III. Liberté compatible avec la manière de vivre des peuples chez qui l'esclavage domestique a été r

CHAP. 8: III. Liberty compatible with the way of life of peoples among whom domestic slavery has been replaced by serfdom.

§ 1. The world, in its adolescence, has known no social state more advanced than that of which I have just offered a picture. Slavery properly speaking, domestic servitude, was the economic regime of all the peoples called ancient. This regime still existed, at least in large part, in the last days of Roman domination. Although slavery had undergone, under the emperors, various alterations, there was still in society a numerous class of individuals directly possessed by others, attached to the service of persons, of whom persons disposed as of their property, and who was in a profound degradation. To show what this degradation still was in the fourth century of our era, under the reign of the emperor Constantine, it suffices to say that an edict of this prince pronounced the death penalty against the woman who would descend so far as to marry her slave, and condemned the latter to be burned [^207].

It would be difficult to designate the epoch when the abolition of domestic servitude began and that when it was accomplished. When one considers the condition of the enslaved classes at the epoch when slavery existed on earth in its greatest plenitude, at the height of Roman domination, at the end of the republic and in the first days of the empire, one finds that then the slaves of all classes, those employed in the cultivation of the fields, those by whom the trades were exercised, those who were immediately attached to the service of persons, were fully possessed, and could be sold individually. When, on the contrary, one considers the same classes in the Middle Ages, at the epoch of the complete establishment of the feudal regime, toward the eleventh and twelfth centuries, one no longer perceives slaves properly speaking. The men who exercise the arts and trades, in the interior of the cities, are still subject to many violences, to many exactions; but they are the property of no one. Those one sees spread throughout the fields find themselves as if chained to the soil they cultivate; they are, so to speak, a part of it: they can be exchanged, given, sold with it; but if they are not permitted to leave it, neither can they be separated from it, and there are some limits to the domination exercised over them. Finally, there are almost no more slaves in the interior of houses; the principal functions of domestic service are filled by relatives, by friends, and in general by persons of the masters' condition.

§ 2. How was this transition from the harsh slavery of the ancients to the slightly softened servitude of the Middle Ages effected? this is what is not easy to determine. It appears that this movement had begun under the Roman empire; that, in the last days of this empire, industry had generally emerged from domesticity; that, in the place of slave artisans, working in the interior of houses for the account of the masters, there had been formed in the cities bodies of free artisans working for the public and for their own profit; that this revolution had been favored rather than thwarted by the fall of Roman domination and the invasion of the peoples of the North; that in the midst of the disorders of this invasion and the overthrow of the fortune of the ancient masters, the artisans of the cities had taken on a little more importance and activity; that, although exposed thereafter to many excesses on the part of the new dominators, they had not however returned to domestic servitude; that the colonists spread throughout the countryside, and particularly exposed to the violences of the barbarians, had doubtless suffered much from the material fact of the invasions; but that nevertheless their condition, instead of worsening, had little by little become better; finally that all that had fallen of slaves properly speaking to the new dominators, or all that had been made of them in the course of the invasions and wars, had been sent by degrees to the cultivation of the soil; and that the Gauls having imitated on this point the morals of the Germans, there had ended up being no domestic slaves at all [^208].

There has been much division over the causes that presided over this great change. Some have wished to attribute all the honor to Christianity, others to the progress of enlightenment and industry, others to the generosity of Germanic morals, others still to the necessity in which one found oneself to conserve one's slaves when it became necessary to be content with those one had, and it became difficult to replace them with others. It is probable that all these causes acted. It remains to know in what way, and to what extent.

First, I do not doubt that one must place, with Gibbon, among those which had most contributed to softening slavery, from the time of the Romans, the necessity of the new circumstances in which this people had found itself placed when it had completed its conquests and united under a single scepter the principal nations of Europe, Africa, and Asia [^209]. One easily feels, in effect, that when the foreign sources of the abundance of slaves had begun to dry up, it was no longer possible to abuse this class of men as had been done so long as the Roman legions had been employed in engaging in the slave trade, and one had seen the vanquished nations reduced to servitude flock from all sides to the markets of Italy. Such had been the abundance of slaves at that time, that they were sometimes given for almost nothing. Plutarch informs us that, in the camp of Lucullus, a slave was sold for 4 drachmas, about 3 livres 10 sous [^210]. One conceives that, in times when slaves were at this price, there could hardly have been any question of abolishing or simply modifying slavery: the less expensive the commodity was, the more one must have hardened in the habit one had taken of using and abusing it. But one also conceives that when the Romans had vanquished everything, when there were no more nations to reduce to servitude, when it was necessary to be content, consequently, with the slaves one possessed, the necessity of preserving them must quite naturally have led to the adoption of less cruel habits toward them.

“The existence of a slave,” observes Gibbon, “became a more precious object; and, although his happiness still depended on the character and fortune of him on whom he depended, fear no longer stifled the voice of pity, and the interest of the master dictated to him more humane sentiments. The virtue or the policy of some sovereigns accelerated the progress of morals; and, by the edicts of Hadrian and the Antonines, the protection of the laws was extended to the most numerous and most miserable class of society. After many centuries, the right of life and death over slaves was taken from private individuals, who had so often abused it; it was reserved for the magistrates alone. The use of underground prisons was abolished; and as soon as a slave could complain of having been unjustly mistreated, he obtained his deliverance or a less cruel master [^211].”

This softening of the lot of the slaves permitted them to make some progress; their peculium grew; many acquired the means to buy themselves back; the number of manumissions multiplied; and as the freedmen did not in general become members of the city, as they did not fulfill public functions, they were forced to continue to devote themselves to the labors of private industry, and it is thus probably that there were formed little by little those bodies of free artisans that the barbarians found established in the cities of Italy and Gaul, and whose origin went back to the Roman world. I add that this need to treat slaves less harshly, which the Romans must have begun to feel at a certain epoch, must also have been experienced later by the barbarians, when the latter had finally ceased their raids, when they had definitively settled, when there were sedentary nations everywhere, and when each of these nations found itself reduced, for the execution of its labors, to only the slaves it had at hand. Then again, men of labor becoming more precious and rarer, it was necessary to begin to conserve them; slavery necessarily had to soften. There happened what would infallibly happen today in the colonies if the slave trade there became definitively impossible, and one saw oneself forever reduced to only the slaves one possesses at this moment... One yielded to the pressing interest one had in conserving an indispensable population, which it was no longer possible to replace otherwise than by the gentle and slow ways of reproduction [^212].

[^203]: This question, which seems so simple to M. de Sismondi, and which he resolves so easily by the fusion of the two races, is not, it must be agreed, without great difficulties. [^204]: Traité d'économie politique, by M. Say, t. I, p. 216. [^205]: Notes on the State of Virginia, by Jefferson. [^206]: Essai sur l'histoire de la société civile, by Fergusson, part. II, sect. 2. [^207]: Code Theod., book IX, tit. 9, leg. 1. [^208]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 9. [^209]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 2. [^210]: Vie de Lucullus. [^211]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 2. [^212]: Histoire de la décadence de l'empire romain, by Gibbon, chap. 2.I am far from claiming, nevertheless, that this motive acted to the exclusion of all others, and, for example, that the influence of Christianity on the abolition of slavery was null. When one considers who the first Christians were, for which classes of society they manifested the most sympathy, in which classes they first sought to make proselytes: when one pays attention to the fact that Christian society was, in the early days, but a gathering of peasants, workers, beggars, and above all slaves, one can hardly doubt that Christianity was, at least in the beginning, opposed to slavery. If one cannot induce this from any formal text of the Gospels, one can infer it from the very nature of Christian society, composed entirely of people to whom slavery must naturally have been odious. Later, when persons of another order entered this association, when Christianity penetrated the upper ranks of society, it is probable that there were found, among these new proselytes, men of a generous nature who shared the sentiments of the oppressed regarding servitude, and perhaps also men of an ambitious nature who sensed all the strength that could be acquired by sympathizing with the great number and by showing themselves touched by the misfortune of the enslaved classes. It is true that Saint Peter had made a merit of obedience for slaves, and had recommended that they be profoundly submissive to their masters [^213]; but there is reason to believe that things did not always stop there; and that after having preached submission to the slaves, the masters were exhorted to moderation. I do not doubt that one can find in the writings of the preachers, doctors, and Fathers of the faith, in the first centuries of the Church, very vehement things against the harshness of the rich, against the oppression of the powerful, against the unjust servitude in which the unfortunate and the poor were held. Now, it is just to think that this mass of sentiments, felt and more or less manifested in favor of the slaves, acting in the same sense as that interest of the masters of which I spoke just now, must have contributed to softening slavery. Then history attests that at the epoch when Roman domination was replaced by that of the barbarians, the leaders of the Christian Church knew how to profit with skill and with courage from the ascendancy that their relative enlightenment, their union, their corporate spirit, and above all their character as priests, gave them over the minds of these coarse and profoundly superstitious peoples, to try to soften a little the ferocity of their morals and to place some bounds on their depredations and their violences... But what history also attests is that they were neither less skillful, nor less ardent, in using these means to found their own domination; that after having been the unofficial defenders of the vanquished populations before the victorious races, they sought to place themselves alongside the victors, even above them, and that they took an ample part in the oppression exercised over the masses. It still happens that they recommend the lot of the plebeians, the poor, the slaves; sometimes even that they excommunicate masters who kill their serfs without judgment; but they are far from always giving the example of the humanity they preach. Having emerged from the depths of the population, they show themselves no more exempt than it from the vices and coarseness of the times. The Church, like everything then, feels the effects of the reigning barbarism: it condemns the avarice of the victors, and it surpasses them in avarice; it sometimes reproves slavery, and no one has more serfs than it; not content with receiving the tithe of all goods, it demands that of slaves; it receives them as gifts; it buys them with lands; it has it established that, if one of its slaves is killed, two will be restored to it; it suffers that, out of a spirit of devotion, people give themselves to it in servitude; it favors with all its power the practice of these immoral oblations, which it calls pious devotions; it teaches that to become a serf of the Church is to place oneself in the service of God himself; that true nobility, true generosity, consist in seeking such a servitude; that the glory of it is all the greater as the enslavement is more complete; and such is, in this regard, the power of its preachings and its maxims that, by the admission of its own writers, the custom of oblations becomes one of the most active causes of the growth of servitude [^214]. Later, when the serfs of the towns and countryside rise up to free themselves, it is, of all the existing powers, the one that opposes this movement with the most obstinate resistance. It pours forth curses and imprecations against the establishment of the communes;

"novum ac pessimum nomen," exclaims Abbot Guibert, "a detestable novelty that reduces the lords to being able to demand nothing from the people subject to the taille beyond an annual rent paid once, and which frees the serfs from the levies of money that one was accustomed to make on them."

If a few ecclesiastical lords show themselves favorable to this innovation, they are the very small number: popes, bishops, abbots, the most sainted personages, a Saint Bernard, for example, curse in concert the execrable communes; the most terrible anathemas are fulminated against the bourgeois who undertake to free themselves; their debtors are canonically released from the obligation to pay them; bishops are seen to perjure themselves, to hatch the blackest plots to take back from the inhabitants of their metropolises liberties that they have sold dearly to them; when they manage momentarily to place these unfortunate men back under the yoke, servitude is preached to them in the name of heaven; the obedience that Saint Peter had advised to slaves, while compassionating affectionately with their misfortune, and making their submission a merit in the eyes of God, is prescribed to them with the imperious accent of pride and injustice; an archbishop cries to them from the height of the pulpit:

"Servi, subditi estote, in omni timore, dominis; serfs, be subject to your lords with all fear; and if you were tempted to take advantage against them of their avarice and their harshness, remember that the Apostle commands you to obey not only those who are good and gentle, but those who are vexatious and rude; remember that the canons strike with anathema whoever, under pretext of religion, would encourage serfs to disobey their lords, and with all the more reason to resist them by force [^215]."

This invincible opposition of the Church to the abolition of serfdom is perpetuated through the centuries; and, just recently, when our revolution broke out, there were in France convents that possessed people of mortmain; so that the last serfs there were among us were a possession of the Church. It is not that it would not have been possible to understand religion more humanely; and I do not deny that, throughout the course of the Middle Ages, there were not many persons who would have regarded servitude as contrary to the precepts of the gospel. It appears that there have remained to us, particularly from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a great number of charters of manumission granted for religious motives; but the coarseness of the epoch is reproduced even in these acts, which appear dictated less by a sentiment of commiseration for the misfortune of the enslaved classes than by personal motives, by the fear of eternal punishments, by the hope of celestial rewards [^216]. It is in the midst of reversals, in public calamities, at the announcement of some great catastrophe, at the approach of death that one decides upon these acts of justice. Still, one often seeks, in these tardy reparations, to compound with heaven, to make reservations, to stipulate terms, and, for example, to retain the enjoyment of one's serfs until one's death, to be just only at one's last hour, to execute it only in the person of one's heirs [^217]. This is how religion then contributes to the abolition of servitude. Everything feels the effects of the spirit of the time: there is no more delicacy and elevation in religious sentiments than in others... It has often been said that Christianity had civilized us: perhaps it would be more exact to say that civilization has purified our Christianity. If the letter of the gospels has not changed, we have changed much in our manner of understanding the gospel; our religious sentiments and principles have followed the march of all our sentiments and all our principles; they have become purer and more reasonable as we have become more cultivated. The Christians of today are not so in the manner of those of the time of the League. Our religion, which still suffers us to traffic in the blood and life of Africans, will perhaps become less inhuman when harsh experience has made us better understand all the dangers of this cruelty... But, to return to the question of what share of influence religion had exercised on the state of the enslaved classes, at the epoch with which this chapter is concerned, one can see by all that I have just said that, whether in the early days of Christianity, or in the Middle Ages, religious motives more or less pure could often have joined with the evident interest one had in managing them, to inspire measures favorable to the slaves.

I would not be disinclined to believe that the particular character of Germanic morals could also have contributed to the softening of slavery, and notably to the abolition of domestic servitude. It appears that a sort of pride, proper to the dominators of the Middle Ages, and which one does not perceive among those of antiquity, did not permit them to let themselves be approached by men of servile condition, and that they consented to have near them only persons of their own condition. To accept the service of someone, to introduce him into one's house, into one's family, was not to humiliate him, to debase him: it was to give him a mark of consideration and of confidence.

"The effect of this disposition," observes M. de Montlosier, "was to send little by little to the profession of trades and to the cultivation of lands those wretches whom the Gauls, as well as the Romans, made serve in the interior of houses. The Franks," he adds further on, "in establishing themselves in Gaul, admitted no slave to their personal service. As the freeborn Gauls became Franks, and adopted Frankish morals, they likewise rid themselves of their slaves, and in the end slavery fell and was abolished. It is certain," says M. de Montlosier again, "that, toward the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that is to say at the time when Frankish morals were fully established, one no longer saw slaves in France."

There were serfs of the glebe, there were artisans in the condition of subjects and taxable at mercy; but domestic servitude had completely disappeared.

"It is certain," continues M. de Montlosier, "that at this epoch, no gentleman, baron, castellan or vavasour, admitted what is called a slave to his service. It is certain that there were no other servants among the nobles than relatives or friends, and that, to approach a gentleman, in general, one had to be a gentleman like him. Personal service, the service that brought one habitually near the person of the master, that put one with him in daily commerce, in an intimate familiarity, such a service could be entrusted only to what was for him most noble and most dear. It was, on the part of a woman of quality, a favor to permit other women to share with her the domestic cares; it was likewise a favor, on the part of a high baron, to permit the children of his relatives and his friends to come and join the children of the house to fill in their place, or jointly with them, the functions with which they were charged: the lords thus sent their children to one another's houses to care for the horses, serve at table, and fill the offices of pages and valets. These morals, concentrated at first in a small number of families, propagated themselves insensibly, invaded all domains, and descended from the dwelling of kings, where one could have remarked them from the beginning, down to the castle of the smallest lord. Such is this great innovation, whose progress was slow, but which, from the moment it manifests itself, suddenly presents two great movements: the first, which brings all the ancient slaves to the condition of tributary serfs, and thus abolishes true slavery; and the second, which brings the luster of grandeur and of nobility to functions that other peoples had affected to stigmatize, etc. [^218]."

I adopt from this explanation what goes to the solution of the question that occupies me. Few writers have had, to the same degree as M. de Montlosier, the sentiment of feudal morals, and I admit without difficulty what he says of that singular haughtiness, or, if you will, of that personal dignity, which made it so that a gentleman would have regarded himself as sullied by the habitual approach of an enslaved man, and that he required sons of good houses to groom his horses, and to serve him at table. Without being of the opinion, like M. de Montlosier, that this sentiment did everything, I believe that it could have contributed with the rest to modifying servitude, and notably to making the custom of having slaves for one's personal service fall away.

Finally, one cannot doubt that at all epochs the enslaved classes have, by their efforts, by their courage, by their industrious and patient activity, by their constant economy, powerfully contributed to the improvement of their state.

"History is there to attest," says the author of the Lettres sur l'histoire de France, "that, in the great movement from which emerged the communes or the republics of the Middle Ages, thought and execution, everything was the work of the merchants and the artisans, who formed the population of the towns [^219]."

That is true; and it is impossible to read the documents, so curious and so instructive, that M. Thierry has gathered on this great epoch, without remaining convinced that the founders of the communes found true support only in themselves, and were rather disserved than seconded by the royal power, to which one ordinarily reports all the honor of their enfranchisement. However, it must be agreed that, if the slaves had always been treated with as much harshness as they had been among the Romans, so long as war had offered the means of replacing them, and permitted one to be prodigal of their existence; that if the masters, under Roman domination first, and then under barbarian domination, had not been led by various causes to feel the necessity of sparing them, of relaxing their chains a little, of leaving them a part of their time and of the fruits of their labor, it would have been very difficult for them to find themselves, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in that state of strength which permitted them to undertake the revolution of which M. Thierry speaks. It would not be possible, therefore, to attribute the situation in which they then were to a single cause. The enslaved classes had doubtless skillfully profited, to raise themselves from their ancient state of degradation, from the few facilities that had been offered them; but one cannot deny that their possessors, by superstition, by calculation, by humanity, by pride, by all sorts of motives, had not made them concessions, and granted them facilities.

For the rest, without insisting any longer on the causes that had placed them in the semi-servitude in which they found themselves at the epoch with which this chapter is concerned, let us occupy ourselves with describing this situation, and with seeing what is the degree of liberty that it comprises.

§ 3. Society, in the Middle Ages, offers an aspect entirely different from that which it had presented in the States of antiquity, notably in the Greek republics. Whereas in Greece the dominators, the masters, the lords, the citizens, the free men, whatever one wishes to call them, all lived together in pretty, elegantly adorned cities, the same men, or their analogues, in the west of Europe, in the Middle Ages, are disseminated in the countryside, and live isolated in dark castles, ordinarily situated in elevated places, surmounted by weathervanes, surrounded by moats, flanked by bastions and turrets, and at the foot of which are grouped, in greater or lesser number, the thatched cottages destined for the enslaved population.

[^213]: 1 Peter, II, 18. [^214]: Muratori, Antiquit. Ital., dissert. 14. [^215]: Histoire des Français, by M. de Sismondi, vol. V, p. 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126. [^216]: Muratori, Antiquit. Ital., dissert. 14. [^217]: Muratori, Antiquit. Ital., dissert. 14. [^218]: De la monarchie française, vol. I, p. 287, 288, 289. [^219]: Lettres sur l'histoire de France, letter 13.The former speak a correct, strong, sonorous, harmonious language; they love to exercise their minds at least as much as to make their limbs act and to fortify them; they cultivate poetry, letters, philosophy; they gather at the Portico, in the gardens of the Academy; they go to applaud, at the theater, the verses of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The latter employ the time they do not spend fighting in riding horses, hunting, leading packs of hounds, training falcons, and unleashing greyhounds; apart from horsemanship and a brutal gymnastics, they cultivate no art; the language they speak is still but a barbaric jargon; they are not capable of reading it, still less of writing it; the only intellectual exercise to which they devote themselves, in the interior of their castles, is to listen sometimes to the reading of some romance of chivalry, or to the insipid songs of some minstrel; they ordinarily keep near them some singular being, a deformed dwarf, a facetious fool, a poet, a bard, a trouvère, a domestic officer whose charge is to chase away the boredom that besieges their dwelling, a difficult charge, and one that is never but incompletely fulfilled. The life of the ecclesiastical lords differs little from that of the other lords. The monks, the religious, the lettered men of the epoch, employ their leisure, when the men of war leave them in peace, in writing, in a corrupt Latin, chronicles sometimes filled with puerile tales, with insignificant details, or else in erasing Greek or Roman manuscripts, to copy in their place fabulous legends, etc.

This society of the Middle Ages offers scarcely a single advantage over that of antiquity; but this advantage is great: it is that, in it, the enslaved class, the base of society, the people, is in a better condition. Surely the feudal aristocracy is not as instructed, as lettered, as polished, as the Greek aristocracy; but surely also the serfs of the Middle Ages are not as enslaved as the Greek slaves. Whereas in Greece all the men who cultivate the land, who exercise the trades, who perform personal service, are the full property of the free men, who can use and abuse them at their pleasure, this whole part of society, in the Middle Ages, amidst the brutal violences and pillages of every kind to which it is still subject, finds itself nonetheless halfway out of the hands of the dominators. Now, it must be avowed that this new manner of being of society permits it to make progress that would not have been possible under the regime of full servitude.

§ 4. However, in making this avowal, and before justifying it, I must recognize the grave obstacles that still oppose here the progress of human faculties.

Everyone knows how the dominators of the Middle Ages were organized, and what the feudal regime was. It is also known how weak was the bond that united, in each State, the members of the feudal hierarchy, and to what excesses they gave themselves over among themselves, especially when there were no more foreign hordes to repulse, and when the definitive possessors of the soil had only to struggle against one another. Much has been said of their private wars, their murders, their rapines, their brigandages. I am willing to grant that there is some exaggeration in the accounts that contemporary writers have transmitted to us of all these disorders: one can nevertheless deny neither their gravity, nor their extent, nor their multiplicity, nor their continual reproduction: nothing shows better what they must have been than the nature of the means that it was necessary to employ to repress them.

From the end of the tenth century until about the middle of the eleventh, in less than fifty years, we see, in France alone, nine or ten councils assembled to advise on the means of making private wars cease. Religion exhausts in vain against these brigandages all its means of terror: it excommunicates; it anathematizes; it has recourse to imprecations, to cries to God, to the most frightening prayer formulas; there is in all the convents a particular bell, which has received the name of angry bell, CAMPANA IRATA, and which is rung at all hours; the relics of the saints are broken; their images are torn; their statues are dragged in the mud; the crucifix and the Gospels are thrown to the ground; lighted candles are overturned and extinguished [^220] .....

Certainly, for the Church to give itself over to such demonstrations, something grave must be happening; but what shows better the ardor that pushes the dominators of that time to war and pillage, is that these means, which should have made a profound impression on minds so open to superstitious terrors, produce almost no effect, and that one is reduced, unable to do better, to compound with crime. A council (the council of Tulujes, in 1041) establishes that it will be permitted for the feudal lords to make war on each other for four days of the week, on condition that, during the other three days, which belong more particularly to God, they will make a truce to their ravages, and will let humanity breathe a little. This is what is called the Truce of God [^221] .

Does one want another proof of the devastations that must have then been committed? History teaches us that, from the end of the tenth century to the beginning of the twelfth, in the space of one hundred and twelve years, famine, which, in the preceding centuries, had already made frightful ravages, reappeared thirteen or fourteen times, almost always accompanied by the plague, or other murderous epidemics, that it lasted fifty-one years out of one hundred and twelve, nearly one year in two, and that in certain years the rage of hunger was such, that men were several times pushed to kill one another to eat one another [^222] .

Finally, a last mark of the disorders and desolation of these times is that aspect of profound sadness that society then presents, a sadness such that the impression of it has reached us, across six centuries, such that it is still impossible to pronounce the name of the Middle Ages without reawakening sentiments of terror and melancholy, and for which one can find the explanation only in the unparalleled calamities that the dominations of this epoch made weigh upon society.

The character of these dominations was not that of those regular, symmetrical, tightly strapped despotisms, in which everything tends without deviation to a common end, and under which nothing moves, nor can move. On the contrary, what characterizes feudalism is the insubordination of all its members, it is, in each of them, an individual pride, a haughty personality, which makes it so that none wishes to recognize a superior. But with this passion for independence, in which one cannot fail to recognize a certain nobility, and which is of such good example for the oppressed, there is mixed such an ardor for war, such a taste for rapine, such a love of vengeance, that all security is as if annihilated, that society is more troubled, and perhaps more unhappy, than it would be under the most vigorous despotism, and that, despite the movement and life with which it is full, it can make almost no progress.

There have remained only too many proofs of this extreme difficulty that society had in developing itself in the long and tenebrous passage from the domination of the Romans to that of the governments that existed in the twelfth century. A century after the establishment of the barbarians, all traces of Roman civilization had disappeared, and, six or seven centuries later, this civilization was still replaced by no other. History offers us some means of judging the state in which the arts, morals, and social relations still found themselves in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A few traits will suffice to show how imperfect all that still was.

§ 5. As for the arts, one cannot doubt that they were in a state of utterly barbarous coarseness. Let us speak first of those that had for their object to provide for the first needs of life.

The first progresses of agriculture and gardening are of a later epoch. In the number of fruits, vegetables, cereals, which serve us as food, of the shrubs and flowers that decorate our flowerbeds, of the plants that furnish useful materials for manufacturing, there are a great number, even among the most common, whose introduction does not go back beyond the sixteenth or fifteenth century [^223] . According to an ancient author, "one hardly made gardens, in Paris, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, except for cabbages, leeks, and a few other vegetables [^224] ." What must it have been three or four centuries earlier? One sees in Dulaure the fruits that were eaten in Paris in the fourteenth century: I have occasion to speak of them elsewhere [^225] ** **One also sees there how one was housed at the same epoch, and especially in the immediately preceding centuries. The dirtiest streets of the most poorly inhabited quarters of the city would today give only a faint idea of most of those of that time: narrow, tortuous, unpaved, bordered only by miserable hovels, except in the places along which reigned some public edifice, filled with filth and refuse that were never removed; they were infectious sewers, as hideous to see as they were unhealthy to inhabit[^226] . The first idea of paving them came only at the end of the twelfth century, in 1185. It was King Philippe-Auguste who had the idea of this singular novelty, one day when, finding himself at the window of his palace, in the Cité, he felt more incommoded than usual by the mephitic odors that some carts made rise to him by stirring the mud [^227] . But this idea then received only a very faint beginning of execution; and, four and a half centuries later, under Louis XIII, only half of the streets were yet paved. A letter from Philippe-Auguste can give some idea of the luxury that his royal dwelling offered:

"We give," he wrote, "to the House of God of Paris, situated before the church of the blessed Mary (at the Hôtel-Dieu, near Notre-Dame), for the poor who are there, all the straw from our chamber and our house in Paris, OMNE STRAMEN DE CAMERA ET DOMO NOSTRA PARISIENSI, each time we depart from this city to go sleep elsewhere [^228] ."

Thus, fresh straw, litter, this is what, at the end of the twelfth century, takes the place of marble floors, parquet, carpets, for kings of France. Let one judge by this luxury of the royal palaces that of private habitations, and by the houses of the capital those of the rest of the country. There are few houses that have chimneys; the most indispensable furniture and utensils are lacking: for example, forks had not yet been invented, and everyone eats with his fingers; nor did they have napkins, and one wiped oneself on the tablecloth [^229] . I can show with a single trait where the interior lighting of habitations must have been: a century later, under Charles V, no light is yet placed on the table, and we read that, in the palace of the Count of Foix, the most magnificent prince of his time, the supper is lit only by a few tallow candles that servants hold in their hands [^230] . The art of dressing is no more advanced than that of lodging. Doubtless, the noble lords of the twelfth century are not as miserably dressed as had been, in the sixth, those Visigoths, established in the south of France, and whom the poet Sidonius Apollinaris represents to us sitting in their general council, girt with their swords, dressed in linen clothes for the most part dirty and greasy, and shod in bad leggings of horse skin [^231] . However, to judge the costumes of the twelfth century by that leather vest that the amorous Petrarch wore in the fourteenth, and on which he wrote his verses, for fear of forgetting them [^232] , one has some reason to believe that the art of adornment had not yet made very great progress: one must consider that they had no shirts; that the greatest lords wore serge on the skin; and that, well short of this time, at the end of the fourteenth century, or at the beginning of the fifteenth, the wife of Charles VI, Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, is accused of prodigality, for having wished to give herself two linen shirts. Stockings were made of pieces of cloth sewn together. The invention of knitting is of a much later epoch: the first knitted stocking seen in France is from the middle of the sixteenth century. In the eleventh and twelfth, most ecclesiastics still have only sandals for all footwear. In the fourteenth, the popes reproach them, as an intolerable luxury, for wearing shoes [^233] . One feels well enough that at the epoch I am describing, one should not speak of factories: all that there is of objects of industry is made by hand.

If such is the imperfection of the arts that provide for the physical needs of men, those of a more elevated nature are probably no more advanced. I have said a word about the barbarism of the language; I have also said that the most elevated classes did not know how to read, and that one would have greatly embarrassed a great lord by asking him to write his name. There remain from these coarse ages acts, in which one sees that personages of the highest rank are reduced to making a cross, for want of knowing how to write, "signum crucis manu propria pro ignoratione litterarum," "the sign of the cross by his own hand for want of knowing letters." And this ignorance is not the exclusive portion of the laity: many ecclesiastics do not understand the breviary they are obliged to recite every day; some are not even in a state to read it. One sees figuring in the councils ecclesiastics in dignity, who cannot sign the deliberations in which they have concurred. It is prescribed to ask candidates who present themselves to receive the priesthood if they know how to read the Epistles and the Gospel, and if they could explain, at least literally, the meaning, etc. [^234] .

Here is where the art of medicine is at this time: as this art is exercised by priests, and finds itself, in a way, in the domain of religion, one proceeds to the healing of the diseases of the body as to the cure of those of the soul, by orations, by religious acts. Most diseases have in heaven a patron whose name they bear, who exercises all power over them, and whom one invokes when one is afflicted by them. When ordinary remedies are ineffective, one imagines making processions; one leaves the churches barefoot, carrying the most precious relics; and, having arrived before the bed of the sick person, one has him kiss them, one applies them successively to all the parts of the body where he experiences suffering, and especially to those where the principal seat of the evil is: this is the last and sovereign remedy, the one from which one expects the most decisive effects [^235] . I must not omit to say that after holy objects nothing appears endowed with a more curative virtue than objects of great value, and, for example, than diamonds, than pearls. Such is the faith one has then, and later, in this remedy, that in 1397, one sees two monks pledge, under pain of death, to radically cure King Charles VI, by means of a potion formed of water distilled over powdered pearls, and, being unable to succeed, in effect suffer the last punishment [^236] .Facts no less extraordinary than those I have just reported show the state, at the same epoch, of the art that consists in regulating the actions of men, and what reason one was then capable of putting into morality. The consideration of the good and evil that actions tend to produce enters for nothing into the judgment that the casuists of the time make of them. The Church thunders against the use of certain foods, which offer absolutely nothing harmful, and of which only the abuse would seem condemnable, or else against the use, just as little reprehensible, of certain adornments. It is permissible to doubt that it would ever have cried out as much against theft, murder, assassination, as it began to do then against poulaine shoes: the chronicles, the sermonaries, are filled with torrents of invective against this footwear, and the moralists take such a dislike to it that they say it was invented in derision of God and his Church. At other times, it is against the use of a garment that we would not know how to do without today, against the use of breeches, that the Church enters into a holy furor; and we then see Peter, called the Venerable, prior of Vézelay and abbot of Cluny, draw upon himself the liveliest censures for having permitted his religious to wear breeches. At still other times, the Church directs the same judicious severity against the use of wigs, of furs, of long beards, etc. [^237] . —The actions that then pass for the most moral are not those that are most favorable to humanity, that preserve it, that honor it, that elevate it: they are the monastic austerities, penance, fasting, all that is done in a spirit of mortification. One sees sinful women (the Recluses) enclosed, for the rest of their lives, in houses whose doors they have had walled up upon them, and from which they no longer communicate with the world except by a high window, which serves to pass to them the most indispensable things of life [^238] . Around the same time, Saint Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, writes to Italian monks that it is expedient, neither to their state, nor to their salvation, to seek remedies to preserve health. He finds it indecent to the religious profession to buy drugs, to call doctors, to take medicinal draughts. That, he says, is contrary to purity.

“Our holy fathers, and blessed predecessors,” writes a little later another abbot of Clairvaux, “chose damp and low valleys in which to build monasteries, so that the religious, being often sick, and having death before their eyes, might live always in the fear of the Lord [^239] .”

It is so much in the practices of the devout life that morality is made to consist, that it was willed that vice should also have its cult, that patrons were chosen for it in heaven, as have been given to misery and to sickness; that impurity finds itself placed under the invocation of Saint Madeleine [^240] , theft under the patronage of Saint Nicholas, and that the vilest scoundrel can flatter himself with entering paradise by the intercession of the saint in whom he has faith, and who is the object of his particular devotion. Let us add, as regards vicious penchants, that it is less a matter of correcting oneself of them than of redeeming the crimes they have caused one to commit; and that one expiates one's crimes, less by taking up new and better habits, than by compounding with heaven, by paying it ransom, by treating it as one treats men. One seeks to appease God with presents, to corrupt some saint with largesse, by vowing him a candle, a silver lamp, a church, or else by making before him an act of submission and servility. One calls the saints, believing to flatter them greatly, monseigneur, monsieur, madame; one says monsieur or monseigneur Saint Denis, monsieur Saint Éloi, madame Sainte Geneviève, etc. One calls, by eminence, God the Lord, and the Virgin Our Lady, not imagining that one could in effect find anything more proper to touch them than these feudal qualifications. This is the state of morality considered as an art, and by what means it is judged that men make themselves agreeable to the author of all virtue and all sanctity.

I say but a word to show the state, in these times, of the art of ascertaining facts and discerning juridical truths: it is known that everything was decided by combat, by the ordeal of hot iron or of boiling water; that the most adroit man, the strongest, he who had the hardest or most calloused skin, was always he who had the better right; and that this unheard-of form of procedure received from the wisdom of men the name of judgment of God.

§ 6. To this extreme imperfection of all the arts corresponds, in the morals, a license that is no less excessive. There have remained to us from the corruption they then offered irrefutable and numerous testimonies. What was common, base, filthy in their character, remained for a long time imprinted, in Paris and in our principal cities, even on the names of a multitude of streets. Some streets of Paris, such as the streets Pavée d'Andouilles, Trop-va-quidure, Qui-mi-trouva-si-dure, du Puits-quiparle, Bertrand-qui-dort, Brise-Miche, TaillePain, Jean-Pain-Mollet, etc., bore only names that were flatly ridiculous; but many others, such as the streets Merderais (Shit-house Street), Merderet, Merduriaux, Merderel, Orde - Rue, rue Breneuse (Shitty Street), Trou-Punais (Stink-Bug Hole), Fosse-aux-Chiens, Fosseaux-Chieurs (Shitters' Ditch), Tire-Pet (Fart-Puller Street), du Pet, du Petit-Pet, du Gros-Pet, du Cul-de-Pet, du Pet-au-Diable, had ones that were decidedly coarse. Finally, there existed a great number of them, serving as dens of debauchery, to which the brazen license of those times had boldly given names taken from the very order of actions that were done there every day, and so dishonest, that one would no longer find them today, even in the vocabulary of the markets. The only ones of these names that can be cited without offending all propriety are those of the streets Vald'Amour, Pute-y-Muce (Whore-in-Hiding Street), Putigneuse, cul-de-sac Putigneux; but the reader who would wish to know how the coarse naivety of our barbarous ages had baptized the streets Transnonain, Tire-Boudin, Deux-Portes-Saint-Sauveur, du Pélican, Marie-Stuart, etc., can consult the Fabliaux of Barbassan, in the edition given by M. Méon, or the Dictionary of the streets of Paris, by M. de la Tynna [^241] .

To these indirect proofs of the corruption of the times I am describing, nothing would be so easy as to add direct ones. Everyone can read in the moral tableau that Dulaure traces of Paris, from Hugh Capet to Charles V, during the course of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and during the first half of the fourteenth, the testimonies that prelates, popes, councils, come to render one after another of the moral depravity of these centuries. One can see there what infamous bacchanals, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the clergy celebrated publicly in the church of Notre-Dame in Paris, as well as in most of the cathedral and collegiate churches of the kingdom, and what was said of these execrable orgies by the bishop of Paris Eudes de Sully, who had the first, in 1198, the glory of blaming and forbidding them. One can also see there to what dissolution and to what disorders a multitude of convents were given over, and what pains were had to bring them back to the rule. One will learn there that the superstitious spirit and religious terrors of the time did not prevent churches and cemeteries from being transformed into places of debauchery, and that the cemetery of the Innocents in particular became every evening the theater of the most shameful disorders. Prostitution, at this epoch, carried so little note of infamy, that the court, in its travels, was habitually followed by girls of joy, and that these girls officially bore the title of royal prostitutes, regia meretrices. One could do, without shocking propriety, things that would now revolt public modesty. It was not very rare, for example, for men and women to be condemned by judgment to be paraded naked in the streets of Paris; and even less so for confessors, in the churches, to inflict discipline on their penitents, male and female, stripped to the waist. Women of condition felt no repugnance in having services rendered to them by their pages for which the least delicate today employ the ministry of a chambermaid. A poet of this time, who could only have written for good company, gives women the strangest advice: for example, not to permit any man, other than their husband, to kiss them on the mouth, or to put his hand in their bosom; not to uncover their throat, nor their legs, nor their side; to drink with measure, not to swear, nor lie, nor steal, to use modesty when they wrestle with men, etc. [^242] .

A particular trait, reported by Dulaure [^243] , would suffice on its own to show how little one was yet warned of the indecency and coarseness of certain actions. This historian, speaking of the church of Sainte-Marie-l'Égyptienne, which already existed in the time of Saint Louis, says that the patroness of this church had been painted on one of the stained-glass windows, in a boat, hiked up to the knee before the boatman, with these words below the painting: How the saint offered her body to the boatman for her passage. It must be added that numerous generations of ecclesiastics and laymen passed before this obscene image without appearing to sense what was shocking about it, especially in such a place, and that it did not disappear from the church where it was found until after more than four centuries, in 1667, when it was removed from there by the care of the curé of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois.

§ 7. I hardly need to say how little an order of things that had so little hastened the progress of the arts and morals must have been favorable, on the other hand, to the perfection of social relations. The old names of the streets of Paris are still there to bear witness to the antisocial spirit of these times, as well as to reveal their coarse and licentious habits. It suffices to say that, in a city still not very large, which was the seat of government, and where, consequently, the police must have been better run than elsewhere, there were nevertheless a multitude of streets ill-famed enough to merit the names of Maudestour (Bad-Turn), Mauconseil (Bad-Counsel), Maldesirant, Maleparole (Evil-Word), Malivaux, Mauvoisin (Bad-Neighbor), des Mauvais-Garçons (of the Bad-Boys), du Coup-de-Báton (of the Cudgel-Blow), Tire-Chappe, Vuide-Gousset (Empty-Pocket), Coupe-Gorge (Cut-Throat), Coupe-Gueule (Cut-Maw), etc., to understand that there must not have been then much more security in relations, than purity in individual habits, or skill in the exercise of the arts and trades.

Besides, the detail of the perils to which one was exposed, and of the violences with which society was filled, is found everywhere, in the accounts of historians, in the monuments of legislation, in the acts of councils. A writer of our time [^244] , speaking of an epoch much anterior to that one, makes the remark that almost the entire penal part of the Salic law had been directed against rapines or murders, and that, out of three hundred and forty-three articles of criminal law that this law contained, there were one hundred and fifty that related to cases of theft, and one hundred and thirteen that were relative to attacks against persons. The morals that had made all these dispositions necessary are still far from being effaced in the twelfth century.

In the midst of the extreme disorder of wills and of individual forces that society continues to present at this epoch, there is really security for no one, not even for the dominators. Victors of today, destined to be vanquished tomorrow, they are almost always sure to expiate an unjust success by some fatal reverse. He who has devastated the fields, carried off the serfs and the cattle, burned the habitations of a neighboring lord, is in imminent danger of seeing the same depredations and the same ravages exercised on his lands.

If the pleasure of victory is great, how bitter are not the shame and misfortune of defeat! Woe to the vanquished, indeed; he has no quarter to expect: it will be in vain for him to lie on the ground, to roll about, weep, pray, cry for mercy [^245] , the victor, unless he has a strong ransom to hope for, will listen only to his vengeance; master of his enemy, he will try to lift some piece of his armor to introduce there the point of his dagger, much as one makes the blade of a knife penetrate between the shells of an oyster, and he will thrust the dagger into his body [^246] .

The vanquished who can ransom his life will obtain it only by submitting to debasing reparations. What the victor will most ordinarily demand is that he transform himself, for a few moments, into a beast of burden, that he walk on all fours before him, a saddle on his back, and, in this equipage, that he come to place himself at his feet, and that he serve him as a mount. There is a multitude of examples of feudal lords who have inflicted this punishment on their defeated enemies. History cites, among others, that of Foulques Néra, who condemned his own son, the Count of Anjou, to traverse, thus harnessed, a space of several miles, and to come then to prostrate himself before him, the saddle on his back:

“So!” he cried to him, mounted on his body and trampling him underfoot, “you are vanquished at last[^247] !

If the disorders of this time can have such consequences for powerful men, one feels to what extremities they must often reduce persons of inferior condition. Such is the state of misery, oppression, and despair into which fall, in the midst of these violences, a multitude of free men, that several see themselves reduced to giving their liberty to ensure their life; and, thence, the practice of obnoxiations [^248] .

To finish off these unfortunates, the clergy strives to persuade them that their misfortune is the fruit of their crimes, of the hardness of their hearts, of the fact that they make no gifts to the Church: it preaches abstinence to the famished; it asks for alms from people stripped of everything, and, when they have absolutely nothing left, it persuades them to give themselves: it is from this that is born, in part, the practice of oblations [^249]

A class of men is the object of a special persecution; it is the Jews: they are treated with a degree of injustice, harshness, contempt, inhumanity, that passes all belief.

And yet the enslaved classes seem still more to be pitied; it is on them above all that weigh the evils caused by private wars. A lord still enjoys some security behind the walls of his castle; but nothing protects the serf in his thatched cottage; and when one cannot get to the lord, one kills, one pillages the colonists, one sets fire to their villages, one carries them off pell-mell with their cattle.

There is in the position of these unfortunates something particularly sad: if they defend with courage the castle of their lord, the aggressor makes them expiate this mark of devotion; if their resistance is not firm enough, it is by their lord that they are punished. Oppression thus comes to them from all sides; and victory, which cannot fail to be favorable to one of the belligerent parties, is always fatal for them.

Besides, to how many exactions and violences are they not habitually exposed on the part of their lord? They are no longer so fully possessed, doubtless; but they are still subject to a multitude of onerous charges and humiliating duties. They owe their lord the tithe, the champart, the cens, the taille, the corvée; the lord exercises over them justices of all sorts, of roads, of mills, of rivers, of ovens, of presses, of monies, of fairs; they must defend his castle by night against all danger and against all inconvenient noise; they are held, if need be, to serve him as hostages, to help pay his ransom if he is taken, to contribute to his daughter's dowry; at the same time, they exercise only a precarious power over their own children; they can marry them only with the permission of the lord, and by means of a fee; they can neither make a will nor inherit without permission; whoever wounds or kills them owes a reparation to the lord, but this reparation, for a long time, did not extend to them or to their family, and they are still at the lowest degree of the compositions; they are considered an appendage of the real property to which they are attached; they are transmitted with it: one gives a man with his holding, unum hortulanum cum terra sua, duos homines et mensuras suas, duos villanos, etc. [^250] ; not only can they not leave the land on which they thus depend, but they would wish to in vain; they always bear some visible mark of their servitude: unlike free men who let their hair grow, they are obliged to have their heads shaved; sometimes they even wear around their neck, like certain domestic animals, a copper collar permanently attached, and on which is written their name and that of the master to whom they belong [^251] .

Thus the arts, morals, social justice, all the things from which we know result for men the power to use their forces with power and facility, could make and had as yet made only very feeble progress under the economic regime of serfdom.§ 8. And nevertheless, if it is true that centuries are born from one another, that the present derives from the past, that the ideas and morals of an epoch ordinarily have their first reason in the ideas and morals of prior epochs, it must indeed be that this Middle Age, from which modern civilization so slowly and laboriously emerged, not only did not oppose insurmountable obstacles to the development of this civilization, but that it contained its germs, and even its somewhat developed germs; for, despite the five or six centuries that separate us from it, one could not conceive of the progress we have made, if we had not already had some head start.

Thus, if we wish to appreciate with justice the state that society then presents, we will be obliged to recognize that this state, so violent and so irregular in many respects, nonetheless offered, in essential respects, fewer obstacles to liberty than that which was described in the preceding chapter. The fact is that there is an enormous distance from the state in which the enslaved classes find themselves here to the state in which they found themselves under the economic regime of the ancients. At the height of the Greek dominations and of Roman domination, the slave was, in the full rigor of the word, only a domestic animal; an animal of a superior nature, if you will, more intelligent than the ass, the ox, the horse, but in the same condition as these quadrupeds; employed, like them, in all the labors of the house; able to be, like them, mistreated with impunity; treated, almost always, more inhumanely than the beasts themselves, and this precisely because he was a man, and more subject to forgetting his condition; finally finding protection nowhere, neither in the ideas, nor in the morals, nor in the religion, nor in the laws that governed his masters. In the Middle Ages, it is a little different. The servile population still forms the base of society, as in ancient times; but it is far, we have already said, from belonging to the same degree. In fact, the condition of the artisans of the towns, and even of the serfs of the countryside, is quite different from that of the ancient slaves. It is so also in law: religion and morality are no longer so completely indifferent to the lot of the enslaved classes; the laws no longer keep such an absolute silence on the violences of which they can be the object; the law of compositions protects, to a certain point, the serf in his life and in his limbs; he has a commencement of property, as well as a commencement of personal security; he is no longer so completely outside of society; one of the powers that governs it, the spiritual power, is recruited in large part from the class of free artisans, and even from the servile population; almost the entire clerical militia emerges from the lowest ranks of society; whereas the slaves, among the ancients, could not be part of the army, the artisans and peasants, in the Middle Ages, form the entire military population of the lords; witnesses of their insubordination, actors in all their quarrels, it is impossible that they not take on something of the spirit of independence that animates them. Each lordship, in the Middle Ages, is a small State and a hotbed of political activity. This local activity, although it is not of an excellent nature, does not fail to produce some good effects. The lord, governing, administering for his own account, has more than one reason not to do so with too much dementia and tyranny. His first interest is not to deteriorate his fief, not to make its inhabitants flee, not to put himself in the impossibility of resisting the neighboring lord with whom he may soon find himself at war. It is important to him therefore to protect the population of the lordship, to make it grow in number, in wealth, in well-being, in affection for the lord. Thus, if he happens to oppress it for his own account, he at least takes great care to defend it against any foreign enterprise, and even against any internal trouble that does not come from him or his own. The lords frequently give themselves over to shameful brigandages; but it is a privilege of their condition, and a privilege of which they are extremely jealous. They do not suffer that obscure men should imitate these sorts of feats, and it goes ill for petty thieves to play the robber. There is some police in the lordships, if not against the lords themselves; the population is responsible for the disorders committed in its midst; everyone is obliged to run to the cry of a person attacked; if the thief or the assassin takes flight, the cry raised against him is propagated from commune to commune, and it is rare that the culprit is not caught. Thus the cry of haro, an institution of these times, is regarded as the safeguard of public tranquility [^252] . Finally the lord, living more or less isolated, in the midst of the serfs of his domains (unlike the slave masters of antiquity who were gathered in cities), and able to fear for himself or his own the consequences of a too tyrannical conduct, has also some interest in not abusing too much this power to do evil that his title of lord gives him, and to abstain from the excesses that the inhabitants of the lordship cannot commit with impunity. There is therefore in the state of the vanquished, of the serfs, of the subjects, an evident improvement [^253] .

Thus the proof that this state did not render all progress impossible for them is shown in the very progress they had made. One cannot doubt, for example, that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France was much more populated than it had been in the time of the Romans. The number of towns had greatly increased [^254] . The anciently existing towns had grown larger [^255] . Paris, under Philippe-Auguste, at the end of the twelfth century, was already at its third wall, and covered a space of land four or five times more extensive than under Roman domination [^256] . The other cities, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Tours, had also grown. There had been, especially in the vicinity of the towns, a multitude of enclosed lands. Extensive land clearing had softened the climate, facilitated the extension of existing crops, and prepared the soil for the introduction of new crops. One felt the need and already had the means to consecrate considerable sums to objects of common interest. Closed markets began to be established in the towns under the name of halles. Establishments for instruction and charity were founded. It is at this epoch that there arose throughout Europe those cathedral churches whose number and grandeur attested not only to the power of the religious sentiment that animated the masses, but also to the extent of the resources at their disposal. These monuments, in which Saracenic architecture had succeeded Romanesque architecture, announced, at the same time, a progress in taste and above all a great movement in the imagination. Imperfect in some respects from the point of view of art, they were so remarkable from the point of view of sentiment and thought, that even today, when the sentiment that had inspired them has lost much of its force, when architecture has changed its character, when taste is no longer the same, when all the arts have made great progress and one has become particularly sensitive to the perfection of their forms, the so-called Gothic churches, where so many forms are incorrect, have preserved, to the highest degree, the power to touch and to move. That is not all. At the epoch when these immense edifices were rising, the fruit of so strong a conception and so bold an imagination, studies became more active; schools multiplied; Saint Louis founded the University of Paris; one began, in instructive and amusing works, to make a more frequent use of the vernacular language. At the same time, attempts were made to correct the barbarity of the old procedure, to put an end to the disorders of private wars and some bounds to the unlimited pretensions of the Roman church. Certainly, one cannot say that a social state in the bosom of which such a movement was possible did not admit of any sort of progress.

But one thing in which the progress it permitted to be made is shown even better, is the revolution that the enslaved classes were able to undertake to free themselves at the very epoch of the most complete establishment of feudal domination: a revolution in which these classes showed that they were rich enough to buy their liberty, courageous enough to defend it after having acquired it, often enterprising enough to acquire it without paying for it, constant enough to resist the most discouraging trials, bold enough to brave alternately all the powers of the time and sometimes several of these powers together, skillful enough, finally, to know how to profit from their dissensions and to always engage one of them in their enterprises: a revolution which, having abolished serfdom and made the dominating classes lose the distinction of liberty, soon pushed these classes to seek a new distinction in privilege, and thus led society to the new manner of being that I will describe in the following chapter.

---

Notes

[^207]: Cod. théod. lib. 9, tịt. 9, 1. I. [^208]: V. the course on modern history by M. Guizot, 1828-1829; vol. 1, pp. 71 to 73, and p. 80; and M. de Montlosier, De la Monarch. franç. vol. 1. [^209]: Hist. de la décad. de l'emp. rom.; French transl., Guizot ed., vol. 1, p. 80 et seq. [^210]: Illustrious Men, life of Lucullus. [^211]: Hist. de la décad. de l'emp. rom., Fr. transl., Guizot ed., vol. 1, p. 85. [^212]: “It must be recommended to the masters of men in servitude,” said Charlemagne in his Capitularies, “to act with gentleness and kindness toward their men, not to condemn them unjustly, not to oppress them with violence, not to unjustly take their small possessions from them, and not to exact with harsh and cruel treatment the dues they are to collect from them.” (Cap. Carol. Magn., lib. II, chap. 47; cited by the Acad. des inscrip., vol. 8, p. 483, of its memoirs.) [^213]: B. Petri apost. epist. prima, chap. II, V, 18] [^214]: V. the Mém. de l'Acad. des inscrip. vol. VIII, pp. 541, 564, 565, 567, 572, 583, and the original documents cited in the notes. V. also the Introduct. to the Hist. of Charles V, vol. II, note xx. [^215]: V., on this entire conduct of the clergy during the enfranchisement of the communes, the Letters of M. Thierry on the History of France, pp. 248 to 504 of the second ed. [^216]: Pro remedio, pro redemptione animae; pro timore Dei omnipotentis, etc. [for the remedy, for the redemption of the soul; for the fear of almighty God, etc.] V. the formulas of enfranchisement cited by Roberts., Introd. to the Hist. of Charles V, vol. II, note xx, and the original sources from which he draws. [^217]: Mém. already cited of the Acad. des inscrip., vol. VIII, p. 596. [^218]: De la Monarchie française, etc.; vol. I, pp. 23 and 141 to 146. [^219]: Lettres sur l'Hist. de France, p. 256, second ed. [^220]: Hist. de Paris by Dulaure, vol. I, pp. 462 to 467, first ed. [^221]: Id., p. 468. [^222]: Ibid., p. 470 et seq.] [^223]: V. the Mémorial de chronologie, d'Hist. industrielle, etc., under the word Végétaux, first part, ed. of 1829. [^224]: V. the Mémorial, ibid, p. 694. [^225]: V. vol. II, my chapter on Agriculture. [^226]: Dul., Hist. de Paris, vol. I, p. 432 of the first ed. [^227]: Id., vol. II, pp. 66 and 67. [^228]: Ibid., pp. 107 and 205. [^229]: Ibid., p. 417. [^230]: V. the Mémorial, etc., under the word Chandelle [Candle]. [^231]: Thierry, Lett. sur l'Hist. de France, p. 519 of the second ed. [^232]: V. the Mémorial under the word Fourrure [Fur]. [^233]: Id., under the words Lin [Flax] and Chanvre [Hemp], Bas [Stockings], Costume [Attire], Chaussure [Footwear], etc. [^234]: V., on all this, the Introd. to the Hist. of Charles V, vol. II, note x. [^235]: V., in Dulaure, vol. II, p. 112 of his Hist. de Paris, first ed., the detail of the procession that was made and the religious ceremonies that took place, in 1191, to cure the son of Philip Augustus of a dysentery against which ordinary medicine could do nothing. [^236]: Mémorial de Chronologie, etc., under the word Médecine [Medicine]. [^237]: V., on all this, the Mémorial under the word Costume [Attire]. [^238]: Hist. de Paris, vol. II, p. 24 of the first ed. [^239]: V. the Mémorial under the word Médecine [Medicine]. [^240]: Hist. de Paris, vol. II, p. 110. [^241]: Cited by Dulaure, vol. I, p. 432 et seq. of his Hist. de Paris, first ed. [^242]: Hist. de Paris, vol. II, p. 414 et seq. [^243]: Ibid., vol. II, p. 167. [^244]: M. Guizot, Cours d'hist. mod., 1828-1829, vol. I, pp. 340 and 341. [^245]: Hist. de Paris, vol. I, p. 460. [^246]: Expression from the Chronicles. [^247]: Hist. de Paris, vol. I, p. 461. [^248]: Introd. to the Hist. of Charles V, vol. II, note ix. [^249]: Ibid. [^250]: Hist. des Expéd. maritimes des Normands, vol. II, p. 247. Paris, 1826. [^251]: Walter-Scott, novel Ivanhoe, vol. I, ch. 1. [^252]: V. on this system of police, what the author of the Hist. des Expéd. marit. des Normands says, vol. II, p. 132 et seq., and the notes placed at the end of the vol. [^253]: Perhaps it is to this isolation of the lords in the midst of their serfs that one should attribute the custom they had adopted of surrounding themselves only with persons of their own condition, a custom that M. de Montlosier, as we have seen above, attributes to the particular character of Germanic morals. [^254]: Hist. des Français des divers états, aux cinq derniers siècles; XIVth century, vol. I, p. 23, and vol. II, p. 387, the notes. [^255]: Ibid., pp. 20, 21 and 22. Although the author speaks of the 14th century, one feels that in the immediately preceding centuries, progress must not have been nil. [^256]: Dulaure, Hist. de Paris. Compare the map at the head of the second vol. with the one at the beginning of the first. V. also the text.