A Short History of France | Page 8

is a strange picture we
have of this descendant of Clovis, this _Roi Fainéant_ (Do-nothing
King) in a royal procession on a state occasion. Curled and perfumed,
he emerges from the Palais des Thermes, attended in great pomp by
Romans and Romanized Frankish warriors. Then, in remembrance of
the primitive simplicity of his ancestral line, sitting alone in a wagon
drawn by bullocks, he leads the pageant through the narrow streets of
old Paris.
But while masquerading as a simple barbarian he was only a poor
imitator of the vices and dregs of a perishing civilization. But in proof
that virility was still a characteristic of the Frank in Gaul, we are told
that while the Church and the offices of State were filled by Romans or
Gallo-Romans, the army at this time was composed entirely of Franks.
With the degeneracy of these _Rois Fainéants_ the kingdom of Clovis
was gradually shrinking, and men were already waiting to seize the
power as it fell from incompetent hands. When Clovis made gifts of
large estates to reward, or to purchase, followers, Roman or Gallic, he
laid the foundations of a system which would prove fatal to his
successors. With these estates came titles and authority, multiplying
and growing with each succeeding reign. A count, who was the chief
officer of a county, was in fact the sovereign of a small state, and so on
a smaller scale were a duke or a marquis. And it was to these smaller
bodies that the power naturally gravitated as it vanished from the
throne.
This meant disintegration into helpless fragments, and this meant the
end of a Frankish kingdom, unless some power should arise great
enough to compel the crumbling state to become homogeneous.
It was a Romanized-Frankish family dwelling in the Valley of the
Rhine which saved the kingdom of Clovis from this fate. France had

already fallen apart into an eastern and a western kingdom, known
respectively as Austrasia and Neustria. A certain Duke of Austrasia,
known as Pepin the Elder, was the forerunner of the Carlovingian line
of kings. With him the centralizing force began to work with saving
power. The one end kept in view was the restoration of the power of
kingship--the strengthening of the power at the centre. To this end,
from generation to generation, these early Pepins steadily moved. In
687 Pepin the Younger, grandson of the Elder, by a victory at Testry
over Neustria, brought together these two sundered divisions under
himself, with the new title Duke of the Franks. The Pepins had already
succeeded in making the office of Maire du Palais hereditary in their
family, and in the year A.D. 732, Charles, son and successor of Pepin
the Younger, made himself forever the hero not of France alone, but of
Christendom, by driving the Saracen invasion back over the Pyrenees,
and was in turn succeeded by his son, Pepin the Short, who seized the
Merovingian crown itself; this remarkable family, the appointed
channel for the centralizing forces, reaching its climax in his son
Charlemagne; creator of a Holy Roman Empire.
There had appeared an enemy to the true faith more to be feared than
paganism.
Less than one hundred years after the death of Clovis, there had come
out of Asia, that birthplace of religions, a new faith, which was
destined to be for centuries the scourge of Christendom, and which
to-day rules one-third of the human family. Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ,
had successively come with saving message to humanity, and now
(A.D. 600) Mahomet believed himself divinely appointed to drive out
of Arabia the idolatry of ancient Magianism (the religion of Zoroaster).
Christianity had passed through strange vicissitudes. Kings, emperors,
popes, and bishops had been terrible custodians of its truths; and while
many still held it in its primitive purity, ecclesiastics were fiercely
righting over the nature of the Trinity, the divinity of the Virgin Mother,
and the Church was shaken to its foundation by furious factions.
In this hour of weakness the Persians (A.D. 590) had conquered Asia
Minor. Bethlehem, Gethsemane, and Calvary were profaned; the Holy

Sepulchre had been burned, and the cross carried off amid shouts of
laughter. Magianism had insulted Christianity, and no miracle had
interposed! The heavens did not roll asunder, nor did the earth open her
abysses to swallow them up. There was consternation and doubt in
Christendom.
Such was the state of the Church when Mahometanism came into
existence. "There is but one God, and Mahomet is his Prophet." Such
was its battle-cry and its creed, and the moral precepts of the Koran
were its gospel. There seems nothing in this to account for the mad
enthusiasm and the passion for worship in its followers. But in less than
a hundred years this lion out of Arabia had subjugated