Two thousand years ago the name of France was Gaul.
When Julius Caesar invaded the country, some fifty years before the birth of Christ, he found it divided into three principal parts: there was Aquitaine, the land of springs and waters, extending, in the southwest, from the ocean to the Garonne, already a land of pleasant life, rich in commerce and refinement; there was Celtic Gaul, the west, which reached from the Atlantic to the Marne and the Seine; and there was Belgian Gaul (as Caesar calls it), that north-eastern space between the Seine and the Rhine: an expanse which roughly corresponds to the provinces devastated by the Great War. Metz, Toul, Verdun, Soissons, Châlons, Saint-Quentin, Arras, Toumai, Cambrai, Noyon, Beauvais, Amiens, and Boulogne were even then the towns of Belgian Gaul. And the inhabitants of these districts, said the Roman General, are braver than any others “because not corrupted by the culture and humanities of the Roman Province [that is to say Provence, already completely Latinized] nor made effeminate by the passage of our merchants.”
If Caesar could revisit France to-day, he would find these essential differences still existent. The man from the Garonne, eloquent, able, versatile, fond of his ease, seems made by nature for a lawyer or a merchant; his neighbour from Celtic Gaul, the Breton sailor or the farmer from Anjou, is gentle, obstinate, and dreamy, careless of comfort or success - ever dependent on something beyond the facts of life: religion, poetry, politics, or drink. But these sons of Martha and these sons of Mary have more in common than either has with the man from the north-east, the keen, calculating, sparing Picard or Lorrainer, admirable in any battlefield, not only on account of his fierce courage, but because of his capacity for discipline, still as of old “horum omnium fortissimus.”
Coming from Italy to conquer first Gaul, and then the German tribes, Caesar was struck by the difference in the worlds that reach from the two banks of the Rhine, and suddenly struck out an idea which, since then, has made much stir in the world; that the Rhine was the natural frontier of Gaul. On the left bank were studded villages with their fields and gardens, for the Celts were builders and agriculturists. Industry and prosperity reigned in their settlements, great were their ingenuity and order, and they would have been richer and more admirable still but for their extraordinary taste for civil conflict, for wars and rumours of wars, for party strife and turbulent agitation. The Gauls were ever lovers of a new thing, “omnes fere Gallos novis rebus studere.” Any change was welcome, and especially a change in the direction of stir and strife.
“In Gaul [writes Caesar] not only every town, but every village and countryside is divided into opposite factions. And indeed almost every family is thus split up into two camps, each with a chief who protects his partisans.”
And he says that this excess of party feeling is doubtless due to the independent spirit of the Gallic race, consumed by a passion for equality, constantly alarmed lest they suffer the oppression of the great, “for none of them will bear any sort of tyranny or management; and they think their factions will protect them against the despotism of the upper class. Anyhow the custom obtains throughout the whole of Gaul, and you will find there no city that is not split in twain.”
And yet this people, always taking sides, was bound in a social order of singular coherence and dignity. These independent, touchy folk - these often insolent Gauls - possessed great qualities of reverence and firmness. They loved their traditions. Their turbulent democracy respected two classes of men; their Church and their army, their Druids and their knights. But the Druids were something more than a Church, magistrates as much as priests, men of science according to the capacity of their time. Their seminaries were the equivalent of our universities. “The movement of the stars, the immensity of the universe, the nature of things, the power and force of the immortal gods, form the subject of their debates and of the theories which they transmit to the young.”
These men of Gaul, so reasonable already, with their taste and instinct for philosophy - these ancestors of Pascal, Descartes, Malebranche, Voltaire - were none the less in the eyes of the practical Italian, extraordinarily superstitious, “too much addicted to religion,” he says, “Natio est omnium Gallorum admodum dedita religionibus.” And the geographer Pomponius Mela also remarks that they are “gentis superbae, superstitiosae.” It is indeed a constant trait of the race. The limits that divide the impossible from the merely unprecedented barely exist for the French. Miracles, wonders, marvels, are to them merely an extension of Nature. I think that is the reason the French are so great in physical science. Caesar already noted their extraordinary inventiveness, their adroitness in experiment, but this of course is but the body of science; the soul of it lies in that imagination which constantly extends the limits of the possible. The same Pascal who accepts the miracle of the Holy Thom invents the barometer and discovers the laws of hydrostatics; Curie, the finder of radio-activity, was deeply interested in the medium Eusapia Paladino; Pasteur was an orthodox Catholic. A strong vein of religiosity may complicate the mind of the physicist without impairing its lucidity. Even to-day Caesar might remark the haunting frequency of immaterial influences, the sense of forces just behind the veil, the religious scruple, and confidence, and deprecation, which still distinguish so many of the children of the Druids, exciting (since there are always two parties in Gaul) a corresponding energy of materialism in the other half of the nation.
All this was changed when Caesar crossed the Rhine. The Germans seemed to him to have no religion at all: no gods, no cultus, no ritual or tradition. They believed only in such things as they could see or feel: natural objects, the Sun, the Moon, or Thunder. They had no priests; the Druids had no counterpart on the further side of the Rhine. In Gaul, Caesar had found a form of worship comprehensible to him, not unlike the other State religions of the time: Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, or their equivalents. The Germans were different. These two peoples, sprung apparently from the same soil, were hopelessly divided so soon as they raised their eyes to heaven. In the eyes of the Germans, the King was the sole High Priest, and, after Nature, War the only god. Among their many altars the Gauls raised one to Teuta: the People, the City, as we should say the State. The Germans had no thought of such a collectivity, but they would die for their leader.
War was their real idol; the Germans were rovers, roaming from place to place with no abiding city. They had no fields, no gardens of their own. It was even forbidden to hedge round and till a private plot, lest the magic of possession dull a man’s zest for war. Great were their virtues; they were patient, sparing, chaste, and long-enduring - but thieves to a man. They held it no crime to plunder a neighbouring tribe. And they were arrogant, with a rougher, ruder arrogance than the charming impertinence of Gaul. They could bear no equal within a day’s journey of them. The lands beyond their forest fastnesses were a wilderness of desolation; for the Germans held it an honour that no man should endure their vicinity. They loved to reign supreme, and the emptiness and solitude of a ravaged desert seemed to them fairer than all the gardens and orchards of the Gauls.
When the Romans burst in their order and their splendour into Gaul, they found before them a people, not savage indeed, but individualized to the verge of incoherence. The Gauls were brave, “soldiers to a man, and at every age,” as Ammianus puts it. But they were undisciplined and disunited. The Romans were at least as brave, very hard, dour, and persevering fighters, and they were admirably organized. Therefore in the space of eight years Julius Caesar conquered Gaul. And on their new possessions the Romans imposed the system of their culture so profoundly that to-day the French remain a Latin nation as conspicuously as they are a Celto-Frankish race.
The Roman system of conquest differed from that of most of the peoples of antiquity; it ennobled rather than humiliated. Rome imposed her rule on the vanquished; she neither enslaved nor exterminated. Her armies overwhelmed a country like a fertilizing tide, and then retired to Rome, leaving behind them her social organization, her municipal system, her culture, and her language. In exchange, she accorded to the towns included in her Empire the rights of Roman citizenship. The Gallo-Roman cities sent delegates to the metropolis, who voted there on questions of war and state and Empire on the same terms as other Roman citizens; while, in Gaul, each town preserved a certain measure of Home Rule, choosing its own religious worship, ordaining its priests and regulating its ceremonies, electing its civic magistrates, administering its own estates and revenues, and deciding all questions of purely local interest. If in any respect the towns outran their due limits, Rome proceeded with vigour (as against the Christians of Lyons in A.D. 177), ‘but her system was to prefer an occasional persecution in punishment of an excess to any sequence of preventive measures.
After some ineffectual revolts and revolutions, the Gauls yielded to the prestige of the Universal City; with every generation they admired her more wholeheartedly; and by the fourth century most of them could say with Ausonius: “Romam colo“ - “Rome is my religion.”
And indeed Rome had done much for Gaul. From Treves in the north to Bordeaux in the south, and the magnificent villas by the Mediterranean Sea, her rough military towns, her homely farms and fields, had been changed into marvellous gardens, into cities with aqueducts and amphitheatres and temples no less splendid or lovely than those of Rome herself. And all this with no rude displacing of beloved landmarks. Take for an example Autun, the Druids’ town: the Romans made of it a great centre of their civilization; the school of rhetoric of Autun was reckoned to furnish the most brilliant orators of the Empire; its monuments were beautiful. But the old faith was not ousted or treated with contempt. The grandfather of the poet Ausonius was a Druid, and, in the middle of the fourth century, discoursed of the secrets of the stars and delivered justice according to the ancient Celtic rites; walking in the streets of Autun, the good man might encounter the augurs of Mercury, or some deacon from the Christian Church established in the town since the first decades of the Christian Era. They were all citizens of the Empire, and equals.
It is difficult for us to form an idea of life in the Roman Empire: such an immense federation of peoples associated in an enchantment of material prosperity. Peace and power spread out such mighty wings that the races of the earth were harboured under them. And the national idea seemed abolished. The Greeks of Marseilles, the large Syrian colonies of Lyons the great industrial city on the Rhone, were as much at home in Gaul as the Romans or the Celts themselves. The conquered nations felt no barrier between them and supremacy: were not the Emperors Vespasian and Titus of Gaulish origin? If, for example, we glance for an instant at the genealogy of that Druid of Autun, we perceive how rapid was the ascension of a man of talent and how far-reaching the attraction of Rome. Caecilius Arbor himself had been an unsuccessful person: a noble Druid, compromised in the revolt of Victorinus, he fled from Autun to Aquitaine in the concluding years of the third century, and, in his new home at Bordeaux, found his Celtic lore and Druid philosophy of such scant account that, in order to earn his children’s bread, he was obliged to practise more remunerative accomplishments, such as fortune-telling and astrology. It is probable that Caecilius Arbor was never quite at home in that splendid Gallo-Roman Bordeaux, nor did he express himself easily in Latin, but used in his home circle some Celtic dialect and considered Greek the natural language of philosophy.
His son, however, Emilius Magnus Arbor, Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Bordeaux, was the glory of the bar of Toulouse and one of the great Latin orators of his time. The men of Gaul were famous for their eloquence. The echo of Emilius Arbor’s gift spread through the Empire till, at Constantinople, the Emperor heard of him and sent for the Gaulish barrister to educate his son.
Meanwhile, Emilius’s sister had married a young doctor of Bordeaux, one Julius Ausonius, a specialist in rheumatic diseases. Their son, Decimus Magnus Ausonius, was the Latin poet, dear to all who have a secret attachment to minor verse. But, for the case in point, it is more important that Ausonius, the Druid’s grandson, should have been the Governor of the Emperor Gratian, a Count of the Empire, First Consul of the year 379, Prefect of Africa, Prefect of Italy, and Prefect of the Gauls.
Thanks to Ausonius, who, bom in 309, lived till the closing years of the fourth century - thanks to the excellent descriptive poet and letter-writer - we can form a living idea of what Gaul looked like under the Emperors Constantine, Valentinian, and Gratian. Even more than other ages, that age was a period of transition. The Roman Empire reigned supreme on the solid Roman roads that ran, from Bordeaux, for example to Paris, to Treves, to Spain, to Rome, and (with a marine interval) to Jerusalem. The carriages and horses of Gaul were far renowned; there was a mail-post; in fact, the service of the road was far better than it was to be in the Middle Ages and much as it existed at the date of the invention of railroads. For the men of the Roman Empire were no stay-at-homes; they were continually upon their beautiful roads: soldiers, officials, or travellers. As you approached the towns, there, too, the magnificence of Rome was apparent in its state: villas whose vast constructions, faced by flowery porticoes and peristyles, crowned terraced gardens, where fountains played and statues gleamed among the greenery; there were noble monuments, baths, theatres, temples; among the farming villages there stood some modest Christian church. The grandson of Ausonius, Paulinus of Pella, gives us an excellent idea of a country house in Gaul at the end of the fourth century: “All that I asked in my youth [says he] was a comfortable mediocrity; for instance, a commodious villa with a double set of apartments disposed to the south for use in winter, and open to the north for summer-time; a well-furnished table; many slaves and in the flower of their youth; furniture of all sorts in great profusion; silver plate more precious for its workmanship than for its weight; among the staff of servants, artists of several sorts, quick to execute my fancies and devices; good stables full of horses and carriages of various sorts for driving.” Paulinus says nothing of his library, but we know that Ausonius, his grandfather, was rich both in books and in instruments of music.
But as the traveller neared the towns of Gaul all this antique state and space and splendour shrank and changed: the cities of the reign of Constantine were the narrow, stifling cities of the early Middle Ages. For already the Barbarians had begun their inroads. The beautiful open cities of antiquity, spread largely on the plain, with spacious streets interspersed with gardens, with colossal temples, baths, porticoes, amphitheatres, were things of yesterday; many of these monuments still existed (since some of them remain to-day), but outside the city walls, scattered among the vineyards. And the towns themselves had shrunken into fortresses with huge encircling walls garnished with towers: the towers of Bordeaux (said Ausonius) “pierce the clouds.” The port was rich and busy, doing already a large trade in wine with England; the University was no less brilliant than it is to-day (Ausonius has left an agreeable gallery of portraits of the professors), but Bordeaux was no longer pleasant as a residential placer it had sadly fallen off from the antique enchantment, the exquisite urbanity, of the grandeur that was Rome.
This Roman Gaul of Constantine and Valentinian and their successors, with the Barbarian at the gates, was already full of the promise of the Middle Ages. The attempt of Julian to bring back the ancient gods had failed; though the landed nobility still clung to his device (they cling to it to-day, with a difference)...
They, indeed, were full of fidelity and faith to the traditions, the laws, and the religion of their forefathers; they were soldiers, believers; but on all sides the Christian ideas were acting as a ferment, transforming society. Now, in the eyes of the Gallo-Roman nobles, no Christian could be a patriot, for the soul of patriotism was, to these men of yesterday, the great cultus of Rome and of Augustus which seemed to them the very cement that built and welded Gallic unity.
Yet, with the Barbarian at the gates, the Christians preached pacifism, non-resistance; they were indeed a peril in the State, more dangerous than men of violence - at least, the ultra-Christians, the party of the Saints, those who, like Paulinus of Nola, besought their friends to desert in face of the enemy and to give themselves up to the salvation of their souls. There were many-such; men who would not wear a sword or an arrow cut on the onyx of their ring; men who said, “We cannot serve two masters,” and who left the army as a necessary consequence of their baptism; men of whom (seeing the danger of the Empire) we instinctively disapprove, until we suddenly remember that, since then, they have all been canonized - that they are called Paulinus of Pella, Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius Severus, Saint Martin of Tours, Tertullian, Saint Ambrose, Saint Augustine. All of them stand now in the ranks of the Orthodox; with them, and not with the Roman centurions and senators, lay the future of Europe.
The insidious dissolving element of saintly enthusiasm was doubtless one cause of the final undoing of the Roman Empire, which seemed as indestructible as its own monuments, yet crumbled at a shock. Another cause has already been indicated at the opening of this chapter: it was the complete divorce between local and imperial affairs. Political life and municipal life had nothing to do with each other. Although the cities of the provinces were extraordinarily free and prosperous, they had no voice in the administration of the Empire: Rome alone governed Rome. Rome sucked from all her subject countries, and drew to her own centre, the men of brain and will and energy who could serve her aims; absorbed them, estranged them from their origins; but the mass left behind in the great provincial towns, though it flourished happily and busily for its humbler ends and objects, was, from the point of view of the Empire, non-existent. Rome had but one head, and when that front was struck, insensibility and inertia spread throughout the vast body of the Empire.
Or, to change our metaphor, these towns so solidly constituted, so separate, these rich municipalities are like round strong beads strung on a slender string. The fibre snaps, and the beads, in nowise destroyed, roll hither and thither, but form no longer a necklace. In the gradual disaggregation of the Roman Empire a quantity of little centres usurp the place of Rome: Milan, Sirmium, Treves, Arles, Paris, Vienne, Lyons; but they are local centres; they have no imperial sense. Little by little, the one real vital force that was left takes on more and more importance; the bishop becomes the natural chief of the inhabitants and more than their mayor. His election is the great affair of the city. What still is left intact of the great Roman order is rescued and preserved by the clergy. Between the municipal system of the Romans and the municipal system of the mediaeval communes, the Church in the city guards and maintains a great tradition.
In the first century of our era, Christianity had penetrated Gaul, but it was about a hundred and fifty years after the birth of Christ that the new religion suddenly awoke and spread, with a rare force of enthusiasm, among the poor industrial populations of the two great cities of the Rhone: Lyons and Vienne. A large Oriental colony was established in these places, Jews, Greeks, and Syrians, laborious, intelligent, and gentle. Their Gaulish neighbours, in adopting their ideas, gave them, as always happens, a twist in the direction of their own temperament - a temperament singularly romantic, superstitious, stoical, chivalrous, and ardent. And French Catholicism came into being. These Syrians of the Rhone knew little Latin and less Celtic; their tongue was Greek - much spoken at that date all through the south of Gaul, where the Greeks had settled long before the Romans knew anything of the country - and we may suppose that their religious instruction was often vague, perhaps half-understood, but the extraordinary fitness of the new ideas to the Gaulish temperament caused the religion to spread. The gods of Rome and Greece - nay, even the gods of Gaul - had never really satisfied the sons of the Druids; and this new faith, with its constant dependence on the invisible, its perpetual visions and miracles, its Paradise promised, its Saviour sacrificed, its unparalleled appeal to the heart and the imagination, seemed made to their measure; these Gauls - nervous, excitable, and yet at the same time heroic and stoical - rushed, we may say, on martyrdom. They had not long to wait.
Lyons was the centre, not only of the young Church of Christ, but also of the patriotic cult of Rome and of the Roman Emperor, regarded as the personification of the Empire. Small wonder that the two religions clashed. Gaul entered into the Church of Christ in a triumph of martyrdom; Lyons was crowded with saints and confessors: the bishop, Pothin; the simple believers, Maturus, Sanctus, Attalus, and the little servant-girl, Blandine, were thrown to the wild beasts, after unutterable tortures, in the public amphitheatre, on the 1st of August, a.d. 177. In the fury of conviction on both sides - of faith and cruelty on the part of the persecutors (absolutely certain of their cause), of faith and stoicism on the part of the martyred - we meet for the first time a paroxysm of sentiment which we shall encounter again and again in the course of the history of France. Blandine is the sister of Joan of Arc and of Madame Rolland.
Smiling, and as if ignorant of her tortures, she endured the flagellation, the red-hot throne, the mauling mouths of the wild beasts, the tossings of the bull, and the final stroke of the sword. “Verily [said the Gauls] never in our country has a woman endured so much!” And, like those who were to burn the Maid of Orleans, then and there they felt dimly that they had put to death a saint.
The worship of the saints, the veneration of their tortured bodies and the treasuring of relics, were features of the new religion which, in superstitious Gaul, awoke the dreamiest fervours of Celtic enthusiasm. Miracles, visions, venerations, ecstasy, contemplation, added all their gamut of holiness to the teaching of the Gospel; it was not for nothing that Lyons became the religious capital of the Gauls. For Lyons was already Lyons.
Nothing is more strange, in studying these early years of Christian Gaul, than to find the character of the different regions already so firmly fixed. The Bordeaux of Ausonius is already the Bordeaux of Montaigne - the Bordeaux of to-day: curious, intelligent, philosophic, sceptical, commercial. And the Lyons of Blandine is our Lyons, mystical, emotive, sensual, yet highly moral.
The doctrines of Christ had taken on a tinge from the souls who received them. Nor was the intense individualism of the Gaul without its effect on the new religion. Martin of Tours, Paulinus of Nola, Sulpicius Severus - nearly all the early Gallic saints, began or finished their saintly lives as hermits, dwelling in grottos or huts, solitary, remote from the world they abandoned. Nothing could be more shocking to the Roman idea of virtue, which is always an active principle. Virtue, in Latin, is valour. But the early Church in Gaul was a Church of Mary, not a Church of Martha, and its device was: Unum est necessarium! The Celtic people of believers was too apt to sink into an incurable apathy, a profound indifference for all things beyond the circle of religion - much as we notice to-day in Moslem countries. Instead of grouping themselves round the State in peril, these new forces gathered apart under the shelter of the Church. And yet, in its next phase, the nation - that new thing, the nation (for the Roman Empire had ignored the principle of nationality) - the nation was to result from their religious cohesion and not from a political principle.
Despite its force, its violence, and terror, the Roman Empire had instituted the greatest moral union as yet known to man; the inhabitants of the civilized world were all the brothers of one family, the dwellers in one home, the equal members of one society. They might well say with Ausonius: “Ronvam colo!“ When the barbarians in their hordes overwhelmed and ruined the material power of Rome, the religious unity of the Empire was, as it were, rescued by Christianity, and transformed into the Catholic Church. The Empire had been a religion and a family of which the half-divine Emperor had been the head. The Rome of the Popes survived the Rome of the Emperors and offered to mankind the shelter of the Church. The Past never really dies: we may forget it, ignore it; but it continues to vivify our actions; and deep down in the soul of man we may discover, as in the geological strata of a rock, the different phases of being that have formed him. The Roman Empire was one phase of the progress of humanity. In every Western nation, and nowhere more than in France, the Roman Empire is still a living root of social life.
For one thing, the Church preserved, almost unaltered, the Roman system of education. The great Christian orators and bishops had all been educated in the schools that served for the Pagan aristocracy. Saint Ambrose and Saint Augustine, Boethius and Paulinus, had been grounded on Cicero and Seneca; Cicero and Seneca had entered into the marrow of their natures. They could not conceive life and letters without Cicero and Seneca. When Christianity became the religion of the Roman State, it did not occur to them to change the system of education. There were no other schools to take the place of the great, learned, and prosperous schools of the Latin rhetoricians. And Christian Rome adopted, just as the centuries of Latin culture had left it, the pedagogy of the Pagans, introducing it, with the Roman administration, into all the conquered provinces. Taking root there, it survived the Empire itself. And that is why our sons to-day learn their Latin, not in the Vulgate, but in Virgil!
From the darkness of the Past these cities of the older France start into light, like the heads in some tarnished altar-piece before which a sacristan draws a lighted torch. But in what a lurid illumination we see the next, Toulouse: Toulouse, the century-long capital of the barbarian Visigoths!
Toulouse was an old town of the Celtic Tectosages, which existed probably many hundred of years before it was conquered by the Romans. It was always rich, not in the way of Lyons or Bordeaux, not as a great commercial centre, but rather as the depository and hoarding-place for the wealth of a vast agricultural region. Caesar noticed it as “situated in an open country which produces a great deal of grain.” Now, every one wants com, and the farmers of Toulouse easily exchanged their harvests against sacks of gold; but they needed little, living on their fertile fields; so the gold accumulated in the treasure-tanks and secret chambers of the Druids’ temples; part of it, no doubt, placed there as it were in a bank, but a great deal of it offered to the gods, for the yeomen and labourers of the region were religious - or, if you choose, superstitious - like all men who depend on the weather and the unguessed will of a Power above.
So rich a place, inhabited by so peaceful a population, is a temptation to robbers; and Toulouse, situated on the neck of land where Gaul is narrowest, is easy of access from the north, west, and east. So more than once the treasures of Toulouse were plundered, by the Romans, by the Cimbri, and might have been plundered yet more, had not men remarked that these ill-gotten gains finally enriched nobody, seemed to turn to faded leaves in the pocket like fairy-gold, while the robbers generally came to a miserable end. So that the words “Aurum Tolosanum” - the gold of Toulouse - became a proverb for unlawful wealth bringing a curse in its train.
But the real gold of Toulouse was on its plains and slopes, ripening anew every harvest, and the farmers and the priests speedily grew wealthy again, as owning a commodity that every one desires. And the rich, helpless city made the best terms it could with dangerous neighbours, swiftly growing as quick to betray as it was accustomed to be plundered, well aware that its real life lay in no schemes of policy or deeds of heroism, but in the task of producing bread for all.
Thus it existed for some hundreds of years, before and after Christ; and then, under the established rule of the Romans, happier days began. The Toulouse of the third and fourth centuries of our era was a learned and pleasant city, famous for its Bar and its University; “Palladian Toulouse,” Ausonius calls it, and so do several of his contemporaries. The great brick town, so populous that it had founded four cities with the overflow of its population - rose-red Toulouse, sheltered by its huge ramparts overlooking its orchards, and its cornfields - appeared definitively seated in its peace and its prosperity when, with the very dawn of the fifth century, the Roman Empire crumbled and fell to bits.
In 402 Alaric the Goth invaded Italy; in 406 the Vandals entered Gaul; in 417 the Goths, now allied with the Romans, chased the Vandals out of Spain and sent two captive Vandal kings to Rome in a triumph. Then, in exchange for Spain, the Goths were awarded Aquitaine, “The Pearl of Gaul,” “The Queen of Provinces,” with its towns of Bordeaux, Agen, Angouleme, Poitiers, and, finally, Toulouse, where the King of the Goths set up his court.
There were Gauls in Toulouse who went out into exile rather than endure the yoke of the Barbarian; such was a certain Victorinus, the friend of Rutilius the poet, who left the land of his birth to live in Tuscany; but there seems to have been no general revolt against the Goths. For one thing, they were brave soldiers, and the whole country round was infested by Germans: the Franks having settled in the north, the Burgunds in the west, and the Sarmates round Paris. Of all these the Goths were the most princely, courteous, and strong; they were Christians, and had assimilated a part of the Roman culture.
It is difficult to assign an exact origin to any of these races of Barbarians who lived on the road, ate and slept on horseback, with their wives and all their wealth in their rude wagons, “trekking” from Finland to Constantinople and from the Vistula to Gaul; it is so easy to take a halting-place for a cradle. But it is probable that the Franks were Germans from the Rhine; the Goths, Germans from the banks of the Baltic, and probably of Scandinavian origin; while the Huns (we are just coming to the Huns) were of Finnish or Mongol origin - dreadful little men, like a bad dream, with their fat, flat faces, pig eyes, rare beards, squat square shoulders and dwarfish stature, “more like biped animals,” says Jomandes, “than like men.” The Goths, Barbarians though they were, seemed a protection against such as these.
The Goths were more or less alive to the things of the spirit. In the fourth century their bishop, Wulfilas, combining the Greek and the Roman characters, had invented for them an alphabet: the Black Letter. King Eurik of Toulouse drew up the first German code of laws. They were a sort of link between the civilized world and the outer darkness of those cruel camps on the road. Better they than worse, at Toulouse! Such was probably the attitude of the discouraged country people. And, in fact (as we are told by Jomandes, the Goth), no sooner were they established by the banks of the Tam than the Burgunds and Franks, “who infested the region most cruelly,” retired each to his own place, while the Vandals and Alans crossed the mountains and retumed to Spain.
Sidonius Apollinaris, the Roman Secretary of a Gothic King, has left us a description of the Barbarian court in Aquitaine, at that moment in residence at Bordeaux. But how different from the Bordeaux of Ausonius in the preceding century!
“I have been here nearly two months,” he writes to a friend, “and have as yet obtained but one audience of the King. The master of the Palace has little leisure for me, for the whole world is here waiting on his pleasure, expectant of an answer. Here passes a blue-eyed Saxon, that no sea puts off his balance walking on the solid earth with a rolling sailor’s gait. There, some old Sicamber, who has shaved his poll in shame of some defeat, is now letting his locks grow anew. Look at yon sea-green Herule, the tint of his own Ocean! And see the Burgund, seven feet high, who bends the knee and implores peace. Here comes an Ostrogoth, the terror of the Huns, but humble enough before King Eurik. And thou, thyself, 0 Roman, thou comest also to the court of the Visigoth, suing for dear life! The strong arm of Eurik shall be thy buckler against the hordes of Scythia, and the Garonne, warlike and powerful, shall protect the enfeebled Tiber.”
Under the wise rule of these enlightened Barbarians, Toulouse became the centre of Occidental politics, a link between the Imperial Court and the half-savage Franks and Burgunds. Surrounded by the flower of Gallo-Roman culture, the King of the Goths was almost as refined and far more dignified than Caesar at Constantinople, and the Latin prose of King Eurik was praised at Rome for its purity and grace.
The Goths reigned at Toulouse for ninety years, and held, towards the close of the fifth century, nearly all the country south of the Loire and west of the Rh6ne; all Provence and all Aquitaine. And then they passed. There is nothing to tell of the kingdom of Toulouse. These apt pupils founded nothing. All over France we come across memorials of the great Roman domination; and they exist no less in the souls and minds of the French: in their system of education, their municipalities, their law, even their religion - all these modem edifices are built up with Roman bricks. We cannot even imagine France without her Roman background. And the Goths in their glory and their bravery passed, and they would be as they had never been but for one great battle which they fought, side by side with the Romans, at Chalons, one of the few decisive battles of the world. The question whether barbarism or civilization should prevail in Western Europe was then decided.
It was in 451. Attila and his heathen Huns were pouring into Gaul, burning and plundering the towns, desolating the marches of Lorraine and Champagne. We have no word for the horror inspired by the Huns. The usurpers in Gaul rose as one man against them - Romans, Goths, Burgunds, Franks. But there were still more Huns, for all the savage kingdoms conquered by Attila marched in his train. There were weeping and fear and lamentation in all the cities in Gaul, till a little Christian shepherdess from Nanterre, near Paris - a Gallo-Roman girl named Genovefa, inspired by that singular fusion of political sense with an ecstatic faith in the Unseen which more than once has illuminated the women of France at some great crisis in the national history - declared that Attila was doomed, that the Huns should not come near Paris. In superstitious Gaul her prophecy spread far and wide, heartening the distraught populations. And has not grateful Paris ever since named Genevieve its patron saint? But if Gaul owed much that day to the sanctity of the young shepherdess of the Seine, who awoke courage and hope in the hearts of the soldiers, Gaul owed even more to Theodoric the Goth, King of Toulouse, who lost his life on the fields of Chalons.
He lost his life, but he won the battle! Attila was compelled to retire to his camp, mourning a hundred and sixty thousand men. Like a wounded lion (says the Gothic historian) he turned and held his enemy at bay, and then, gathering the mighty remnant of his forces around him, slowly he retreated into Italy.
Nor did the Huns again cross the frontiers of Gaul. And the Goths ruled at Toulouse for another fifty years, till they in their turn were defeated and routed by Clovis the Frank.
Now let us cross the Loire and enter that northern half of Gaul so strangely different from the France of the South. For if Lyons, Vienne, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and all the cities of Provence (and indeed right up to Poitiers, Tours, or even Orleans) appear easily recognizable - and in such detail that the very villages of our acquaintance bear as a rule in their names the trace of the Roman villa or vicus that they have superseded - the whole North of France was still, at that date, enveloped in forests from which emerged rude military towns, as a rule forts or posting-stations. Treves in its Roman magnificence was a notable exception: “The eye no longer has to pierce a network of branches’ to find the sky, obscured by a green mist: the air is clear again; the sunlight radiates in space; and at last I beheld an image of Bordeaux, its brilliant culture, its green vineyards and smiling villas.” So Ausonius in his poem on the Moselle records his journey through the interminable northern forest.
If towards the end of the fifth century we cross the Loire, on a mission, let us say, to Clovis, King of Tournai, the great man of that age, we find ourselves, between Orleans and Frankish Soissons, in a country still nominally Roman, the kingdom of Syagrius.
But since the invasion of Attila all that region was in reality far more Christian than Roman. In most eyes, its chief city, Lutetia (the capital of the Parisii), was less remarkable as the residence of King Syagrius than as holding in its walls, like a relic, the holy Genevieve, whose prayers, in the estimation of all her Christian contemporaries, had preserved the kingdom of Paris, as Lutetia began to be called, from the abhorred inroad of the Huns. With Saint Marcel, Bishop of Paris, and Saint Remy, Bishop of Reims, Genevieve, far more than any Roman viceroy, was the respected leader of the people.
And on the Belgian frontier Clovis, King of Toumai, considered these things in his heart. He was a German, or at least a Frankish, heathen, but his young wife, Clotilde, was of the Church of Christ. Clovis was a man of extraordinary acuteness, activity, and restlessness. He saw the growing importance of the Catholic Church, he remarked the ardent faith of that Gaul in which his German gods made of him and his chiefs mere strangers and usurpers - such as the Visigoths had always remained in Aquitaine. For the Goths were Arians, and had never had the policy to see the widening gulf which their heretical opinions were opening between their ruling caste and the intolerant Catholics, their subjects. Doubtless Clovis said to himself that a great part might be played by a Catholic soldier of genius, and that the cross might make a splendid handle to a sword. And perhaps, as the legend avers, his wife had influence on him. Whether or no he thought, with Henri Quatre: “Paris vaut bien une messe” (and Toulouse another), at all events, in 496, at the hands of Saint Remy, he was baptized at Reims, he and three thousand of his Frankish followers.
Ten years before, in 486, at the age of one-and-twenty, Clovis had beaten the Roman Syagrius in battle, near Soissons, and had taken his kingdom from him. King Syagrius had fled to Toulouse, and was at first received with welcome, but when Clovis demanded his victim the Gothic king dared not refuse so powerful a neighbour, and handed over his guest and ally, loaded with chains, to the tender mercies of the conqueror. This proof of the feebleness of the Gothic king encouraged the disaffection of the Catholics, for the hatred between religious parties was so great that it was almost impossible, in Gaul, for a sovereign to win the allegiance of subjects who regarded him as a heretic. And, after the baptism of Reims, many of the clergy began to offer public prayers for the coming of Clovis, the champion of the Church.
In 507 he came, accompanied by signs and wonders, by comets blazing in the sky, by mysterious messages from the saints; a white hart showed him a ford through the swollen waters of the Vienne in flood; and all these presages and miracles showed at least that the foreign king had been adopted by the very heart of superstitious Gaul. He advanced with unexampled rapidity. At Vouglé, near Poitiers, a great battle took place; the Visigoths were utterly defeated and their king was killed. In less than two years Clovis conquered almost all their Gaulish dominions, and added them to those kingdoms of Paris, of Reims, of Toumai, of Soissons, which he had already inherited or taken. They were now the kingdom of France.
And of the Visigoths, after ninety years of possession, nothing was left, save one word: out of “Visigoth” (in the flat, almost Spanish pronunciation of Aquitaine, “Bisigot") the people made Bigot. It was their revenge for the dominion of the heretic.
Aquitaine had now acquired another foreign name: it was part of France. But the Franks, having conquered, did not remain in possession like the Goths; they retreated north of the Loire. The Franks, though brave and powerful, were but a smallish tribe. It is improbable that their conquest greatly affected the racial composition of the peoples south of the Loire, which remained principally Celtic, with a strong infusion of Latin, both in Aquitaine and in the Provincial for the Romans during the half-dozen centuries of their dominion had loved these sunny and temperate regions of Gaul, had settled there abundantly and mingled their stronger strain with the supple native stock of the inhabitants.
But Clovis came of another race - a Frank is a German and a forest-lover: the radiant space and sunniness of these southern plains were profitable in his eyes as a conquest; but for a capital and a home, he preferred the North. Thus, at the moment when Gaul becomes France, Paris, not Lyons, or Arles, or Toulouse, or even Tours, becomes the capital.
Paris had never been an important place under the Roman dominion: the actual diocese of Paris represents pretty accurately the territory of the Parisii (so true is it that the Church has preserved all sorts of vestiges of Rome like flies in amber), but their capital was contained in the two small islands of the Seine, gradually overflowing on to the left bank where the Palace of the Thermae (whose ruins still border the Boulevard St. Michel) stood among the vineyards. The Emperor Julian had liked Paris and had spent a winter there (it was, indeed, there that he was proclaimed Augustus); “a small city,” he says, but he admired the mild, equable climate and praised the thin wine of Suresnes. There was an amphitheatre there, of which something still remains, but compared with the cities of the South its monuments were of small account. Clovis and his wife, when they reigned there, founded a Christian church in honour of SS. Peter and Paul (on the site of the Pantheon), but their reign was short, and when it came to an end, in 511, Paris again slipped out of notice for several centuries.
When the Romans “reigned in Gaul, the conquered Celts forgot their native tongue, adopting the language of their masters, and by the end of the fourth century there was little trace remaining of the primitive Celtic speech. Its last, rare vestiges linger still in the names of places, always the words that change the least. Even to-day the suffix dun evokes a Celtic fortress (as in Verdun, Issoudun, Châteaudun), the prefix tre or tref recalls a long-perished hamlet; dieue and couse speak of the waters, nant of the dingle, lan or lande of the field or God’s acre. That is all. If we except the province of Brittany, whose Celtic speech was reimported after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Celts the Romans knew have left no trace of their language in modem France.
For the Celts of Gaul conversed in Latin, not in the Latin of the classics but in a living, popular Latin of their own. This rustic Roman tongue - this Roman, or Romance, as it came to be called in distinction from literary Latin - is still alive and easily recognizable (although much alloyed by constant additions from modem French) in the dialects and patois of the Centre and the South of France. The names of usual objects there have probably changed little since the days of Diocletian. There still a cock is gall, a wild field comps, a cornfield fromentau, while aigo recalls aqua and neu, niveus; a bird is ussell, a cow bacco, a dog cone; when the shepherds pass the summer on the heights they are said to estivar, while hibernar is to spend the winter. The sights and sounds, the habits and necessities of daily life are still currently expressed in rustic Latin.
For the Centre and South of France retained the impress of Rome until the beginning of the thirteenth century. But in the North the Romans receded early, giving place to the Franks. Early in the sixth century Brittany was reconquered by the Celts of England and thus lost, for full five hundred years, to Latin culture. And all along the Rhine German invasion and possession effaced the Latin tongue. Only in the region which lies between the Somme, the Meuse, and the Loire were the Frankish and the Latin languages beautifully interfused. This was the cradle of France. And when France began to speak, it spoke in French.
The earliest French poem that we possess dates from the third quarter of the ninth century; the language is still all mixed with and steeped in Latin:
Buona pulcella fut Eulalia,
Bel avret corps, bellezour anima....
In figura de colomb volat a ciel.
Tuit oram que per nos degnet preier
Qued avuisset de nos Christus mercit
Post la mort, et a lui nos laist venir
Par soun dementia!
(Bonne pucelle fut Eulalie, Elle avait un beau corps, une âme plus belle.... Elle vola au ciel en forme de colombe. Prions tous qu’elle daigne intercéder pour nous, Afin que le Christ ait pitié de nous Apres la mort et nous laisse venir a lui Par sa clémence.)
Meanwhile the Church continued to use the right Latin of Rome, and often in old books we find the clerks calling the Latin of the people lingua laica, while the laymen name the Church-Latin clerquois. During the course of the ninth century the two languages became distinct; Latin was no longer understanded of the people: The clergy were obliged to use the popular dialect for their catechisms and sermons, and, in fact, in the year 812 the Council of Tours ordered the priests of France to instruct their flock in “the rustic Roman tongue.” Henceforth French is no mere patois, but a national speech with a literature of its own.