which they had been plunged by barbaric invasion and the conquests of Charlemagne, and to form themselves into quite distinct nations; but there were in each of the kingdoms of Lothaire, of Louis the Germanic, and of Charles the Bald, populations widely differing in race, language, manners, and geographical affinity, and it required many great events and the lapse of many centuries to bring about the degree of national unity they now possess. To say nothing touching the agency of individual and independent forces, which is always considerable, although so many men of intellect ignore it in the present day, what would have happened, had any one of the three new kings, Lothaire, or Louis the Germanic, or Charles the Bald, been a second Charlemagne, as Charlemagne had been a second Charles Martel? Who can say that, in such a case, the three kingdoms would have taken the form they took in 843?
Happily or unhappily, it was not so; none of Charlemagne’s successors was capable of exercising on the events of his time, by virtue of his brain and his own will, any notable influence. Not that they were all unintelligent, or timid, or indolent. It has been seen that Louis the Debonnair did not lack virtues and good intentions; and Charles the Bald was clear-sighted, dexterous, and energetic; he had a taste for information and intellectual distinction; he liked and sheltered men of learning and letters, and to such purpose that, instead of speaking, as under Charlemagne, of the school of the palace, people called the palace of Charles the Bald the palace of the school. Amongst the eleven kings who after him ascended the Carlovingian throne, several, such as Louis III. and Carloman, and, especially, Louis the Ultramarine (d’Outremer) and Lothaire, displayed, on several occasions, energy and courage; and the kings elected, at this epoch, without the pale of the Carlovingian dynasty—Eudes in 887 and Raoul in 923—gave proofs of a valor both discreet and effectual. The Carlovingians did not, as the Merovingians did, end in monkish retirement or shameful inactivity even the last of them, and the only one termed sluggard, Louis V., was getting ready, when he died, for an expedition in Spain against the Saracens. The truth is that, mediocre or undecided or addle-pated as they may have been, they all succumbed, internally and externally, without initiating and without resisting, to the course of events, and that, in 987, the fall of the Carlovingian line was the natural and easily accomplished consequence of the new social condition which had been preparing in France under the empire.
CHAPTER XIII.
FEUDAL FRANCE AND HUGH CAPET.
The reader has just seen that, twenty-nine years after the death of Charlemagne, that is, in 843, when, by the treaty of Verdun, the sons of Louis the Debonnair had divided amongst them his dominions, the great empire split up into three distinct and independent kingdoms—the kingdoms of Italy, Germany, and France. The split did not stop there. Forty-five years later, at the end of the ninth century, shortly after the death of Charles the Fat, the last of the Carlovingians who appears to have re-united for a while all the empire of Charlemagne, this empire had begotten seven instead of three kingdoms, those of France, of Navarre, of Provence or Cisjuran Burgundy, of Trans-juran Burgundy, or Lorraine, of Allemannia, and of Italy. This is what had become of the factitious and ephemeral unity of that Empire of the West which Charlemagne had wished to put in the place of the Roman empire.
We will leave where they are the three distinct and independent kingdoms, and turn our introspective gaze upon the kingdom of France. There we recognize the same fact; there the same work of dismemberment is going on. About the end of the ninth century there were already twenty-nine provinces or fragments of provinces which had become petty states, the former governors of which, under the names of dukes, counts, marquises, and viscounts, were pretty nearly real sovereigns. Twenty-nine great fiefs, which have played a special part in French history, date back to this epoch.
These petty states were not all of equal importance or in possession of a perfectly similar independence; there were certain ties uniting them to other states, resulting in certain reciprocal obligations which became the basis, or, one might say, the constitution of the feudal community; but their prevailing feature was, nevertheless, isolation, personal existence. They were really petty states begotten from the dismemberment of a great territory; those local governments were formed at the expense of a central power.
From the end of the ninth pass we to the end of the tenth century, to the epoch when the Capetians take the place of the Carlovingians. Instead of seven kingdoms to replace the empire of Charlemagne, there were then no more than four. The kingdoms of Provence and Trans-juran Burgundy had formed, by re-union, the kingdom of Arles. The kingdom of Lorraine was no more than a duchy in dispute between Allemannia and France. The Emperor Otho the Great had united the kingdom of Italy to the empire of. Allemannia. Overtures had produced their effects amongst the great states. But in the interior of the kingdom of France, dismemberment had held on its course; and instead of the twenty-nine petty states or great fiefs observable at the end of the ninth century, we find at the end of the tenth, fifty-five actually established. (Vide Guizot’s Histoire de la Civilisation, t. ii., pp. 238–246.)
Now, how was this ever-increasing dismemberment accomplished? What causes determined it, and little by little made it the substitute for the unity of the empire? Two causes, perfectly natural and independent of all human calculation, one moral and the other political. They were the absence from the minds of men of any general and dominant idea; and the reflux, in social relations and manners, of the individual liberties but lately repressed or regulated by the strong hand of Charlemagne. In times of formation or transition, states and governments conform to the measure, one had almost said to the height, of the men of the period, their ideas, their sentiments, and their personal force of character; when ideas are few and narrow, when sentiments spread only over a confined circle, when means of action and expansion are wanting to men, communities become petty and local, just as the thoughts and existence of their members are. Such was the state of things in the ninth and tenth centuries; there was no general and fructifying idea, save the Christian creed; no great intellectual vent; no great national feeling; no easy and rapid means of communication; mind and life were both confined in a narrow space, and encountered, at every step, stoppages and obstacles well nigh insurmountable. At the same time, by the fall of the empires of Rome and of Charlemagne, men regained possession of the rough and ready individual liberties which were the essential characteristic of Germanic manners: Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians, Saxons, Lombards, none of these new peoples had lived as the Greeks and Romans had, under the sway of an essentially political idea, the idea of city, state, and fatherland: they were free men, and not citizens; comrades, not members of one and the same public body. They gave up their vagabond life; they settled upon a soil conquered by themselves and partitioned amongst themselves; and there they lived each by himself, master of himself and all that was his, family, servitors, husbandmen, and slaves: the territorial domain became the fatherland, and the owner remained a free man, a local and independent chieftain, at his own risk and peril. And this, quite naturally, grew up feudal France, when the new comers, settled in their new abodes, were no more swayed or hampered by the vain attempt to re-establish the Roman empire.
The consequences of such a state of things and of such a disposition of persons were rapidly developed. Territorial ownership became the fundamental characteristic of and warranty for independence and social importance. Local sovereignty, if not complete and absolute, at least in respect of its principal rights, right of making war, right of judicature, right of taxation, and right of regulating the police, became one with the territorial ownership, which before long grew to be hereditary, whether, under the title of alleu (allodium), it had been originally perfectly independent and exempt from any feudal tie, or, under the title of benefice, had arisen from grants of land made by the chieftain to his followers, on condition of certain obligations. The offices, that is, the divers functions, military or civil, conferred by the king on his lieges, also ended by becoming hereditary. Having become established in fact, this heirship in lands and local powers was soon recognized by the law. A capitulary of Charles the Bald, promulgated in 877, contains the two following provisions:—
