In. spite of these, qualities in the time, the vital forces of Gallic civilization were still declining. Men built less well and thought less well from year to year, and when the omnip otent chief of this military episode had died in 814, there broke, upon what was left of civilization, the heaviest storm it had hitherto endured. In that storm Europe, and therefore its surviving centre in Gaul, was nearly over whelmed.
The pagan tribes of Scandinavia, a fresh horde of Mongols, a renewed splendor in Islam, all fought together against the Christian name. It was a far stricter ordeal than were the bar barian invasions of the 5th century; indeed, there was but little relation between these in filtrations of that period and the savage attack of this. The numbers were far larger, the op posing forces of civilization were far weaker, knowledge and discipline by which alone civ ilized men can resist barbarians were at their lowest ebb.
'The issue had already been joined in the British Islands by the beginning of what are known as the Invasions?' Some 30 years after the death of Charlemagne it men aced what was left of the Christian continent, and with the close of the 9th century it came to a climax. In that whirlwind two things of vast importance to the future of Europe occurred. The first was the military success of a Chris tendom absolutely united in religion; the non Christian was beaten off by men of one faith and one ritual and of one immutable manner of thinking. The second was that so much was forgotten and so many traditions lost in the struggle as to necessitate the growth of a new society. It is in this close of the 9th century that the old owners of the land, mainly Roman or Gallic in ancestry, become territorial lords. It is in this period of darkness and upheaval that the long process of independence is at last achieved and that the village communities with their chiefs finally adopt those groupings for self-defense which are later called the Feudal System, and it is in this period that the sub conscious national groups of Europe take on conscious form.
Two points of western Europe determine the struggle in favor of our tradition and of Europe. There are the southwest of England, Somersetshire and Berkshire, in which Alfred outlasted the savage invader and finally de feated him; and Paris, where, just before, the local forces had beaten back the same enemies in a memorable siege in 885.
The second alone concerns these lines.
To understand the city of Paris is essential to anyone who would understand the history of France. The town has played for a thousand years the same part in the government of that country that the English governing class or plu tocracy have played in Britain since the Reformation. 'Thence have orders proceeded; thither has intelligence flowed, and there has been fixed that specialized organ of adtninistra don, round which all national development gath ers, and which, though it has many names in many polities, is a necessary nucleus to every great nation.
Paris had risen to its great position rnthrough e the waterways of northern France. In breakdown of Roman order the disuse of the roads and the collapse of the posting system had increased the importance of the rivers in a nexus of which the city found' itself and from the last Roman emperors it had maintained a sort of special place, not as a capital (for there was no such thing), but as a chief town — the town of Clovis and of the early kings, the town in which the early Carlovingians came to die and in whose shrine they were buried: The local chief — who stood the siege of 885 — was by name Odo. Of the ancestry of his father, Robert, we are not overcertain, but from that father and his descendants sprang that line of men who symbolized the rejuven escence of Gaul when the struggle was over, and in whom centred that which was at once the symbol and the organ of the new nation: the monarchy.
Robert the Second, the brother of Odo, was, like Odo, elected to a rough kingship, in the contempt which all felt for the decaying idea of the Carlovingian empire, and the grandson of this second Robert, Hugh, was formally crowned at Noyon, and the separation of French government from the mass of Europe was complete.
From that moment, for exactly 800 years, to the assembly of the nobles under Louis XVI, the monarchy, retained in one house, perpetu ally increasing its power, is synonymous with and develops the consciousness of the nation. This date, 987, stand as the second landmark in the history of France, and our first business before entering the story of that great develop ment is to consider how Gaul looked when the first of its nominal chiefs was crowned.