a javelin in each hand, and mounted his horse.  "Thou seest," said he to
his wife, "these javelins I brandish: I will bring them back to thee this
very day dyed with the blood of Franks.  Farewell."  Setting out he
pierced, followed by his men, through the thickness of the forest, and
advanced to meet the Franks.

The battle began.  The large numbers of the Franks, who covered the
ground for some distance, dismayed the Britons, and many of them fled,
seeking where they might hide themselves.  Morvan, beside himself with
rage, and at the head of his most devoted followers, rushed down upon the
Franks as if to demolish them at a single stroke; and many fell beneath
his blows.  He singled out a warrior of inferior grade, towards whom he
made at a gallop, and, insulting him by word of mouth, after the ancient
fashion of the Celtic warriors, cried, "Frank, I am going to give thee my
first present, a present which I have been keeping for thee a long while,
and which I hope thou wilt bear in mind;" and launched at him a javelin,
which the other received on his shield.  "Proud Briton," replied the
Frank, "I have received thy present, and I am going to give thee mine."
He dug both spurs into his horse's sides, and galloped down upon Morvan,
who, clad though he was in a coat of mail, fell pierced by the thrust of
a lance.  The Frank had but time to dismount and cut off his head, when
he fell himself, mortally wounded by one of Morvan's young warriors, but
not without having, in his turn, dealt the other his death-blow.

It spreads on all sides that Morvan is dead; and the Franks come
thronging to the scene of the encounter.  There is picked up and passed
from hand to hand a head all bloody and fearfully disfigured.  Ditcar the
monk is called to see it, and to say whether it is that of Morvan; but he
has to wash the mass of disfigurement, and to partially adjust the hair,
before he can pronounce that it is really Morvan's.  There is then no
more doubt; resistance is now impossible; the widow, the family, and the
servants of Morvan arrive, are brought before Louis the Debonnair, accept
all the conditions imposed upon them, and the Franks withdraw with the
boast that Brittany is henceforth their tributary.  (_Faits et testes de
Louis le Picux,_ a poem by Ermold le Noir, in M. Guizot's _Collection des
Memoires relatifs L'Histoire de France,_ t. iv., p. 1-113.--Fauriel,
_Histoire de la Gaule,_ etc., t.  iv., p.  77-88.)

[Illustration: Ditcar the Monk recognizing the Head of Morvan----273]

On arriving at Angers, Louis found the Empress Hermengarde dying; and two
days afterwards she was dead.  He had a tender heart, which was not proof
against sorrow; and he testified a desire to abdicate and turn monk.  But
he was dissuaded from his purpose; for it was easy to influence his
resolutions.  A little later, he was advised to marry again, and he
yielded.  Several princesses were introduced; and he chose Judith of
Bavaria, daughter of Count Welf (Guelf), a family already powerful and in
later times celebrated.  Judith was young, beautiful, witty, ambitious,
and skilled in the art of making the gift of pleasing subserve the
passion for ruling.  Louis, during his expedition into Brittany, had just
witnessed the fatal result of a woman's empire over her husband; he was
destined himself to offer a more striking and more long-lived example of
it.  In 823, he had, by his new empress Judith, a son, whom he called
Charles, and who was hereafter to be known as Charles the Bald.  This son
became his mother's ruling, if not exclusive, passion, and the source of
his father's woes.  His birth could not fail to cause ill-temper and
mistrust in Louis's three sons by Hermengarde, who were already kings.
They had but a short time previously received the first proof of their
father's weakness.  In 822, Louis, repenting of his severity towards his
nephew, Bernard of Italy, whose eyes he had caused to be put out as a
punishment for rebellion, and who had died in consequence, considered
himself bound to perform at Attigny, in the church and before the people,
a solemn act of penance; which was creditable to his honesty and piety,
but the details left upon the minds of the beholders an impression
unfavorable to the emperor's dignity and authority.  In 829, during an
assembly held at Worms, he, yielding to his wife's entreaties and
doubtless also to his own yearnings towards his youngest son, set at
nought the solemn act whereby, in 817, he had shared his dominions
amongst his three elder sons; and took away from two of them, in Burgundy
and Allemannia, some of the territories he had assigned to them, and gave
them to the boy Charles for his share.  Lothaire, Pepin, and Louis
thereupon revolted.  Court rivalries were added to family differences.
The emperor had summoned to his side a young Southron, Bernard by name,
duke of Septimania and son of Count William of Toulouse, who had
gallantly fought the Saracens.  He made him his chief chamberlain and his
favorite counsellor.  Bernard was bold, ambitious, vain, imperious, and
restless.  He removed his rivals from court, and put in their places his
own creatures.  He was accused not only of abusing the emperor's favor,
but even of carrying on a guilty intrigue with the Empress Judith.  There
grew up against him, and, by consequence, against the emperor, the
empress, and their youngest son a powerful opposition, in which certain
ecclesiastics, and, amongst them, Wala, abbot of Corbie, cousin-german
and but lately one of the privy counsellors of Charlemagne, joined
eagerly.  Some had at heart the unity of the empire, which Louis was
breaking up more and more; others were concerned for the spiritual
interests of the Church which Louis, in spite of his piety and by reason
of his weakness, often permitted to be attacked.  Thus strengthened, the
conspirators considered themselves certain of success.  They had the
empress Judith carried off and shut up in the convent of St. Radegonde at
Poitiers; and Louis in person came to deliver himself up to them at
Compiegne, where they were assembled.  There they passed a decree to the
effect that the power and title of emperor were transferred from Louis to
Lothaire, his eldest son; that the act whereby a share of the empire had
but lately beer assigned to Charles was annulled; and that the act of
817, which had regulated the partition of Louis's dominions after his
death, was once more in force.  But soon there was a burst of reaction in
favor of the emperor; Lothaire's two brothers, jealous of his late
elevation, made overtures to their father; the ecclesiastics were a
little ashamed at being mixed up in a revolt; the people felt pity for
the poor, honest emperor; and a general assembly, meeting at Nimeguen,
abolished the acts of Compiegne, and restored to Louis his title and his
power.  But it was not long before there was revolt again, originating
this time with Pepin, king of Aquitaine.  Louis fought him, and gave
Aquitaine to Charles the Bald.  The alliance between the three sons of
Hermengarde was at once renewed; they raised an army; the emperor marched
against them with his; and the two hosts met between Colmar and Bale, in
a place called le Champ rouge (the field of red).  Negotiations were set
on foot; and Louis was called upon to leave his wife Judith and his son
Charles, and put himself under the guardianship of his elder sons.  He
refused; but, just when the conflict was about to commence, desertion
took place in Louis's army; most of the prelates, laics, and men-at-arms
who had accompanied him passed over to the camp of Lothaire; and the
field of red became the field of falsehood (_le Champ du mensonge_).
Louis, left almost alone, ordered his attendants to withdraw, "being
unwilling," he said, "that any one of them should lose life or limb on
his account," and surrendered to his sons.  They received him with great
demonstrations of respect, but without relinquishing the prosecution of
their enterprise.  Lothaire hastily collected an assembly, which
proclaimed him emperor, with the addition of divers territories to the
kingdoms of Aquitaine and Bavaria: and, three months afterwards, another
assembly, meeting at Compiegne, declared the Emperor Louis to have
forfeited the crown, "for having, by his faults and incapacity, suffered
to sink so sadly low the empire which had been raised to grandeur and
brought into unity by Charlemagne and his predecessors."  Louis submitted
to this decision; himself read out aloud, in the church of St. Medard at
Soissons, but not quite unresistingly, a confession, in eight articles,
of his faults, and, laying his baldric upon the altar, stripped off his
royal robe, and received from the hands of Ebbo, archbishop of Rheims,
the gray vestment of a penitent.

Lothaire considered his father dethroned for good, and himself henceforth
sole emperor; but he was mistaken.  For six years longer the scenes which
have just been described kept repeating themselves again and again;
rivalries and secret plots began once more between the three victorious
brothers and their partisans; popular feeling revived in favor of Louis;
a large portion of the clergy shared it; several counts of Neustria and
Burgundy appeared in arms in the name of the deposed emperor; and the
seductive and able Judith came afresh upon the scene, and gained over to
the cause of her husband and her son a multitude of friends.  In 834, two
assemblies, one meeting at St. Denis and the other at Thionville,
annulled all the acts of the assembly of Compiegne, and for the third
time put Louis in possession of the imperial title and power.  He
displayed no violence in his use of it; but he was growing more and more
irresolute and weak, when, in 838, the second of his rebellious sons,
Pepin, king of Aquitaine, died suddenly.  Louis, ever under the sway of
Judith, speedily convoked at Worms, in 839, once more and for the last
time, a general assembly, whereat, leaving his son Louis of Bavaria
reduced to his kingdom in Eastern Europe, he divided the rest of his
dominions into two nearly equal parts, separated by the course of the
Meuse and the Rhone.  Between these two parts he left the choice to
Lothaire, who took the eastern portion, promising at the same time to
guarantee the western portion to his younger brother Charles.  Louis the
Germanic protested against this partition, and took up arms to resist it.
His father, the emperor, set himself in motion towards the Rhine, to
reduce him to submission; but, on arriving close to Mayence, he caught a
violent fever, and died on the 20th of June, 840, at the castle of
Ingelheim, on a little island in the river.  His last acts were a fresh
proof of his goodness towards even his rebellious sons, and of his
solicitude for his last-born.  He sent to Louis the Germanic his pardon,
and to Lothaire the golden crown and sword, at the same time bidding him
fulfil his father's wishes on behalf of Charles and Judith.

There is no telling whether, in the credulousness of his good nature,
Louis had, at his dying hour, any great confidence in the appeal he made
to his son Lothaire, and in the impression which would be produced on his
other son, Louis of Bavaria, by the pardon bestowed.  The prayers of the
dying are of little avail against violent passions and barbaric manners.
Scarcely was Louis the Debonnair dead, when Lothaire was already
conspiring against young Charles, and was in secret alliance, for his
despoilment, with Pepin II., the late king of Aquitaine's son, who had
taken up arms for the purpose of seizing his father's kingdom, in the
possession of which his grandfather Louis had not been pleased to confirm
him.  Charles suddenly learned that his mother Judith was on the point of
being besieged in Poitiers by the Aquitanians; and, in spite of the
friendly protestations sent to him by Lothaire, it was not long before he
discovered the plot formed against him.  He was not wanting in shrewdness
or energy; and, having first provided for his mother's safety, he set
about forming an alliance, in the cause of their common interests, with
his other brother, Louis the Germanic, who was equally in danger from the
ambition of Lothaire.  The historians of the period do not say what
negotiator was employed by Charles on this distant and delicate mission;
but several circumstances indicate that the Empress Judith herself
undertook it; that she went in quest of the king of Bavaria; and that it
was she who, with her accustomed grace and address, determined him to
make common cause with his younger against their eldest brother.  Divers
incidents retarded for a whole year the outburst of this family plot, and
of the war of which it was the precursor.  The position of the young King
Charles appeared for some time a very bad one; but "certain chieftains,"
says the historian Nithard, "faithful to his mother and to him, and
having nothing more to lose than life or limb, chose rather to die
gloriously than to betray their king."  The arrival of Louis the Germanic
with his troops helped to swell the forces and increase the confidence of
Charles; and it was on the 21st of June, 841, exactly a year after the
death of Louis the Debonnair, that the two armies, that of Lothaire and
Pepin on the one side, and that of Charles the Bald and Louis the
Germanic on the other, stood face to face in the neighborhood of the
village of Fontenailles, six leagues from Auxerre, on the rivulet of
Audries.  Never, according to such evidence as is forthcoming, since the
battle on the plains of Chalons against the Huns, and that of Poitiers
against the Saracens, had so great masses of men been engaged.  "There
would be nothing untruthlike," says that scrupulous authority, M.
Fauriel, "in putting the whole number of combatants at three hundred
thousand; and there is nothing to show that either of the two armies was
much less numerous than the other."  However that may be, the leaders
hesitated for four days to come to blows; and whilst they were
hesitating, the old favorite not only of Louis the Debonnair, but also,
according to several chroniclers, of the Empress Judith, held himself
aloof with his troops in the vicinity, having made equal promise of
assistance to both sides, and waiting, to govern his decision, for the
prospect afforded by the first conflict.  The battle began on the 25th of
June, at daybreak, and was at first in favor of Lothaire; but the troops
of Charles the Bald recovered the advantage which had been lost by Louis
the Germanic, and the action was soon nothing but a terribly simple scene
of carnage between enormous masses of men, charging hand to hand, again
and again, with a front extending over a couple of leagues.  Before
midday the slaughter, the plunder, the spoliation of the dead--all was
over; the victory of Charles and Louis was complete the victors had
retired to their camp, and there remained nothing on the field of battle
but corpses in thick heaps or a long line, according as they had fallen
in the disorder of flight or steadily fighting in their ranks.  .  .  .
"Accursed be this day!" cries Angilbert, one of Lothaire's officers, in
rough Latin verse; "be it unnumbered in the return of the year, but wiped
out of all remembrance!  Be it unlit by the light of the sun!  Be it
without either dawn or twilight!  Accursed, also, be this night, this
awful night in which fell the brave, the most expert in battle!  Eye
ne'er hath seen more fearful slaughter: in streams of blood fell
Christian men; the linen vestments of the dead did whiten the champaign
even as it is whitened by the birds of autumn!"

In spite of this battle, which appeared a decisive one, Lothaire made
zealous efforts to continue the struggle; he scoured the countries
wherein he hoped to find partisans: to the Saxons he promised the
unrestricted re-establishment of their pagan worship, and several of the
Saxon tribes responded to his appeal.  Louis the Germanic and Charles the
Bald, having information of these preliminaries, resolved to solemnly
renew their alliance; and, seven months after their victory at
Fontenailles, in February, 842, they repaired both of them, each with his
army, to Argentaria, on the right bank of the Rhine, between Bale and
Strasbourg, and there, at an open-air meeting, Louis first, addressing
the chieftains about him in the German tongue, said, "Ye all know how
often, since our father's death, Lothaire hath attacked us, in order to
destroy us, this my brother and me.  Having never been able, as brothers
and Christians, or in any just way, to obtain peace from him, we were
constrained to appeal to the judgment of God.  Lothaire was beaten and
retired, whither he could, with his following; for we, restrained by
paternal affection and moved with compassion for Christian people, were
unwilling to pursue them to extermination.  Neither then nor aforetime
did we demand ought else save that each of us should be maintained in his
rights.  But he, rebelling against the judgment of God, ceaseth not to
attack us as enemies, this my brother and me; and he destroyeth our
peoples with fire and pillage and the sword.  That is the cause which
hath united us afresh; and, as we trove that ye doubt the soundness of
our alliance and our fraternal union, we have resolved to bind ourselves
afresh by this oath in your presence, being led thereto by no prompting
of wicked covetousness, but only that we may secure our common advantage
in case that, by your aid, God should cause us to obtain peace.  If,
then, I violate--which God forbid--this oath that I am about to take to
my brother, I hold you all quit of submission to me and of the faith ye
have sworn to me."

Charles repeated this speech, word for word, to his own troops, in the
Romance language, in that idiom derived from a mixture of Latin and of
the tongues of ancient Gaul, and spoken, thenceforth, with varieties of
dialect and pronunciation, in nearly all parts of Frankish Gaul.  After
this address, Louis pronounced and Charles repeated after him, each in
his own tongue, the oath couched in these terms: "For the love of God,
for the Christian people, and for our common weal, from this day forth
and so long as God shall grant me power and knowledge, I will defend this
my brother, and will be an aid to him in everything, as one ought to
defend his brother, provided that he do likewise unto me; and I will
never make with Lothaire any covenant which may be, to my knowledge, to
the damage of this my brother."

When the two brothers had thus sworn, the two armies, officers and men,
took, in their turn, a similar oath, going bail, in a mass, for the
engagements of their kings.  Then they took up their quarters, all of
them, for some time, between Worms and Mayence, and followed up their
political proceeding with military fetes, precursors of the knightly
tournaments of the middle ages.  "A place of meeting was fixed," says the
contemporary historian Nithard, "at a spot suitable for this kind of
exercises.  Here were drawn up, on one side, a certain number of
combatants, Saxons, Vasconians, Austrasians, or Britons; there were
ranged, on the opposite side, an equal number of warriors, and the two
divisions advanced, each against the other, as if to attack.  One of
them, with their bucklers at their backs, took to flight, as if to seek,
in the main body, shelter against those who were pursuing them; then
suddenly, facing about, they dashed out in pursuit of those before whom
they had just been flying.  This sport lasted until the two kings,
appearing with all the youth of their suites, rode up at a gallop,
brandishing their spears and chasing first one lot and then the other It
was a fine sight to see so much temper amongst so many valiant folks, for
great as were the number and the mixture of different nationalities, no
one was insulted or maltreated, though the contrary is often the case
amongst men in small numbers and known one to another."

After four or five months of tentative measures or of incidents which
taught both parties that they could not, either of them, hope to
completely destroy their opponents, the two allied brothers received at
Verdun, whither they had repaired to concert their next movement, a
messenger from Lothaire, with peaceful proposals which they were
unwilling to reject.  The principal was that, with the exception of
Italy, Aquitaine, and Bavaria, to be secured without dispute to their
then possessors, the Frankish empire should be divided into three
portions, that the arbiters elected to preside over the partition should
swear to make it as equal as possible, and that Lothaire should have his
choice, with the title of Emperor.  About mid June, 842, the three
brothers met on an island of the Saone, near Chalons, where they began to
discuss the questions which divided them; but it was not till more than a
year after, in August, 843, that assembling all three of them, with their
umpires, at Verdun, they at last came to an agreement about the partition
of the Frankish empire, save the three countries which it had been
beforehand agreed to except.  Louis kept all the provinces of Germany of
which he was already in possession, and received besides, on the left
bank of the Rhine, the towns of Mayence, Worms, and Spire, with the
territory appertaining to them.  Lothaire, for his part, had the eastern
belt of Gaul, bounded on one side by the Rhine and the Alps, on the other
by the courses of the Meuse, the Saone, and the Rhone, starting from the
confluence of the two latter rivers, and, further, the country comprised
between the Meuse and the Scheldt, together with certain countships lying
to the west of that river.  To Charles fell all the rest of Gaul:
Vasconia or Biscaye, Septimania, the marches of Spain, beyond the
Pyrenees, and the other countries of Southern Gaul which had enjoyed
hitherto, under the title of the Kingdom of Aquitaine, a special
government subordinated to the general government of the empire, but
distinct from it, lost this last remnant of their Gallo-Roman
nationality, and became integral portions of Frankish Gaul, which fell by
partition to Charles the Bald, and formed one and the same kingdom under
one and the same king.

Thus fell through and disappeared, in 843, by virtue of the treaty of
Verdun, the second of Charlemagne's grand designs, the resuscitation of
the Roman empire by means of the Frankish and Christian masters of Gaul.
The name of emperor still retained a certain value in the minds of the
people, and still remained an object of ambition to princes; but the
empire was completely abolished, and in its stead sprang up three
kingdoms, independent one of another, without any necessary connection or
relation.  One of the three was thenceforth France.

In this great event are comprehended two facts; the disappearance of the
empire and the formation of the three kingdoms which took its place.  The
first is easily explained.  The resuscitation of the Roman empire had
been a dream of ambition and ignorance on the part of a great man, but a
barbarian.  Political unity and central absolute power had been the
essential characteristics of that empire.  They became introduced and
established, through a long succession of ages, on the ruins of the
splendid Roman republic, destroyed by its own dissensions, under favor of
the still great influence of the old Roman senate, though fallen from its
high estate, and beneath the guardianship of the Roman legions and
imperial pretorians.  Not one of these conditions, not one of these
forces, was to be met with in the Roman world reigned over by
Charlemagne.  The nation of the Franks and Charlemagne himself were but
of yesterday; the new emperor had neither ancient senate to hedge at the
same time that it obeyed him, nor old bodies of troops to support him.
Political unity and absolute power were repugnant alike to the
intellectual and the social condition, to the national manners and
personal sentiments of the victorious barbarians.  The necessity of
placing their conquests beyond the reach of a new swarm of barbarians and
the personal ascendency of Charlemagne were the only things which gave
his government a momentary gleam of success in the way of unity and of
factitious despotism under the name of empire.  In 814, Charlemagne had
made territorial security an accomplished fact; but the personal power he
had exercised disappeared with him.  The new Gallo-Frankish community
recovered, under the mighty but gradual influence of Christianity, its
proper and natural course, producing disruption into different local
communities and bold struggles for individual liberties, either one with
another, or against whosoever tried to become their master.

As for the second fact, the formation of the three kingdoms which were
the issue of the treaty of Verdun, various explanations have been given
of it.  This distribution of certain peoples of Western Europe into three
distinct and independent groups, Italians, Germans, and French, has been
attributed at one time to a diversity of histories and manners; at
another to geographical causes and to what is called the rule of natural
frontiers; and oftener still to a spirit of nationality and to
differences of language.  Let none of these causes be gainsaid; they
all exercised some sort of influence, but they are all incomplete in
themselves and far too redolent of theoretical system.  It is true that
Germany, France, and Italy began, at that time, to emerge from the chaos
into which they had been plunged by barbaric invasion and the conquests
of Charlemagne, and to form themselves into quite distinct nations; but
there were in each of the kingdoms of Lothaire, of Louis the Germanic,
and of Charles the Bald, populations widely differing in race, language,
manners, and geographical affinity, and it required many great events and
the lapse of many centuries to bring about the degree of national unity
they now possess.  To say nothing touching the agency of individual and
independent forces, which is always considerable, although so many men of
intellect ignore it in the present day, what would have happened, had any
one of the three new kings, Lothaire, or Louis the Germanic, or Charles
the Bald, been a second Charlemagne, as Charlemagne had been a second
Charles Martel?  Who can say that, in such a case, the three kingdoms
would have taken the form they took in 843?

Happily or unhappily, it was not so; none of Charlemagne's successors was
capable of exercising on the events of his time, by virtue of his brain
and his own will, any notable influence.  Not that they were all
unintelligent, or timid, or indolent.  It has been seen that Louis the
Debonnair did not lack virtues and good intentions; and Charles the Bald
was clear-sighted, dexterous, and energetic; he had a taste for
information and intellectual distinction; he liked and sheltered men of
learning and letters, and to such purpose that, instead of speaking, as
under Charlemagne, of the school of the palace, people called the palace
of Charles the Bald the palace of the school.  Amongst the eleven kings
who after him ascended the Carlovingian throne, several, such as Louis
III.  and Carloman, and, especially, Louis the Ultramarine (d'Outremer)
and Lothaire, displayed, on several occasions, energy and courage; and
the kings elected, at this epoch, without the pale of the Carlovingian
dynasty--Eudes in 887 and Raoul in 923--gave proofs of a valor both
discreet and effectual.  The Carlovingians did not, as the Merovingians
did, end in monkish retirement or shameful inactivity even the last of
them, and the only one termed sluggard, Louis V., was getting ready, when
he died, for an expedition in Spain against the Saracens.  The truth is
that, mediocre or undecided or addle-pated as they may have been, they
all succumbed, internally and externally, without initiating and without
resisting, to the course of events, and that, in 987, the fall of the
Carlovingian line was the natural and easily accomplished consequence of
the new social condition which had been preparing in France under the
empire.




CHAPTER XIII.----FEUDAL FRANCE AND HUGH CAPET.

The reader has just seen that, twenty-nine years after the death of
Charlemagne, that is, in 843, when, by the treaty of Verdun, the sons of
Louis the Debonnair had divided amongst them his dominions, the great
empire split up into three distinct and independent kingdoms--the
kingdoms of Italy, Germany, and France.  The split did not stop there.
Forty-five years later, at the end of the ninth century, shortly after
the death of Charles the Fat, the last of the Carlovingians who appears
to have re-united for a while all the empire of Charlemagne, this empire
had begotten seven instead of three kingdoms, those of France, of
Navarre, of Provence or Cisjuran Burgundy, of Trans-juran Burgundy, or
Lorraine, of Allemannia, and of Italy.  This is what had become of the
factitious and ephemeral unity of that Empire of the West which
Charlemagne had wished to put in the place of the Roman empire.

We will leave where they are the three distinct and independent kingdoms,
and turn our introspective gaze upon the kingdom of France.  There we
recognize the same fact; there the same work of dismemberment is going
on.  About the end of the ninth century there were already twenty-nine
provinces or fragments of provinces which had become petty states, the
former governors of which, under the names of dukes, counts, marquises,
and viscounts, were pretty nearly real sovereigns.  Twenty-nine great
fiefs, which have played a special part in French history, date back to
this epoch.

These petty states were not all of equal importance or in possession of a
perfectly similar independence; there were certain ties uniting them to
other states, resulting in certain reciprocal obligations which became
the basis, or, one might say, the constitution of the feudal community;
but their prevailing feature was, nevertheless, isolation, personal
existence.  They were really petty states begotten from the dismemberment
of a great territory; those local governments were formed at the expense
of a central power.

From the end of the ninth pass we to the end of the tenth century, to the
epoch when the Capetians take the place of the Carlovingians.  Instead of
seven kingdoms to replace the empire of Charlemagne, there were then no
more than four.  The kingdoms of Provence and Trans-juran Burgundy had
formed, by re-union, the kingdom of Arles.  The kingdom of Lorraine was
no more than a duchy in dispute between Allemannia and France.  The
Emperor Otho the Great had united the kingdom of Italy to the empire of.
Allemannia.  Overtures had produced their effects amongst the great
states.  But in the interior of the kingdom of France, dismemberment had
held on its course; and instead of the twenty-nine petty states or great
fiefs observable at the end of the ninth century, we find at the end of
the tenth, fifty-five actually established.  (_Vide_ Guizot's _Histoire
de la Civilisation,_ t. ii., pp. 238-246.)

Now, how was this ever-increasing dismemberment accomplished?  What
causes determined it, and little by little made it the substitute for the
unity of the empire?  Two causes, perfectly natural and independent of
all human calculation, one moral and the other political.  They were the
absence from the minds of men of any general and dominant idea; and the
reflux, in social relations and manners, of the individual liberties but
lately repressed or regulated by the strong hand of Charlemagne.  In
times of formation or transition, states and governments conform to the
measure, one had almost said to the height, of the men of the period,
their ideas, their sentiments, and their personal force of character;
when ideas are few and narrow, when sentiments spread only over a
confined circle, when means of action and expansion are wanting to men,
communities become petty and local, just as the thoughts and existence of
their members are.  Such was the state of things in the ninth and tenth
centuries; there was no general and fructifying idea, save the Christian
creed; no great intellectual vent; no great national feeling; no easy and
rapid means of communication; mind and life were both confined in a
narrow space, and encountered, at every step, stoppages and obstacles
well nigh insurmountable.  At the same time, by the fall of the empires
of Rome and of Charlemagne, men regained possession of the rough and
ready individual liberties which were the essential characteristic of
Germanic manners: Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Saxons, Lombards, none
of these new peoples had lived as the Greeks and Romans had, under the
sway of an essentially political idea, the idea of city, state, and
fatherland: they were free men, and not citizens; comrades, not members
of one and the same public body.  They gave up their vagabond life; they
settled upon a soil conquered by themselves and partitioned amongst
themselves; and there they lived each by himself, master of himself and
all that was his, family, servitors, husbandmen, and slaves: the
territorial domain became the fatherland, and the owner remained a free
man, a local and independent chieftain, at his own risk and peril.  And
this, quite naturally, grew up feudal France, when the new comers,
settled in their new abodes, were no more swayed or hampered by the vain
attempt to re-establish the Roman empire.

The consequences of such a state of things and of such a disposition of
persons were rapidly developed.  Territorial ownership became the
fundamental characteristic of and warranty for independence and social
importance.  Local sovereignty, if not complete and absolute, at least
in respect of its principal rights, right of making war, right of
judicature, right of taxation, and right of regulating the police, became
one with the territorial ownership, which before long grew to be
hereditary, whether, under the title of _alleu (allodium)_, it had been
originally perfectly independent and exempt from any feudal tie, or,
under the title of benefice, had arisen from grants of land made by the
chieftain to his followers, on condition of certain obligations.  The
offices, that is, the divers functions, military or civil, conferred by
the king on his lieges, also ended by becoming hereditary.  Having become
established in fact, this heirship in lands and local powers was soon
recognized by the law.  A capitulary of Charles the Bald, promulgated in
877, contains the two following provisions:--

"If, after our death, any one of our lieges, moved by love for God and
our person, desire to renounce the world, and if he have a son or other
relative capable of serving the public weal, let him be free to transmit
to him his benefices and his honor, according to his pleasure."

"If a count of this kingdom happen to die, and his son be about our
person, we will that our son; together with those of our lieges who may
chance to be the nearest relatives of the deceased count, as well as with
the other officers of the said countship and the bishop of the diocese
wherein it is situated, shall provide for its administration until the
death of the heretofore count shall have been announced to us and we have
been enabled to confer on the son, present at our court, the honors
wherewith his father was invested."

Thus the king still retained the nominal right of conferring on the son
the offices or local functions of the father, but he recognized in the
son the right to obtain them.  A host of documents testify that at this
epoch, when, on the death of a governor of a province, the king attempted
to give his countship to some one else than his descendants, not only did
personal interest resist, but such a measure was considered a violation
of right.  Under the reign of Louis the Stutterer, son of Charles the
Bald, two of his lieges, Wilhelm and Engelschalk, held two countships on
the confines of Bavaria; and, at their death, their offices were given to
Count Arbo, to the prejudice of their sons.  "The children and their
relatives," says the chronicler, "taking that as a gross injustice,  said
that matters ought to go differently, and that they would die by the
sword or Arbo should give up the courtship of their family."  Heirship in
territorial ownerships and their local rights, whatever may have
originally been their character; heirship in local offices or powers,
military or civil, primarily conferred by the king; and, by consequence,
hereditary union of territorial ownership and local government, under the
condition, a little confused and precarious, of subordinated relations
and duties between suzerain and vassal--such was, in law and in fact, the
feudal order of things.  From the ninth to the tenth century it had
acquired full force.

This order of things being thus well defined, we find ourselves face to
face with an indisputable historic fact: no period, no system has ever,
in France, remained so odious to the public instincts.  And this
antipathy is not peculiar to our age, nor merely the fruit of that great
revolution which not long since separated, as by a gulf, the French
present from its past.  Go back to any portion of French history, and
stop where you will; and you will everywhere find the feudal system
considered, by the mass of the population, a foe to be fought and fought
down at any price.  At all times, whoever dealt it a blow has been
popular in France.

The reasons for this fact are not all, or even the chief of them, to be
traced to the evils which, in France, the people had to endure under the
feudal system.  It is not evil plight which is most detested and feared
by peoples; they have more than once borne, faced, and almost wooed it,
and there are woful epochs, the memory of which has remained dear.  It is
in the political character of feudalism, in the nature and shape of its
power, that we find lurking that element of popular aversion which, in
France at least, it has never ceased to inspire.

It was a confederation of petty sovereigns, of petty despots, unequal
amongst themselves, and having, one towards another, certain duties and
rights, but invested in their own domains, over their personal and direct
subjects, with arbitrary and absolute power.  That is the essential
element of the feudal system; therein it differs from every other
aristocracy, every other form of government.

There has been no scarcity in this world of aristocracies and despotisms.
There have been peoples arbitrarily governed, nay, absolutely possessed
by a single man, by a college of priests, by a body of patricians.  But
none of these despotic governments was like the feudal system.

In the case where the sovereign power has been placed in the hands of a
single man, the condition of the people has been servile and woful.  At
bottom the feudal system was somewhat better; and it will presently be
explained why.  Meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that that condition
often appeared less burdensome, and obtained more easy acceptance than
the feudal system.  It was because, under the great absolute monarchies,
men did, nevertheless, obtain some sort of equality and tranquillity.  A
shameful equality and a fatal tranquillity, no doubt; but such as peoples
are sometimes contented with under the dominance of certain
circumstances, or in the last gasp of their existence.  Liberty,
equality, and tranquillity were all alike wanting, from the tenth to the
thirteenth century, to the inhabitants of each lord's domains; their
sovereign was at their very doors, and none of them was hidden from him,
or beyond reach of his mighty arm.  Of all tyrannies, the worst is that
which can thus keep account of its subjects, and which sees, from its
seat, the limits of its empire.  The caprices of the human will then show
themselves in all their intolerable extravagance, and, moreover, with
irresistible promptness.  It is then, too, that inequality of conditions
makes itself more rudely felt; riches, might, independence, every
advantage and every right present themselves every instant to the gaze of
misery, weakness, and servitude.  The inhabitants of fiefs could not find
consolation in the bosom of tranquillity; incessantly mixed up in the
quarrels of their lord, a prey to his neighbors' devastations, they led a
life still more precarious and still more restless than that of the lords
themselves, and they had to put up at one and the same time with the
presence of war, privilege, and absolute power. Nor did the rule of
feudalism differ less from that of a college of priests or a senate of
patricians than from the despotism of an individual.  In the two former
systems we have an aristocratic body governing the mass of the people; in
the feudal system we have an aristocracy resolved into individuals, each
of whom governs on his own private account a certain number of persons
dependent upon him alone.  Be the aristocratic body a clergy, its power
has its root in creeds which are common to itself and its subjects.  Now,
in every creed common to those who command and those who obey there is a
moral tie, an element of sympathetic equality, and on the part of those
who obey a tacit adhesion to the rule.  Be it a senate of patricians that
reigns, it cannot govern so capriciously, so arbitrarily, as an
individual.  There are differences and discussions in the very bosom of
the government; there may be, nay, there always are, formed factions,
parties which, in order to arrive at their own ends, strive to conciliate
the favor of the people, sometimes take in hand its interests, and,
however bad may be its condition, the people, by sharing in its masters'
rivalries, exercises some sort of influence over its own destiny.
Feudalism was not, properly speaking, an aristocratic government, a
senate of kings--to use the language used by Cineas to Pyrrhus; it was a
collection of individual despotisms, exercised by isolated aristocrats,
each of whom, being sovereign in his own domains, had to give no account
to another, and asked nobody's opinion about his conduct towards his
subjects.

Is it astonishing that such a system incurred, on the part of the
peoples, more hatred than even those which had reduced them to a more
monotonous and more lasting servitude?  There was despotism, just as in
pure monarchies, and there was privilege, just as in the very closest
aristocracies.  And both obtruded themselves in the most offensive, and,
so to speak, crude form.  Despotism was not tapered off by means of the
distant and elevation of a throne; and privilege did not veil itself
behind the majesty of a large body.  Both were the appurtenances of an
individual ever present and ever alone, ever at his subjects' doors, and
never called upon, in dealing with their lot, to gather his peers around
him.

And now we will leave the subjects in the case of feudalism, and consider
the masters, the owners of fiefs, and their relations one with another.
We here behold quite a different spectacle; we see liberties, rights, and
guarantees, which not only give protection and honor to those who enjoy
them, but of which the tendency and effect are to open to the subject
population an outlet towards a better future.

It could not, in fact, be otherwise: for, on the one hand, feudal society
was not wanting in dignity and glory; and, on the other, the feudal
system did not, as the theocracy of Egypt or the despotism of Asia did,
condemn its subjects irretrievably to slavery.  It oppressed them; but
they ended by having the power as well as the will to go free.

It is the fault of pure monarchy to set up power so high, and encompass
it with such splendor, that the possessor's head is turned, and that
those who are beneath it dare scarcely look upon it.  The sovereign
thinks himself a god; and the people fall down and worship him.  But it
was not so in society under owners of fiefs: the grandeur was neither
dazzling nor unapproachable; it was but a short step from vassal to
suzerain; they lived familiarly one with another, without any possibility
that superiority should think itself illimitable, or subordination think
itself servile.  Thence came that extension of the domestic circle, that
ennoblement of personal service, from which sprang one of the most
generous sentiments of the middle ages, fealty, which reconciled the
dignity of the man with the devotion of the vassal.

Further, it was not from a numerous aristocratic senate, but from
himself, and almost from himself alone, that every possessor of fiefs
derived his strength and his lustre.  Isolated as he was in his domains,
it was for him to maintain himself therein, to extend them, to keep his
subjects submissive and his vassals faithful, and to correct those who
were wanting in obedience to him, or who ignored their duties as members
of the feudal hierarchy.  It was, as it were, a people consisting of
scattered citizens, of whom each, ever armed, accompanied by his
following or intrenched in his castle, kept watch himself over his own
safety and his own rights, relying far more on his own courage and his
own renown than on the protection of the public authorities.  Such a
condition bears less resemblance to an organized and settled society than
to a constant prospect of peril and war; but the energy and the dignity
of the individual were kept up in it, and a more extended and better
regulated society might issue therefrom.

And it did issue.  This society of the future was not slow to sprout and
grow in the midst of that feudal system so turbulent, so oppressive, so
detested.  For five centuries, from the invasion of the barbarians to the
fall of the Carlovingians, France presents the appearance of being
stationary in the middle of chaos.  Over this long, dark space of
anarchy, feudalism is slowly taking shape, at the expense, at one time,
of liberty, at another, of order; not as a real rectification of the
social condition, but as the only order of things which could possibly
acquire fixity, as, in fact, a sort of unpleasant but necessary
alternative.  No sooner is the feudal system in force, than, with its
victory scarcely secured, it is attacked in the lower grades by the mass
of the people attempting to regain certain liberties, ownerships, and
rights, and in the highest by royalty laboring to recover its public
character, to become once more the head of a nation.  It is no longer the
case of free men in a vague and dubious position, unsuccessfully
defending, against the nomination of the chieftains whose lands they
inhabit, the wreck of their independence, whether Gallic, or Roman, or
barbaric; it is the case of burgesses, agriculturists, and serfs, who
know well what their grievances and who their oppressors are, and who are
working to get free.  It is no longer the case of a king doubtful about
his title and the nature of his power, at one time a chieftain of
warriors, at another the anointed of the Most High; here a mayor of the
palace of some sluggard barbarian, there the heir of the emperors of
Rome; a sovereign tossing about confusedly amidst followers or servitors
eager at one time to invade his authority, at another to render
themselves completely isolated: it is the case of one of the premier
feudal lords exerting himself to become the master of all, to change his
suzerainty into sovereignty.  Thus, in spite of the servitude into which
the people had sunk at the end of the tenth century, from this moment the
enfranchisement of the people makes way.  In spite of the weakness, or
rather nullity, of the regal power at the same epoch, from this moment
the regal power begins to gain ground.  That monarchical system which the
genius of Charlemagne could not found, kings far inferior to Charlemagne
will little by little make triumphant.  Those liberties and those
guarantees which the German warriors were incapable of transmitting to a
well-regulated society, the commonalty will regain one after another.
Nothing but feudalism could have sprung from the womb of barbarism; but
scarcely is feudalism established when we see monarchy and liberty
nascent and growing in its womb.

From the end of the ninth to the end of the tenth century, two families
were, in French history, the representatives and instruments of the two
systems thus confronted and conflicting at that epoch, the imperial which
was falling, and the feudal which was rising.  After the death of
Charlemagne, his descendants, to the number of ten, from Louis the
Debonnair to Louis the Sluggard, strove obstinately, but in vain, to
maintain the unity of the empire and the unity of the central power.  In
four generations, on the other hand, the descendants of Robert the Strong
climbed to the head of feudal France.  The former, though German in race,
were imbued with the maxims, the traditions, and the pretensions of that
Roman world which had been for a while resuscitated by their glorious
ancestor; and they claimed it as their heritage.  The latter preserved,
at their settlement upon Gallo-Roman territory, Germanic sentiments,
manners, and instincts, and were occupied only with the idea of getting
more and more settled, and greater and greater in the new society which
was little by little being formed upon the soil won by the barbarians,
their forefathers.  Louis the Ultra-marine and Lothaire were not, we may
suppose, less personally brave than Robert the Strong and his son Eudes;
but when the Northmen put the Frankish dominions in peril, it was not to
the descendants of Charlemagne, not to the emperor Charles the Fat, but
to the local and feudal chieftain, to Eudes, count of Paris, that the
population turned for salvation: and Eudes it was who saved them.

In this painful parturition of French monarchy, one fact deserves to be
remarked, and that is, the lasting respect attached, in the minds of the
people, to the name and the reminiscences of the Carlovingian rule,