Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Old Street Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Shortest Histories
- Sprache: Englisch
A Global History of France for our Times From 'glorious defeat' in 52 BCE at the hands of Julius Caesar to the coup de théâtre of the 2024 Olympics, The Shortest History of France charts over two millennia of eventful and surprising history.The romantic boulevards of Paris, the sublime art of Renoir and Monet, the delights of haute couture and grande cuisine -- what could be more quintessentially French?Yet even a humble breakfast of café au lait and croissants can tell a global tale of trade and empire, war and revolution. Colin Jones leads us on a tour of France across the centuries that takes in the cultural highlights of the Grand Siècle and the age of Voltaire as well as the darker side of French history, from the grim legacy of the Crusades to the guillotine's long shadow. Along the way he explores the historic tension between xenophobia and tolerance that continues to shape the nation today.Enlivened by dozens of maps and illustrations, this is a timely, accessible and eye-opening history of our nearest neighbour by one of the world's foremost experts.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 315
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
i
SELECTED PRAISE FOR COLIN JONES
On The Fall of Robespierre
‘Vital, incisive, revelatory – takes us to the place, to the instant, to the heartbeat of revolution in the making’ hilary mantel
‘Brilliant… Jones has a marvellous eye for colour’ dominic sandbrook, The Sunday Times
‘Enthralling, incisively argued… a thrilling moment-by-moment examination’ Financial Times
‘Unfailingly gripping, superbly researched and strikingly original’ Literary Review
On The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris
‘A compelling Cheshire cat of a book’ Guardian
‘The most original approach to history in years… one of the most absorbing and unusual history books imaginable’ The Sunday Times
‘Highly readable, intelligent, unpretentious and even mischievous’ Times Literary Supplement
‘An education and an entertainment… Jones drills into his subject with wit, clarity and a fine theatrical flourish’ The Times
On The Cambridge Illustrated History of France
‘Authoritative… this book, which has no equivalent in recent writing about French history, should reach out beyond the British Isles to the English-speaking world in its entirety.’ emmanuel le roy ladurie
‘It’s hard to see how this might be bettered… will be the obvious starting point for years to come for anglophones everywhere who want to know about the history of France.’ French Studiesii
iii
iv
For Violet (Lettie), Charley, Thea and Josh, the ‘Shortest’ of our grandchildren
v
CONTENTS
French History: A Timeline
c. 500 bce Celts settle throughout Gaul
c. 200 bce–150 ce Roman Warm Period
58–51 bce Conquest by Julius Caesar.
52 bce Julius Caesar defeats the Gauls under Vercingetorix at battle of Alésia
Late 2nd century ce Beginning of ‘barbarian’ attacks and invasions
451 Defeat of Attila the Hun at the Catalaunian Plains
476 End of the Western Roman Empire
486 Frankish leader Clovis defeats Roman general Syagrius; Frankish expansion begins
496 Clovis baptised and anointed king of the Franks; first ruler of Merovingian dynasty (496–751)
508 Clovis chooses Paris as Frankish capital
511 Death of Clovis and subdivision of kingdom among his sons
c. 530–660 Late Antique Little Ice Age
732 Battle of Tours (or Poitiers): Charles Martel defeats Saracen army
751 Pepin III crowned first ruler of Carolingian dynasty (751–987)
771–814 Reign of Charlemagne; Carolingian cultural renaissance
800 Charlemagne crowned emperor in Rome
842 Strasbourg Oaths: French and German languages begin to diverge
843 Treaty of Verdun: tripartite division of Frankish lands
Late 8th–9th centuries Viking raids and invasions
c. 950–c. 1250 Medieval Warm Period
987 Hugh Capet made king of the West Franks; first monarch of Capetian dynasty (987–1328)
1066 Duke William of Normandy invades and becomes king of England
1095 Pope Innocent III calls for first Crusade
1159–1299 (First) Hundred Years War against England. Angevin empire extends across western and southern France
1209–29 Albigensian crusade
1214 Philip II Augustus wins significant victory at Battle of Bouvines
c. 1250 Establishment of the Sorbonne
1302 First meeting of the Estates General
1328 Death of last Capetian king, Charles IV; Philip VI founds Valois dynasty (1328–1589)
1337–1453 (Second) Hundred Years War
1338–52 Black Death
c. 1350–c. 1850 Little Ice Age viii
1358Jacquerie (peasant revolt) in northern France
1360 Treaty of Brétigny and English dominance of France
1394 Expulsion of Jews
1415 English victory at Battle of Agincourt
1421–36 France under English rule
1429 Siege of Orleans raised by Joan of Arc
1431 Joan of Arc burnt at the stake
1439 Estates General grants kings right to levy a national tax (the taille) to pay for a standing army
c. 1450 Print revolution begins
1453 Battle of Castillon: end of Hundred Years War
1477 Death of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy
1492 Christopher Columbus lands in the Americas
1494 Charles VIII leads expedition into Italy; start of Italian Wars (1494–1559)
1517 Martin Luther posts 95 Theses; beginning of Reformation
1525 Battle of Pavia: King Francis I taken prisoner
c. 1530 Jean Calvin establishes Calvinist branch of Protestantism
1539 Edict of Villers-Cotterêts: French becomes language of law and administration
1559 Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis ends the Italian Wars
1561–98 Wars of Religion
1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
1589 Henry of Navarre accedes to the throne as Henry IV, the first ruler of the Bourbon dynasty (1589–1792, 1814–30)
1598 Edict of Nantes: toleration for Protestants
c.1600 Beginnings of Counter-Reformation in France
1610 Assassination of Henry IV, accession of Louis XIII
1618–48 Thirty Years War
1624–42 Cardinal Richelieu chief minister of King Louis XIII
1631 Creation of the Gazette, the first national newspaper
1635 Foundation of the Académie française
1638 Birth of Louis XIV: accedes to throne with Marie de’ Medici as regent
1642–61 Cardinal Mazarin chief minister under Louis XIII and Louis XIV
1648–52 The Fronde (civil wars)
1682 Louis XIV establishes royal court and government at Versailles
1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; introduction of Code noir for the colonies
1701–13 War of Spanish Succession
1715 Death of Louis XIV, regency of the duke of Orleans
1723 Louis XV accedes to throne ix
1751–72 Publication of the Encyclopédie, the ‘Enlightenment Bible’
1756–63 Seven Years’ War
1774 Death of Louis XV, accession of Louis XVI
1778–83 French involvement in the American War of Independence
1789 Fall of Bastille, start of French Revolution; Declaration of the Rights of Man
1791 Slave revolt in Saint-Domingue
1792–1815 French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars
1792 Overthrow of the monarchy, First Republic founded
1793 Execution of Louis XVI
1793–4 The Terror
1795–9 The Directory
1798 Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign
1799Coup d’état by Napoleon, overthrow of Directory and establishment of Consulate
1804 Napoleon becomes emperor, end of First Republic; Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) declares independence
1808–14 Spanish Peninsula War
1812 Moscow campaign
1814 Overthrow of Napoleon; Bourbon restoration under Louis XVIII
1815 Napoleon escapes; the Hundred Days, battle of Waterloo, exile; Congress of Vienna
1830 Invasion of Algeria; the Trois glorieuses revolt: end of the Bourbon regime, establishment of the July Monarchy under King Louis-Philippe
1832 Cholera epidemic
1848 Revolution, end of July Monarchy, establishment of Second Republic; abolition of slavery
1852 End of Second Republic. Louis Bonaparte becomes Emperor Napoleon III
1852–70 Urban renewal of Paris under Haussmann, Prefect of Paris
1863 Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
1870 Franco-Prussian War; loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany; Second Empire replaced by Third Republic
1871 The Paris Commune
1881–2 Jules Ferry’s primary education reforms
1889, 1900 Universal Expositions in Paris; Eiffel Tower erected
1894–1906 Dreyfus Affair
1905 Formal separation of church and state
1914–18 First World War
1916 Battle of Verdun
1919 Versailles peace treaties; restoration of Alsace and Lorraine
1934 Stavisky Affair x
1936 Left-wing Popular Front: Matignon Agreements guarantee workers’ rights
1939–45 Second World War
1940 German Blitzkrieg; fall of France; end of Third Republic
1900–44l’État français or Vichy regime
1944 D-Day landings; liberation of Paris
1945–6 End of war; provisional government under Charles de Gaulle; establishment of Fourth Republic
1945–76 The trente glorieuses, record economic growth
1951 European Coal and Steel Community, precursor to the European Union
1954 Defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam
1954–62 Algerian War
1957 Treaty of Rome, creation of Common Market
1958 Political and constitutional crisis over Algeria; end of Fourth Republic, foundation of Fifth with de Gaulle as President
1960 Major decolonisation agreements
1962 Treaty of Évian: end of Algerian war, creation of an independent Algeria
1968 ‘May Events’, Grenelle Agreements
1971 Marcel Ophuls, Le Chagrin et la pitié
1981–95 Socialist François Mitterrand longest-serving president
1989 The foulard (headscarf) affair
1992 Maastricht Treaty: formation of European Union
1995–2007 Jacques Chirac president
1998 Sentencing in Papon Affair; France wins soccer World Cup
2000Parité law on female representation
2002 Chirac wins second term as president, defeating Jean-Marie Le Pen (Front National) in run-off
2005 Nationwide riots
2007–12 Nicolas Sarkozy president
2008 International banking crisis
2012–17 Socialist François Hollande president
2015 Terrorist attacks: Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan; Paris Climate Accords
2017 Election of Emmanuel Macron as president
2018Gilets jaunes demonstrations
2019 Fire at Notre-Dame cathedral
2020–1 COVID-19 pandemic
2022 Macron re-elected president
2022 Ukraine invaded by Russia: French aid to Ukraine
2023 Pension law reform and nationwide demonstrations
2024 Legislative elections; Olympic Games xi
Introduction
The Hexagon
No country is the exclusive artisan of its own civilisation.
Paul Vidal de La Blache (1903)
Visiting France as a teenager, I remember being struck by the small, roughly hexagonal plastic templates of the country that were available in stationery shops among the school supplies. Their aim, I suppose, was to familiarise primary school children with the outline and geography of ‘l’Hexagone’, as many French people refer to their country.
The idea of France as a hexagon was popularised in the mid-nineteenth century, the golden age of French nationalism, when the country’s modern political contours were being firmed up.
An English friend who spent her early schooldays in France tells me these six-sided templates, still widely available today, led her to believe the country was an island. Regrettably, many writers still give the impression that France and its history have been made solely within these sharply defined ‘hexagonal’ borders. 2
This book offers something different. While telling the story of the nation and its culture from within, it also shows the extent to which France has been shaped by events and developments well beyond its frontiers.1 Unlike the hard edges of those little plastic hexagons, French borders have always been porous. In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, we are used to the notion that flows of people, goods, ideas and even viruses transcend national boundaries. Yet none of these developments is new. France has never been an impregnable fortress.
‘How French!’ A woman on a tricycle delivers bread in Paris c. 1901. In 2022, the baguette entered UNESCO’s inventory of the world’s intangible cultural heritage. In fact, this quintessentially French food was invented in 1837 by an Austrian-born baker, August Zang, albeit in a Parisian bakery.
France has profoundly influenced the course of global history, notably through trade, conquest and colonisation. And while English may be the lingua franca of today’s globalised world, the French language remains a significant tool of the country’s soft power abroad. More subtly, too, French art, architecture, music 3and literature continue to have a global reach, to say nothing of the democratic political ideals of the French Revolution.
From the very earliest times, France has received as much as it has given. Archaeological and DNA evidence suggest that this area of Europe experienced three prehistoric waves of settlement following the great migrations of Homo sapiens out of Africa. The first was around 55,000 years ago, when groups of hunter-gatherers encountered and ultimately replaced Neanderthal populations already living in the region. Their descendants would go on to create the extraordinary cave-paintings discovered at Lascaux and Chauvet. 4
Some time after 7000 bce, a second wave of settlers, farmers from Anatolia in present-day Turkey, migrated across the continent, largely eradicating existing hunter-gathering populations as they went. Between 5,000 and 4,800 years ago, nomadic herding cultures swept in from the east. They had emerged from the Pontic-Caspian steppe – an area that extends from present-day Bulgaria to Kazakhstan – and may have been fleeing climatic changes, famine, disease or some combination of all three. They brought with them a Bronze Age culture and probably the Indo-European language as well. Many of these warrior bands interbred with local women, settling down and becoming farmers.
It is thus worth bearing in mind that even the most ‘indigenous’ French men and women are genetic hybrids, bearing a mélange of DNA from across the globe. Some of the earliest inhabitants of France had dark skin and blue eyes, while later arrivals had olive complexions and dark hair. Immigrants with paler skin would come later still. Over the past two millennia, French genetic stock has continued to be shaped by the inward migration of Italian, Germanic, Nordic and Eurasian newcomers as well as more recent post-colonial arrivals from Africa, the Caribbean, East Asia and beyond. As a melting pot of chromosomes and cultures, France bears comparison with – and by some measures surpasses – the United States of America.
Today the ethnic diversity of France is evident from a quick glance around any Paris metro carriage. But many famous French men and women of the past had foreign origins too. France’s first king (Clovis) and emperor (Charlemagne) were Germans. Had he been born only a year earlier, before the island of Corsica became part of France, Napoleon would have been Genoese. The Paris Panthéon that honours France’s greatest men and women contains the remains of scientist 5Marie Curie, who was Polish, and Alexandre Dumas, whose grandmother was a Caribbean slave. No fewer than six of the ten francophone winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature since 1945 have ‘non-hexagonal’ roots. Meanwhile, film director Jean-Luc Godard was Swiss, chansonnier Charles Aznavour was Armenian and ‘the French Elvis’ Johnny Hallyday was half Belgian, while singer-songwriter Aya Nakamura is half Malian. And so on. The French firmament is and always has been crowded with foreign stars.
Les Pains de Picasso by Robert Doisneau, 1959. Catalonian by birth, Picasso spent much of his life in France.
The same goes for much of France’s most cherished cultural patrimony. Gothic architecture took inspiration from the Islamic world, while many Loire châteaux are copycat versions of Italian Renaissance palazzi. ‘Typically French’ public parks were originally modelled on Italian formal styles or else 6on English landscape gardens. Many of the trees that line their promenades and city boulevards – chestnut, lime, cypress and eucalyptus, as well as Monet’s beloved poplars – are imports, some quite recent.
The national dish biftek et frites takes half its name from English while potatoes come from the Americas. The classic French breakfast of café au lait and croissants is a similarly global medley: croissants are styled after Austrian pastries; coffee first arrived in France from Turkey and later came (along with sugar) from the Caribbean; and most of France’s dairy products are created with the milk of Holstein Friesian cows.
As this small selection shows, France has never been an empty vessel into which the world has poured its wares. It has reshaped ideas, commodities and forms of behaviour in its own manner, often re-exporting them as ‘quintessentially French’ products.
There is a well-known proverb, ‘It takes a village to raise a child’. Any person’s successes, however great, are grounded in the achievements of the wider community. The same principle applies to a nation state such as France, which has been shaped not only by the efforts and imaginations of countless French men and women but also by innumerable influences from the global community. At a time when nativist, xenophobic and white supremacist messages are being openly deployed by populist politicians – in France as well as other countries – this is an important message for a national history of the Hexagon to convey.
1 In this it takes its cue from some leading French historians. See especially Patrick Boucheron, France in the World: A New Global History (2021), which contains contributions from over a hundred historians, as well as the brilliant pioneering work of Lucien Febvre and François Crouzet, Nous sommes des sang-mêlés: Manuel d’histoire de la civilisation française. Written in the early 1950s, the latter was only published in 2012 and has not been translated into English. A general bibliography in English is provided at the end of this book.
Chapter 1
On Roman Coattails
The First Millennium (52 bce–1000 ce)
Alésia: A Glorious Defeat
Vercingetorix the nationalist hero, as seen in 1865. The plinth reads: ‘Gaul united, forming a single nation and animated by the same spirit, could defy the universe.’
From a towering seven-metre-high structure on Mont Auxois, near the modern spa-town of Alise-Sainte-Reine in Burgundy, a huge bronze statue of the Gaulish warlord Vercingetorix looks down sombrely on the site of the battle of Alésia. Here in 52 bce, the forces under his command were routed by Roman generalissimo Julius Caesar.
Alésia is a good place to start a history of France. It marks the moment when written records appear for the first time in a hitherto wholly oral culture. While the battle was a defeat, it was a glorious one that linked French destiny to classical civilisation. Until the nineteenth century, the story of France had traditionally begun in 496 ce with the coronation of Clovis, the Frankish ruler deemed France’s first king. But this convention rankled with the anti-monarchist and republican historians of the period. The Clovis story also felt a little too German at a time of rising French nationalism. Instead, every schoolchild across 8the French-speaking empire was taught to admire Vercingetorix as a proto-nationalist and resistance fighter. Young citizens from the Île-de-France to Indochina were encouraged to revere ‘their’ Gaulish ancestors – ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois’ – whose fiery blood was held to run through the veins of modern French men and women.
Yet the Vercingetorix myth is largely based on wishful thinking. The little we know of the tribal chieftain mostly comes from Julius Caesar’s account of his triumph in The Gallic Wars, and the future Roman emperor had every reason to beef up his opponent in order to burnish his own military reputation. The bronze Vercingetorix of 1865 wears anachronistic clothes, bears an outdated Bronze Age sword and sports a florid moustache that is based on the sheerest guesswork: coins discovered at Alésia show him clean-shaven. It is a representation of Gaulishness that is as much a reflection of its age as Asterix is of our own.
Asterix the Gaul
‘The year is 50 bc. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely. One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the invaders…’ With these opening words, the authors of the hugely popular Asterix books offer a comic antidote to Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Since their first appearance in 1959, the adventures of the diminutive resistance hero and his faithful companion Obelix have stretched to over forty volumes, with world sales approaching 400 million. The Asterix brand is used to advertise everything from washing powder to climbing boots and false moustaches, while Parc Astérix is one of France’s most-visited theme parks. Most French men and women have read at least one adventure in the series – and not only as children, since the comic-book (bande dessinée) genre is popular among 9adults too. The humour of Asterix is aimed at all ages, with storylines, references and visual gags that affectionately lampoon stereotypes from French history.
This icon of modern French culture was invented by storyteller René Goscinny, a Polish Jew born in France who spent his childhood in Argentina, and artist Albert Uderzo, the child of Italian immigrants. Scratch a French icon and traces of the wider world are never far beneath the surface.
Any hunt for premonitions of future national glory in Roman Gaul would be futile, however. The area that eventually became France was in constant flux in the centuries after the battle of Alésia, as Italian, Germanic, Arab, Magyar, Scandinavian and many other outsiders made their mark. Two of these groups imposed their rule directly: first, until the fifth century, the great global Roman empire; then a string of Germanic kings and emperors whose origins and powerbase lay to the east. Even when it was not under external control, the future Hexagon was fracturing internally and splintering into smaller groupings. Frontiers? There were no stable frontiers.
The Invention of Gaul
France trailed into history on Roman coattails. ‘Gaul’ and ‘the Gauls’ were Julius Caesar’s invention: the warriors he defeated at Alésia were Celts. Settling in the Hexagon from around 500 bce, they formed part of a sprawling agglomeration of peoples that stretched well beyond the frontiers of present-day France, from the Atlantic in the west to the Danube and beyond into Asia Minor. The Celts shared not only similar farming and herding lifestyles but also a common culture and language, at least up to a point – Vercingetorix would have struggled to understand a Gael or a Galatian. 10
The Romans made ‘Gaul’ a political reality, organising the area they had conquered into a group of colonies that bore little resemblance to pre-existing arrangements. Pre-conquest Gaul – like the rest of the Celtic world – was a tangle of tribal groupings and settlements, each ruled by a warrior elite. After Alésia, the Romans organised these sixty or so ‘peoples’ into three provinces, collectively and unflatteringly known as Gallia comata or ‘Hairy Gaul’.
Gaul: Three Parts or Four?
‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres’. Caesar’s lofty opening to The Gallic Wars laid out the three divisions of his spoils, covering an area that extended into what is now Switzerland, Germany and the Low Countries. Yet he omitted the Mediterranean coastal strip of Gallia Narbonensis, under Roman control since 121 bce. This zone had long been home to Phoenician, Etruscan and other merchants – a Greek colony was founded at Marseille in about 600 bce. It also proved to be Gaul’s most Romanised region, containing many of its biggest cities and monuments. At the local level, former Celtic groupings were reorganised as civitates, communities centred around a principal town or stronghold. 11
Caesar regarded the Celtic peoples beyond Gaul’s eastern frontier as quite distinct. He gave them a new name too: Germani. According to his account, the Germans were pastoralists, rather than settled farmers, who did not follow the druidic form of worship current among the Gauls. Above all, they were more warlike than their neighbours. Caesar defeated these hot-headed tribes in brutal military campaigns in 58 and 55 bce but never brought them fully under Roman control. Instead, he erected a fortified defensive system along the Rhine (and later the Danube). The limes, as it came to be known, was designed to keep the Germans out of Gaul.
Hairy but Loyal: Gaul Under the Romans
Meanwhile, Rome imposed its will on the Gauls with an iron fist. The Pax Romana came at a cost. The wars that climaxed at Alésia were brutal, with entire civilian populations massacred or kept as slaves after their defeat in battle. Perhaps a million Gauls died and a further million were enslaved out of a pre-conquest total of 6 to 8 million. Vercingetorix himself was humiliated: dragged to Rome in 46 bce and paraded in the official triumph celebrating Caesar’s victories before being garrotted in his prison cell.
Once they had been subdued, the Gauls were controlled with a relatively light touch. Rome expected docility and obedience, payment of taxes, acceptance of military service and adoption of the Latin language. Mostly, it got what it wanted. The heaviest concentrations of troops were stationed near the Rhine to keep an eye on the Germans. By contrast, Gaulish resistance was sparse and scattered (Asterix notwithstanding). There were occasional rumblings in the countryside, yet the local elite soon grasped the advantages of collusion and Roman Gaul was largely governed by Gauls working for the Romans. 12In 48 ce, the emperor Claudius publicly complimented his hirsute subjects on their embrace of the Pax Romana:
I openly plead the cause of ‘Hairy Gaul’. I would set one hundred years of unbridled loyalty and devotion in a great many difficult circumstances against the objection that they fought the divine Julius for ten years.
Admirers often talk of a unified ‘Gallo-Roman’ culture, but in reality Gaul was anything but homogeneous, while any implied equality between conqueror and conquered is sheer fantasy. The Gauls were always juniors in a partnership that testified to the shrewd Roman strategy of co-opting the defeated. In the immediate aftermath of Caesar’s victory, the Romans offered citizenship to local magistrates. In 212 ce the offer was extended to free men throughout the wider empire. These inclusive gestures helped to forge a pliant urban elite, eager to climb the social ladder and occupy administrative and even military positions. Some Gaulish words and place names survived, but by the sixth century Latin monikers had largely replaced local Celtic ones.
The Gauls effortlessly adopted the cult of the emperor and of the Roman gods, which they grafted onto their existing polytheistic beliefs. Constantine’s decision in 313 to extend toleration to the empire’s Christians also helped the acculturation process. Christianity had been introduced to Gaul by Asian, African and German missionaries and at first was a source of conflict. But its later adoption as the Roman state religion helped it see off rival faiths. In Gaul, the role of the papacy in Rome was strengthened by the fact that its religious dioceses assumed the same boundaries as secular civitates, with bishops playing significant roles in local government alongside lay magistrates. 13
Better roads were a common good. If the raison d’être of the Roman road network was to mobilise troops swiftly into any area of tension in Gaul and other parts of the empire, it also boosted the economy, supplementing long-distance, sea-based trading. Older cities in the south such as Marseille (Massalia) benefited most from the Roman imperium, being close to dynamic Mediterranean trade routes. Merchant communities of Greeks, Syrians and Jews lubricated the Gaulish wheels of commerce – literally so, as the Gauls acquired a reputation for an immoderate love of wine. 14
The Gauls are exceedingly addicted to the use of wine and fill themselves with wine brought into their country by merchants, drinking it unmixed, and since they partake of it without moderation by reason of their craving for it, when they are drunk they fall into a stupor or a state of madness… In exchange for an amphora of wine the merchants receive a slave…
Diodorus Siculus (first century bce)
Vine cultivation diversified an economy based on cereal production and livestock farming. In the south, luxury villa estates were built and worked by slave labourers, producing olive oil, wine, fruit and grain not only for the domestic market but also the wider empire. The relatively stable, warm and wet conditions of the Roman Warm Period (from about 200 bce to around 150 ce) helped to keep crop yields high.
Bread, Baths and Beyond
The Roman amphitheatre at Arles
In the cities, the local elite were well fed and lived Roman high life to the full. Gaulish cities boasted as many as eighty theatres between them and nearly as many other entertainment venues such as circuses. These were contained within the familiar Roman urban grid system, alongside the forum, baths, temples, curia and other civic buildings.
Decline, Fall and Global Winter
At its height, the Roman empire was a global power, spanning three continents and stretching from Scotland to the Sahara 15and from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. It seemed to have been built to last. It didn’t.
Major climatic, demographic and environmental changes eventually proved too much for Roman Gaul, and indeed for the whole empire. As the Roman Warm Period came to an end, the prosperity it helped to foster began to erode. First the climate became less predictable. Then, after about 450 ce, it turned plain bad as the Late Antique Little Ice Age kicked in. Severe global volcanic activity in the mid-sixth century had a powerful cooling effect, piling on the environmental agony.
Climate Change in Europe
France has endured several notable climatic changes in the past, though human activity has only been a major factor in the modern era. The most significant periods* are referred to here using the following terms:
*All dates are approximate.
A succession of pandemics ripped through the social fabric of the Roman empire. Its trading links with far-flung places in China, India and Africa made it especially vulnerable to the import of new diseases. The so-called Antonine Plague (165–80) – probably an early form of smallpox – sent some 10 per cent of the empire’s subjects to their graves, while an unknown pathogen responsible for the Plague of Cyprian (249–62) had a similar impact. The Plague of Justinian (541–9) marked an early appearance of the hyper-deadly bacterium Yersinia pestis, which 16returned to cause the Black Death of the 1340s. The effect of these huge population losses on the overall economy was devastating.
A further cause – and symptom – of Roman decline was raiding and settlement by warrior groups from the east, which the empire also struggled to prevent. The limes had always been more of a sieve than a shield: cross-border trading thrived, with Romans offering the ‘barbarians’ (the Latin term for foreigners) arms, precious metals, luxury goods and wine in return for slaves, animals and woodland products. From the late second century, this peaceful exchange turned into something more violent and disruptive. German attacks on the wealthy Roman cities behind the limes grew more frequent, forcing city-dwellers to build their own fortifications.
Enter the Franks
‘I am a Frank, a Roman citizen, and a soldier in arms’
Inscription found in the Roman city of Aquincum (modern-day Budapest)
The Franks were the most significant of these raiders. Their origins are obscure. Later medieval chroniclers claimed they were a band of refugees from the legendary city of Troy, but the truth seems rather more mundane. They first appeared in the second century as a loose coalition of German warbands regularly looting Gaulish cities and carrying their booty back across the border. By the late third century, they had settled on the near side of the Rhine. Rome made the best of a bad 17situation, granting the settlers land rights and political autonomy in return for military assistance against other foes. Soon, Rome was recruiting these barbarians into the empire’s own army.
The wealth of Gaul’s cities continued to attract raiders from the east long after the initial attacks. But factors far beyond the empire were driving migrants to its borders. A more unsettled climate seems to have disrupted the ecology of the vast steppe grasslands that stretch across Eurasia from Hungary to Manchuria. Nomadic tribes moved westwards, displacing others and piling up population levels behind the limes.
Coming to Armorica
While most raiders and settlers came to Gaul from eastern Europe, a smaller current of migrants trickled in from the British Isles to the north. From the late fourth century, Celtic refugees from Cornwall, Ireland, Wales and Scotland fled the raids of the Germanic Angles and Saxons, following old maritime trading routes south to the Armorican peninsula. This far-western tip of France was only lightly Romanised. By the sixth century its provincial name of Armorica was edged out by Britannia – or Bretagne, as it became. Celtic missionaries would play a major role in Christianising the peninsula. Breton cities named after Welsh saints include Saint-Malo, Saint-Brieuc and Saint-Pol-de-Léon. The ‘Brythonic’ Welsh and Cornish languages also merged with pre-Roman Celtic to create the Breton language, still spoken in the region.
As more and more women and children joined these migrating warbands, they began to look less like bloodthirsty raiders and more like hapless refugees seeking new homes. In 406, a huge population surge overwhelmed the defensive cordon on the Rhine. Tribal groups from the middle Danube region 18joined Visigoth warbands already plundering the Italian peninsula. Rome was sacked in 410. Other Visigoth groups moved south-west, some settling to form the kingdom of Aquitaine, others pressing on to join the Alani and Suebi in the Iberian peninsula. The Vandals even reached Africa.
The Huns, the most imposing of these nomadic groupings, broke through from the eastern steppes. But their incursion was short-lived. In 451, at the battle of the Catalaunian Fields near Châlons-en-Champagne, the Roman general Aetius defeated their leader Attila, forcing them to retreat. Despite representing the last vestiges of Roman authority, Aetius’s victorious army 19included a wide assortment of barbarian contingents, especially Visigoths. In this restless swirl of peoples on the move, the old distinction between Romans and barbarians was eroding fast.
Picking Over the Spoils
Roman emperors were by now wholly incapable of arresting these migratory surges. Their power in Europe had been weakened by the creation in 330 of a new imperial centre in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. This eastern ‘Byzantine’ empire continued to thrive, but in the west the end was nigh. In 476, the last emperor in Rome was overthrown.
At its height, the Roman empire’s vast networks opened up avenues for foreign trade, military adventure and distant cultural encounters on a scale the Gauls and their descendants would not experience for another millennium or more. Now, as the empire broke in two and then lost its western half, their horizons narrowed. In effect, Gaul had been deglobalised.
The power vacuum left by Rome did, however, present a golden opportunity for the Franks. Already well-established within the limes, they chose to stay put while other barbarian tribes were on the move. Over the course of the fifth century, one Frankish sub-group, the Salians, gradually imposed their authority on their neighbours. In 486, their leader Clovis defeated the pretender to the imperial crown, Roman general Syagrius, in the battle of Soissons. It was a case of a Romanised barbarian prevailing over a barbarised Roman.
Clovis went on to conquer the Alamanni, the Burgundians and the Visigoths to the south, choosing Paris as the capital of a by-now extensive Frankish kingdom. By the mid-sixth century, his dynasty would rule an area that covered a large proportion of the old western Roman empire. 20
Rule of the Long-Haired Kings
The signet ring of Clovis’s father, Childeric, showing the flowing locks characteristic of the Merovingian dynasty
Clovis was the first of the so-called Merovingians, who derived their name from Merowech, a fantastical half-human, half-divine ancestor. More importantly, he styled himself ‘king of the Francs’ (rex Francorum). The Latin term would be employed by French rulers well into the Middle Ages and was retained on royal coinage until the eighteenth century.
The Merovingians, later dubbed ‘the long-haired kings’ on account of their distinctive hairstyle, took their recently conquered territories in a new political direction, swivelling away from the Mediterranean and the south towards the east. But the scale and nature of these changes were not immediately apparent, as the Merovingians continued to stress their Roman heritage and credentials. The Frankish civil law code issued around 500 – the Salian or Salic Law – was written in Latin. Clovis’s conversion in 496 to Christianity, Rome’s state religion, was another marker of continuity. This was particularly important south of the Loire, for it ensured that rulers retained the support of bishops, who had become the most powerful members of the elite in former civitates.
Despite the regime’s early emphasis on its Romanitas, it grew progressively more Germanic in character as time wore on. Archaeology and place-names suggest the Frankish presence was strongest in a dense strip of German-speaking territory between 100 and 200 kilometres west of the Rhine. New patterns of landownership here effaced the pre-existing villa system and shifted more land into Frankish hands. Away from these heartlands, however, Merovingian authority waned. On the map, the dimensions of the Frankish kingdom look 21impressive, but size did not equate to real power. As time went on, the regime became ever more fragile.
Crumbling Foundations
The seeds of Merovingian weakness germinated while Clovis was still warm in his grave. At his death, the territories he had amassed were divided among his four sons. This practice of partible inheritance was to remain an Achilles heel of the dynasty and its successors, causing repeated fracturings of the Frankish imperium over the next centuries. The kingdom’s main territorial blocs of Austrasia to the east, Neustria to the west, and Burgundy and Aquitaine south of the Loire provoked continuous intra-familial strife, with numerous competing heirs at each other’s throats. 22
Fragmentation of authority was evident from the top to the bottom of the Merovingian system. The Pax Romana had brought a significant peace dividend and its demise hit the economy hard. With many rural areas in a state of chronic insecurity, trade collapsed, agriculture stagnated, population levels declined and cities fell into serious disrepair. The state’s tax base shrank so sharply that rulers resorted to paying their war-band followers with shares in plundered goods or gifts of territory.
This new gift economy further deepened the fractures caused by dynastic squabbling. Powerful alliances of local notables resisted any strengthening of royal power. From the early seventh century, kingly authority began to be usurped by the stewards of their royal estates, the so-called Mayors of the Palace. These men became effective viceroys, performing executive and military functions, while the kings were confined to ceremonial roles. The early eighth century saw a succession of so-called rois fainéants – ‘do-nothing kings’ – chronically unable to impose their political will.
There was nothing left for the king to do but to be content with his name of king, his flowing hair, and long beard, to sit on his throne and play the ruler… He had nothing that he could call his own beyond this vain title of King and the precarious support allowed by the Mayor of the Palace in his discretion, except a single country seat, that brought him but a very small income.
Einhard (ninth century) on the last of the Merovingian rois fainéants
Though it touched on some truths, Einhard’s withering description is certainly overdrawn. It was a propaganda piece 23in praise of Charles the Great, best known as Charlemagne, the most illustrious of the Merovingians’ successors.
