The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism

The Seigneurs of Old Canada:A
Chronicle of New-World
Feudalism

Project Gutenberg's The Seigneurs of Old Canada, by William Bennett
Munro #5 in our series Chronicles of Canada
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Title: The Seigneurs of Old Canada: A Chronicle of New-World
Feudalism
Author: William Bennett Munro
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4655] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 21,
2002]
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CHRONICLES OF CANADA Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H.
Langton In thirty-two volumes
Volume 5
THE SEIGNEURS OF OLD CANADA A Chronicle of New-World
Feudalism
By WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO TORONTO, 1915

CHAPTER I

AN OUTPOST OF EMPIRE
What would history be without the picturesque annals of the Gallic race?
This is a question which the serious student may well ask himself as he
works his way through the chronicles of a dozen centuries. From the
age of Charlemagne to the last of the Bonapartes is a long stride down
the ages; but there was never a time in all these years when men might
make reckonings in the arithmetic of European politics without taking
into account the prestige, the power, and even the primacy of France.
There were times without number when France among her neighbours
made herself hated with an undying hate; there were times, again, when
she rallied them to her side in friendship and admiration. There were
epochs in which her hegemony passed unquestioned among men of
other lands, and there were times when a sudden shift in fortune
seemed to lay the nation prostrate, with none so poor to do her
reverence.
It was France that first brought an orderly nationalism out of feudal
chaos; it was her royal house of Capet that rallied Europe to the rescue
of the Holy Sepulchre and led the greatest of the crusades to Palestine.
Yet the France of the last crusades was within a century the France of
Crecy, just as the France of Austerlitz was more speedily the France of
Waterloo; and men who followed the tricolour at Solferino lived to see
it furled in humiliation at Sedan. No other country has had a history as
prolific in triumph and reverse, in epochs of peaceful progress and
periods of civil commotion, in pageant and tragedy, in all that gives
fascination to historical narrative. Happy the land whose annals are
tiresome! Not such has been the fortune of poor old France.
The sage Tocqueville has somewhere remarked that whether France
was loved or hated by the outside world she could not be ignored. That
is very true. The Gaul has at all stages of his national history defied an
attitude of indifference in others. His country has been at many times
the head and at all