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When the crusaders returned home, this sociability, this habit of living near to the superior lord, remained fixed in their manners. Thus as we see the augmentation of the great fiefs after the crusades, so we see the holders of those fiefs holding a much more considerable court in the interior of their castles, having near them a larger number of gentlemen who still preserved their small domains, but did not shut themselves up within them.

The extension of the great fiefs and the creation of a certain number of centres of society, in place of the dispersion which formerly existed, are the two principal effects brought about by the crusades in the heart of feudalism.

As to the burghers, a result of the same nature is easily perceptible. The crusades created the great boroughs. Petty commerce and industry did not suffice to create boroughs such as the great towns of Italy and Flanders were. It was commerce on a great scale, maritime commerce, and especially that of the east, which gave rise to them; it was the crusades which gave to maritime commerce the most powerful impulsion it had ever received.

Upon the whole, when we regard the state of society at the end of the crusades, we find that this movement of dissolution, of the dispersion of existences and influences, this movement of universal localization, if such a phrase be permitted, which had preceded this epoch, had ceased, by a movement with an exactly contrary tendency, by a movement of centralization. All now tended to approximation. The lesser existences were either absorbed in the greater, or were grouped around them. It was in this direction that society advanced, that all its progress was made.

You now see, why, towards the end of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, neither people nor sovereigns any longer desired the crusades; they had no longer either the need or desire for them; they had been cast into them by the impulsion of the religious spirit, and by the exclusive domination of religious ideas upon the whole existence; this domination had lost its energy. They had sought, too, in the crusades a new life, more extensive and more varied; they now began to find it in Europe itself, in the progress of social relations. It was at this epoch the career of political aggrandizement opened itself to kings. Wherefore seek kingdoms

in Asia, when they had them to conquer at their own doors? Philip Augustus went to the crusades against his will: what could be more natural? He had to make himself king of France. It was the same with the people. The career of riches opened before their eyes; they renounced adventures for work. For the sovereigns, the place of adventures was supplied by policy; for the people, by work on a great scale. One single class of society still had a taste for adventure: this was that portion of feudal nobility who, not being in a condition to think of political aggrandizement, and not liking work, preserved their ancient condition and manners. They therefore continued to rush to the crusades, and attempted their revival.

Such, in my opinion, are the great and true effects of the crusades: on one side, the extension of ideas, the enfranchisement of mind; on the other, the aggrandizement of existences, and a large sphere opened to activity of all kind: they produced at once a greater degree of individual liberty, and of political unity. They aided the independence of man and the centralization of society. Much has been asked as to the means of civilization-which they directly imported from the east; it has been said that the chief portion of the great discoveries which, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, called forth the development of European civilizationthe compass, printing, gunpowder-were known in the east, and that the crusaders may have brought them thence. This, to a certain point, is true. But some of these assertions' are disputable. That which is not disputable is this influence, this general effect of the crusades upon the mind on one hand, and upon society on the other hand; they drew European society from a very straightened track, and led it into new and infinitely more extensive paths; they commenced that transformation of the various elements of European society into governments and peoples, which is the character of modern civilization. About the same time, royalty, one of those institutions which have most powerfully contributed tc this great result, developed itself. Its history, from the birth of modern states down to the thirteenth century, will form the subject of my next lecture.

NINTH LECTURE.

Object of the lecture-Important part taken by royalty in the history of Europe, and in the history of the world-True causes of this importance -Two-fold point of view under which the institution of royalty should be considered-1st. Its true and permanent nature-It is the personification of the sovereignty of right-With what limits-2nd. Its flexibility and diversity-European royalty seems to be the result of various kinds of royalty Of barbarian royalty-Of imperial royalty-Of religious royalty Of feudal royalty-Of modern royalty, properly so called, and of its true character.

In our last lecture, I attempted to determine the essential and distinctive character of modern European society, as compared with primitive European society; I believe that we discovered in this fact, that all the elements of the social state, at first numerous and various, reduce themselves to two: on one hand the government, and on the other, the people. Instead of encountering the feudal nobility, the clergy, the kings, burghers, and serfs, as the dominant powers and chief actors in history, we find in modern Europe but two great figures which alone occupy the historic scene, the government and the country.

If such is the fact in which European civilization terminates, such also is the end to which we should tend, and to which our researches should conduct us. It is necessary that w should see this grand result take birth, and progressively develop and strengthen itself. We are entered upon the epoch in which we may arrive at its origin: it was, as you have seen, between the twelfth and the sixteenth century that the slow and concealed work operated in Europe which has led our society to this new form and definitive state. We

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have likewise studied the first great event, which, in my opinion, evidently and powerfully impelled Europe in this direction, that is, the crusades.

About the same epoch, almost at the moment that the crusades broke out, that institution commenced its aggrandizement, which has, perhaps, contributed more than anything to the formation of modern society, and to that fusion of all the social elements into two powers, the government and the people; royalty.

It is evident that royalty has played a prodigious part in the history of European civilization; a single glance at facts suffices to convince one of it; we see the development of royalty marching with the same step, so to speak, at least for a long period, as that of society itself; the progress is mutual.

And not only is the progress mutual, but whenever society advances towards its modern and definitive character, royalty seems to extend and prosper; so that when the work is consummated, when there is no longer any, or scarcely any other important or decisive influence in the great states of Europe, than that of the government and the public, royalty is the government.

And it has thus happened, not only in France, where the fact is evident, but also in the greater portion of European countries: a little earlier or a little later, under somewhat different forms, the same result is offered us in the history of society in England, Spain, and Germany. In England, for example, it was under the Tudors, that the ancient, peculiar and local elements of English society were pèrverted and dissolved, and gave place to the system of public powers; this also was the time of the greatest influence of royalty. It was the same in Germany, Spain, and all the great European

states.

If we leave Europe, and if we turn our view upon the rest of the world, we shall be struck by an analogous fact; we shall everywhere find royalty occupying an important position, appearing as, perhaps, the most general and permanent of institutions, the most difficult to prevent, where it did not formerly exist, and the most difficult to root out where it had existed. From time immemorial it has possessed Asia. At the discovery of America, all the great states there were found with different combinations, subject to the monarchical

system. When we penetrate into the interior of Africa, wherever we meet with nations in any way extensive, this is the prevailing system. And not only has royalty penetrated everywhere, but it has accommodated itself to the most diverse situations, to civilization and to barbarism, to manners the most pacific, as in China, for example, and to those in which war, in which the military spirit dominate. It has alike established itself in the heart of the system of castes, in the most rigorously classified societies, and in the midst of a system of equality, in societies which are utter strangers to all legal and permanent classification. Here despotic and oppressive, there favourable to civilization and even to liberty, it seems like a head which may be placed upon a multitude of different bodies, a fruit that will spring from the most dissimilar germs.

In this fact, we may discover many curious and important consequences. I will take only two. The first is, that it is impossible such a result should be the fruit of mere chance, of force or usurpation alone; it is impossible but that there should be a profound and powerful analogy between the nature of royalty, considered as an institution, and the nature, whether of individual man, or of human society. Doubtless, force is intermixed with the origin of the institution; doubtless, force has taken an important part in its progress; but when we meet with such a result as this, when we see a great event developing and reproducing itself during the course of many centuries, and in the midst of such different situations, we cannot attribute it to force. Force plays a great part, and an incessant one, in human affairs; but it is not their principle, their primum mobile; above force and the part which it plays, there hovers a moral cause which decides the totality of things. It is with force in the history of societies, as with the body in the history of man. The body surely holds a high place in the life of man, but still it is not the principle of life. Life circulates within it, but it does not emanate from it. So it is with human societies; whatever part force takes therein, it is not force which governs them, and which presides supremely over their destinies; it is ideas and moral influences, which conceal themselves under the accidents of force, and regulate the course of the society. It is a cause of this kind, and not force, which gave success to royalty.

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