A History of France

John Julius Norwich

• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780802146700
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

An "engaging, enthusiastic, sympathetic, funny" journey through French history from the New York Times– bestselling author of Absolute Monarchs ( The Wall Street Journal ). Beginning with Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the first century BC, this study of French history comprises a cast of legendary characters?Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and Marie Antoinette, to name a few?as John Julius Norwich chronicles France's often violent, always fascinating history. From the French Revolution?after which neither France nor the world would be the same again?to the storming of the Bastille, from the Vichy regime and the Resistance to the end of the Second World War, A History of France is packed with heroes and villains, battles and rebellion—written with both an expert command of detail and a lively appreciation for the subject matter by this "true master of narrative history" (Simon Sebag Montefiore).

1

Very Dark Indeed

58 BC–843

La Gaule unie

Formant une seule nation

Animée d’un même esprit

Peut défier l’Univers.*

Inscription on Vercingetorix monument

THE FRENCH, LIKE the English, are a racial cocktail: Ligurians, Iberians, Phoenicians and Celts just for a start, not to mention the five hundred-odd different tribes of ancient Gaul. Prehistory, however – as I think I may have mentioned before – is best left to the prehistorians. It is perhaps worth recording that a party of adventurous Greeks from Phocaea on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor founded Marseille around 600 BC; but they left, alas, no surviving monuments behind them, and not much of their culture either. Our story really begins towards the end of the second century BC, when the Romans conquered the south-east corner of what is now France and made it their first province (hence the name it still bears), founding as its capital their new town of Aquae Sextiae, later to become Aix-en-Provence. Other splendid cities – Nîmes, Arles and Orange for a start – followed. Pliny the Elder thought it to be ‘more like Italy than a province’. It must, in those days, have been a wonderful place to live.

When asked to name France’s first hero, few outside the country would go further back than Charlemagne. But to the French, their earliest important leader is Vercingetorix, whose name means either ‘great warrior king’ or ‘king of great warriors’. This is all the more impressive since all the written accounts of him come from the Romans, the people with the most to gain from diminishing his reputation. The South of France was the Roman Empire’s first and most profitable province – so profitable, indeed, that they were keen to expand. Seeing that neighbouring Gaul was, to quote Caesar’s famous opening line ‘divided in three parts’, the wily Romans decided to manipulate the perpetual tensions between the three mutually hostile tribes. Caesar always claimed that his reasons for the invasion of Gaul in 58 BC were primarily defensive and pre-emptive; the Roman province had suffered countless raids – and several quite serious attacks – from the Gallic tribes to the north, and he was determined to prevent any further trouble. This may have been partly true, and the war certainly enabled Rome to establish its natural frontier on the Rhine. But Caesar was, as we know, ambitious. The Roman Republic was rapidly becoming a dictatorship, with more and more power being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. If, as he hoped, he was ultimately to gather it all into his own, he would need an army; and a major campaign in Gaul would provide one.

Though a number of their tribes had attained a moderate degree of civilisation, the Gauls who opposed him were still essentially barbarians. They had no towns worthy of the name; their villages were often little more than clusters of mud-and-wattle huts, thatched with straw and surrounded with primitive stockades. Of agriculture they knew – or cared – practically nothing. They were herdsmen rather than farmers; they kept sheep and pigs, and they hunted the always plentiful deer. They were carnivores through and through. And they loved fighting. Their horsemanship probably outclassed even that of the Romans, and though they lacked the more sophisticated Roman weaponry their courage and determination, combined with the sheer weight of their numbers, made them formidable enemies. In several of their bloodiest encounters they were victorious; their ultimate defeat was probably due to the simple fact that their tribal society prevented them from achieving any degree of political unity.

Largely for this reason, during the first half of the war they produced no outstanding leaders; but early in 52 BC, when Caesar was away raising troops in Cisalpine Gaul,* the thirty-year-old Vercingetorix became chieftain of the Arverni, who inhabited what is now the Auvergne. Immediately he began forging alliances with the neighbouring tribes, and soon acquired a sizeable army. The first step was to convince the Gauls that it was the Romans, not their own neighbours, who were the enemies. He proved an inspired strategist. His first encounter with the invaders, at Gergovia in the Massif Central, was a decisive victory; according to Caesar himself, the Romans lost some 750 legionaries, including 46 centurions. This brilliant young general represented the most serious threat that he had so far faced. Determined to force the Romans out at all costs, Vercingetorix set up a scorched earth policy. Every village that could offer food or shelter was destroyed: this guerrilla war, however, proved as costly to the inhabitants as the invaders. The tide turned when the tribes baulked at torching the wealthy settlement of Avaricum, arguing that its natural defences (it was built on a hillock and surrounded by marshland) would protect it. Vercingetorix reluctantly agreed, but was proved right when the Roman siege was successful. The following September at Alesia,^† Caesar won the deciding victory. The Gauls, fleeing from the field, were intercepted by the Roman cavalry and slaughtered almost to a man. Among the few survivors was their leader himself, who made his formal surrender on the following day. The great Graeco-Roman historian Plutarch, writing around 100 AD, tells how Vercingetorix, ‘the chief spring of all the war’, put on his finest armour and fitted out his horse in its finest trappings before riding out of the gates. He then made a ceremonial turn around the enthroned Caesar, dismounted, threw off his armour and remained quietly sitting at Caesar’s feet until he was led away to prison.

The temptation must have been to commit suicide, as Queen Boadicea is believed to have done after her defeat in the following century. Instead, Vercingetorix was imprisoned for five years before being paraded, as part of Caesar’s triumph, through the streets of Rome and finally meeting the customary death by strangulation. In the nineteenth century, thanks largely to Napoleon III, he was celebrated as the first of the great French nationalists. In Clermont-Ferrand there is a marvellous equestrian statue of the young general, his horse at full gallop; while on the supposed site of his last magnificent battle there stands another, its cylindrical plinth bearing the inscription quoted at the beginning of this chapter and endowing its subject with a wonderfully luxuriant walrus moustache, seldom rivalled until the days of Georges Clemenceau.

The war dragged on for another year or two, but after Alesia Gaul became to all intents and purposes Roman. The Gauls, heaven knows, had little reason to love their conquerors: Caesar had treated them harshly – often cruelly – and had shown them little respect. He had looted and plundered without mercy, had seized their gold and silver and had sold thousands of prisoners into slavery. But, as the years went by, they began to see that there were, after all, compensations. Nothing unites peoples like a common enemy, and under Roman governorship they became united as never before; their tribal system simply withered away. Three Roman governments were established, for the provinces of Gallia Celtica (with the headquarters of the Governor General in Lyon), Gallia Belgica, corresponding roughly to what is now Belgium, and Aquitania in the south-west corner; and at once they settled down to work. Within fifty years, the Gallic landscape was transformed just as Provence had been the best part of a century before – with new roads, cities, country villas, theatres, public baths and – for the first time – properly ploughed fields. Now, with a little effort, an educated Gaul might obtain Roman citizenship, with all the privileges that it entailed: as a civis romanus, he might even be entrusted with the command of an army, or the administration of a province.

Gaul was to remain Roman for some five hundred years – roughly the same period of time that separates us from the reign of King Henry VIII. By the beginning of the second century, men had begun to talk of a new religion – one that had its origin in the far-distant province of Asia but was set to inaugurate profound changes across Europe and beyond. Like Roman civilisation itself, Christianity spread slowly northward from the Mediterranean. By 100 AD the first missionaries had reached Marseille; it was the best part of another century before the message got as far as Lyon. The Roman Empire – for an empire it had now become – was surprisingly relaxed where religion was concerned: so long as lip-service was paid to the cult of the emperor, people were free to believe more or less what they liked. The Christians, however, were not prepared to go even that far. Persecution was therefore inevitable. It began under Nero in 64, after the Great Fire of Rome, and continued spasmodically for the next 250 years, reaching its darkest hour in the reign of Diocletian at the turn of the third and fourth centuries. Martyrs were innumerable – among them Saint Denis, third-century Bishop of Paris, who when beheaded calmly picked up his severed head and walked several miles* to the site of the abbey that bears his name while preaching a sermon on repentance.

But then came the dawn: in February 313 the two emperors Constantine the Great and Licinius published the Edict of Milan, which permanently established toleration for Christians throughout the empire; and twenty-five years later – though admittedly only when on his deathbed^† – Constantine himself was baptised. In the centuries to come, though France would suffer more than her full share of religious wars, the sway of Christianity would not again be threatened until the Revolution.

By the beginning of the fifth century the Roman Empire was on its last legs, almost defenceless against the barbarians – Goths, Huns and Vandals – who swept down from the north-east, ever in search of warmer climates and more fertile lands. These were not invading armies; they were migrations of whole peoples – men, women and children. The eastern Goths (Ostrogoths), the western Goths (Visigoths) and the Vandals were at least semicivilised; they were all of Germanic origin and were Christians. Unfortunately they were also Arian heretics, steadfastly maintaining that Jesus Christ was not, as the orthodox believed, co-eternal and of one substance with God the Father, but that he had been created by Him at a specific time and for a specific purpose, as His chosen instrument for the salvation of the world. This put them at loggerheads with the Church; but they had no desire to destroy the empire, for which they had nothing but admiration. All they asked was Lebensraum, somewhere to settle; and settle they did.

The Huns, on the other hand, were Mongols, and barbarians through and through. Most of them still lived and slept in the open, disdaining all agriculture and even cooked food – though legend has it that they softened raw meat by massaging it between their thighs and the flanks of their horses as they rode. For clothing they favoured tunics made either from linen or, rather surprisingly, from the skins of field mice crudely stitched together; these they wore continuously, without ever removing them, until they dropped off of their own accord. (A law was passed in 416 banning anyone dressed in animal skins or with long hair from coming within the walls of Rome.) The leader of the Huns, Attila, was short, swarthy and snub-nosed, with a thin, straggling beard and beady little eyes set in a head too big for his body. Within the space of a few years he had made himself feared throughout Europe: more feared, perhaps, than any other single man – with the possible exception of Napoleon – before or since.

These were the people who crossed the Rhine early in 451 and smashed their way through France as far as Orléans, before being defeated on 20 June by a combined Roman and Visigothic force on the Catalaunian Plains, just outside Châlons-sur-Marne. Had Attila continued his advance, French history might have been very different; but the situation was quite bad enough without him. As the whole machinery of the empire began to crumble, even communications across the Alps were broken; orders from Rome simply failed to arrive. The abdication in 476 of the last Emperor of the West, the pathetic child Romulus Augustulus – his very name a double-diminutive – is no surprise.

With the Roman Empire effectively gone – though the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople continued to claim authority – Gaul disintegrated into a mass of small barbarian states under so-called kings, dukes and counts. As we know, however, nature abhors a vacuum; sooner or later one state becomes stronger than the rest and ultimately achieves domination. This time it was the Salian Franks. Relatively recent arrivals, they first appeared in the area in the second century, and over the next three hundred years gradually merged with the Gallo-Roman populations, giving their name to modern France in the process. In the later fourth century their kingdom had been founded by a certain Childeric, son of Merovech, and was consequently known as the Merovingian; and it was Childeric’s son Clovis who became King of the Franks in 481. Uniting as he did nearly all Gaul under Merovingian rule, Clovis has a serious claim to have been the first King of France. His name, in its later version of ‘Louis’, was to be given to eighteen successors before the French monarchy ended.

It would be pleasant indeed if we could look upon Clovis in a heroic light, as we can Vercingetorix. Alas, we cannot. He was a monster. He eliminated his enemies occasionally in a legitimate battle – as he did in 486 at Soissons, when he effectively put an end to all Western Roman authority outside Italy – but far more frequently by cold-blooded murder, cheerfully assassinating all potential threats, Frankish and otherwise. It worked. By the time of his death around 513 – the precise date is uncertain – his rule extended over the greater part of modern France, Belgium and, to the east, a considerable distance into northern Germany. He had also reluctantly abandoned his initial Arianism – largely at the instigation of his Burgundian wife Clotilde – and on Christmas Day 496 had been received into the Catholic faith. On that day the fate of Arianism in France was sealed. Over the coming years more and more of his people were to follow his example, leading eventually to the religious unification of France and Germany, which was to endure for the next millennium. And it was thanks to that same baptism that, three hundred years later, Charlemagne and Pope Leo III could forge the alliance that gave birth to the Holy Roman Empire.

Throughout some two hundred and fifty of those years, the Merovingian dynasty ruled France – and came dangerously near to destroying it. The good old days of settled government were over; cities and towns were left to fall into ruin. The Frankish kings, immediately distinguishable from their subjects by their shoulder-length blondish hair – said to represent the sun’s rays – journeyed endlessly from one village to the next with their officials and their men-at-arms, carrying with them their huge triple-sealed coffers of treasure and cheerfully waging countless and pointless little family wars. Even when they were not so engaged, violence was never far away. For an example we have to look no further than Clovis’s son Chilperic, whom the later French chronicler Gregory of Tours dubbed ‘the Nero and Herod of his time’ and who took as his second wife Galswintha, daughter of the Visigothic King of Spain. The marriage was not a success, and one morning Galswintha was found strangled in her bed. This seems to have been the work of a serving-maid called Fredegund, who had long been the king’s mistress and whom he married a short time later. Now it happened that Galswintha had a sister, Brunhilda, who was the wife of Chilperic’s brother Sigebert. The murder caused a series of fearsome wars between the two brothers, until in 575, just when he had Chilperic at his mercy, Sigebert was murdered by Fredegund. Chilperic lived on for another nine years – during which time he introduced eye-gouging as a new sort of punishment – before being stabbed to death in 584 by an unknown assailant, probably one of Brunhilda’s men; but he was posthumously avenged when his son Chlothar II seized Brunhilda and had her lashed to the tail of a horse, which was then sent off at a gallop.

There were in theory twenty-seven Merovingian kings, but it will be a relief to the reader that their detailed history will play no part in this book. In fact even this figure can be only a very conservative estimate, since for much of the time France was once again broken up into an infinity of minor kingdoms; frequently there were several kings reigning at the same time. Mention must be made, however, of one, simply since he is the most famous of them all: Dagobert I who, as every French schoolboy knows, put on his trousers inside out.* But he also did a good deal more. In 630 or thereabouts he annexed Alsace, the Vosges and the Ardennes, creating a new duchy, and he made Paris his capital. Though his debaucheries were famous – hence the perfectly idiotic little song – he was deeply religious and founded the Basilica of Saint-Denis, in which he was the first French king to be buried. From the tenth century onwards all but three were to join him there.

These were the dark ages; and in France they were very dark indeed. The only glimmering of light came from the Church which, unlike the State, remained firm and well organised. By this time the ecclesiastical hierarchy had been securely established, with a bishop in every diocese and a conscientious if largely uneducated priesthood. Meanwhile, thanks to the benefactions of the faithful and the efficient exaction of tithes, church property was steadily increasing – as indeed was church power: every ruler knew all too well that he was in constant danger of excommunication or even of an interdict, which would condemn not only himself, but all his subjects as well. The monasteries too were beginning to make their presence felt. They had long flourished in the east, where there was only one monastic order, that of St Basil; but the Basilians were essentially contemplatives and hermits. St Benedict, the sixth-century father of monasticism in the west, had very different ideas. The black-robed Benedictines were communities in the fullest sense of the word, dedicated to total obedience and hard physical labour, principally agricultural. But they also found time to study, to copy manuscripts – immensely important in the centuries before the invention of printing – and generally to keep alive a little spark of learning and humanity in the bleak, depressing world in which they lived.

Then the Muslims arrived. In 633 – just a year after the Prophet’s death – they had burst out of Arabia. The speed of their advance was astonishing. Within thirty years they had captured not only Syria and Palestine, but also most of the Persian Empire, Afghanistan and part of the Punjab. They next turned their attention to the west. Constantinople looked too tough a nut to crack, so they swung to the left and headed along the shores of North Africa. At this point their pace became slower; it was not before the end of the century that they reached the Atlantic, and not till 711 that they were ready to cross the Straits of Gibraltar into Spain. But by 732, still less than a century after their eruption from their desert homeland, they had made their way over the Pyrenees and, according to tradition, pressed on as far as Tours – where, only 150 miles from Paris, they were checked at last by the Frankish king Charles Martel in an engagement which inspired Edward Gibbon to one of his most celebrated flights of fancy:

A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pupils might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the Revelation of Mahomet.

Modern historians are quick to point out that the Battle of Tours is scarcely mentioned by contemporary or near-contemporary Arab historians, and then only as a comp...