Title: The Evolution of an Empire - A Brief Historical Sketch of France
Author: Parmele, Mary Platt, 1843-1911
Language: English
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THE

EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE



A BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH OF

FRANCE



BY

MARY PARMELE


_Author of "Evolution of Empire Series, Germany;"
  "Who? When? What? Literature Chart."_



NEW YORK

WILLIAM BEVERLEY HARISON,

59 FIFTH AVENUE

1894



PUBLISHED AND COPYRIGHTED, 1894,

BY

WILLIAM BEVERLEY HARISON,

59 FIFTH AVE., NEW YORK CITY.



ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY

THE PUBLISHERS' PRINTING COMPANY

182-186 WEST 14TH STREET

NEW YORK



PREFACE.

In an attempt to tell the story of a great nation in about 100 pages,
it is needless to say there must be a rigid exclusion of all save
essential facts.  To those already familiar with the subject, this
sketch is offered merely as a reminder of the sequence of conditions
and events in the evolution of France; while to the student it is
presented as a framework upon which may be placed, in orderly and
comprehensible fashion, the results of future reading and research.

To the latter class I would suggest that a series of papers, written
upon the most prominent themes found in the Table of Contents, will
bear fruit in knowledge more real and vital than may be obtained from
the writings of others, however eloquent and vivid the presentation.

M. P.

NEW YORK, July 23d, 1894.



CONTENTS.


CHAPTER I.

The Aryan Family of Nations--Keltic Race--Ancient Gaul--Gauls in
Rome--Gauls in Greece and in Asia Minor


CHAPTER II.

Roman Conquest of Gaul--Julius Cæsar


CHAPTER III.

Birth of Christianity--Its Dissemination--Persecution at Lyons by order
of Marcus Aurelius--The Roman Empire Espouses Christianity under
Constantine


CHAPTER IV.

Gaul Overrun and Subjugated by Franks--Clovis King--Decay of the
Merovingian Line--_Maire du Palais_ King _de facto_--Charles
Martel--Birth of Mohammedanism--Its Triumphs--Christendom
Threatened--Pepin King--Charlemagne--Alliance with Pope--France, Italy,
and Germany Emerge as Separate Nationalities


CHAPTER V.

The Northmen--Beginnings of Feudalism in France--Normandy Bestowed upon
the Northmen--Conquest of England by William, Duke of
Normandy--Albigenses--Inquisition at Toulouse--The Crusades


CHAPTER VI.

Decline of Feudalism--Creation of the Commune--Charles VII.--Henry V.
in France--Joan of Arc


CHAPTER VII.

Francis I.--Huguenots--Catharine de Medici--Francis II.


CHAPTER VIII.

Massacre of St. Bartholomew--Henry III.--Henry IV.


CHAPTER IX.

Edict of Nantes--Louis XIII.--Richelieu


CHAPTER X.

Louis XIV.--Revocation of the Edict of Nantes--Louis XV.--Age of
Voltaire and Rousseau--The Gathering Storm


CHAPTER XI.

Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette--American Colonies Arrayed Against
England--French Aid to America--Smouldering Fires of Discontent--Louis
Convokes States-General--National Assembly Created by Commons--Bastille
Attacked--Revolution--Execution of King


CHAPTER XII.

Napoleon Bonaparte--Toulon--Campaign in Italy--Empire
Established--Europe Under the Feet of the Great Corsican--Marie
Louise--Waterloo--Louis XVIII.--Charles X.--Louis Philippe--Second
Republic--Louis Napoleon President--Second Empire--Napoleon
III.--Franco-Prussian War--Sedan--Third Republic--Review of Present
Conditions



EVOLUTION OF AN EMPIRE.


CHAPTER I.

One of the greatest achievements of modern research is the discovery of
a key by which we may determine the kinship of nations.  What we used
to conjecture, we now know.  An identity in the structural form of
language establishes with scientific certitude that however diverse
their character and civilizations, Russian, German, English, French,
Spaniard, are all but branches from the same parent stem, are all alike
children of the Asiatic Aryan.

So skilful are modern methods of questioning the past, and so
determined the effort to find out its secrets, we may yet know the
origin and history of this wonderful Asiatic people, and when and why
they left their native continent and colonized upon the northern shores
of the Mediterranean.  Certain it is, however, that, more centuries
before the Christian era than there have been since, they had peopled
Western Europe.

This branch of the Aryan family is known as the Keltic, and was older
brother to the Teuton and Slav, which at a much later period followed
them from the ancestral home, and appropriated the middle and eastern
portions of the European Continent.

The name of Gaul was given to the territory lying between the Ocean and
the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenees and the Alps.  And at a later
period a portion of Northern Gaul, and the islands lying north of it,
received from an invading chieftain and his tribe the name _Brit_ or
_Britain_ (or Pryd or Prydain).

If the mind could be carried back on the track of time, and we could
see what we now call France as it existed twenty centuries before the
Christian era, we should behold the same natural features: the same
mountains rearing their heads; the same rivers flowing to the sea; the
same plains stretching out in the sunlight.  But instead of vines and
flowers and cultivated fields we should behold great herds of wild ox
and elk, and of swine as fierce as wolves, ranging in a climate as cold
as Norway; and vast inaccessible forests, the home of beasts of prey,
which contended with man for food and shelter.

Let us read Guizot's description of life in Gaul five centuries before
Christ:

"Here lived six or seven millions of men a bestial life, in dwellings
dark and low, built of wood and clay and covered with branches or
straw, open to daylight by the door alone and confusedly heaped
together behind a rampart of timber, earth, and stone, which enclosed
and protected what they were pleased to call--a _town_."

Such was the Paris, and such the Frenchmen of the age of Pericles!  And
the same tides that washed the sands of Southern Gaul, a few hours
later ebbed and flowed upon the shores of Greece--rich in culture, with
refinements and subtleties in art which are the despair of the world
to-day--with an intellectual endowment never since attained by any
people.

The same sun which rose upon temples and palaces and life serene and
beautiful in Greece, an hour later lighted sacrificial altars and
hideous orgies in the forests of Gaul.  While the Gaul was nailing the
heads of human victims to his door, or hanging them from the bridle of
his horse, or burning or flogging his prisoners to death, the Greek,
with a literature, an art, and a civilization in ripest perfection,
discussed with his friends the deepest problems of life and destiny,
which were then baffling human intelligence, even as they are with us
to-day.  Truly we of Keltic and Teuton descent are late-comers upon the
stage of national life.

There was no promise of greatness in ancient Gaul.  It was a great
unregulated force, rushing hither and thither.  Impelled by insatiate
greed for the possessions of their neighbors, there was no permanence
in their loves or their hatreds.  The enemies of to-day were the allies
of to-morrow.  Guided entirely by the fleeting desires and passions of
the moment, with no far-reaching plans to restrain, the sixty or more
tribes composing the Gallic people were in perpetual state of feud and
anarchy, apparently insensible to the ties of brotherhood, which give
concert of action, and stability in form of national life.  If they
overran a neighboring country, it seemed not so much for permanent
acquisition, as to make it a camping-ground until its resources were
exhausted.

We read of one Massillia who came with a colony of Greeks long ages
ago, and after founding the city of Marseilles, created a narrow bright
border of Greek civilization along the Southern edge of the benighted
land.  It was a brief illumination, lasting only a century or more, and
leaving few traces; but it may account for the superior intellectual
quality of the southern provinces in future France.

It requires a vast extent of territory to sustain a people living by
the chase, and upon herds and flocks; hence the area which now amply
maintains thirty-five millions of Frenchmen was all too small for six
or seven million Gauls; and they were in perpetual struggle with their
neighbors for land--more land.

"Give us land," they said to the Romans, and when land was denied them
and the gates of cities disdainfully closed upon their messengers, not
land, but vengeance, was their cry; and hordes of half-naked barbarians
trampled down the vineyards, and rushed, a tumultuous torrent, upon
Rome.

The Romans could not stand before this new and strange kind of warfare.
The Gauls streamed over the vanquished legions into the Eternal City,
silent and deserted save only by the Senate and a few who remained
intrenched in the Citadel; and there the barbarians kept them besieged
for seven months, while they made themselves at home amid
uncomprehended luxuries.

Of course Roman skill and courage at last dislodged and drove them
back.  But the fact remained that the Gaul had been there,--master of
Rome; that the ironclad legions had been no match for his naked force,
and a new sensation thrilled through the length and breadth of Gaul.
It was the first throb of national life.  The sixty or more fragments
drew closer together into something like Gallic unity--with a common
danger to meet, a common foe to drive back.

Hereafter there was another hunger to be appeased besides that for food
and land; a hunger for conquest, for vengeance, and for glory for the
Gallic name.  National pride was born.

For years they hovered like wolves about Rome.  But skill and superior
intelligence tell in the centuries.  It took long--and cost no end of
blood and treasure; but two hundred years from the capture of Rome, the
Gauls were driven out of Italy, and the Alps pronounced a barrier set
by Nature herself against barbarian encroachments.

Italy was not the only country suffering from the destroying footsteps
of the Western Kelts.  There had been long ago an overflow of a tribe
in Northern Gaul (the Kymrians), which had hewed and plundered its way
south and eastward; until at the time of Alexander (340 B.C.) it was
knocking at the gates of Macedonia.

Stimulated by the success at Rome fifty years earlier, they were, with
fresh insolence, demanding "land," and during the centuries which
followed, the Gallic name acquired no fresh lustre in Greece.
Half-naked, gross, ferocious and ignorant, sometimes allies, but always
a scourge, they finally crossed the Hellespont (278 B.C.), and turned
their attention to Asia Minor.  And there, at last, we find them
settled in a province called Gallicia, where they lived without
amalgamating with the people about them; it is said, even as late as
400 years after Christ, speaking the language of their tribal home
(what is now Belgium).  And these were the Galatians--the "foolish
Galatians," to whom Paul addressed his epistle; and we have followed up
this Gallic thread simply because it mingles with the larger strand of
ancient and sacred history with which we are all so familiar.


It is not strange that Roman courage and endurance became a by-word.
Her fibre was toughened by perpetual strain of conflict.  Even while
she was struggling with Gaul and while the echoes of the Hunnish
invasion were still resounding through the Continent, Hannibal, with
his hosts, was pouring through Gaul and gathering accessions from that
people as he swept down into Italy.  Then, with the memories of the
Carthagenian wars still fresh at Rome, the Goths were at her
gates,--their blows directed with a solidity superior to that of the
barbarians who had preceded them.  Where the Gauls had knocked, the
Goths thundered.

Again the city was invaded by barbarian feet, and again did superior
training and intelligence drive back the invading torrent and triumph
over native brute force.

Such, in brief outline, was the condition of the centuries just before
the Christian era.



CHAPTER II.

The making of a nation is not unlike bread or cake making.  One element
is used as the basis, to which are added other component parts, of
varying qualities, and the result we call England, or Germany, or
France.  The steps by which it is accomplished, the blending and fusing
of the elements, require centuries, and the process makes what we
call--history.

It was written in the book of fate that Gaul should become a great
nation; but not until fused and interpenetrated with two other
nationalities.  She must first be humanized and civilized by the Roman,
and then energized and made free from the Roman by the Teuton.

The instrument chosen for the former was Julius Cæsar, and for the
latter--five centuries later--Clovis, the Frankish leader.  It is safe
to affirm that no man has ever so changed the course of human events as
did Julius Cæsar.  Napoleon, who strove to imitate him 1800 years
later, was a charlatan in comparison; a mere scene-shifter on a great
theatrical stage.  Not a trace of his work remains upon humanity to-day.

Cæsar opened up a pathway for the old civilizations of the world to
flow into Western Europe, and the sodden mass of barbarism was infused
with a life-compelling current.  This was not accomplished by placing
before the inferior race a higher ideal of life for imitation, but by a
mingling of the blood of the nations--a transfusion into Gallic veins
of the germs of a higher living and thinking--thus making them heirs to
the great civilizations of antiquity.

No human event was ever fraught with such consequences to the human
race as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Cæsar.

The Gallic wars had for centuries drained the treasure and taxed the
resources of Rome.  Cæsar conceived the audacious idea of stopping them
at their source--in fact, of making Gaul a Roman province.

It was a marvellous exhibition, not simply of force, but of force
wielded by supreme intelligence and craft.  He had lived four years
among this people and knew their sources of weakness, their internal
jealousies and rivalries, their incohesiveness.  When they hurled
themselves against Rome, it was as a mass of sharp fragments.  When the
Goths did the same, it was as one solid, indivisible body.  Cæsar saw
that by adroit management he could disintegrate this people, even while
conquering them.

By forcibly maintaining in power those who submitted to him, being by
turns gentle and severe, ingratiating here, terrifying there, he
established a tremendous personal force; and during nine years carried
on eight campaigns, marvels in the art of war, as well as in the
subtler methods of negotiation and intrigue.  He had successively dealt
with all the Gallic tribes, even including Great Britain, subjugating
either through their own rivalries, or by his invincible arm.

Equally able to charm and to terrify, he had all the gifts, all the
means to success and empire, that can be possessed by man.  Great in
politics as in war, as full of resource in the forum as on the
battle-field, he was by nature called to dominion.

It was not as a patriot, simply intent upon freeing Rome of an
harassing enemy, that he endured those nine years in Gaul--not as a
great leader burning with military ardor that he conducted those eight
campaigns.  The conquest of Gaul meant the greater conquest of Rome.
The one was accomplished; he now turned his back upon the devastated
country, and prepared to complete his great project of human ascendency.

Rome was mistress of the world; he--would be master of Rome.



CHAPTER III.

While the Star of Empire was thus moving toward the West, another and
brighter star was about to arise in the East.  So accustomed are we to
the story, that we lose all sense of wonder at its recital.

Julius Cæsar's brief triumph was over.  Marc Antony had recited his
virtues over his bier, Rome had wept, and then forgotten him in the
absorbing splendors of his nephew Augustus.  In an obscure village of
an obscure country in Asia Minor, the young wife of a peasant finds
shelter in a stable, and gives birth to a son, who is cradled in the
straw of a manger, from which the cattle are feeding.

Can the mind conceive of human circumstances more lowly?  The child
grew to manhood, and in his thirty-three years of life was never lifted
above the obscure sphere into which he was born; never spoke from the
vantage-ground of worldly elevation,--simply moving among people of his
own station in life, mechanics, fishermen, and peasants, he told of a
religion of love, a gospel of peace, for which he was willing to die.

Who would have dreamed that this was the germ of the most potent, the
most regenerative force the world had ever known?  That thrones,
empires, principalities, and powers would melt and crumble before his
name?  Of all miracles, is not this the greatest?

The passionate ardor with which this religion was propagated in the
first two centuries had no motive but the yearning to make others share
in its benefits and hopes; and to this end to accept the belief that
Jesus Christ had come in fulfilment of a long-promised Saviour,--who
should be sent to this world clothed with divine authority to establish
a spiritual kingdom, in which he was King of Kings, Lord of Lords,
Mediator between us and the Father, of whom he was the "only begotten
Son."

The religion in its essence was absolutely simple.  Its founder summed
it up in two sentences,--expressing the duty of man to man, and of man
to God.  That was all the Theology he formulated.

For two centuries the religion of Christ was an elementary spiritual
force.  It appealed only to the highest attributes and longings of the
human soul, and under its sustaining influence frail women, men, and
even children were able to endure tortures, of which we cannot read
even now without shuddering horror.


Nature's method of gardening is very beautiful.  She carefully guards
the seed until it is ripe, then she bursts the imprisoning walls and
gives it to the winds to distribute.  Precisely such method was used in
disseminating Christianity.  It was not for one people--it was for the
healing of the nations, and its home was wherever man abides.

Nearly five decades after Christ's death upon the cross, Jerusalem was
destroyed by Titus.  The home of Christianity was effaced.  At just the
right moment the enclosing walls had broken, and freed to the winds the
germs in all their primitive purity.

Imperial favor had not tarnished it, human ambitions had not employed
and degraded it, nor had it been made into complex system by ingenious
casuists.  The pure spiritual truth, unsullied as it came from the hand
of its founder, was scattered broadcast, as the band of Christians
dispersed throughout the Roman Empire, naturally forming into
communities here and there, which became the centres of Christian
propagandism.  Lyons in Gaul was such a centre.


The fires of persecution had been lighted here and there throughout the
Empire, and the Emperor Nero, under whom the Apostles Peter and Paul
are said to have suffered martyrdom, had amused himself by making
torches of the Christians at Rome.  But until 177 A.D. Gaul was exempt
from such horrors.

Marcus Aurelius--that peerless pagan,--large in intelligence, exalted
in character, and guided by a conscientious rectitude which has made
his name shine like a star in the lurid light of Roman history, still
failed utterly to comprehend the significance of this spiritual kingdom
established by Christ on earth.  He it was who ordered the first
persecution in Gaul.  In pursuance of his command, horrible tortures
were inflicted at Lyons upon those who would not abjure the new faith.

A letter, written by an eye-witness, pictures with terrible vividness
the scenes which followed.  Many cases are described with harrowing
detail, and of one Blandina it is said: "From morn till eve they put
her to all manner of torture, marvelling that she still lived with her
body pierced through and through and torn piecemeal by so many tortures
of which a single one should have sufficed to kill her, to which she
only replied, 'I am a Christian.'"

The recital goes on to tell how she was then cast into a dungeon,--her
feet compressed and dragged out to the utmost tension of the
muscles,--then left alone in darkness, until new methods of torture
could be devised.

Finally she was brought, with other Christians, into the amphitheatre,
hanging from a cross to which she was tied, and there thrown to the
beasts.  As the beasts refused to touch her she was taken back to the
dungeon to be reserved for another occasion, being brought out daily to
witness the fate and suffering of her friends and fellow-martyrs; still
answering the oft-repeated question--"I am a Christian."

The writer goes on to say, "After she had undergone fire, the talons of
beasts, and every agony which could be thought of, she was wrapped in a
network and thrown to a bull, who tossed her in the air"--and her
sufferings were ended.

Truly it cost something to say "I am a Christian" in those days.

Marcus Aurelius probably gave orders for the persecution at Lyons, with
little knowledge of what would be the nature of those persecutions, or
of the religion he was trying to exterminate.  Some of the hours spent
in writing introspective essays would have been well employed in
studying the period in which he lived, and the Empire he ruled.

Paganism and Druidism, those twin monsters, receded before the
advancing light of Christianity.  Neither contained anything which
could nourish the soul of man, and both had become simply badges of
nationality.

Druidism was the last stronghold of independent Gallic life.  It was a
mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of metempsychosis, coarse,
mystical, and cruel.  The Roman paganism which was superimposed by the
conquering race was the mere shell of a once vital religion.  Educated
men had long ceased to believe in the gods and divinities of Greece,
and it is said that the Roman augurs, while giving their solemn
prophetic utterances, could not look at each other without laughing.


In the year 312, alas for Christianity, it was espoused by imperial
power.  When the Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian,
there was no doubt rejoicing among the saints; but it was the beginning
of the degeneracy of the religion of Christ.  The faith of the humble
was to be raised to a throne; its lowly garb to be exchanged for purple
and scarlet, the gospel of peace to be enforced by the sword.

The Empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and
social conditions of modern times were forming.  Paganism and Druidism
would have been an impossibility.  Christianity even with its lustre
dimmed, its purity tarnished, its simplicity overlaid with
scholasticism, was better than these.  The miracle had been
accomplished.  The great Roman Empire had said: "I am Christian."



CHAPTER IV.

Gaul had been Latinized and Christianized.  Now one more thing was
needed to prepare her for a great future.  Her fibre was to be
toughened by the infusion of a stronger race.  Julius Cæsar had shaken
her into submission, and Rome had chastised her into decency of
behavior and speech, but as her manners improved her native vigor
declined.  She took kindly to Roman luxury and effeminacy, and could no
longer have thundered at the gates of her neighbors demanding "land."

But at last the great Roman Empire was dying, and even degenerate Gaul
was struggling out of her relaxing grasp.  In her extremity she called
upon the Franks, a powerful Germanic race, to aid her.  This people had
long looked with covetous eyes at the fair fields stretching beyond the
Rhine, and lost no time in accepting the invitation.  They overspread
the land, and Gaul and Roman alike were submerged beneath the Teuton
flood, while the Frankish Conqueror, Clovis (son of the great
Merovaæus), was at Paris (or "Lutetia") wearing the kingly crown.

Such was the beginning of independent and of dynastic life in France.

Rome had found a more powerful ally than she hoped; and the desire of
Gaul was accomplished in that she was free from Rome.  But the king of
whom she had dreamed was of her own race; not this terrible Frank.  Had
she exchanged one servitude for another?  Had she been, not set free,
but simply annexed to the realm of the Barbarian across the Rhine?  Let
us say rather that it was an espousal.  She had brought her dowry of
beauty and "land," that most coveted of possessions, and had pledged
obedience, for which she was to be cherished, honored, and protected,
and to bear the name of her lord.

      *      *      *      *      *

Ancient heroes are said to be seen through a shadowy lens, which
magnifies their stature.  Let us hope that the crimes of the three or
four generations immediately succeeding Clovis have been in like manner
expanded; for it is sickening to read of such monstrous prodigality of
wickedness.  Whole families butchered, husbands, wives,
children--anything obstructing the path to the throne--with an atrocity
which makes Richard III. seem a mere pigmy in the art of intrigue and
killing.  The chapter closes with the daughter and mother of kings
(Brunehilde or Brunhaut) naked and tied by one arm, one leg and her
hair to the tail of an unbroken horse, and amid jeers and shouts dashed
over the stones of Paris (600 A.D.).

But even the Frank succumbed to the enervating Gallic influence.  The
Merovingian line commenced by Clovis faded from ferocity into
imbecility.  Its Kings in less than two centuries had become mere
lay-figures, wearing the symbols of an authority which existed nowhere,
unless in the _Maire du Palais_.

This office from being a sort of royal stewardship had grown to be the
governing power _de facto_.  While Theodoric, the Phantom King, was
having his long locks dressed and perfumed, his _Maire du Palais_,
Charles, was moulding and welding his kingdom, and at the same time
staying the Mohammedan flood which was pouring over the Pyrenees; and,
by his final and decisive blow in defence of the Christianity espoused
by Clovis, earning the name _Charles Martel_ (the hammer).

      *      *      *      *      *

Less than one hundred years after the death of Clovis, there had come
out of Asia, that birthplace of religions, a new faith, which was
destined to be for centuries the scourge of Christendom, and which
to-day rules one-third of the human family.  Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ,
had successively come with saving message to humanity, and now (600
A.D.) Mohammed believed himself divinely appointed to drive out of
Arabia the idolatry of ancient Magianism (the religion of Zoroaster).

Christianity had passed through strange vicissitudes.  Kings, Emperors,
Popes, and Bishops had been terrible custodians of its truths, and
while many still held it in its primitive purity, ecclesiastics were
fiercely fighting over the nature of the Trinity, the divinity of the
Virgin Mother, and the Church was shaken to its foundation by furious
factions.

In this hour of weakness, the Persians (590 A.D.) had conquered Asia
Minor.  Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary were profaned; the Holy
Sepulchre had been burned, and the cross carried off amid shouts of
laughter.  Magianism had insulted Christianity, and no miracle had
interposed!  The heavens did not roll asunder, nor did the earth open
her abysses to swallow them up.  There was consternation and doubt in
Christendom.

Such was the state of the Church when Mohammedanism came into
existence.  "There is but one God, and Mohammed is his Prophet."  Such
was its battle-cry and its creed, and the moral precepts of the Koran
its gospel.  There seems nothing in this to account for the mad
enthusiasm and the passion for worship in its followers.  But in less
than a hundred years this lion out of Arabia had subjected Syria,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, Northern Africa, and the Spanish Peninsula.  Now,
sword in one hand, and the Koran in the other, the Mohammedan had
crossed the Pyrenees and was in Southern Gaul.

Under the strange magic of this faith, the largest religious empire the
world had known had sprung into existence, stretching from the Chinese
Wall to the Atlantic; from the Caspian to the Indian Ocean; and
Jerusalem, the metropolis of Christianity-Jerusalem, the Mecca of the
Christian, was lost!  The crescent floated over the birthplace of our
Lord, and notwithstanding the temporary successes of the Crusades, it
does to this day.

If the Pyrenees were passed, the very existence of Christendom was
threatened.  Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, averted
this danger when he stayed the infidel flood at the battle of Tours,
732 A.D.

Pepin, the son of Charles Martel, who succeeded him as _Maire du
Palais_, does not seem to have had the temper or spirit of an usurper,
but simply to have been an energetic, resolute man who was bored by the
circumlocution of governing through a King who did not exist.  He
determined to put an end to the fiction, and to cut the Gordian knot by
first cutting the long curls of the last Merovingian, Childeric; and
then putting the crown upon his own head, he sent the unfortunate
phantom of royalty to a monastery, to reflect upon the uncertainty of
human pleasures and events.  By right of manhood and superiority, the
Carlovingian line had succeeded to the Merovingian.

      *      *      *      *      *

Against the dark background of European history, and with the broad
level of obscurity stretching over the ages at its feet, there rises
one shining pinnacle.  Considered as man or sovereign, Charlemagne is
one of the most impressive figures in history.  His seven feet of
stature clad in shining steel, his masterful grasp of the forces of his
time, his splendid intelligence, instinct even then with the modern
spirit, all combine to elevate him in solitary grandeur.

Charlemagne found France in disorder measureless, and apparently
insurmountable.  Barbarian invasion without, and anarchy within; Saxon
paganism pressing in upon the North, and Asiatic Islamism upon the
South and West; a host of forces struggling for dominion in a nation
brutish, ignorant, and without cohesion.

It is the attribute of genius to discern opportunity where others see
nothing.  Charlemagne saw rising out of this chaos a great resuscitated
Roman empire, which should be at the same time a spiritual and
Christian empire as well.  Saxons, Slavs, Huns, Lombards, Arabs, came
under his compelling grasp; these antagonistic races all held together
by the force of one terrible will, in unnatural combination with
France.  No political liberties, no popular assemblies discussing
public measures; it is Charlemagne alone who fills the picture; it is
absolutism,--marked by prudence, ability, and grandeur, but still,
absolutism.

The Pope looked approvingly upon this son of the Church by whose order
4,500 pagan heads could be cut off in one day, and a whole army
compelled to baptism in an afternoon.  Here was a champion to be
propitiated!  Charlemagne, on the other hand, saw in the Church the
most compliant and effective means to empire.  In the loving alliance
formed, he was to be the protector, the Pope the protected.  He wore
the Church as a precious jewel in his crown.

It was a splendid dream, splendidly realized; the most imposing of
human successes, and the most impressive of human failures.  It seems
designed as a lesson for the human race in the transitory nature of
power applied from without.

The vast fabric passed with himself; was gone like a shadow when he was
gone.  The unity of the Empire was buried in the grave of its founder.
In twenty-nine years (by the treaty of Verdun) three kingdoms emerged
from the crumbling mass.  France, Italy, Germany, already separated by
race repulsions, had taken up each a distinct national existence, the
Imperial crown remaining with Germany.

And France--France, the centre of this dream of unity, with her native
incohesiveness, and in the irony of fate, had broken into no less than
59 fragments, loosely held together by one Carlovingian King.



CHAPTER V.

I think that it was Lincoln who said that "the Lord must like common
people, because he had made so many of them."  The path for the common
people in France at this time led through heavy shadows.  But a darker
time was approaching.  A system of oppression was maturing, which was
soon to envelop them in the obscurity of darkest night.

Those Scandinavian freebooters called Northmen, and later Normans, were
the scourge of the kingdom.  Nothing was safe from their insolent
courage and rapacity.

The rich could intrench themselves in stone fortresses, with moats and
drawbridges, and be in comparative security, but the poor were utterly
defenceless against this perennial destroyer.  The result was a compact
between the powerful and the weak, which was the beginning of the
Feudal System.  It was in effect an exchange of protection for service
and fealty.  You give us absolute control of your persons--your
military service when required, and a portion of your substance and the
fruit of your toil--and we will in exchange give you our fortified
castles as a refuge from the Northmen.  Such was the offer.  It was a
choice between vassalage, serfdom, or destruction outright.

Simple enough in its beginnings, this became a ramified system of
oppression, a curious network of authority, ingeniously controlling an
entire people.  The conditions upon which was engrafted this compact
were of great antiquity, had indeed been brought across the Rhine by
their German conquerors; but the Northmen were the impelling cause of
the swift development of feudalism in France.

Charlemagne had felt grave apprehensions of evil from these robber
incursions, but could not have conceived of a result such as this, the
most oppressive system ever fastened upon a nation, and one which would
at the same time sap the foundations of royalty itself.

The theory was that the King was absolute owner of all the territory;
the great lords holding their titles from him on condition of military
service, their vassals pledging military service and obedience to them
again on similar terms, and sub-vassals again to them repeating the
pledge; and so on in descending chain, until at last the serf, that
wretched being whom none looks up to nor fears, is ground to powder
beneath the superimposed mass.  No appeal from the authority, no escape
from the caprice or cruelty of his feudal lord.  Could any scales
weigh, could any words measure the suffering which must have been
endured?  Is it strange, with every aspiration thwarted, hope stifled,
that Europe sank into the long sleep of the Middle Ages?


It is easy to conceive that under such a system, where all the affairs
of the realm were adjusted by individual rulers with unlimited power,
and where the great barons could make war upon each other without
authorization from the King, that by the time this nominal head of the
entire system was reached, there was nothing for him to do.  In fact,
there was not left one vestige of kingly authority, and Carlovingian
rulers were almost as insignificant as their Merovingian predecessors.
France had, instead of one great sovereign, 150 petty ones!

      *      *      *      *      *

In 911 A.D. the Northmen were offered the province henceforth known as
Normandy, upon condition of their acceptance of the religion and
submission to the laws of the realm.  Rollo, the disreputable
robber-chief, took the oath of fealty to the King of France his
Suzerain, and Christian baptism transformed him into respectable,
law-abiding Robert, Duke of Normandy.

With marvellous facility this people took on the language and manners
of their neighbors, and in a century and a half were prepared to
instruct the Britons in a higher civilization.

I think it is one hundred years of respectability that is required by a
certain aristocratic club for admission to its membership.  The blood
does not acquire the proper shade of azure until it has flowed in the
full light of day for at least three generations.  Decidedly, William
the Conqueror, first Norman King of England, could not have been
admitted to this club.

A century before his birth, his ancestors had lived by looting their
neighbors.  They were highwaymen, robbers, by profession.  And, to
increase his ineligibility, his mother, a pretty Norman peasant girl,
daughter of a tanner, had ensnared the affections of that pleasant Duke
of Normandy, known as "Robert the Devil."

William, the fruit of this unconsecrated union, became in time Duke of
Normandy.  With that reversion to ancestral types to which scientists
tell us we are all liable, he seems to have looked across the Channel
toward England, with an awakening of his robber-instincts.  In a few
weeks, Harold, the last King of the Saxons, lay dead at his feet, and
William, Duke of Normandy, was William I., King of England.

Then was presented the curious anomaly of an English sovereign who was
also ruler of a French province; an English king who was vassal to the
King of France.  A door was thus opened (1066 A.D.) through which
entered entangling complications and countless woes in the future.

      *      *      *      *      *

If Charlemagne had worn the Church as a precious jewel in his crown in
the ninth century, the Church now in the eleventh century wore all the
European states, a tiara of jewels in her mitre.  The centre of
dominion had passed from the Empire of Germany to Rome, when Henry IV.
prostrated himself barefooted before Gregory VII. at Canossa in 1072.

The Church was at its zenith.  As a political system it was unrivalled;
but its triumphs brought little joy to the earnest souls still clinging
to the ideals of primitive Christianity.  But what availed it for
Abelard to lead an intellectual revolt against corrupted beliefs in the
North, or the Albigenses a spiritual one in the South?  He was silenced
and immured for life, while the unhappy inhabitants of Languedoc were
massacred and almost exterminated, and an inquisition, established at
Toulouse, made sure that heretical germs should not again spread from
that infected centre.

But however imperfect the religious sentiment of the time, however it
may have departed from the simple precepts of its founder, its power to
sway the hearts and lives of the people may be judged from the
extraordinary movement started in France in the twelfth century.

How inconceivable, in this practical age, that Europe should three
times have emptied her choicest and best into Asia for a sentiment!
Business suspended, private interests sacrificed or forgotten, life,
treasure, all eagerly given--for what?  That a small bit of territory,
a thousand miles away, be torn from profaning infidels, because of its
sacred associations, because it was the birthplace of a religion whose
meaning seems to have escaped them--a religion which they wore on their
battle-flags, but not in their hearts.  How would a barefooted,
rope-girdled monk, however inspired and eloquent, fare to-day in New
York, or London, or Paris?

History has no stranger chapter than that of the Crusades.  When Peter
the Hermit pictured the desecration of the Holy Land by Mohammedans,
all classes in France, from King to serf, were for the first time moved
by a common sentiment, and poured life and treasure with passionate
zeal into those streams which three times inundated Palestine.

The order of Knights Templar had been created, and a splendid ideal of
manhood held up before the French nation, and now the knightly ideal,
side by side with the Christian and the romantic ideal, entered into
the life of the people.  Romance, song, poetry, eloquence came into
being from a sort of spiritual baptism, and France began to wear the
mantle of beauty which was to be her chief glory in the future.

But future France was not clad in coat of mail in the twelfth century.
She was lying helpless, beneath the mass of feudal trappings.  Her time
was not yet.



CHAPTER VI.

Like all oppressive systems, feudalism bore within itself the seeds of
its own destruction.  When the King, shorn of prerogative and of
dignity, made alliance with the people lying in helpless misery beneath
the mailed surface, the system was rudely shaken.  When artisans
flocked to the free cities enjoying especial immunities and privileges
from the King, and by skill and industry amassed fortunes, the
_commune_ and the _bourgeoisie_ were created, and feudalism was
stricken to its centre.  When spendthrift nobles and needy barons
mortgaged their estates, the end was not far off.  And when in 1302 the
"_tiers état_" entered the States-General as a legitimate order of the
Government, the very foundations were crumbling, and it needed but the
final _coup de grâce_ given by Charles VII. in the fifteenth century,
when he established a standing army under the control of the King.
When this was done, the feudal system was relegated to the region of
the obsolete.

It was well for that sovereign that he could do something to save his
name from the obloquy attached to it on account of his base desertion
of Joan of Arc, to whom he owed his throne and his kingdom.

From the moment when a French province was attached to the crown of
England, the dream of that nation was the conquest of France.
Generations came and went, one dynasty replaced another, and still the
struggle continued; France sometimes seeming near to dominion over
England, and England always believing it was her destiny to bring
France under the rule of an English sovereign.

A glamour of romance is thrown over history by the royal marriages
which occur in dazzling profusion.  It seems to have been the custom,
whenever a peace was concluded in Europe, to cement it with a royal
marriage, and to throw in a princess as a sacrifice,--one of the
conditions of almost every treaty being that a royal daughter, or
sister, or niece, should be tossed across the Channel, or into Germany,
or Italy, or Spain, an unwilling bride thrown into the arms of a
reluctant bridegroom; with the result that in the succeeding generation
there was a plentiful sprinkling of heirs with claims, more or less
shadowy, to the neighboring thrones.  This was the source, or rather
pretext, for most of the wars between France and England for four
hundred years.

In the early part of the fifteenth century the great crisis arrived.
With that lack of unity which seemed a fatal Gallic inheritance, France
broke into civil war, while an invading English army was in the heart
of her kingdom.  England's dream was near realization.

An insane King, a vicious intriguing Queen-Regent, the Duke of Burgundy
madly jealous of the Duke of Orleans, and both ready to sacrifice
France in the rage of disappointed ambition,--such were the elements.
England's opportunity had come.

The depraved Queen Isabella, acting for her insane husband, held
conference with Henry V., and actually concluded a treaty bestowing the
regency upon the English King.  There was the usual douceur of a
princess thrown in, and Katharine, the daughter of Isabella, and sister
to the Dauphin (the future King Charles VII.), was espoused by King
Henry V. of England, who set up a royal court at Vincennes.

The fortunes of the kingdom had never been so desperate.  The people
saw in these insolent traitorous dukes their natural enemy; in the
King, their friend and protector.  Had not monarchy given them life and
hope?  It was to them sacred next to Heaven.  They rose in an outburst
of patriotism.  The young Dauphin was hastily and informally crowned,
and thousands flocked to his standard.  It was the King and the people
against the great vassals, the last struggle of an expiring feudalism.
Desperation lent fury to the conflict which was, upon both sides, a
fight for existence; the Queen-mother in unnatural alliance with the
Duke of Burgundy, who was resolved to rule or ruin.

He soon saw that defeat was inevitable, and, preferring infamy, threw
himself into the hands of the English, offering to turn the kingdom
over to the infant King Henry VI.  (Henry V. having died).

Charles abandoned hope; how could he struggle against such a
combination?  He was considering whether he should find refuge in Spain
or in Scotland, when the tide of events was turned by the strangest
romance in history.


It must ever remain a mystery that a peasant girl, a child in years and
in experience, should have believed herself called to such a mission;
conferring only with her heavenly guides or "voices," that she should
have sought the King, inspired him with faith in her, and in himself
and his cause, reanimated the courage of the army, and led it herself
to victory absolute and complete; and then, compelling the
half-reluctant, half-doubting Charles to go with her to Rheims, where
she had him anointed and consecrated, this simple child in that day
bestowed upon him a kingdom, and upon France a King!

Was there ever a stranger chapter in history!  Alas, if it could have
ended here, and she could have gone back to her mother and her spinning
and her simple pleasures, as she was always longing to do when her work
should be done.  But no! we see her falling into the hands of the
defeated and revengeful English--this child, who had wrested from them
a kingdom already in their grasp.  She was turned over to the French
ecclesiastical court to be tried.  A sorceress and a blasphemer they
pronounce her, and pass her on to the secular authorities, and her
sentence is--death.

We see the poor defenceless girl, bewildered, terrified, wringing her
hands and declaring her innocence as she rides to execution.  God and
man had abandoned her.  No heavenly voice spoke, no miracle intervened
as her young limbs were tied to the stake and the fagots and straw
piled up about her.  The torch was applied, and her pure soul mounted
heavenward in a column of flames.

Rugged men wept.  A Burgundian general said, as he turned gloomily
away, "We have murdered a saint."

And Charles, sitting upon the throne she had rescued for him, what was
he doing to save her?  Nothing--to his everlasting shame be it said,
nothing.  He might not have succeeded; the effort at rescue, or to stay
the event, might have been unavailing.  But where was his knighthood,
where his manhood, that he did not try, or utter passionate protest
against her fate?

Twenty-five years later we see him erecting statues to her memory, and
"rehabilitating" her desecrated name.  And to-day, the Church which
condemned her for blasphemy is placing her upon the calendar of saints,
while all political parties alike are using her name as a thing to
conjure with.



CHAPTER VII.

The early part of the sixteenth century must ever be memorable in the
history of Europe.  Ferdinand and Isabella had given to the human race
a new world.  Luther had hurled his defiance at Rome--had arraigned Leo
X. for blasphemy and corrupt practices.  Henry V., grandson of
Ferdinand and Isabella (and nephew of Katharine, wife of Henry VIII.)
was Emperor of Germany.  Astute and powerful though he was, he had been
unable to stay the Protestant flood.  His empire, apparently hungering
for the new heresy, was divided already into States Protestant and
States Catholic.  England was Protestant.  The conversion of her King,
because the Pope refused to annul his marriage with Katharine, was not
one of the proudest triumphs of the new faith, but one of the most
important.  Had Katharine's charms been fresher, or Anne Boleyn's less
alluring, the course of history might have been strangely changed.
Henry VIII. as persecutor of heretics would have found congenial
occupation for his ferocious instincts, and Protestantism would have
been long delayed.  Spain was unchangeably Catholic, while France
offered congenial soil for the new faith.  The germs of heresy, long
slumbering, were everywhere stirred into life.

Francis I. was King; sumptuous in tastes, suave and elegant in manners,
as handsome as an Apollo, gay, pleasure-loving, as vicious as he was
false, and if need be with a cruelty which matched his ambition, such
was the man who held the destinies of France at this time.

A rival claimant for the throne of Germany, he was destined to spend
his life in fruitless contest with the more able, wily, and astute
Henry V., the possession of that Empire the ignis-fatuus ever luring
him on; an end to which all other ends were simply the means.  The
religious question upon which Europe was divided meant nothing to him,
except as he could use it in his duel with the Emperor.  He was in turn
the ally of Henry VIII. or the willing tool of Henry V.  If he needed
the English King's friendship, the Protestants had protection.  If he
desired to placate Henry V., the roastings and torturings commenced
again.

In 1547 Francis and Henry VIII. each went to his reward, and a few
years later Henry V. had laid down his crown and carried his weary,
unsatisfied heart to St. Yuste.  The brilliant pageant was over; but
Protestantism was expanding.

The question at issue was deeper than any one knew.  Neither Luther nor
Leo X. understood the revolution they had precipitated.  Protestants
and Papists alike failed to comprehend the true nature of the struggle,
which was not for supremacy of Romanist or Protestant; not whether this
dogma or that was true, and should prevail; but an assertion of the
right of every human soul to choose its own faith and form of worship.
The great battle for human liberty had commenced; the struggle for
religious liberty was but the prelude to what was to follow.  There was
abundant proof later that Protestants no less than Papists needed only
opportunity and power to be as cruel and intolerant as their
persecutors had been.  Before the Reformation was fifty years old,
Servetus, one of the greatest men of his age, a scholar, philosopher,
and man of irreproachable character, was burned at Geneva for heretical
views concerning the nature of the Trinity, Calvin, the great organizer
of Protestant theology, giving, if not the order for this crime, at
least the nod of approval.

      *      *      *      *      *

Huguenot, that name of tragic association, was a corruption of the
German _Eidgenossen_--meaning associates.  By the way of Switzerland it
came into France as _Eguenots_, and the transition to its present form
was simple.  The Huguenots were no longer a timorous band hiding in
darkness as in the time of Francis I.  A party with such leaders as
Anthony de Bourbon, Prince of Condé (his brother), and Admiral Coligny,
was not to be put down by a few roastings and stranglings here and
there.  Anthony de Bourbon (King of Navarre) was next in succession
should the House of Valois become extinct, with a young son valiant as
himself (the future Henry IV.) pressing on toward manhood.

Catholic France needed plenty of comfort from Rome and Madrid in
dealing with this formidable body of heretics which had fastened upon
her vitals, and which was in turn receiving aid and comfort from the
young Protestant Queen across the Channel.


When that fair princess Catharine de Medici became the wife of Henry,
second son of Francis I., no one suspected the tremendous import of the
event.  Powerless to win the affection or even confidence of her
husband, she remained during his reign almost unobserved, but, as the
event proved, not unobservant.  Her alert faculties were not idle, and
when upon the death of Henry II. she found herself Queen-Regent, with
only a frail boy of sixteen to obstruct her will, she quickly gathered
the threads she already knew so well, and her supple hand closed upon
them with a grasp not to be relinquished while she lived.

Another young Princess had been tossed across the Channel.  This time
it was her most serene little highness, Marie Stuart, Queen of
Scotland, intended for the dauphin, who was to be Francis II.

In order to be prepared for this high destiny, the little maid was
brought when only six years old to the Court of France to be trained
under the direct supervision of her future mother-in-law, Catharine de
Medici.  Poor little Marie Stuart--predestined to sin and to tragedy!
Who could be good, with the blood of the Guises in her veins, and with
Catharine de Medici as preceptress?

This marriage was planned before Catharine's advent to power, or it
would never have been.  Marie was the niece of the Duke of Guise, and
the central thought of Catharine's policy was the exclusion of this
ambitious, intriguing family from every avenue to power in the state.
Now, Marie would be Queen, and who so natural advisers as her uncles of
the house of "Lorraine"?

The marriage of the two children had taken place--the sickly boy with
only a modest portion of intelligence was Francis II.  Marie, his
Queen, whom he adored, controlled him utterly, and was in turn
controlled by her uncles, the Guises.  The wily Catharine saw herself
defeated by a beautiful girl of sixteen.

The family of Guise was the self-appointed head of the Catholic party
in France and represented the most extreme views regarding the
treatment of heretics.  So the strange result was, that Catharine, if
she looked for any allies in her fight with the house of Lorraine, of
which the Duke of Guise was the head, must make common cause with the
Protestants, whom she hated a little less than she did the uncles of
Marie Stuart.  But events were soon to change the situation.  Did she
hasten them?  Such a suspicion may never have existed.  But may one not
suspect anything of a woman capable of a St. Bartholomew?

Francis II. was dead.  Marie Stuart had passed out of French history.
The fates were fighting on the side of Catharine, who wasted no regrets
upon the death of a son, which made her Queen-Regent during the
minority of her second son Charles.  She entered upon her fight with
the Guises with renewed energy, and became to some extent protector of
the Protestants.  Realizing that her time was brief, she prepared
Charles for the position he would soon hold.

What can be said of a mother who seeks to exterminate every germ of
truth or virtue in her son--who immerses him in degrading vices in
order to deaden his too sensitive conscience and make him a willing
tool for her purposes?  Inheriting the splendid intelligence as well as
genius for statecraft of the de Medici, nourished from her infancy upon
Machiavellian principles, cold and cruel by nature, this Florentine
woman has written her name in blood across the pages of French history.



CHAPTER VIII.

There is not time to tell the story of the events leading up to that
fateful night, August 24, 1572.  Impelled always by her fear and dread
of the Guises, Catharine had been vacillating in her policy with the
Huguenots.  Charles IX. was now King: impressible, easily influenced,
yet stubborn, intractable, incoherent, passionate, and unreliable;
sometimes inclining to the Guises, sometimes to Coligny and the
Huguenots, and always submitting at last after vain struggle to his
imperious mother's will, in her efforts to free him from both.  We see
in him a weak character, not naturally bad, torn to distraction by the
cruel forces about him, who when compelled to yield, as he always did
in the end, to that terrible woman, would give way to fits of impotent
rage against the fate which allowed him no peace.

A time arrived when Catharine feared the influence of the Protestant
Coligny more than the Guises.  Brave, patriotic, magnetic, he had
succeeded in winning Charles' consent to declare war against Spain.
Philip II. of Spain was Catharine's son-in-law and closest ally.  Her
entire policy would be undermined.  At all hazards Coligny must be
gotten rid of.  The young King of Navarre, adored leader of the
Protestants, was a constant menace; he too must in some way be disposed
of.

There were sinister conferences with Philip of Spain and with his
Minister, that incarnation of cruelty and of the Inquisition, the Duke
of Alva.

God knows France was not guiltless in what followed; but the
initiative, the inception of the horrid deed, was not French.  It was
conceived in the brain of either this Italian woman or her Spanish
adviser and co-conspirator, the Duke of Alva.  We will never know the
inside history of the massacre of St. Bartholomew.  It must ever remain
a matter of conjecture just how and when it was planned, but the
probabilities point strongly one way.

Charles was to be gradually prepared for it by his mother, the plot
revealed to him as he was in condition to bear it; by working upon his
fears, his suspicions, by stories of plottings against his life and his
kingdom, to infuriate him, and then--before his rage was exhausted--to
act.  The marriage of Charles' sister Margaret with the young
Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, with its promise of future
protection to the Huguenots, was part of the plot.  It would lure all
the leaders of the cause to Paris.  Coligny, Condé, all the heads of
the party were urgently invited to attend the marriage-feast which was
to inaugurate an era of peace.

Admiral Coligny was requested by Catharine, simply as a measure of
protection to the Protestants, to have an additional regiment of guards
in Paris, to act in case of any unforeseen violence.

Two days after the marriage and while the festivities were at their
height, an attempt upon the life of the old Admiral awoke suspicion and
alarm.  But Catharine and her son went immediately in person to see the
wounded old man, and to express their grief and horror at the event.
They commanded that a careful list of the names and abode of every
Protestant in Paris be made, in order, as they said, "to take them
under their own immediate protection."  "My dear father," said the
King, "the hurt is yours, the grief is mine."

At that moment, the knives were already sharpened, every man instructed
in his part in the hideous drama, and the signal for its commencement
determined upon.  Charles did not know it, but his mother did.  She
went to her son's room that night, artfully and eloquently pictured the
danger he was in, confessed to him that she had authorized the attempt
upon Coligny, but that it was done because of the Admiral's plottings
against him, which she had discovered.  But the Guises--her enemies and
his--they knew it, and would denounce her and the King!  The only thing
now is to finish the work.  He must die.

Charles was in frightful agitation and stubbornly refused.  Finally
with an air of offended dignity she bowed coldly and said to her son,
"Sir, will you permit me to withdraw with my daughter, from your
kingdom?"  The wretched Charles was conquered.  In a sort of insane
fury he exclaimed, "Well, let them kill him, and all the rest of the
Huguenots too.  See that not one remains to reproach me."

This was more than she had hoped.  All was easy now.  So eager was she
to give the order before a change of mood, that she flew herself to
give the signal, fully two hours earlier than was expected.  At
midnight the tocsin rang out upon the night, and the horror began.

Lulled to a feeling of security by artfully contrived circumstances,
husbands, wives, sons, daughters, peacefully sleeping, were awakened to
see each other hideously slaughtered.

The stars have looked down upon some terrible scenes in Paris, her
stones are not unacquainted with the taste of human blood, but never
had there been anything like this.  The carnage of battle is merciful
compared with it.  Shrieking women and children, half-clothed, fleeing
from knives already dripping with human blood; frantic mothers
shielding the bodies of their children, and wives pleading for the
lives of husbands; the living hiding beneath the bodies of the dead.

The cry that ascended to Heaven from Paris that night was the most
awful and despairing in the world's history.  It was centuries of
cruelty crowded into a few hours.

The number slain can never be accurately stated; but it was thousands.
Human blood is intoxicating.  An orgie set in which laughed at orders
to cease.  Seven days it continued and then died out for lack of
material.  The provinces had caught the contagion, and orders to slay
were received and obeyed in all except two, the Governor of Bayonne, to
his honor be it told, writing to the King in reply: "Your Majesty has
many faithful subjects in Bayonne, but not one executioner."

And where was "His Majesty" while this work was being done?  How was it
with Catharine?  She was possibly seeing to the embalming of Coligny's
head, which we learn she sent as a present to the Pope.  We hear of no
regrets, no misgivings, that she was calm, collected, suave and
unfathomable as ever, but that Charles in a strange, half-frenzied
state was amusing himself by firing from the windows of the palace at
the fleeing Huguenots.  Had he killed himself in remorse, would it not
have been better, instead of lingering two wretched years, a prey to
mental tortures and an inscrutable malady, before he died?

Europe was shocked.  Christendom averted her face in horror.  But at
Madrid and Rome there was satisfaction.

Catharine and the Duke of Alva had done their work skilfully, but the
result surprised and disappointed them.  Tens of thousands of Huguenots
were slain, which was well; but many times that number remained, with
spirit unbroken, which was not well.

They had been too merciful!  Why had Henry of Navarre been spared?  Had
not Alva said, "Take the big fish and let the small fry go.  One salmon
is worth more than a thousand frogs."

But Charles considered the matter settled when he uttered those
swelling words to Henry of Navarre the day after the massacre: "I mean
in future to have one religion in my kingdom.  It is mass or death."


Catharine's third son now wore the crown of France.  In Henry III. she
had as pliant an instrument for her will as in the two brothers
preceding him; and, like them, his reign was spent in alternating
conflict with the Protestants and the Duke de Guise.  At last, wearied
and exasperated, this half-Italian and altogether conscienceless King
quite naturally thought of the stiletto.  The old Duke, as he entered
the King's apartment by invitation, was stricken down by assassins
hidden for that purpose.

Henry had not counted on the rebound from that blow.  Catholic France
was excited to such popular fury against him that he threw himself into
the arms of the Protestants, imploring their aid in keeping his crown
and his kingdom; and when himself assassinated, a year later, in the
absence of a son he named Henry, King of Navarre, his successor.  A
Protestant and a Huguenot was King of France.



CHAPTER IX.

After long wandering in strange seas, we come in view of familiar
lights and headlands.  With the advent of the house of Bourbon, we have
grasped a thread which leads directly down to our own time.


The accession of a Protestant King was hailed with delirious joy by the
Huguenots, and with corresponding rage by Catholic France.  The one
looked forward to redressing of wrongs and avenging of injuries; and
the other flatly refused submission unless Henry should recant his
heresy, and become a convert to the true faith.

The new King saw there was no bed of roses preparing for him.  After
four years of effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, he decided upon
his course.  He was not called to the throne to rule over Protestant
France, nor to be an instrument of vengeance for the Huguenots.  He saw
that the highest good of the kingdom required, not that he should
impose upon it either form of belief or worship, but give equal
opportunity and privilege to both.

To the consternation of the Huguenots he announced himself ready to
listen to the arguments in favor of the religion of Rome; and it took
just five hours of deliberation to convince him of its truth.  He
announced himself ready to abjure his old faith.  Bitter reproaches on
the one side and rejoicings on the other greeted this decision.  It was
not heroic.  But many even among the Protestants acknowledged it to be
an act of supreme political wisdom.

Peace was restored, and the "Edict of Nantes," which quickly followed,
proved to his old friends, the Huguenots, that they were not forgotten.
The Protestants, with every disability removed, shared equal privileges
with the Catholics throughout the kingdom; and the first victory for
religious liberty was splendidly won.

An era of unexampled prosperity dawned.  Never had the kingdom been so
wisely and beneficently governed.  Sincerity, simplicity, and sympathy
had taken the place of dissimulation, craft, and cruelty.  Uplifting
agencies were everywhere at work, reaching even to the peasantry, that
forgotten element in the nation.

The reign of the Bourbon dynasty had opened auspiciously.  Henry IV.
was the idol of the people.  His loveless marriage with Margaret de
Valois had been annulled, and he had espoused Marie de Medici.  The
blood from that poisoned stream was again to be intermingled with the
blood of the future Kings of France.

After a reign of twenty-one years, the sagacious ruler who had done
more than any other to make her great and happy was stricken down by
the hand of an assassin, and a cry of grief arose alike from Catholic
and Protestant throughout the kingdom.


Poor France was again at the mercy of a woman with the corrupt
instincts of the de Medici.  The widow of Henry IV., who was Regent
during the infancy of her son Louis, was intriguing, vulgar, and
without the ability of the great Catharine.  The kingdom was rent by
cabals of aspiring favorites and ambitious nobles, until the reign of
Louis XIII., or rather of Cardinal Richelieu, began.

The foundations of this man's policy lay deep, out of sight of all save
his own far-reaching intelligence.  Pitiless as an iceberg, he crushed
every obstacle to his purpose.  Impartial as fate, with no loves, no
hatreds, Catholics, Protestants, nobles, Parliaments, one after another
were borne down before his determination to make the King, what he had
not been since Charlemagne, supreme in France.

The will of the great minister mowed down like a scythe.  The power of
the grandees, that last remnant of feudalism, and a perpetual menace to
monarchy, was swept away.  One great noble after another was humiliated
and shorn of his privileges, if not of his head.

The Huguenots, being first shaken into submission, saw their political
liberties torn from them by the stroke of a pen, and even while the
Catholics were making merry over this discomfiture, the minister was
planning to send Henrietta, sister of the King, across the Channel to
become Queen of Protestant England, as wife of Charles I.  But the act
of supreme audacity was to come.  This high prelate of the church, this
cardinal minister, formed alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, the great
leader of the Protestants in the war upon the Emperor and the Pope!

He allowed no religion, no class, to sway or to hold him.  He was for
France; and her greatness and glory augmented under his ruthless
dominion.  By his extraordinary genius he made the reign of a
commonplace King one of dazzling splendor; and while gratifying his own
colossal ambition he so strengthened the foundations of the monarchy
that princes of the blood themselves could not shake it.

It was great--it was dazzling, but of all his work there is but one
thing which revolutions and time have not swept away.  The "French
Academy" alone survives as his monument.  Out of a gathering of
literary friends he created a national institution, its object the
establishing a court of last appeal in all that makes for eloquence in
speaking or writing the French language.  In a country where nothing
endures, this has remained unchanged for two hundred and thirty years.

But this master of statecraft, this creator of despotic monarchy, had
one unsatisfied ambition.  He would have exchanged all his honors for
the ability to write one play like those of Corneille.  Hungering for
literary distinction, he could not have gotten into his own Academy had
he not created it.  And jealous of his laurels, he hated Corneille as
much as he did the enemies of France.



CHAPTER X.

Again do we recognize the fine Italian hand in French politics.
Cardinal Mazarin was Minister during the regency of Anne of Austria,
directing and controlling the affairs of the Kingdom, less intent upon
the greatness of France than the greatness and magnificence of her
Prime Minister.  At last the wily Italian was gone, and Louis XIV.
settled himself upon the throne which Richelieu had rendered so exalted
and immovable.

Cardinal Mazarin had said of the young Louis that "there was enough in
him to make four Kings, and one honest man."  His greatness consisted
more in amplitude than in kind.  Nature made him in prodigal mood.  He
was an average man of colossal proportions.  His ability, courage,
dignity, industry, greed for power and possessions, were all on a
magnificent scale, and so were his vanity, his loves, his cruelties,
his pleasures, his triumphs, and his disappointments.

No King more wickedly oppressed France, and none made her more
glorious.  He made her feared abroad and magnificent at home, but he
desolated her, and drained her resources with ambitious wars.  He
crowned her with imperishable laurels in literature, art, and every
manifestation of genius, but he signed the "Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes," and drove out of his kingdom 500,000 of the best of his
subjects.

If the names of Marlborough and Maintenon could have been stricken out
of his life, the story might have had a different ending.  From the
moment the great Duke checked his victorious army, his sun began to go
down; but it was Maintenon who most obscured its setting.

His unloved Queen, the Spanish Marie Therese, had borne his mad
infatuation for Louise la Vallière; la Vallière had carried her broken
heart to a convent, and been superseded by de Montespan, and de
Montespan had invited her own destruction by bringing into her
household the pious widow of the poet Scarron, Madame de Maintenon,
(grand-daughter of d'Aubigne, the historian of the Reformation).
Grave, austere, ambitious, talented, she was not too much engrossed in
her duties as governess of de Montespan's children to find ways of
establishing an influence over the King.

This man who had absorbed into himself all the functions of the
Government, who was Ministers, Magistrates, Parliaments, all in one,
this central sun of whom Corneille, Molière, Racine were but single
rays, was destined to be enslaved in his old age by a designing
adventuress; her will his law.  The hey-day of youth having passed, he
was beginning to be anxious about his soul.  She artfully pricked his
conscience, and de Montespan was sent away, but de Maintenon remained.

She next convinced him that the only fitting atonement for his sins was
to drive heresy out of his kingdom, and re-establish the true faith.
At her bidding he undid the glorious work of Henry IV., signed the
"Revocation of the Edict of Nantes," and brutally stamped out
Protestantism.

A part of the scheme of penitence seems to have been that on the death
of poor Marie Therese, he should make her (de Maintenon) his lawful
wife, which he did privately; and his sun went down obscured by
crushing griefs and disappointments.  His children swept away, the
prestige of success tarnished, this demigod was taken to pieces by
time's destroying fingers, quite as unceremoniously as are the rest of
us, hiding finally behind the bed-curtains while a kneeling courtier
passed to him his wig on the end of a stick, and at last lying down
like any other old dying sinner, overwhelmed with the vanity of earthly
things and with the vastness of eternity.

Still more would the dying moments of the Grand Monarque have been
embittered could he have foreseen into what hands his great inheritance
was passing.


Upon Louis XV. more than any other rests the responsibility of the
crisis which was approaching.

A heartless sybarite, depraved in tastes, without sense of
responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary
governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national
poverty, indulging in wildest extravagance,--such was the man in whom
was vested the authority rendered so absolute by Richelieu,--such the
man who opened up a pathway for the storm.

As for the nobility, their degradation may be imagined when it is said
there was as bitter rivalry between titled and illustrious fathers to
secure for their daughters the coveted position held by Madame de
Pompadour, as for the highest offices of State.

Could the upper ranks fall lower than this?  Had not the kingdom
reached its lowest depths, where its foreign policy was determined by
the amount of consideration shown to Madame de Pompadour?  But this
woman, whose friendship was artfully sought by the great Empress Maria
Theresa, was superseded, and the fresher charms of Madame du Barri
enslaved the King.  The deposed favorite could not survive her fall,
and died of a broken heart.  It is said that as Louis, looking from an
upper window of his palace, saw the coffin borne out in a drenching
rain, he smiled and said: "Ah, the Marquise has a bad day for her
journey."  It may be imagined that the man who could be so pitiless to
the woman he had loved would feel little pity for the people whom he
had not loved, but whom he knew only as a remote, obscure something,
which held up the weight of his glory.

But this "obscure something" was undergoing strange transformation.
The greater light at the surface had sent some glimmering rays down
into the mass below, which began to awaken and to think.  Misery,
hopeless and abject, was changing into rage and thirst for vengeance.

A new class had come into existence which was not noble, but with
highly trained intelligence it looked with contempt and loathing upon
the frivolous, half-educated nobles.  Scorn was added to the ferment of
human passions beneath the surface, and when Voltaire had spoken, and
the restraints of religion were loosened, no living hand, not that of a
Richelieu nor a Louis XIV., could have averted the coming doom.
But--no one seems to have suspected what was approaching.

A wonderful literature had come into existence--not stately and classic
as in the age preceding,--but instinct with a new sort of life.  The
highest speculations which can occupy the soul of man were handled with
marvellous lightness of touch and prismatic brilliancy of expression;
but all was negation.  None tried to build; all to demolish.  The
black-winged angel of Destruction was hovering over the land.

Then Rousseau tossed his dreamy abstractions into the quivering air,
and the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality," was caught up by
the titled aristocracy as a charming idyllic toy, while Princes, Dukes,
and Marquises amused themselves with a dream of Arcadian simplicity, to
be attained in some indefinite way in some remote and equally
indefinite future.  It was all a masquerade.  No reality, no sincerity,
no convictions, good or evil.  The only thing that was real was that an
over-taxed, impoverished people was exasperated and--hungry.

Did the King need new supplies for his unimaginable luxuries, they were
taxed.  Was it necessary to have new accessions to French "glory," in
order to allay popular clamor or discontent, they must supply the men
to fight the glorious battles, and the means with which to pay them.
Every burden fell at last upon this lowest stratum of the State, the
nobility and clergy, while owning two-thirds of the land, being nearly
exempt from taxation.

And yet the King and nobility of France, in love with Rousseau's
theories, were airily discussing the "rights of man."  Wolves and foxes
coming together to talk over the sacredness of the rights of
property--or the occupants of murderers' row growing eloquent over the
sanctity of human life!  How incomprehensible that among those
quick-witted Frenchmen there seems not one to have realized that the
logical sequence of the formula, "Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,"
must be, "Down with the Aristocrats!"

And so the surface which Richelieu had converted into adamant grew
thinner and thinner each day, until King and Court danced upon a mere
gilded crust, unconscious of the abysmal fires beneath.  Some of those
powdered heads fell into the executioner's basket twenty-five years
later.  Did they recall this time?  Did Madame du Barri think of it,
did she exult at her triumph over de Pompadour, when she was dragged
shrieking and struggling to the guillotine?


And while France was thus weaving her future, what were the other
nations doing?  England, sane, practical, with little time for
abstractions, and little said about "glory," was importing turnips,
converting agriculture into a science, and under the instruction of
exiled Huguenots, establishing marvellous industries.  In the new
kingdom of Prussia, a half-savage, half-inspired King had been
importing artisans and skill of all sorts, reclaiming waste lands.
Living like a miser, he had indulged in but one luxury: an army, which
should be the best in the world.  There was no powder, no patches at
his Court; where he thrashed with his own royal hands male and female
courtiers, starved, imprisoned, and cudgelled his son and heir to his
throne for playing on the violin; and, it is said, so terrified and
scarified his grenadiers with canes and cats that not one of them would
not have preferred facing the enemy to meeting his enraged sovereign,
had he done wrong.

Frederick was not a pleasant barbarian.  But there is at least a ring
of sincerity about all this, which it is refreshing to recall after the
tinsel and depraved refinements of France under Louis XV., and
something too which gives promise, in spite of its brutality, of a
stalwart future.

Five years before the close of this miserable reign, an event occurred
seemingly of small importance to Europe.  A child was born in an
obscure Italian household.  His name was Napoleon Bonaparte.



CHAPTER XI.

Louis XV. was dead, and two children, with the light-heartedness of
youth and inexperience, stepped upon the throne which was to be a
scaffold--Louis XVI., only twenty, and Marie Antoinette, his wife,
nineteen.  He, amiable, kind, full of generous intentions; she,
beautiful, simple, child-like and lovely.  Instead of a debauched old
King with depraved surroundings, here were a Prince and Princess out of
a fairy-tale.  The air was filled with indefinite promise of a new era
for mankind to be inaugurated by this amiable young king, whose
kindness of heart shone forth in his first speech, "We will have no
more loans, no credit, no fresh burdens on the people;" then, leaving
his ministers to devise ways of paying the enormous salaries of
officials out of an empty treasury, and to arrange the financial
details of his benevolent scheme of government, he proceeded with his
gay and brilliant young wife to Rheims, there to be crowned with a
magnificence undreamed of by Louis XIV.

In the midst of these rejoicings over the new reign, and of speculative
dreams of universal freedom, there was wafted across the Atlantic news
of a handful of patriots arrayed against the tyranny of the British
Crown.  Here were the theories of the new philosophy translated into
the reality of actual experience.  "No taxation without
representation," "No privileged class," "No government without the
consent of the governed."  Was this not an embodiment of their dreams?
Nor did it detract from the interest in the conflict that
England--England, the hated rival of France, was defied by an indignant
people of her own race.  There was not a young noble in the land who
would not have rushed if he could to the defence of the outraged
colonies.

The King, half doubting, and vaguely fearing, was swept into the
current, and the armies and the courage of the Americans were
splendidly reinforced by generous, enthusiastic France.

Why should the simple-hearted Louis see what no one else seemed to see:
that victory or failure were alike full of peril for France?  If the
colonies were conquered, France would feel the vengeance of England; if
they were freed and self-governing, the principle of Monarchy had a
staggering blow.

In the mean time, as the American Revolution moved on toward success,
there was talk in the cabin as well as the _château_ of the "rights of
man."  In shops and barns, as well as in clubs and drawing-rooms, there
was a glimmering of the coming day.

"What is true upon one continent is true upon another," say they.  "If
it is cowardly to submit to tyranny in America, what is it in France?"
"If Englishmen may revolt against oppression, why may not Frenchmen?"
"No government without the consent of the governed, eh?  When has our
consent been asked, the consent of twenty-five million people?  Are we
sheep, that we have let a few thousands govern us for a thousand years,
_without_ our consent?"

Poverty and hunger gave force and urgency to these questions.  The
people began to clamor more boldly for the good time which had been
promised by the kind-hearted King.  The murmur swelled to an ominous
roar.  Thousands were at his very palace gates, telling him in no
unmistakable terms that they were tired of smooth words and fair
promises.  What they wanted was a new constitution and--bread.

Poor Louis! the one could be made with pen and paper; but by what
miracle could he produce the other?  How gladly would he have given
them anything.  But what could he do?  There was not enough money to
pay the salaries of his officials, nor for his gay young Queen's fêtes
and balls!  The old way would have been to impose new taxes.  But how
could he tax a people crying at his gates for bread?  He made more
promises which he could not keep; yielded, one after another,
concessions of authority and dignity; then vacillated, and tried to
return over the slippery path, only to be dragged on again by an
irresistible fate.

When Louis XVI. convoked the States-General, he made his last
concession to the demands of his subjects.

That almost-forgotten body had not been seen since Richelieu effaced
all the auxiliary functions of government.  Nobles, ecclesiastics, and
_tiers état_ (or commons) found themselves face to face once more.  The
handsome contemptuous nobles, the princely ecclesiastics were
unchanged--but there was a new expression in the pale faces of the
commons.  There was a look of calm defiance as they met the disdainful
gaze of the aristocrats across the gulf of two centuries.

The two superior bodies absolutely refused to sit in the same room with
the commons.  They might under the same roof, but in the same
room--never.

No outburst met this insult.  With marvellous self-control and dignity,
and with an ominous calm, the commons constituted themselves into the
"National Assembly."

Aristocratic France had committed its concluding act of arrogance and
folly.  And when poor distracted Louis gave impotent order for the
Assembly to disperse, he committed suicide.  Louis the man lived on to
be slain by the people three years later, but Louis the King died at
that moment.

When the Assembly defied his authority and continued to solemnly act as
if he had not spoken, the power had passed to the people.  They were
sovereign.

Paris was in wild excitement; and a rumor that troops were marching
upon the Assembly to disperse it converted excitement into madness.
The populace marched toward the Bastille, and in another hour the heads
of the Governor and his officials were being carried on pikes through
the streets of Paris.

The horrible drama had opened, and events developed with the swiftness
of a falling avalanche.  Louis might have followed his fleeing nobles.
But always vacillating, and "letting I dare not wait upon I would," the
opportunity was lost.  He and his family were prisoners in the
"Temple," while an awful travesty upon a court of justice was sending
out death-warrants for his friends and adherents faster than the
guillotine could devour them.

More and more furious swept the torrent, gathering to itself all that
was vile and outcast.  Where were the pale-faced, determined patriots
who sat in the "National Assembly"?  Some of them riding with Dukes and
Marquises to the guillotine.  Was this the equality they expected when
they cried "Down with the Aristocrats"?

Did they think they could guide the whirlwind after raising it?  As
well whisper to the cyclone to level only the tall trees, or to the
conflagration to burn only the temples and palaces.

With restraining agencies removed, religion, government, King, all
swept away, that hideous brood born of vice, poverty, hatred, and
despair came out from dark hiding-places; and what had commenced as a
patriotic revolt had become a wild orgie of bloodthirsty demons, led by
three master-demons, Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, vying with each
other in ferocity.

Then we see that simple girl thinking by one supreme act of heroism and
sacrifice, like Joan of Arc, to save her country.  Foolish child!  Did
she think to slay the monster devouring Paris by cutting off one of his
heads?  The death of Marat only added to the fury of the tempest; and
the falling of Charlotte Corday's head was not more noticed than the
falling of a leaf in the forest.

On the 21st of January, 1793, Louis XVI. embraced for the last time his
adored wife and children; then, with every possible indignity, was
strapped to a plank and shoved under the guillotine.

The kindest-hearted, most inoffensive gentleman in Europe had expiated
the crimes of his ancestors.

A few months later, Marie Antoinette, daughter of the proud Empress
Maria Theresa, and child of the Cæsars, was borne along the same road.
And how bravely she met her awful fate!  We forget her follies, her
reckless grasping after pleasures, in view of her horrible sufferings
and in admiration of her courage as she rides to her death; sitting in
that hideous tumbril, head erect, pale, proud, defiant, as if upon a
throne.

With the death of the King and Queen the madness had reached its
height, and a revulsion of feeling set in.  There was a surfeit of
blood, and an awakening sense of horror, which turned upon the
instigators.  Danton fell, and finally, when amid cries of "Death to
the tyrant!" Robespierre was dragged wounded and shivering to the fate
he had brought upon so many thousands, the drama which had opened at
the Bastille was fittingly closed.

The great battle for human liberty had been fought and won.  Religious
freedom and political freedom were identical in principle.  The right
of the human conscience proclaimed by Luther in 1517 had in 1793 only
expanded into the large conception of all the inherent rights of the
_individual_.

It had taken centuries for English persistence to accomplish what
France, with such appalling violence, had done in as many years.  It
had been a furious outburst of pent-up force; but the work had been
thorough.  Not a germ of tyranny remained.  The incrustations of a
thousand years were not alone broken, but pulverized; the privileged
classes were swept away, and their vast estates, two-thirds of the
territory of France, ready to be distributed among the rightful owners
of the soil, those who by toil and industry could win them.  France was
as new as if she had no history.  There was ample opportunity for her
people now.  What would they do with it?



CHAPTER XII.

It is strange to read that the armies went on fighting battles
automatically, even while there was no central head to direct them.
While the ghastly scenes were enacting in Paris, and while Josephine de
Beauharnais was at the Conciergerie listening with blanched face to the
call of her husband's name on the death roll for the day, a young
lieutenant of artillery, only twenty-four years old, was at Toulon,
winning his first military honors.  He would have been thought a
strange prophet who had said that in less than ten years the young
Corsican lieutenant would be Emperor, and the prisoner at the
Conciergerie Empress of the French!  Nor did M. de Beauharnais, as he
rode to execution, dream that forty-five years later his grandson would
over the same stones be borne to his coronation.

In the anarchy which prevailed after the Revolution, the young hero of
Toulon was called upon to quell a riot in Paris.  The people realized
they had met a master.  For twenty-five years from that day, the
history of France, and indeed of Europe, was that of one man, Napoleon
Bonaparte.  Commander-in-chief of the Army, then First Consul of the
Republic, then Emperor--the steps in his ascent were as rapid and as
bewildering as the movements in one of his own campaigns.  France,
groping about helplessly among the wreckage of the past, believed what
she most desired was _liberty_ and _self-government_.

This Italian, who was a French citizen even only by merest accident,
knew her better than she did herself, and that what she really wanted
was a fresh mantle of glory to cover her humiliation, and--a master.

Leading a broken, unpaid, half-clothed army into Italy, he electrified
France and all Europe.  Before the world had really found out who he
was, and whence he had come, he had conquered all of Northern Italy,
part of Austria and Belgium, had created a Cisalpine Republic out of
the fragments, and was making treaties and dictating terms to kings and
princes.

France, discredited and almost disgraced among the monarchies of
Europe, found herself suddenly feared and glorious.  Napoleon had
captured the most imaginative and military people in Europe.  The rest
of the way was easy.  Prudent, discreet, knowing when to wait, and when
to come down like an avalanche, this marvellous man held France in his
hands, and placed Europe under his feet.

The people which had exerted such superhuman effort for freedom were
held by a hand more despotic than Richelieu's, more destructive to
popular freedom than that of Louis XIV.; and the more absolute his
rule, the more overpowering his authority, the better pleased they
seemed to be.

But, was there not equal opportunity for every man in the Empire?
Every soldier's knapsack, might it not hold a Marshal's baton?  Was not
the Emperor himself a living illustration of what a man from the people
might become?  And then what did it mean to Frenchmen to be suddenly
lifted to dazzling ascendancy in Europe?  Who would not willingly serve
a master who could bring Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanoff, Bourbon,
crouching at his feet--who could tear down states, and set them up, and
if an extra throne were needed for a retainer, could carve a new state
from territory of friend and foe alike, and place a diadem upon every
head in his domestic or military household?  It was the most stupendous
display of personal power ever beheld, England alone standing upright
in his presence, and in the end accomplishing his ruin.

When Austria with a reluctant shudder bestowed her princess upon the
invincible parvenu, and when France with regretful pity saw the adored
Josephine set aside for that disdainful royal maiden, Marie Louise, at
that moment Napoleon passed the meridian of his greatness.

It had taken just fifteen years to make the most astonishing and
dazzling chapter in French history; and then came "Moscow" and "Elba,"
to be quickly followed by "Waterloo" and "St. Helena."  And then for
France--most incomprehensible of all--a return to the Bourbons!  It had
required the greatest tragedy of modern times to get rid of them, and
here they were again, Louis XVIII. and Charles X., as overbearing and
as arrogant as if their brother's head had not dropped into a basket in
1793.  When somebody said of the Bourbons "they learn nothing and
forget nothing," he was inaccurate.  They had certainly forgotten the
French Revolution.

But death removed the first, and popular sentiment the second, of these
relics of an obsolete past.  And a new experiment was tried.  This time
it was the son of _Philippe Egalité_, that wickedest of all the
regicides, who came smiling and bowing before the people as a popular
sovereign, who would beneficently rule under a liberal constitution.
Whatever his father had been, Louis Philippe was far from being a
wicked man.  Whether teaching school in Switzerland, or giving French
lessons in America, or wearing the kingly crown in France, he was the
kindest hearted, most inoffensive of gentlemen.


When in the pre-revolutionary days we read of France making war, it
means that the King, or his minister, with more or less deference to
the will of a few thousand nobles, did so.  They are the France
referred to.  The real France was not consulted and had nothing to do
with it, unless it were to fill the ranks with fathers, sons, and
husbands, and then pay the taxes imposed to support them.  But times
were changed.  Under a constitutional monarchy, the King does not
govern; he reigns.  Louis Philippe was King of the French,--not of
France.  He was chosen by the people as their ornamental figurehead.
But what if he ceased to be ornamental?  What was the use of a King who
in eighteen years had added not a single ray of glory to the national
name, but who was using his high position to increase his enormous
private fortune, and incessantly begging an impoverished country for
benefits and emoluments for five sons?

An excellent father, truly, though a short-sighted one.  His power had
no roots.  The cutting from the Orleans tree had never taken hold upon
the soil, and toppled over at the sound of Lamartine's voice
proclaiming a Republic from the balcony of the "Hôtel de Ville."

When invited to step down from his royal throne, he did so on the
instant.  Never did King succumb with such alacrity, and never did
retiring royalty look less imposing, than when Louis Philippe was in
hiding at Havre under the name of "William Smith," waiting for safe
convoy to England, without having struck one blow in defence of his
throne.

But three terrible words had floated into the open windows of the
Tuileries.  With the echoes of 1792 still sounding in his ears,
"Liberty," "Fraternity," and "Equality," shouted in the streets of
Paris, had not a pleasant sound!


Republicanism was an abiding sentiment in France, even while two dull
Bourbon Kings were stupidly trying to turn back the hands on the dial
of time, and while an Orleans, with more supple neck, was posing as a
popular sovereign.  During all this tiresome interlude, the real fact
was developing.  A Republican sentiment which had existed vaguely in
the air was materializing, consolidating, into a more and more tangible
reality in the minds of thinking men and patriots.

The ablest men in the country stood with plans matured, ready to meet
this crisis.  A Republic was proclaimed; M. de Lamartine, Ledru-Rollin,
General Cavaignac, M. Raspail, and Louis Napoleon were rival candidates
for the office of President.

The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and son of Hortense, was only known
as the perpetrator of two very absurd attempts to overthrow the
monarchy under Louis Philippe.  But since the remains of the great
Emperor had been returned to France by England, and the splendors of
the past placed in striking contrast with a dull, lustreless present,
there had been a revival of Napoleonic memories and enthusiasm.  Here
was an opportunity to unite two powerful sentiments in one man--a
Napoleon at the head of Republican France would express the glory of
the past and the hope of the future.

The magic of the name was irresistible.  Louis Napoleon was elected
President of the second Republic, and history prepared to repeat
itself.  What sort of a ruler would he be--this dark, mysterious,
unmagnetic man?  Even should he not turn out well, no great harm could
be done.  It was only for four years.  His hand had not the steely
fineness of touch of his great uncle's, but it was strong, and guided,
they soon found, by a subtle intelligence.

The overthrow of Monarchy in France had set fire to Republicanism in
Europe, Kossuth with transcendent eloquence leading a revolution in
Hungary, and Garibaldi and Mazzini with pen and sword in Italy.  Europe
was in a blaze of revolt.  The first great military exploit of Napoleon
Bonaparte had been in Italy, and so was his nephew's, but with this
difference--the object of the one was to build up Republics on the
other side of the Alps, and of the other to pull them down.  Garibaldi
and Mazzini were driven out of Italy by French bayonets, which also
propped up the pontifical throne for the fugitive Pope.

The Assembly soon realized that in this Prince-President it had no
automaton to deal with.  A deep antagonism grew, and the cunningly
devised issue could not fail to secure popular support to Louis
Napoleon.  When an Assembly is at war with the President because it
desires to restrict the suffrage, and he to make it universal, can any
one doubt the result?  He was safe in appealing to the people on such
an issue, and sure of being sustained in his Proclamation dissolving
the Assembly.  He was gathering the reins into his hands with the
astute courage of his uncle.  Moving on almost identical lines with his
great original, the nephew set his face toward the same goal.

The French people must have realized they were being betrayed.  They
must have seen that this ambitious plotter was slipping the old fetters
of arbitrary power into position.  But, under the powerful spell of the
Napoleonic name, lulled to tranquillity by the gift of suffrage, and
fascinated by the growing splendors of an ingenious reproduction of the
most brilliant chapter in French history, they were unresistingly drawn
into the Imperial net.

France was for the second time an Empire, and Napoleon III. was Emperor
of the French.

His Mephistophelian face did not look as classic under the laurel
wreath as had his uncle's, nor had his work the blinding splendor nor
the fineness of texture of his great model.  But then, an imitation
never has.  It was a marble masterpiece, done in plaster!  But what a
clever reproduction it was!  And how, by sheer audacity, it compelled
recognition and homage, and at last even adulation in Europe!--and what
a clever stroke it was, for this heavy, unsympathetic man to bring up
to his throne from the people a radiant Empress, who would capture
romantic and æsthetic France!

The distance was great from cheap lodgings in New York to a seat upon
the Imperial throne of France; but human ambition is not easily
satisfied.  A Pelion always rises beyond an Ossa.  It was not enough to
feel that he had re-established the prosperity and prestige of France,
that fresh glory had been added to the Napoleonic name.  Was there not
after all a certain irritating reserve in the homage paid him, was
there not a touch of condescension in the friendship of his royal
neighbors?  And had he not always a Mordecai at his gate--while the
"_Faubourg St. Germain_" stood aloof and disdainful, smiling at his
brand-new aristocracy?

War is the thing to give solidity to empire and to reputation!  Neither
France nor Europe can withstand the magic of military renown.  And so,
upon a quickly improvised pretext, the French Emperor started, amid the
booming of cannon and the wild acclamations of a delighted people, upon
his errand of conquest.  The insolent Germans were to be chastised;
and, incidentally, Europe was to be made to tremble!

In a few months the bubble was pricked.  The glittering French army
proved to be a thing of tinsel and fustian.  No reality, no power to
stand before the solid German battalions, it melted like hoar-frost.
Napoleon III. was prisoner of war at Sedan, and King William, Unser
Fritz, and Von Moltke were at Versailles.

Moved by his colossal misfortunes, and perhaps partly in displeasure at
having a French Republic once more at her door, England offered asylum
to the deposed Emperor.  There, from the seclusion of "Chiselhurst," he
and his still beautiful Eugenie watched the Republic weathering the
first days of storm and stress, and coming out at last stable and
triumphant.

The weary exile felt that not in his day would the reaction come.  But
his son would yet wear the Imperial crown which was his birthright.
Futile dream!  The boy was destined to cruel fate--to be slain by Zulu
assegai, while fighting the battles of England,--England, the author of
_Waterloo_.  Strange ending for the heir to the name and glory of
Napoleon Bonaparte.

But the reaction Louis Napoleon so confidently hoped for did not come.
With military pride humbled in the dust, national pride wounded by the
loss of two provinces, loaded down with an immense war indemnity, the
people set about the task of rehabilitation; in an incredibly short
time, the galling debt was paid, financial prosperity and political
strength restored, and with military organization second to none in
Europe, France, with revengeful eyes fastened on Germany, waits for the
day of reckoning.

For twenty-four years the Republic has existed.  Communistic fires
always smouldering have again and again burst forth--demagogues,
fanatics, and those creatures for whom there is no place in organized
society, whose element is chaos, standing ready to fan the fires of
revolt; while Orleanist, Bonapartist, Bourbon, are ever on the alert,
watching for opportunity to slip in through the open door of Revolution.

England in conscious superiority smiles at a nation which has had seven
political revolutions in a hundred years.  Republic, then Empire, then
a return to the Bourbons, then Constitutional Monarchy under Louis
Philippe, then Republic, followed by Empire again, and now for the
third time a Republic!

But France, complex, mobile, changeful as the sea, in riotous enjoyment
of her new-found liberties, casts off a form of government as she would
an ill-fitting garment.  She knows the value of tranquillity--she had
it for one thousand years!  The _people_, which have only breathed the
upper air for a century--the people, who were stifled under feudalism,
stamped upon by Valois Kings, riveted down by Richelieu, then prodded,
outraged, and starved by Bourbons, have become a great nation.
Many-sided, resourceful, gifted, it matters not whether they have
called the head of their government Consul, Emperor, King, or
President.  They are a race of freemen, who can never again be enslaved
by tyrannous system.

It was a bright day for France when that ambitious young Emperor of
Germany sent his great Chancellor into retirement; and another bright
day when, taking offence at scant courtesy at the hands of the Czar, he
left ajar the back door to his dominions.  An alliance between despotic
Russia thirsting for the waters of the Mediterranean, and Republican
France thirsting for revenge, is the darkest cloud on the German
horizon to-day.  It is only a matter of months or of years when France
will be at the throat of Germany demanding Alsace and Lorraine.  The
French army is not the one which faced Von Moltke in 1871; and when
France knocks at her front door, Germany will have all she can attend
to, without hearing Russian batteries thundering at her rear.  A
dramatic reconciliation with the old Chancellor is interesting, but it
will not undo the work of the last four years.

There is no longer thought of conflict between any two nations of
Europe.  The next war is to be one of tremendous combinations.
National alliances are shifting and uncertain.  But at the time this is
written (1894) Germany, Austria, and Italy are drawn together in one
hostile camp, while France and Russia, in loving embrace, stand in the
other; and England, aloof and suspicious, holds herself ready to hurl
her weight against whichever one obstructs her path to India.

There is something in the air which makes one think the name Napoleon
is still a thing to conjure with.  But whatever the future may hold for
France, no American can be indifferent to the fate of a nation to whom
we owe so much.  Nor can we ever forget that in the hour of our direst
extremity, and regardless of cost to herself, she helped us to
establish our liberties, and to take our place among the great nations
of the earth.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Evolution of an Empire - A Brief Historical Sketch of France" ***

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