A Short History of France | Page 6

essays would have been well employed in
studying the period in which he lived, and the empire he ruled.
Paganism and Druidism, those twin monsters, receded before the
advancing light of Christianity. Neither contained anything which
could nourish the soul of man, and both had become simply badges of
nationality.

Druidism was the last stronghold of independent Gallic life. It was a
mixture of northern myth and oriental dreams of metempsychosis,
coarse, mystical, and cruel. The Roman paganism which was
superimposed by the conquering race was the mere shell of a once vital
religion. Educated men had long ceased to believe in the gods and
divinities of Greece, and it is said that the Roman augurs, while giving
their solemn prophetic utterances, could not look at each other without
laughing.
In the year 312--alas for Christianity!--it was espoused by imperial
power. When the Emperor Constantine declared himself a Christian,
there was no doubt rejoicing among the saints; but it was the beginning
of the degeneracy of the religion of Christ. The faith of the humble was
to be raised to a throne; its lowly garb to be exchanged for purple and
scarlet; the gospel of peace to be enforced by the sword.
The empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and
social conditions of modern times were forming. Paganism and
Druidism would have been an impossibility. Christianity, even with its
lustre dimmed, its purity tarnished, its simplicity overlaid with
scholasticism, was better than these. The miracle had been
accomplished. The great Roman Empire had said, "I am Christian."
A belief in the gods of Parnassus, which Rome had imposed upon Gaul,
had now become a heresy to be exterminated. If fires were lighted at
Lyons or elsewhere, they were for the extermination not of Christians,
but of pagans, and of all who would depart from the religion of Christ
as interpreted by Rome. It was a death-bed repentance for the cruel old
empire, a repentance which might delay, but could not avert a
calamitous ending, and an unexpected event was near at hand which
would hasten the coming of the end.
It was in the year A.D. 375 that the Huns, a terrible race of beings,
came out from that then mysterious but now historic region, lying
between China and Russia, and surged into Europe under the leadership
of Attila, sweeping before them as they came Goths, Vandals, and other
Teutonic races, as if with a predetermined purpose of forcing the
uncivilized Teuton into the lap of a perishing civilization in the south.

Then having accomplished this, after the defeat of Attila at Châlons in
A.D. 453, they disappeared forever as a race from the stage of human
events.
This is the time when Paris was saved by Genevieve, the poor
sheperdess, who, like an early Joan of Arc, awoke the people from the
apathy of despair, and led them to victory--and is rewarded by an
immortality as "Saint Genevieve," the patron saint of Paris. It would
seem that the vigilance of the gentle saint has either slept or been
unequal to the task of protecting her city at times!
It was the combined forces of the Goth and the Frank which drove this
scourge out of Europe. Meroveus, or Meroveg, the leader of the Franks
in this great achievement, once the terror of the Gallic people, was now
their deliverer. He had won the gratitude of all classes, from bishops to
slaves, throughout Gaul, and fate had thus opened wide a door leading
into the future of that land.
CHAPTER IV.
Gaul had been Latinized and Christianized. Now one more thing was
needed to prepare her for a great future. Her fibre was to be toughened
by the infusion of a stronger race. Julius Caesar had shaken her into
submission, and Rome had chastised her into decency of behavior and
speech, but as her manners improved her native vigor declined. She
took kindly to Roman luxury and effeminacy, and could no longer have
thundered at the gates of her neighbors demanding "land."
The despotism of a perishing Roman Empire had become intolerable;
and the thoughts of an overtaxed and enslaved people turned naturally
to the Franks. They had rescued them from one terrible fate, might they
not deliver them from another? And so it came about that the young
savage Chlodoveg, or Clovis, grandson of Meroveus, found himself
master of the fair land long coveted beyond the Rhine; and Gaul and
Roman alike were submerged beneath the Teuton flood, while Clovis,
sitting in the Palace of the Caesars, on the island in the Seine, was
wearing the kingly crown, and independent and dynastic life had

commenced in what was hereafter to be not Gaul, but France.
But the king of whom she had dreamed was of her