A Short History of France | Page 2

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 today. 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 which later distinguished Provence, the home of minstrelsy.
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 forty 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