His son Charles was only 13 at his father's death, and the kingdom was under the guardian ship of his elder sister Anne. She was well served. A second revolt of the great men in the kingdom was crushed at the battle of Saint Aubin du Cormier, and five years later Charles VIII, having now freed himself from his sis ter's power, married the heiress of Brittany and united that province to the Crown. He next in vaded Italy in pursuance to a claim to the throne of Naples. The military result was small, but the moral results large. First, and by far the most important, the military temper of the nation was given an opportunity to exercise after the long and successful diplomacy of his father. Such foreign wars have always been of the ut most stimulant effect upon Gaul. And the sec ond result was the introduction into France of the Italian Renaissance. When Charles VIII died, still quite a young man, in 1498, he was succeeded by the Duke of Orleans, a distant cousin of his, the great grandson of Charles V, who was the nearest male heir, and who had led the great insurrection of 12 years before. This prince, among the most sagacious and tem perate of all European kings, insisted as a mat ter of policy upon renewing the Breton mar riage, though the experiment was perilously near incest, continued the Italian invasions, effected an alliance with Henri VIII, marrying Mary, a sister of that king, and died on the first day of 1515 with power more complete, a territory more united and the military organization of the kingdom more thorough, than any of these factors in French history had hitherto been.
This date, the opening of the year 1515, is of such moment for France and for all European civilization, that a short digression is necessary in order to appreciate the change we are about to witness.
The change which fell upon Europe in these first years of the 16th century is not one to which precise causes can be ascribed: it was rather one of those whirlwinds which appear to blow from without the field of material ob servation and of material causation, though it is indeed true that the mind of Europe had been stirring uneasily and with increasing force for three generations past. The movement which was to be of such prodigious consequence, and to which we owe the modern world, took two forms; the first of which was evidently of vast moment, the second of which at first ap peared to be a particular and local phenomenon. The first was an extension of human knowledge and a rediscovery of the past. The second was the revival of those interminable theological discussions which had been wearily familiar in Europe for more than a century past. The revival of learning, the discovery of antiquity, the expansion of the known world and so forth, for a hundred years occupied the chief energies of men, but side by side with that great wave of change went with expanding force the theological discussions of the time, until their united effect was such as to split asunder the unity of Europe; that unity has not yet been regained, though it very nearly was under Napoleon, and though the trend of things to-day is to achieve it at the expense of bitter conflicts. When this enormous result of petti
fogging theological discussions was apparent, even educated men woke up to the importance of what had hitherto been a by-product in the general intellectual movement of the time.
This waking up, so to speak, to the import ance of the religious quarrel took place in the middle and toward the end of the 16th century, but it was not until the 17th century had opened that the schism was irredeemably fixed or that the division of Europe into two camps of op posed thought and morals was reluctantly ac cepted. This period of ferment is covered in French history by six reigns. That of Francis I, from 1515 to 1547, very nearly contemporary with the reign of Henry VIII in England, was occupied with the glories of the Renaissance. It also corresponds to the reign of the great Em peror Charles V, and covers the first stage of the theological discussions already alluded to.
The first 10 years of Francis I's reign were occupied with foreign ambitions, and were closed by his defeat at the battle of Pavia in 1525. He was defeated, and only obtained his liberty with difficulty. The remainder of the reign is concerned with the transformation of architectural and every form of plastic art under the inspiration of his court, and quite late — in 1535— it was occupied with the be ginning of the persecutions, an attitude which is retained during the remaining 12 years of the reign. Meanwhile, however, as the middle of the century approached, and as the principles of the Reformation obtained hold in Germany, the French kings saw the opportunity for maintaining the independence and increasing the greatness of France, against the overwhelm ing power of the Hapsburg house which sur rounded them on every side, in Spain as upon the Rhine, and in the Low Countries. This opportunity was afforded by the Reformation which was supported in Germany as every where by the squires and the great merchants, and all those who desired to break from the cen tral authority, of the Crown. From this period, for full 200 years, it was the constant policy, now more, now less active, of the French Mon archs, to support the petty Protestant com munities against the general authority of the Empire.
The next reign, that of Henry II, was im bued with this idea, although the repression of the Protestant movement at home was con tinued.