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 times the heart of Europe. His hysteria has made Europe hysterical, while his sober national sense at critical moments has held the whole continent to good behaviour. For a half-dozen centuries there