SECOND COURSE

LECTURE THE FIRST.

Object of the course-Elements of national unity-They exist and begin to be developed in France towards the end of the 10th century-Thence dates French civilization-The feudal period will be the subject of this course-It includes the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, from Hugh Capet to Philippe de Valois-Proof that these are the limits of the feudal period-Plan of the course: History; 1st, of society; 2d, of the human mind, during the feudal period-The history of society resolves itself into, 1st, history of civil society; 2d, history of religious society-The history of the human mind resolves itself into, 1st, history of learned literature; 2d, history of national literature in the vulgar tongue-Importance of the middle ages in the history of French civilization-The present state of opinions concerning the middle ages-Is it true that there is danger in historical impartiality and poetical sympathy for this period?-Utility of this study.

IN commencing the last course, I was obliged to determine its subject, and to explain the motives of my choice. At present I have not any thing of the kind to do. The subject of our study is known; the route is traced. I endeavored to place you in the presence of the origins of French civilization under the first two races; I propose to follow it through all its vicissitudes, in its long and glorious development up to the eve of our own times. I now, therefore, again take up the subject where we left it, that is to say, at the end of the tenth century, at the accession of the Capetians.

As I told you in concluding the past course, it is there that French civilization commences. Hitherto, you will recollect, we have spoken of Gaulish, Roman, Gallo-Roman, Frankish, Gallo-Frankish, civilization; we were obliged to make use of foreign names which did not belong to us, in order to express with any fulness, a society without unity, without fixedness, without entirety. Dating from the end of the tenth century, there is no longer any thing of this

kind; it is now with the French, with French civilization, that we have to occupy ourselves.

And yet it was at this very epoch that all national and political unity was disappearing from our land. All books say this, and all facts show it. It was the epoch when the feudal system, that is to say, the dismemberment of the people and of power, entirely prevailed. At the eleventh century, the soil which we call France was covered with petty nations and petty sovereigns, almost strangers one to the other, almost independent of each other. Even the very shadow of a central government, of a general nation, seemed to have disappeared.

How comes it that really French civilization and history commence exactly at the moment when it was almost impossible to discover a France?

It is because, in the life of nations, the external visible unity, the unity of name and government, although important, is not the first, the most real, not that which truly constitutes a nation. There is a more profound, more powerful unity: that which results, not from the identity of government and destiny, but from the similarity of social elements, from the similarity of institutions, manners, ideas, sentiments, languages; the unity which resides in the men themselves whom the society unites together, and not in the forms of their junction; moral unity, in point of fact, far superior to political unity, and which alone can give it a solid foundation.

Well, it is at the end of the tenth century that the cradle of this at once unique and complex being, which has become the French nation, is placed. She required many centuries and long efforts to extricate herself, and to produce herself in her simplicity and grandeur. Still, at this epoch, her elements existed, and we begin to catch glimpses of the work of their development. In the times which we studied in the last course, from the fifth to the tenth century, under Charlemagne, for example, external political unity was often greater and stronger than at the epoch with which we are about to occupy ourselves. But if you go thoroughly into the matter, into the moral state of the men themselves, you find there is an utter absence of unity. The races are profoundly different, and even hostile; the laws, traditions, manners, languages, likewise differ and struggle; situations, social relations have neither generality nor fixedness. At the end of the tenth and at the commencement of the elev

enth century, there was no kind of political unity like that of Charlemagne, but races began to amalgamate; diversity of laws according to origin is no longer the principle of all legislation. Social situations have acquired some fixedness; institutions not the same, but throughout analogous, the feudal institutions prevailed, or nearly so, over all the land. In place of the radical, imperishable diversity of the Latin language and the Germanic languages, two languages began to be formed, the Roman language of the south, and the Roman language of the north, doubtless different, but still of the same origin, of the same character, and destined one day to become amalgamated. Diversity also began to be effaced from the soul of men, from their moral existence. The German is less addicted to his Germanic traditions and habits; he gradually detaches himself from the past to belong to his present situation. It is the same with the Roman; he thinks less of the ancient empire, of its fall, and of the sentiments which it gave rise to in him. Over conquerors and conquered, the new, actual facts, which are common to them, daily exercise more influence. In a word, political unity is almost null, real diversity still very great, and yet at bottom there is more of true unity than there has been for five centuries. We begin to catch glimpses of the elements of a nation; and the proof is, that from this epoch the tendency of all these social elements to conjoin, to assimilate and form themselves into great masses, that is to say, the tendency towards national unity, and thence towards political unity, becomes the dominant characteristic, the great fact of the history of French civilization, the general and constant fact around which all our study will turn.

The development of this fact, the triumph of this tendency, has made the fortune of France. It is by this especially that she has outstripped the other nations of the continent in the career of civilization. Look at Spain, Italy, even Germany: what is it that they want? They have progressed far more slowly than France towards moral unity, towards the formation into a single people. Even there where moral unity has been formed, or nearly so, as in Italy and Germany, its transformation into political unity, the birth of a general government, has been slackened or almost entirely stopped. France, more happy, arrived more rapidly and more completely at that double unity, not the only principle, but the only pledge of the strength and grandeur

nations. It was at the end of the tenth century that it, so to speak, commenced its progress towards this important result. It is, therefore, from this epoch that French civilization really dates; it is there that we may begin to study it under its true name.

The feudal period, that is, the period when the feudal system was the dominant fact of our country, will be the subject of the present course.

It is comprehended between Hugh Capet and Philippe de Valois, that is, it embraces the eleventh, twelfth, and thir teenth centuries.

That these are the true limits, the career of the feuda! system, it is easy I think to establish.

The peculiar general character of feudalism, as I have just repeated, and as every one knows, is the dismemberment of the people and of power into a multitude of petty nations and petty sovereigns; the absence of any universal nation, of any central government. Let us see the limits in which this fact is contained. These limits will necessarily be those of the feudal period.

We may, if I do not deceive myself, recognise them especially by three symptoms.

1. To what enemies did feudalism succumb? Who opposed it in France? Two powers; royalty on the one hand, on the other, the commons. By royalty a central government was formed in France; by the commons was formed a universal nation, which grouped itself around the central government.

At the end of the tenth century, royalty and the commons were not visible, or at all events scarcely visible. At the commencement of the fourteenth century, royalty was the head of the state, the commons were the body of the nation. The two forces to which the feudal system was to succumb had then attained, not, indeed, their entire development, but a decided preponderance. By this symptom we may then say that there the feudal period, properly so called, stops, since the absence of any universal nation, and of all central power, is its essential characteristic.

Here is a second symptom which assigns the same limits to the feudal period.

From the tenth to the fourteenth century, wars, which were then the principal event of history, have, at least the greater part of them, the same characteristic. They are in

ternal, civil wars, as it were in the bosom of feudalism itself. It is a suzerain who endeavors to acquire the territory of his vassals; vassals who dispute among themselves certain portions of the territory. Such appear to us, with the ex ception of the crusades, almost all the wars of Louis le Gros of Philip August, Saint Louis, and Philippe le Bel. It is from the very nature of the feudal society that their causes and effects arise.

With the fourteenth century the character of war changed. Then began the foreign wars; no longer a vassal against suzerain, or vassal against vassal, but nation against nation, government against government. On the accession of Philippe de Valois, the great wars between the French and the English broke out-the claims of the kings of England, not upon any particular fief, but upon the whole land, and upon the throne of France-and they continued up to Louis XI. They were no longer feudal, but national wars; a certain proof that the feudal period stopped at this limit, that another society had already commenced.

Lastly, if we address ourselves to a third kind of indication, if we interrogate the great events which we are accustomed, and with reason, to look upon as the result, as the expression of feudal society, we shall find that they are all included within the epoch of which we speak. The crusades, that great adventure of feudalism, and its popular glory, finished, or nearly finished, with Saint Louis and the thirteenth century; we hear afterwards but a futile echo of them. Chivalry, that poetical daughter, that ideal, so to speak, of the feudal system, is equally enclosed in the same limits. In the fourteenth century it was on the decline, and a knight-errant already appears a ridiculous personage. Romantic and chivalrous literature, the troubadours, the trouveres, in a word, all the institutions, all the facts which may be looked upon as the results, the companions of feudalism, alike belong to the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. That, therefore, is evidently the feudal period; and when I confine it to these limits, I do not adopt an arbitrary, purely conventional classification; it is the fact. Now, how shall we study this epoch? What method will best make it known to us?

It will, I hope, be borne in mind, that I have regarded civilization as the result of two great facts; the development, on the one hand, of society, on the other, of individual