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with it, if not completely, at least in its essential features. In order to prepare ourselves to understand the society which followed it, we have now to study the new element which mixed with it, the barbarians. Their state before the invasion, before they came to overthrow the Roman society, and were changed under its influence, will form the subject of our next lecture.

SEVENTH LECTURL.

Object of the lecture Of the Germanic element in modern civilizationOf the monuments of the ancient social state of the Germans: 1. Of the Roman and Greek historians; 2. Of the barbaric laws; 3. Of national traditions-They relate to very different epochs-They are often made use of promiscuously-Error which results therefrom-The work of Tacitus concerning the manners of the Germans-Opinions of the modern German writers concerning the ancient Germanic stateWhat kind of life prevailed there? was it the wandering life, or the sedentary life?--Of the institutions--Of the moral state-Comparison between the state of the German tribes and that of other hordes-Fallacy of most of the views of barbarous life-Principal characteristics of the true influence of the Germans upon modern civilization.

WE approach successively the various sources of our civilization. We have already studied, on one side, what we call the Roman element, the civil Roman society; on the other, the Christian element, the religious society. Let us now consider the barbaric element, the German society.

Opinions are very various concerning the importance of this element, concerning the part and share of the Germans in modern civilization; the prejudices of nation, of situation, of class, have modified the idea which each has formed of it.

The German historians, the feudal publicists, M. de Boulainvilliers, for example, have in general attributed too extensive an influence to the barbarians; the burgher publicists, as the abbé Dubos, have, on the contrary, too much reduced it, in order to give far too large a part to Roman society; according to the ecclesiastics, it is to the church that modern civilization is the most indebted. Sometimes political doctrines have alone determined the opinion of the

writer; the abbé de Mably, all devoted as he was to the popular cause, and despite his antipathy for the feudal system, insists strongly upon the German origins, because he thought to find there more institutions and principles of liberty than anywhere else. I do not wish to treat at present of this question; we shall treat of it, it will be resolved as we advance in the history of French civilization. We shall see from epoch to epoch what part each of its primitive elements has there played, what each has brought and received in their combination. I shall confine myself to asserting beforehand the two results to which I believe this study will conduct us:-First, that the state of the barbaric element in modern civilization has, in general, been made a great deal too much of. Second, its true share has not been given it: too great an influence upon our society has been attributed to the Germans, to their institutions, to their manners; what they have truly exercised has not been attributed to them; we do not owe to them all that has been done in their name; we do owe to them what seems not to proceed from them.

Until this twofold result shall arise under our eyes, from the progressive development of facts, the first condition, in order to appreciate with accuracy the share of the Germanic element in our civilization, is to correctly understand what the Germans really were at the time when it commenced, when they themselves concurred in its formatior; that is to say, before their invasion and their establishment on the Roman territory; when they still inhabited Germany in the third and fourth centuries. By this alone shall we be enabled to form an exact idea of what they brought to the common work, to distinguish what facts are truly of German origin.

This study is difficult. The monuments where we may study the barbarians before the invasion are of three kinds; first, the Greek or Roman writers, who knew and described them from their first appearance in history up to this epoch; that is to say, from Polybius, about one hundred and fifty years before Christ, down to Ammianus Marcellinus, whose work stops at the year of our Lord 378. Between these two eras a crowd of historians, Livy, Cæsar, Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Plutarch, Florus. Pausanias,

&c., have left us information, more or less detailed, concerning the German nations; secondly, writings and documents posterior to the German invasion, but which relate or reveal anterior facts; for example, many Chronicles, the Barbaric laws, Salic, Visigoth, Burgundian, &c.; thirdly, the recollection and national traditions of the Germans themselves concerning their fate and their state in the ages anterior to the invasion, reascending up to the first origin and their most ancient history.

At the mere mention of these documents, it is evident that very various times and states are comprehended in them. The Roman and Greek writers, for example, embrace a space of five hundred years, during which Germany and her nations were presented to them in the most different points of view. Then came the first expeditions of the wandering Germans, especially that of the Teutones and the Cimbrians. Rather later, dating from Cæsar and Augustus, the Romans, in their turn, penetrated into Germany; their armies passed the Rhine and the Danube, and saw the Germans under a new aspect and in a new state. Lastly, from the third century, the Germans fell upon the Roman empire, which repelling and admitting them alternately, came to know them far more intimately, and in an entirely different situation from what they had done hitherto. Who does not perceive that, during this interval, through so many centuries and events, the barbarians and the writers who described them, the object and the picture, must have prodigiously varied?

The documents of the second class are in the same case: the barbaric laws were drawn up some time after the invasion: the most ancient portion of the law of the Visigoths belonged to the last half of the fifth century; the Salic law may have been written first under Clovis, but the digest which we have of it is of a far posterior epoch; the law of the Burgundians dates from the year 517.

They are all, therefore, in their actual form, much more modern than the barbaric society which we wish to study. There can be no doubt but that they contain many facts, that they often describe a social state anterior to the invasion; there can be no doubt but that the Germans, transported into Gaul, retained much of their ancient customs, their ancient relations. But there can also be no doubt here that, after the

invasion, Germanic society was profoundly modified, and that these modifications had passed into laws; the law of the Visigoths and that of the Burgundians are much more Roman than barbarian; three fourths of the provisions concern facts which could not have arisen until after these nations were established upon Roman soil. The Salic law is more primitive, more barbaric; but still, I believe it may be proved that, in many parts-among others, in that concerning property-it is of more recent origin. Like the Roman historians, the German laws evidence very various times and states of society.

According to the documents of the third class, the national traditions of the Germans, the evidence is still more striking: the subjects of these traditions are almost all facts, so far anterior as probably to have become almost foreign to the state of these nations at the third and fourth centuries; facts which had concurred to produce this state and which may serve to explain it, but which no longer constituted it. Suppose, that, in order to study the state of the highlanders of Scotland fifty years ago, one had collected their still living and popular traditions, and had taken the facts which they express as the real elements of Scotch society in the eighteenth century: assuredly the illusion would be great and fruitful of error. It would be the same and with much greater reason, with regard to the ancient German traditions; they coincide with the primitive history of the Germans, with their origin, their religious filiation, their relations with a multitude of nations in Asia, on the borders of the Black sea, of the Baltic sea; with events, in a word, which, doubtless, had powerfully tended to bring about the social state of the German tribes in the third century, and which we must closely observe, but which were then no longer facts but only causes.

You see that all the monuments that remain to us of the state of the barbarians before the invasion, whatever may be their origin and their nature, Roman or German, traditions, chronicles, or laws, refer to times and facts very far removed from one another, and among which it is very difficult to separate what truly belongs to the third and fourth centuries. The fundamental error, in my opinion, of a great number of German writers, and sometimes of the most distinguished, is not having sufficiently attended to this circumstance: in order to picture German society and mau