igitur est mons redolentie & summe aromaticitatis. nam ibi herbe odorifere crescunt. ibi etiam arbores thurifere coalescunt quarum gummi electum olibanum a medicis nuncupatur.”—Perigrinatio, p. 53 (1502, fol.).

[14] See, on the chemistry of frankincense, Braconnot, Ann. de chimie, lxviii. (1808) pp. 60-69; Johnston, Phil. Trans. (1839), pp. 301-305; J. Stenhouse, Ann. der Chem. und Pharm. xxxv. (1840) p. 306; and A. Kurbatow, Zeitsch. für Chem. (1871), p. 201.

[15] “Praecipua autem gratia est mammoso, cum haerente lacryma priore consecuta alia miscuit se” (Nat. Hist. xii. 32). One of the Chinese names for frankincense, Jú-hiang, “milk-perfume,” is explained by the Pen Ts’au (xxxiv. 45), a Chinese work, as being derived from the nipple-like form of its drops. (See E. Bretschneider, On the Knowledge possessed by the Ancient Chinese of the Arabs, &c., p. 19, Lond., 1871.)

[16] The Voyage of Nearchus, loc. cit.

[17] Vaughan (Pharm. Journ. xii. 1853) speaks of the Arabian Lubān, commonly called Morbat or Shaharree Luban, as realizing higher prices in the market than any of the qualities exported from Africa. The incense of “Esher,” i.e. Shihr or Shehr, is mentioned by Marco Polo, as also by Barbosa. (See Yule, op. cit. ii. p. 377.) J. Raymond Wellsted (Travels to the City of the Caliphs, p. 173, Lond., 1840) distinguishes two kinds of frankincense—“Meaty,” selling at $4 per cwt., and an inferior article fetching 20% less.

[18] “Es scheint, dass selber die Araber ihr eignes Räuchwerk nicht hoch schätzen; denn die Vornehmen in Jemen brauchen gemeiniglich indianisches Räuchwerk, ja eine grosse Menge Mastix von der Insel Scio” (Beschreibung von Arabien, p. 143, Kopenh., 1772).

[19] “De Arabibus minus mirum, qui nigricantem colorem, quo Thus Indicum praeditum esse vult Dioscorides [lib. i. c. 70], Indum plerumque vocent, ut ex Myrobalano nigro quem Indum appellant, patet” (op. sup. cit. p. 157).

FRANKING, a term used for the right of sending letters or postal packages free (Fr. franc) of charge. The privilege was claimed by the House of Commons in 1660 in “a Bill for erecting and establishing a Post Office,” their demand being that all letters addressed to or sent by members during the session should be carried free. The clause embodying this claim was struck out by the Lords, but with the proviso in the Act as passed for the free carriage of all letters to and from the king and the great officers of state, and also the single inland letters of the members of that present parliament during that session only. It seems, however, that the practice was tolerated until 1764, when by an act dealing with postage it was legalized, every peer and each member of the House of Commons being allowed to send free ten letters a day, not exceeding an ounce in weight, to any part of the United Kingdom, and to receive fifteen. The act did not restrict the privilege to letters either actually written by or to the member, and thus the right was very easily abused, members sending and receiving letters for friends, all that was necessary being the signature of the peer or M.P. in the corner of the envelope. Wholesale franking grew usual, and M.P.’s supplied their friends with envelopes already signed to be used at any time. In 1837 the scandal had become so great that stricter regulations came into force. The franker had to write the full address, to which he had to add his name, the post-town and the day of the month; the letter had to be posted on the day written or the following day at the latest, and in a post-town not more than 20 m. from the place where the peer or M.P. was then living. On the 10th of January 1840 parliamentary franking was abolished on the introduction of the uniform penny rate.

In the United States the franking privilege was first granted in January 1776 to the soldiers engaged in the American War of Independence. The right was gradually extended till it included nearly all officials and members of the public service. By special acts the privilege was bestowed on presidents and their widows. By an act of the 3rd of March 1845, franking was limited to the president, vice-president, members and delegates in Congress and postmasters, other officers being required to keep quarterly accounts of postage and pay it from their contingent funds. In 1851 free exchange of newspapers was re-established. By an act of the 3rd of March 1863 the privilege was granted the president and his private secretary, the vice-president, chiefs of executive departments, such heads of bureaus and chief clerks as might be designated by the postmaster-general for official letters only; senators and representatives in Congress for all correspondence, senders of petitions to either branch of the legislature, and to publishers of newspapers for their exchanges. There was a limit as to weight. Members of Congress could also frank, in matters concerning the federal department of agriculture, “seeds, roots and cuttings,” the weight to be fixed by the postmaster-general. This act remained in force till the 31st of January 1873, when franking was abolished. Since 1875, by sundry acts, franking for official correspondence, government publications, seeds, &c., has been allowed to congressmen, ex-congressmen (for 9 months after the close of their term), congressmen-elect and other government officials. By special acts of 1881, 1886, 1902, 1909, respectively, the franking privilege was granted to the widows of Presidents Garfield, Grant, McKinley and Cleveland.

FRANKL, LUDWIG AUGUST (1810-1894), Austrian poet. He took part in the revolution of 1848, and his poems on liberty had considerable vogue. His lyrics are among his best work. He was secretary of the Jewish community in Vienna, and did a lasting service to education by his visit to the Orient in 1856. He founded the first modern Jewish school (the Von Lämmel Schule) in Jerusalem. His brilliant volumes Nach Jerusalem describing his eastern tour have been translated into English, as is the case with many of his poems. His collected poems appeared in three volumes in 1880.

(I. A.)

FRANKLAND, SIR EDWARD (1825-1899), English chemist, was born at Churchtown, near Lancaster, on the 18th of January 1825. After attending the grammar school at Lancaster he spent six years as an apprentice to a druggist in that town. In 1845 he went to London and entered Lyon Playfair’s laboratory, subsequently working under R. W. Bunsen at Marburg. In 1847 he was appointed science-master at Queenwood school, Hampshire, where he first met J. Tyndall, and in 1851 first professor of chemistry at Owens College, Manchester. Returning to London six years later he became lecturer in chemistry at St Bartholomew’s hospital, and in 1863 professor of chemistry at the Royal Institution. From an early age he engaged in original research with great success.

Analytical problems, such as the isolation of certain organic radicals, attracted his attention to begin with, but he soon turned to synthetical studies, and he was only about twenty-five years of age when an investigation, doubtless suggested by the work of his master, Bunsen, on cacodyl, yielded the interesting discovery of the organo-metallic compounds. The theoretical deductions which he drew from the consideration of these bodies were even more interesting and important than the bodies themselves. Perceiving a molecular isonomy between them and the inorganic compounds of the metals from which they may be formed, he saw their true molecular type in the oxygen, sulphur or chlorine compounds of those metals, from which he held them to be derived by the substitution of an organic group for the oxygen, sulphur, &c. In this way they enabled him to overthrow the theory of conjugate compounds, and they further led him in 1852 to publish the conception that the atoms of each elementary substance have a definite saturation capacity, so that they can only combine with a certain limited number of the atoms of other elements. The theory of valency thus founded has dominated the subsequent development of chemical doctrine, and forms the groundwork upon which the fabric of modern structural chemistry reposes.

In applied chemistry Frankland’s great work was in connexion with water-supply. Appointed a member of the second royal commission on the pollution of rivers in 1868, he was provided by the government with a completely-equipped laboratory, in which, for a period of six years, he carried on the inquiries necessary for the purposes of that body, and was thus the means of bringing to light an enormous amount of valuable information respecting the contamination of rivers by sewage, trade-refuse, &c., and the purification of water for domestic use. In 1865, when he succeeded A. W. von Hofmann at the School of Mines, he undertook the duty of making monthly reports to the registrar-general on the character of the water supplied to London, and these he continued down to the end of his life. At one time he was an unsparing critic of its quality, but in later years he became strongly convinced of its general excellence and wholesomeness. His analyses were both chemical and bacteriological, and his dissatisfaction with the processes in vogue for the former at the time of his appointment caused him to spend two years in devising new and more accurate methods. In 1859 he passed a night on the very top of Mont Blanc in company with John Tyndall. One of the purposes of the expedition was to discover whether the rate of combustion of a candle varies with the density of the atmosphere in which it is burnt, a question which was answered in the negative. Other observations made by Frankland at the time formed the starting-point of a series of experiments which yielded far-reaching results. He noticed that at the summit the candle gave a very poor light, and was thereby led to investigate the effect produced on luminous flames by varying the pressure of the atmosphere in which they are burning. He found that pressure increases luminosity, so that hydrogen, for example, the flame of which in normal circumstances gives no light, burns with a luminous flame under a pressure of ten or twenty atmospheres, and the inference he drew was that the presence of solid particles is not the only factor that determines the light-giving power of a flame. Further, he showed that the spectrum of a dense ignited gas resembles that of an incandescent liquid or solid, and he traced a gradual change in the spectrum of an incandescent gas under increasing pressure, the sharp lines observable when it is extremely attenuated broadening out to nebulous bands as the pressure rises, till they merge in the continuous spectrum as the gas approaches a density comparable with that of the liquid state. An application of these results to solar physics in conjunction with Sir Norman Lockyer led to the view that at least the external layers of the sun cannot consist of matter in the liquid or solid forms, but must be composed of gases or vapours. Frankland and Lockyer were also the discoverers of helium. In 1868 they noticed in the solar spectrum a bright yellow line which did not correspond to any substance then known, and which they therefore attributed to the then hypothetical element, helium.

Sir Edward Frankland, who was made a K.C.B. in 1897, died on the 9th of August 1899 while on a holiday at Golaa, Gudbrandsdalen, Norway.

A memorial lecture delivered by Professor H. E. Armstrong before the London Chemical Society on the 31st of October 1901 contained many personal details of Frankland’s life, together with a full discussion of his scientific work; and a volume of Autobiographical Sketches was printed for private circulation in 1902. His original papers, down to 1877, were collected and published in that year as Experimental Researches in Pure, Applied and Physical Chemistry.

FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN (1706-1790), American diplomat, statesman and scientist, was born on the 17th of January 1706 in a house in Milk Street, opposite the Old South church, Boston, Massachusetts. He was the tenth son of Josiah Franklin, and the eighth child and youngest son of ten children borne by Abiah Folger, his father’s second wife. The elder Franklin was born at Ecton in Northamptonshire, England, where the strongly Protestant Franklin family may be traced back for nearly four centuries. He had married young and had migrated from Banbury to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1685. Benjamin could not remember when he did not know how to read, and when eight years old he was sent to the Boston grammar school, being destined by his father for the church as a tithe of his sons. He spent a year there and a year in a school for writing and arithmetic, and then at the age of ten he was taken from school to assist his father in the business of a tallow-chandler and soapboiler. In his thirteenth year he was apprenticed to his half-brother James, who was establishing himself in the printing business, and who in 1721 started the New England Courant, one of the earliest newspapers in America.

Benjamin’s tastes had at first been for the sea rather than the pulpit; now they inclined rather to intellectual than to other pleasures. At an early age he had made himself familiar with The Pilgrim’s Progress, with Locke, On the Human Understanding, and with a volume of The Spectator. Thanks to his father’s excellent advice, he gave up writing doggerel verse (much of which had been printed by his brother and sold on the streets) and turned to prose composition. His success in reproducing articles he had read in The Spectator led him to write an article for his brother’s paper, which he slipped under the door of the printing shop with no name attached, and which was printed and attracted some attention. After repeated successes of the same sort Benjamin threw off his disguise and contributed regularly to the Courant. When, after various journalistic indiscretions, James Franklin in 1722 was forbidden to publish the Courant, it appeared with Benjamin’s name as that of the publisher and was received with much favour, chiefly because of the cleverness of his articles signed “Dr Janus,” which, like those previously signed “Mistress Silence Dogood,” gave promise of “Poor Richard.” But Benjamin’s management of the paper, and particularly his free-thinking, displeased the authorities; the relations of the two brothers gradually grew unfriendly, possibly, as Benjamin thought, because of his brother’s jealousy of his superior ability; and Benjamin determined to quit his brother’s employ and to leave New England. He made his way first to New York City, and then (October 1723) to Philadelphia, where he got employment with a printer named Samuel Keimer.[1]

A rapid composer and a workman full of resource, Franklin was soon recognized as the master spirit of the shop. Sir William Keith (1680-1749), governor of the province, urged him to start in business for himself, and when Franklin had unsuccessfully appealed to his father for the means to do so, Keith promised to furnish him with what he needed for the equipment of a new printing office and sent him to England to buy the materials. Keith had repeatedly promised to send a letter of credit by the ship on which Franklin sailed, but when the Channel was reached and the ship’s mails were examined no such letter was found. Franklin reached London in December 1724, and found employment first at Palmer’s, a famous printing house in Bartholomew Close, and afterwards at Watts’s Printing House. At Palmer’s he had set up a second edition of Wollaston’s Religion of Nature Delineated. To refute this book and to prove that there could be no such thing as religion, he wrote and printed a small pamphlet, A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, which brought him some curious acquaintances, and of which he soon became thoroughly ashamed. After a year and a half in London, Franklin was persuaded by a friend named Denham, a Quaker merchant, to return with him to America and engage in mercantile business; he accordingly gave up printing, but a few days before sailing he received a tempting offer to remain and give lessons in swimming—his feats as a swimmer having given him considerable reputation—and he says that he might have consented “had the overtures been sooner made.” He reached Philadelphia in October 1726, but a few months later Denham died, and Franklin was induced by large wages to return to his old employer Keimer; with Keimer he quarrelled repeatedly, thinking himself ill used and kept only to train apprentices until they could in some degree take his place. In 1728 Franklin and Hugh Meredith, a fellow-worker at Keimer’s, set up in business for themselves; the capital being furnished by Meredith’s father. In 1730 the partnership was dissolved, and Franklin, through the financial assistance of two friends, secured the sole management of the printing house. In September 1729 he bought at a merely nominal price The Pennsylvania Gazette, a weekly newspaper which Keimer had started nine months before to defeat a similar project of Franklin’s, and which Franklin conducted until 1765. Franklin’s superior management of the paper, his new type, “some spirited remarks” on the controversy between the Massachusetts assembly and Governor Burnet, brought his paper into immediate notice, and his success both as a printer and as a journalist was assured and complete. In 1731 he established in Philadelphia one of the earliest circulating libraries in America (often said to have been the earliest), and in 1732 he published the first of his Almanacks, under the pseudonym of Richard Saunders. These “Poor Richard’s Almanacks” were issued for the next twenty-five years with remarkable success, the annual sale averaging 10,000 copies, and far exceeding the sale of any other publication in the colonies.

Beginning in 1733 Franklin taught himself enough French, Italian, Spanish and Latin to read these languages with some ease. In 1736 he was chosen clerk of the General Assembly, and served in this capacity until 1751. In 1737 he had been appointed postmaster at Philadelphia, and about the same time he organized the first police force and fire company in the colonies; in 1749, after he had written Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania, he and twenty-three other citizens of Philadelphia formed themselves into an association for the purpose of establishing an academy, which was opened in 1751, was chartered in 1753, and eventually became the University of Pennsylvania; in 1727 he organized a debating club, the “Junto,” in Philadelphia, and later he was one of the founders of the American Philosophical Society (1743; incorporated 1780); he took the lead in the organization of a militia force, and in the paving of the city streets, improved the method of street lighting, and assisted in the founding of a city hospital (1751); in brief, he gave the impulse to nearly every measure or project for the welfare and prosperity of Philadelphia undertaken in his day. In 1751 he became a member of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, in which he served for thirteen years. In 1753 he and William Hunter were put in charge of the post service of the colonies, which he brought in the next ten years to a high state of efficiency and made a financial success; this position he held until 1774. He visited nearly every post office in the colonies and increased the mail service between New York and Philadelphia from once to three times a week in summer, and from twice a month to once a week in winter. When war with France appeared imminent in 1754, Franklin was sent to the Albany Convention, where he submitted his plan for colonial union (see [Albany], N.Y.). When the home government sent over General Edward Braddock[2] with two regiments of British troops, Franklin undertook to secure the requisite number of horses and waggons for the march against Ft. Duquesne, and became personally responsible for payment to the Pennsylvanians who furnished them. Notwithstanding the alarm occasioned by Braddock’s defeat, the old quarrel between the proprietors of Pennsylvania and the assembly prevented any adequate preparations for defence; “with incredible meanness” the proprietors had instructed their governors to approve no act for levying the necessary taxes, unless the vast estates of the proprietors were by the same act exempted. So great was the confidence in Franklin in this emergency that early in 1756 the governor of Pennsylvania placed him in charge of the north-western frontier of the province, with power to raise troops, issue commissions and erect blockhouses; and Franklin remained in the wilderness for over a month, superintending the building of forts and watching the Indians. In February 1757 the assembly, “finding the proprietary obstinately persisted in manacling their deputies with instructions inconsistent not only with the privileges of the people, but with the service of the crown, resolv’d to petition the king against them,” and appointed Franklin as their agent to present the petition. He arrived in London on the 27th of July 1757, and shortly afterwards, when, at a conference with Earl Granville, president of the council, the latter declared that “the King is the legislator of the colonies,” Franklin in reply declared that the laws of the colonies were to be made by their assemblies, to be passed upon by the king, and when once approved were no longer subject to repeal or amendment by the crown. As the assemblies, said he, could not make permanent laws without the king’s consent, “neither could he make a law for them without theirs.” This opposition of views distinctly raised the issue between the home government and the colonies. As to the proprietors Franklin succeeded in 1760 in securing an understanding that the assembly should pass an act exempting from taxation the unsurveyed waste lands of the Penn estate, the surveyed waste lands being assessed at the usual rate for other property of that description. Thus the proprietors finally acknowledged the right of the assembly to tax their estates.

The success of Franklin’s first foreign mission was, therefore, substantial and satisfactory. During this sojourn of five years in England he had made many valuable friends outside of court and political circles, among whom Hume, Robertson and Adam Smith were conspicuous. In 1759, for his literary and more particularly his scientific attainments, he received the freedom of the city of Edinburgh and the degree of doctor of laws from the university of St Andrews. He had been made a Master of Arts at Harvard and at Yale in 1753, and at the college of William and Mary in 1756; and in 1762 he received the degree of D.C.L. at Oxford. While in England he had made active use of his remarkable talent for pamphleteering. In the clamour for peace following the death of George II. (25th of October 1760), he was for a vigorous prosecution of the war with France; he had written what purported to be a chapter from an old book written by a Spanish Jesuit, On the Meanes of Disposing the Enemie to Peace, which had a great effect; and in the spring of 1760 there had been published a more elaborate paper written by Franklin with the assistance of Richard Jackson, agent of Massachusetts and Connecticut in London, entitled The Interest of Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies, and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe (1760). This pamphlet answered the argument that it would be unsafe to keep Canada because of the added strength that would thus be given to any possible movement for independence in the English colonies, by urging that so long as Canada remained French there could be no safety for the English colonies in North America, nor any permanent peace in Europe. Tradition reports that this pamphlet had considerable weight in determining the ministry to retain Canada.

Franklin sailed again for America in August 1762, hoping to be able to settle down in quiet and devote the remainder of his life to experiments in physics. This quiet was interrupted, however, by the “Paxton Massacre” (Dec. 14, 1763)—the slaughter of a score of Indians (children, women and old men) at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, by some young rowdies from the town of Paxton, who then marched upon Philadelphia to kill a few Christian Indians there. Franklin, appealed to by the governor, raised a troop sufficient to frighten away the “Paxton boys,” and for the moment there seemed a possibility of an understanding between Franklin and the proprietors. But the question of taxing the estates of the proprietors came up in a new form, and a petition from the assembly was drawn by Franklin, requesting the king “to resume the government” of Pennsylvania. In the autumn election of 1764 the influence of the proprietors was exerted against Franklin, and by an adverse majority of 25 votes in 4000 he failed to be re-elected to the assembly. The new assembly sent Franklin again to England as its special agent to take charge of another petition for a change of government, which, however, came to nothing. Matters of much greater consequence soon demanded Franklin’s attention.

Early in 1764 Lord Grenville had informed the London agents of the American colonies that he proposed to lay a portion of the burden left by the war with France upon the shoulders of the colonists by means of a stamp duty, unless some other tax equally productive and less inconvenient were proposed. The natural objection of the colonies, as voiced, for example, by the assembly of Pennsylvania, was that it was a cruel thing to tax colonies already taxed beyond their strength, and surrounded by enemies and exposed to constant expenditures for defence, and that it was an indignity that they should be taxed by a parliament in which they were not represented; at the same time the Pennsylvania assembly recognized it as “their duty to grant aid to the crown, according to their abilities, whenever required of them in the usual manner.” To prevent the introduction of the Stamp Act, which he characterized as “the mother of mischief,” Franklin used every effort, but the bill was easily passed, and it was thought that the colonists would soon be reconciled to it. Because he, too, thought so, and because he recommended John Hughes, a merchant of Philadelphia, for the office of distributor of stamps, Franklin himself was denounced—he was even accused of having planned the Stamp Act—and his family in Philadelphia was in danger of being mobbed. Of Franklin’s examination, in February 1766, by the House in Committee of the Whole, as to the effects of the Stamp Act, Burke said that the scene reminded him of a master examined by a parcel of schoolboys, and George Whitefield said: “Dr Franklin has gained immortal honour by his behaviour at the bar of the House. His answer was always found equal to the questioner. He stood unappalled, gave pleasure to his friends and did honour to his country.”[3] Franklin compared the position of the colonies to that of Scotland in the days before the union, and in the same year (1766) audaciously urged a similar union with the colonies before it was too late. The knowledge of colonial affairs gained from Franklin’s testimony, probably more than all other causes combined, determined the immediate repeal of the Stamp Act. For Franklin this was a great triumph, and the news of it filled the colonists with delight and restored him to their confidence and affection. Another bill (the Declaratory Act), however, was almost immediately passed by the king’s party, asserting absolute supremacy of parliament over the colonies, and in the succeeding parliament, by the Townshend Acts of 1767, duties were imposed on paper, paints and glass imported by the colonists; a tax was imposed on tea also. The imposition of these taxes was bitterly resented in the colonies, where it quickly crystallized public opinion round the principle of “No taxation without representation.” In spite of the opposition in the colonies to the Declaratory Act, the Townshend Acts and the tea tax, Franklin continued to assure the British ministry and the British public of the loyalty of the colonists. He tried to find some middle ground of reconciliation, and kept up his quiet work of informing England as to the opinions and conditions of the colonies, and of moderating the attitude of the colonies toward the home government; so that, as he said, he was accused in America of being too much an Englishman, and in England of being too much an American. He was agent now, not only of Pennsylvania, but also of New Jersey, of Georgia and of Massachusetts. Hillsborough, who became secretary of state for the colonies in 1768, refused to recognize Franklin as agent of Massachusetts, because the governor of Massachusetts had not approved the appointment, which was by resolution of the assembly. Franklin contended that the governor, as a mere agent of the king, could have nothing to do with the assembly’s appointment of its agent to the king; that “the King, and not the King, Lords, and Commons collectively, is their sovereign; and that the King, with their respective Parliaments, is their only legislator.” Franklin’s influence helped to oust Hillsborough, and Dartmouth, whose name Franklin suggested, was made secretary In 1772 and promptly recognized Franklin as the agent of Massachusetts.

In 1773 there appeared in the Public Advertiser one of Franklin’s cleverest hoaxes, “An Edict of the King of Prussia,” proclaiming that the island of Britain was a colony of Prussia, having been settled by Angles and Saxons, having been protected by Prussia, having been defended by Prussia against France in the war just past, and never having been definitely freed from Prussia’s rule; and that, therefore, Great Britain should now submit to certain taxes laid by Prussia—the taxes being identical with those laid upon the American colonies by Great Britain. In the same year occurred the famous episode of the Hutchinson Letters. These were written by Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, Andrew Oliver (1706-1774), his lieutenant-governor, and others to William Whately, a member of Parliament, and private secretary to George Grenville, suggesting an increase of the power of the governor at the expense of the assembly, “an abridgement of what are called English liberties,” and other measures more extreme than those undertaken by the government. The correspondence was shown to Franklin by a mysterious “member of parliament” to back up the contention that the quartering of troops in Boston was suggested, not by the British ministry, but by Americans and Bostonians. Upon his promise not to publish the letters Franklin received permission to send them to Massachusetts, where they were much passed about and were printed, and they were soon republished in English newspapers. The Massachusetts assembly on receiving the letters resolved to petition the crown for the removal of both Hutchinson and Oliver. The petition was refused and was condemned as scandalous, and Franklin, who took upon himself the responsibility for the publication of the letters, in the hearing before the privy council at the Cockpit on the 29th of January 1774 was insulted and was called a thief by Alexander Wedderburn (the solicitor-general, who appeared for Hutchinson and Oliver), and was removed from his position as head of the post office in the American colonies.

Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, Franklin entrusted his agencies to the care of Arthur Lee, and on the 21st of March 1775 again set sail for Philadelphia. During the last years of his stay in England there had been repeated attempts to win him (probably with an under-secretaryship) to the British service, and in these same years he had done a great work for the colonies by gaining friends for them among the opposition, and by impressing France with his ability and the excellence of his case. Upon reaching America, he heard of the fighting at Lexington and Concord, and with the news of an actual outbreak of hostilities his feeling toward England seems to have changed completely. He was no longer a peacemaker, but an ardent war-maker. On the 6th of May, the day after his arrival in Philadelphia, he was elected by the assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In October he was elected a member of the Pennsylvania assembly, but, as members of this body were still required to take an oath of allegiance to the crown, he refused to serve. In the Congress he served on as many as ten committees, and upon the organization of a continental postal system, he was made postmaster-general, a position he held for one year, when (in 1776) he was succeeded by his son-in-law, Richard Bache, who had been his deputy. With Benjamin Harrison, John Dickinson, Thomas Johnson and John Jay he was appointed in November 1775 to a committee to carry on a secret correspondence with the friends of America “in Great Britain, Ireland and other parts of the world.” He planned an appeal to the king of France for aid, and wrote the instructions of Silas Deane who was to convey it. In April 1776 he went to Montreal with Charles Carroll, Samuel Chase and John Carroll, as a member of the commission which conferred with General Arnold, and attempted without success to gain the co-operation of Canada. Immediately after his return from Montreal he was a member of the committee of five appointed to draw up the Declaration of Independence, but he took no actual part himself in drafting that instrument, aside from suggesting the change or insertion of a few words in Jefferson’s draft. From July 16 to September 28 he acted as president of the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania.

With John Adams and Edward Rutledge he was selected by Congress to discuss with Admiral Howe (September 1776, at Staten Island) the terms of peace proposed by Howe, who had arrived in New York harbour in July 1776, and who had been an intimate friend of Franklin; but the discussion was fruitless, as the American commissioners refused to treat “back of this step of independency.” On the 26th of September in the same year Franklin was chosen as commissioner to France to join Arthur Lee, who was in London, and Silas Deane, who had arrived in France in June 1776. He collected all the money he could command, between £3000 and £4000, lent it to Congress before he set sail, and arrived at Paris on the 22nd of December. He found quarters at Passy,[4] then a suburb of Paris, in a house belonging to Le Ray de Chaumont, an active friend of the American cause, who had influential relations with the court, and through whom he was enabled to be in the fullest communication with the French government without compromising it in the eyes of Great Britain.

At the time of Franklin’s arrival in Paris he was already one of the most talked about men in the world. He was a member of every important learned society in Europe; he was a member, and one of the managers, of the Royal Society, and was one of eight foreign members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Three editions of his scientific works had already appeared in Paris, and a new edition had recently appeared in London. To all these advantages he added a political purpose—the dismemberment of the British empire—which was entirely congenial to every citizen of France. “Franklin’s reputation,” wrote John Adams with characteristic extravagance, “was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire; and his character more esteemed and beloved than all of them.... If a collection could be made of all the gazettes of Europe, for the latter half of the 18th century, a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon le grand Franklin would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived.” “Franklin’s appearance in the French salons, even before he began to negotiate,” says Friedrich Christoph Schlosser, “was an event of great importance to the whole of Europe.... His dress, the simplicity of his external appearance, the friendly meekness of the old man, and the apparent humility of the Quaker, procured for Freedom a mass of votaries among the court circles who used to be alarmed at its coarseness and unsophisticated truths. Such was the number of portraits,[5] busts and medallions of him in circulation before he left Paris that he would have been recognized from them by any adult citizen in any part of the civilized world.”

Franklin’s position in France was a difficult one from the start, because of the delicacy of the task of getting French aid at a time when France was unready openly to take sides against Great Britain. But on the 6th of February 1778, after the news of the defeat and surrender of Burgoyne had reached Europe, a treaty of alliance and a treaty of amity and commerce between France and the United States were signed at Paris by Franklin, Deane and Lee. On the 28th of October this commission was discharged and Franklin was appointed sole plenipotentiary to the French court. Lee, from the beginning of the mission to Paris, seems to have been possessed of a mania of jealousy toward Franklin, or of misunderstanding of his acts, and he tried to undermine his influence with the Continental Congress. John Adams, when he succeeded Deane (recalled from Paris through Lee’s machinations) joined in the chorus of fault-finding against Franklin, dilated upon his social habits, his personal slothfulness and his complete lack of business-like system; but Adams soon came to see that, although careless of details, Franklin was doing what no other man could have done, and he ceased his harsher criticism. Even greater than his diplomatic difficulties were Franklin’s financial straits. Drafts were being drawn on him by all the American agents in Europe, and by the Continental Congress at home. Acting as American naval agent for the many successful privateers who harried the English Channel, and for whom he skilfully got every bit of assistance possible, open and covert, from the French government, he was continually called upon for funds in these ventures. Of the vessels to be sent to Paris with American cargoes which were to be sold for the liquidation of French loans to the colonies made through Beaumarchais, few arrived; those that did come did not cover Beaumarchais’s advances, and hardly a vessel came from America without word of fresh drafts on Franklin. After bold and repeated overtures for an exchange of prisoners—an important matter, both because the American frigates had no place in which to stow away their prisoners, and because of the maltreatment of American captives in such prisons as Dartmoor—exchanges began at the end of March 1779, although there were annoying delays, and immediately after November 1781 there was a long break in the agreement; and the Americans discharged from English prisons were constantly in need of money. Franklin, besides, was constantly called upon to meet the indebtedness of Lee and of Ralph Izard (1742-1804), and of John Jay, who in Madrid was being drawn on by the American Congress. In spite of the poor condition in Europe of the credit of the struggling colonies, and of the fact that France was almost bankrupt (and in the later years was at war), and although Necker strenuously resisted the making of any loans to the colonies, France, largely because of Franklin’s appeals, expended, by loan or gift to the colonies, or in sustenance of the French arms in America, a sum estimated at $60,000,000.

In 1781 Franklin, with John Adams, John Jay, Jefferson, who remained in America, and Henry Laurens, then a prisoner in England, was appointed on a commission to make peace with Great Britain. In the spring of 1782 Franklin had been informally negotiating with Shelburne, secretary of state for the home department, through the medium of Richard Oswald, a Scotch merchant, and had suggested that England should cede Canada to the United States in return for the recognition of loyalist claims by the states. When the formal negotiations began Franklin held closely to the instructions of Congress to its commissioners, that they should maintain confidential relations with the French ministers and that they were “to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge and concurrence,” and were ultimately to be governed by “their advice and opinion.” Jay and Adams disagreed with him on this point, believing that France intended to curtail the territorial aspirations of the Americans for her own benefit and for that of her ally, Spain. At last, after the British government had authorized its agents to treat with the commissioners as representatives of an independent power, thus recognizing American independence before the treaty was made, Franklin acquiesced in the policy of Jay. The preliminary treaty was signed by the commissioners on the 30th of November 1782, the final treaty on the 3rd of September 1783. Franklin had repeatedly petitioned Congress for his recall, but his letters were unanswered or his appeals refused until the 7th of March 1785, when Congress resolved that he be allowed to return to America; on the 10th of March Thomas Jefferson, who had joined him in August of the year before, was appointed to his place. Jefferson, when asked if he replaced Franklin, replied, “No one can replace him, sir; I am only his successor.” Before Franklin left Paris on the 12th of July 1785 he had made commercial treaties with Sweden (1783) and Prussia (1785; signed after Franklin’s departure by Jefferson and John Adams). Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on the 13th of September, disembarking at the same wharf as when he had first entered the city. He was immediately elected a member of the municipal council of Philadelphia, becoming its chairman; and was chosen president of the Supreme Executive Council (the chief executive officer) of Pennsylvania, and was re-elected in 1786 and 1787, serving from October 1785 to October 1788. In May 1787 he was elected a delegate to the Convention which drew up the Federal Constitution, this body thus having a member upon whom all could agree as chairman, should Washington be absent. He opposed over-centralization of government and favoured the Connecticut Compromise, and after the work of the Convention was done used his influence to secure the adoption of the Constitution.[6] As president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Franklin signed a petition to Congress (12th February 1790) for immediate abolition of slavery, and six weeks later in his most brilliant manner parodied the attack on the petition made by James Jackson (1757-1806) of Georgia, taking off Jackson’s quotations of Scripture with pretended texts from the Koran cited by a member of the Divan of Algiers in opposition to a petition asking for the prohibition of holding Christians in slavery. These were his last public acts. His last days were marked by a fine serenity and calm; he died in his own house in Philadelphia on the 17th of April 1790, the immediate cause being an abscess in the lungs. He was buried with his wife in the graveyard (Fifth and Arch Streets) of Christ Church, Philadelphia.

Physically Franklin was large, about 5 ft. 10 in. tall, with a well-rounded, powerful figure; he inherited an excellent constitution from his parents—“I never knew,” says he, “either my father or mother to have any sickness but that of which they dy’d, he at 89, and she at 85 years of age”—but injured it somewhat by excesses; in early life he had severe attacks of pleurisy, from one of which, in 1727, it was not expected that he would recover, and in his later years he was the victim of stone and gout. When he was sixteen he became a vegetarian for a time, rather to save money for books than for any other reason, and he always preached moderation in eating, though he was less consistent in his practice in this particular than as regards moderate drinking. He was always enthusiastically fond of swimming, and was a great believer in fresh air, taking a cold air bath regularly in the morning, when he sat naked in his bedroom beguiling himself with a book or with writing for a half-hour or more. He insisted that fresh, cold air was not the cause of colds, and preached zealously the “gospel of ventilation.” He was a charming talker, with a gay humour and a quiet sarcasm and a telling use of anecdote for argument. Henri Martin, the French historian, speaks of him as “of a mind altogether French in its grace and elasticity.” In 1730 he married Deborah Read, in whose father’s house he had lived when he had first come to Philadelphia, to whom he had been engaged before his first departure from Philadelphia for London, and who in his absence had married a ne’er-do-well, one Rogers, who had deserted her. The marriage to Franklin is presumed to have been a common law marriage, for there was no proof that Miss Read’s former husband was dead, nor that, as was suspected, a former wife, alive when Rogers married Miss Read, was still alive, and that therefore his marriage to Deborah was void. His “Debby,” or his “dear child,” as Franklin usually addressed her in his letters, received into the family, soon after her marriage, Franklin’s illegitimate son, William Franklin (1729-1813),[7] with whom she afterwards quarrelled, and whose mother, tradition says, was Barbara, a servant in the Franklin household. Another illegitimate child became the wife of John Foxcroft of Philadelphia. Deborah, who was “as much dispos’d to industry and frugality as” her husband, was illiterate and shared none of her husband’s tastes for literature and science; her dread of an ocean voyage kept her in Philadelphia during Franklin’s missions to England, and she died in 1774, while Franklin was in London. She bore him two children, one a son, Francis Folger, “whom I have seldom since seen equal’d in everything, and whom to this day [thirty-six years after the child’s death] I cannot think of without a sigh,” who died (1736) when four years old of small-pox, not having been inoculated; the other was Sarah (1744-1808), who married Richard Bache (1737-1811), Franklin’s successor in 1776-1782 as postmaster-general. Franklin’s gallant relations with women after his wife’s death were probably innocent enough. Best known of his French amies were Mme Helvétius, widow of the philosopher, and the young Mme Brillon, who corrected her “Papa’s” French and tried to bring him safely into the Roman Catholic Church. With him in France were his grandsons, William Temple Franklin, William Franklin’s natural son, who acted as private secretary to his grandfather, and Benjamin Franklin Bache (1769-1798), Sarah’s son, whom he sent to Geneva to be educated, for whom he later asked public office of Washington, and who became editor of the Aurora, one of the leading journals in the Republican attacks on Washington.

Franklin early rebelled against New England Puritanism and spent his Sundays in reading and in study instead of attending church. His free-thinking ran its extreme course at the time of his publication in London of A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725), which he recognized as one of the great errata of his life. He later called himself a deist, or theist, not discriminating between the terms. To his favourite sister he wrote: “There are some things in your New England doctrine and worship which I do not agree with; but I do not therefore condemn them, or desire to shake your belief or practice of them.” Such was his general attitude. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ, but thought “his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is like to see.” His intense practical-mindedness drew him away from religion, but drove him to a morality of his own (the “art of virtue,” he called it), based on thirteen virtues each accompanied by a short precept; the virtues were Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity and Humility, the precept accompanying the last-named virtue being “Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” He made a business-like little notebook, ruled off spaces for the thirteen virtues and the seven days of the week, “determined to give a week’s strict attention to each of the virtues successively ... [going] thro’ a course compleate in thirteen weeks and four courses in a year,” marking for each day a record of his adherence to each of the precepts. “And conceiving God to be the fountain of wisdom,” he “thought it right and necessary to solicit His assistance for obtaining it,” and drew up the following prayer for daily use: “O powerful Goodness! bountiful Father! merciful Guide! Increase in me that wisdom which discovers my truest interest. Strengthen my resolution to perform what that wisdom dictates. Accept my kind offices to Thy other children, as the only return in my power for Thy continual favours to me.” He was by no means prone to overmuch introspection, his great interest in the conduct of others being shown in the wise maxims of Poor Richard, which were possibly too utilitarian but were wonderfully successful in instructing American morals. His Art of Virtue on which he worked for years was never completed or published in any form.

“Benjamin Franklin, Printer,” was Franklin’s own favourite description of himself. He was an excellent compositor and pressman; his workmanship, clear impressions, black ink and comparative freedom from errata did much to get him the public printing in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the printing of the paper money[8] and other public matters in Delaware. The first book with his imprint is The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament and apply’d to the Christian State and Worship. By I. Watts ..., Philadelphia: Printed by B. F. and H. M. for Thomas Godfrey, and Sold at his Shop, 1729. The first novel printed in America was Franklin’s reprint in 1744 of Pamela; and the first American translation from the classics which was printed in America was a version by James Logan (1674-1751) of Cato’s Moral Distichs (1735). In 1744 he published another translation of Logan’s, Cicero On Old Age, which Franklin thought typographically the finest book he had ever printed. In 1733 he had established a press in Charleston, South Carolina, and soon after did the same in Lancaster, Pa., in New Haven, Conn., in New York, in Antigua, in Kingston, Jamaica, and in other places. Personally he had little connexion with the Philadelphia printing office after 1748, when David Hall became his partner and took charge of it. But in 1753 he was eagerly engaged in having several of his improvements incorporated in a new press, and more than twenty years after was actively interested in John Walter’s scheme of “logography.” In France he had a private press in his house in Passy, on which he printed “bagatelles.” Franklin’s work as a publisher is for the most part closely connected with his work in issuing the Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack (a summary of the proverbs from which appeared in the number for 1758, and has often been reprinted—under such titles as Father Abraham’s Speech, and The Way to Wealth).[9]

Of much of Franklin’s work as an author something has already been said. Judged as literature, the first place belongs to his Autobiography, which unquestionably ranks among the few great autobiographies ever written. His style in its simplicity, facility and clearness owed something to De Foe, something to Cotton Mather, something to Plutarch, more to Bunyan and to his early attempts to reproduce the manner of the third volume of the Spectator; and not the least to his own careful study of word usage. From Xenophon’s Memorabilia he learned when a boy the Socratic method of argument. Swift he resembled in the occasional broadness of his humour, in his brilliantly successful use of sarcasm and irony,[10] and in his mastery of the hoax. Balzac said of him that he “invented the lightning-rod, the hoax (’le canard’) and the republic.” Among his more famous hoaxes were the “Edict of the King of Prussia” (1773), already described; the fictitious supplement to the Boston Chronicle, printed on his private press at Passy in 1782, and containing a letter with an invoice of eight packs of 954 cured, dried, hooped and painted scalps of rebels, men, women and children, taken by Indians in the British employ; and another fictitious Letter from the Count de Schaumberg to the Baron Hohendorf commanding the Hessian Troops in America (1777)—the count’s only anxiety is that not enough men will be killed to bring him in moneys he needs, and he urges his officer in command in America “to prolong the war ... for I have made arrangements for a grand Italian opera, and I do not wish to be obliged to give it up.”[11]

Closely related to Franklin’s political pamphlets are his writings on economics, which, though undertaken with a political or practical purpose and not in a purely scientific spirit, rank him as the first American economist. He wrote in 1729 A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, which argued that a plentiful currency will make rates of interest low and will promote immigration and home manufactures, and which did much to secure the further issue of paper money in Pennsylvania. After the British Act of 1750 forbidding the erection or the operating of iron or steel mills in the colonies, Franklin wrote Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries (1751); its thesis was that manufactures come to be common only with a high degree of social development and with great density of population, and that Great Britain need not, therefore, fear the industrial competition of the colonies, but it is better known for the estimate (adopted by Adam Smith) that the population of the colonies would double every quarter-century; and for the likeness to Malthus’s[12] “preventive check” of its statement: “The greater the common fashionable expense of any rank of people the more cautious they are of marriage.” His Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth (1769) shows that he was greatly influenced by the French physiocrats after his visit to France in 1767. His Wail of a Protected Manufacturer voices a protest against protection as raising the cost of living; and he held that free trade was based on a natural right. He knew Kames, Hume and Adam Smith, and corresponded with Mirabeau, “the friend of Man.” Some of the more important of his economic theses, as summarized by W. A. Wetzel, are: that money as coin may have more than its bullion value; that natural interest is determined by the rent of land valued at the sum of money loaned—an anticipation of Turgot; that high wages are not inconsistent with a large foreign trade; that the value of an article is determined by the amount of labour necessary to produce the food consumed in making the article; that manufactures are advantageous but agriculture only is truly productive; and that when practicable (as he did not think it practicable at the end of the War of Independence) state revenue should be raised by direct tax.

Franklin as a scientist[13] and as an inventor has been decried by experts as an amateur and a dabbler; but it should be remembered that it was always his hope to retire from public life and devote himself to science. In the American Philosophical Society (founded 1743) scientific subjects were much discussed. Franklin wrote a paper on the causes of earthquakes for his Gazette of the 15th of December 1737; and he eagerly collected material to uphold his theory that waterspouts and whirlwinds resulted from the same causes. In 1743, from the circumstance that an eclipse not visible in Philadelphia because of a storm had been observed in Boston, where the storm although north-easterly did not occur until an hour after the eclipse, he surmised that storms move against the wind along the Atlantic coast. In the year before (1742) he had planned the “Pennsylvania fire-place,” better known as the “Franklin stove,” which saved fuel, heated all the room, and had the same principle as the hot-air furnace; the stove was never patented by Franklin, but was described in his pamphlet dated 1744. He was much engaged at the same time in remedying smoking chimneys, and as late as 1785 wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, physician to the emperor of Austria, on chimneys and draughts; smoking street lamps he remedied by a simple contrivance. The study of electricity he took up in 1746 when he first saw a Leyden jar, in the manipulation of which he became expert and which he improved by the use of granulated lead in the place of water for the interior armatures; he recognized that condensation is due to the dielectric and not to the metal coatings. A note in his diary, dated the 7th of November 1749, shows that he had then conjectured that thunder and lightning were electrical manifestations; in the same year he planned the lightning-rod (long known as “Franklin’s rod”), which he described and recommended to the public in 1753, when the Copley medal of the Royal Society was awarded him for his discoveries. The famous experiment with the kite, proving lightning an electrical phenomenon, was performed by Franklin in June 1752. He overthrew entirely the “friction” theory of electricity and conceived the idea of plus and minus charges (1753); he thought the sea the source of electricity. On light Franklin wrote to David Rittenhouse in June 1784; the sum of his own conjectures was that the corpuscular theory of Newton was wrong, and that light was due to the vibration of an elastic aether. He studied with some care the temperature of the Gulf Stream. In navigation he suggested many new contrivances, such as water-tight compartments, floating anchors to lay a ship to in a storm, and dishes that would not upset during a gale; and beginning in 1757 made repeated experiments with oil on stormy waters. As a mathematician he devised various elaborate magic squares and novel magic circles, of which he speaks apologetically, because they are of no practical use. Always much interested in agriculture, he made an especial effort (like Robert R. Livingston) to promote the use of plaster of Paris as a fertiliser. He took a prominent part in aeronautic experiments during his stay in France. He made an excellent clock, which because of a slight improvement introduced by James Ferguson in 1757 was long known as Ferguson’s clock. In medicine Franklin was considered important enough to be elected to the Royal Medical Society of Paris in 1777, and an honorary member of the Medical Society of London in 1787. In 1784 he was on the committee which investigated Mesmer, and the report is a document of lasting scientific value. Franklin’s advocacy of vegetarianism, of sparing and simple diet, and of temperance in the use of liquors, and of proper ventilation has already been referred to. His most direct contribution to medicine was the invention for his own use of bifocal eyeglasses.

A summary of so versatile a genius is impossible. His services to America in England and France rank him as one of the heroes of the American War of Independence and as the greatest of American diplomats. Almost the only American scientist of his day, he displayed remarkably deep as well as remarkably varied abilities in science and deserved the honours enthusiastically given him by the savants of Europe.

Bibliography.—Franklin’s works were not collected in his own lifetime, and he made no effort to publish his writings. Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London, 1769) was translated into French by Barbeu Dubourg (Paris, 1773); Vaughan attempted a more complete edition, Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces (London, 1779); an edition in three volumes appeared after Franklin’s death (London, 1806); what seemed the authentic Works, as it was under the care of Temple Franklin, was published at London (6 vols., 1817-1819; 3 vols., 1818) and with some additional matter at Philadelphia (6 vols., 1818). Sparks’s edition (10 vols., Boston, 1836-1842; revised, Philadelphia, 1858) also contained fresh matter; and there are further additions in the edition of John Bigelow (Philadelphia, 1887-1888; 5th ed., 1905) and in that by Albert Henry Smyth (10 vols., New York, 1905-1907). There are important Frankliniana, about 13,000 papers, in the possession of the American Philosophical Society, to which they were conveyed by the son of Temple Franklin’s executor, George Fox. Other papers which had been left to Fox lay for years in barrels in a stable garret; they were finally cleared out, their owner, Mary Fox, intending to send them to a paper mill. One barrel went to the mill. The others, it was found, contained papers belonging to Franklin, and this important collection was bought and presented to the university of Pennsylvania. The valuable Frankliniana collected by Henry Stevens were purchased by Congress in 1885. These MS. collections were first carefully gone over for the edition of the Works by A. H. Smyth. Franklin’s Autobiography was begun in 1771 as a private chronicle for his son, Governor William Franklin; the papers, bringing the story of his father’s life down to 1730, were lost by the governor during the War of Independence, and in 1783 came into the possession of Abel James, who restored them to Franklin and urged him to complete the sketch. He wrote a little in 1784, more in 1788, when he furnished a copy to his friend le Veillard, and a little more in 1790. The original manuscript was long in the possession of Temple Franklin, who spent years rearranging the matter in it and making over into politer English his grandfather’s plain-spokenness. So long was the publication delayed that it was generally believed that Temple Franklin had sold all the papers to the British government; a French version, Mémoires de la vie privée (Paris, 1791), was retranslated into English twice in 1793 (London), and from one of these versions (by Robinson) still another French version was made (Paris, 1798). Temple Franklin, deciding to print, got from le Veillard the copy sent to him in 1788 (sending in return the original with autograph alterations and the final addition), and from the copy published (London, 1817) an edition supposed to be authentic and complete. The complete autograph of the biography, acquired by John Bigelow in 1867 from its French owners, upon collation with Temple Franklin’s edition showed that the latter contained 1200 emasculations and that it omitted entirely what had been written in 1790. Bigelow published the complete Autobiography with additions from Franklin’s correspondence and other writings in 1868; a second edition (3 vols., Philadelphia, 1888) was published under the title, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Written by Himself.

In addition to the Autobiography see James Parton, Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2 vols., New York, 1864); John T. Morse, Jr., Benjamin Franklin (Boston, 1889, in the American Statesmen series); J. B. McMaster, Benjamin Franklin as a Man of Letters (Boston, 1887, in American Men of Letters series); Paul L. Ford, The Many-Sided Franklin (New York, 1899) and Franklin Bibliography (Brooklyn, 1889); E. E. Hale and E. E. Hale, Jr., Franklin in France (2 vols., Boston, 1888); J. H. A. Doniol, Histoire de la participation de la France a l’établissement des États-Unis d’Amérique (Paris, 6 vols., 1886-1900); S. G. Fisher, The True Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia, 1899); E. Robins, Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1898, in the American Men of Energy series); W. A. Wetzel, “Benjamin Franklin as an Economist,” No. 9, in series 13 of Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science; and the prefaces and biographical matter in A. H. Smyth’s edition of the Works (New York, 10 vols., 1905-1907).

(R. We.)

[1] Keimer and his sister had come the year before from London, where he had learned his trade; both were ardent members of the fanatic band of “French prophets.” He proposed founding a new sect with the help of Franklin, who after leaving his shop ridiculed him for his long square beard and for keeping the seventh day. Keimer settled in the Barbadoes about 1730; and in 1731 began to publish at Bridgetown the semi-weekly Barbadoes Gazette. Selections from it called Caribbeana (1741) and A Brand Plucked from the Burning, Exemplified in the Unparalleled Case of Samuel Keimer (1718) are from his pen. He died about 1738.

[2] The meeting between Franklin, the type of the shrewd, cool provincial, and Braddock, a blustering, blundering, drinking British soldier, is dramatically portrayed by Thackeray in the 9th chapter of The Virginians.

[3] Many questions (about 20 of the first 25) were put by his friends to draw out what he wished to be known.

[4] The house is familiar from the drawing of it by Victor Hugo.

[5] Many of these portraits bore inscriptions, the most famous of which was Turgot’s line, “Eripuit fulmen coelo sceptrumque tyrannis.”