A Short History of France from Caesar to Waterloo

Agnes Robinson

• Publisher: Ozymandias Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781531280246
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

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."

PART I. THE ROMAN TRADITION

CHAPTER I. THE ROMANS IN GAUL

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.

CHAPTER II. THE GALLO-ROMANS: BORDEAUX

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 exqu...

Table of contents

• PART I. THE ROMAN TRADITION
• PART II. FEUDAL SOCIETY
• PART III. THE CENTRALIZED MONARCHY
• PART IV. THE REVOLUTION AND EUROPE