18. FRENCH CIVILIZATION. Nation ality does not consist in a race, still less in the use of a common language, but in the possession of a corporate tradition. A nation is a body of men distinguished from other bodies around it by the possession of an organic tradition which so molds the habits of life of those subjected to it as to define them clearly from their neighbors.
The territory the larger part of which is now called France, and the ancient name of which was Gallia, has since the beginning of recorded history been inhabited by many mil lion men possessed of and influenced by such a corporate tradition as has given unity to their commonwealth even in its most anarchic or barbaric periods, and which permits us therefore to speak of the French people as of a permanent historical phenomenon in western Europe. Compared with this solid and recog nizable truth, guesswork upon complicated racial origins and still vainer guesswork upon the evidence of language are negligible.
The characteristics which the Gauls have developed in this national tradition of theirs and in which in turn their national tradition has imposed upon them and confirmed them in are easily recognized by the modern traveler or by the student of the detailed history of the last 300 years. This tradition comports energy working at a very high potential, a potential so high as sometimes to fuse its communications, and so high as to suggest to those unused to it a necessary absence of volume. It comports in philosophy a combination, somewhat paradoxi cal in character, by which material and tangible things are chiefly regarded and yet treated by the methods of pure thought. Thus no nation has expressed political theory in terms more general than the French, yet none have had less inclination for metaphysics.
In the political sphere the national tradition of which I speak is essentially military, and in the various forms of its expression has never ceased to be so,—by which is not meant that the French are perpetually under arms, or chiefly concerned with making war, but that their conception of the organization of a state is always a military conception; and that as the art of war changes and develops, now tribal, now municipal, now based on castles and at last national, so has Gaul been a loose hierarchy of tribes, a web of Roman municipalities and gar risons, a tangle of feudal relations, or a highly centralized and bureaucratic body. The whole trend and determination of the French mind in civics may be expressed in the formula •With out authority there is no It is on this account that throughout French history prompt itude and power are demanded from govern ment, and that among a people to whom the Oriental ideal of collectivism is highly repug nant, so much is demanded from the state and so many of a citizen's actions are considered only in the light of his relation to the state, as though the duties which he owes to the state were in some way more sacred than the rights which the state should guarantee to himself.
The minor and more superficial character istics that go with this general picture are a vivacity and often an excellence in oratory, an exact and somewhat excessive precision in daily life, accompanied by an excessive neglect of such details as are considered unimportant, which neglect is repulsive to those who carry a less precise order more generally over the whole of life; a considerable artistic faculty, waning and waxing with various periods, but fairly constant in dramatic art and in architecture; a lack of appetite for individual adventure (a trait in which the Frenchman contrasts very sharply with the Scandinavian and the Islander of the North, whether Irish, Highland, English or Dane) ; and finally, a curious power of common action often suddenly inflamed and always extreme, in which the Frenchman con trasts not only with the Scandinavian spirit upon the north of him, but also with the various Germanies, the Spaniards and Italians of his frontiers, and indeed with every other European community. It is to this trait that France owes the many popular risings and massacres to be discovered in her history, the extreme rapidity with which a leader is chosen and again rejected, the lack of judgment in foreign affairs which cannot but accompany the confused action of a great number of men, and the startling military successes which that com mon action often produces. Of these of course the main historic examples are the great east ward march of the Gauls in the 3d century be fore our Lord, which led them to the sack of Rome and of Delphi, and to a permanent colony in Asia Minor; the march of the Crusades, and the wars of the French Revolution. But beside these enormous swarmings of the French, in numerable minor phases of the same type are to be discovered in the 2,000 years of Gallic history: It is to be noted also that just as the French are unique in expeditions of this kind, so are they unique in the multitude of their civil wars.