THE reading of CÆsar’s “Commentaries” makes us know that the Gauls with whom he contended were worthy opponents, ingenious in planning warfare and enthusiastic in fighting. Even the trained Roman legions had to work for their victories. Granting possible exaggeration, which is a sore temptation to a conqueror, eager to magnify the difficulties of his conquest, it is nevertheless clear that a radical change had transformed these fierce Gauls and irresistible Romans of a half century before Christ when, five hundred years later, a band of less than 10,000 “barbarians”, led by Clovis, swept across a comparatively unresisting Gaul.

What had happened in Gaul was what had happened in other parts of the Roman Empire. Money had concentrated in the hands of an insatiable few. To supply them and the government every stratum of society was squeezed of its smallest coin, until good men of middle-class position were willing to sell themselves into slavery to avoid the insistent demands of self-seeking tax collectors, and the government was meanly willing to accept the sacrifice because the supply of slaves was not being kept up since the victorious eagles had ceased to perch upon Rome’s banner.

In Paris conditions were not different from those in other parts of the province. The town was good to look upon with handsome Roman buildings, and it was ordered with due respect to the laws for whose making Rome had undoubted genius; but beneath this fair outside there shivered the soul of the dependent grown cowardly from abuse, lacking loyalty for what was unworthy of loyalty. The Gauls, who had adopted the language and manners of their conquerors, had become weak from overmuch reliance on the stronger power; the Romans had softened during years of peace. So it happened that when the barbarians from the north and east threatened Gaul they were bought off with gifts of land, and when, in 451, Attila, the Scourge of God, led into the north his fierce and hideous Huns whose only joy was bloodshed, the people of Paris prepared themselves for flight when he was still a long way off.

For every vital crisis in the life of the individual there is given a counterbalancing power of endurance; to groups this power is taught by the man or woman whom the circumstances develop as a leader. In this emergency, when the dreaded shadow of the hawklike Hun fluttered the citizens, and they were making preparations for deserting the town and taking into hiding such of their goods and chattels as they could, the leader developed in the unexpected form of a woman—Sainte GeneviÈve. Some say that GeneviÈve was, like Jeanne Darc a thousand years later, a peasant girl. Saint Germain of Auxerre, the story goes, on his way to “quenche an heresye” across the Channel, chanced to visit Nanterre where his prophetic eye espied the divine spirit in the little maid and his holy hand sealed her unto God. Another version insists that GeneviÈve belonged to a prominent family in Paris and that her family’s influence accounted for her sway over the people.

For sway them she did. At her bidding the women of the city fasted and fell on their knees and assailed God with prayer. Nearer and nearer came the foe, and the unbelieving reviled the maiden; but Saint Germain reproached them for their lack of faith and the miracle came to pass—the “tyrantes approachyd not parys.”

All quarrels were lost in the apprehension of this attack of a common enemy, and by the united effort of Gauls and Romans, of Burgundians, Visigoths and Franks, the dreaded Attila was defeated near ChÂlons in a battle so determined that the very ghosts of the slain, it was declared, continued the fight.

Freed of this menace to the whole country the victorious tribes again fell to quarreling among themselves. The Franks proved sturdiest and most persistent. Descended from Pharamond, who, perhaps, was legendary, their king, MÉrovÉe, had led them against Attila. Now his son, ChildÉric, attacked Paris. Again GeneviÈve rescued her townsmen from famine, herself embarking upon the Seine, which probably was beset by the enemy along the banks, and returning with a boatload of provisions which, by miraculous multiplication, revictualed the whole hungry and despairing garrison.

ChildÉric’s son, Clovis, leading about 8000 men, in 481 made himself king of northern France with Paris as his capital, thus establishing the line of monarchs who called themselves Merovingians. “Paris,” he wrote in 500 A.D., “is a brilliant queen over other cities; a royal city, the seat and head of the empire of the Gauls. With Paris safe the realm has nothing to fear.”

Clovis had married an orthodox Catholic wife, Clotilde, who was eager for his conversion. Her arguments are said to have been far from gentle, but they seem to have been suited to her husband’s nature, for he was almost persuaded to make the great change at the time of the birth of his eldest child. The baby died within the week, however, and the king looked upon his loss as an act of vengeance on the part of his deserted gods. When the second child recovered from a serious illness he was convinced that Clotilde’s intercessions had saved its life, and again he inclined toward Christianity. An incident determined his acceptance of his wife’s faith. In the battle of Tolbiac against the Germans Clovis begged the aid of “the God of the Christians” to determine in his favor a wavering victory. He won the fight, and it is easy to believe the joy of Sainte GeneviÈve, when the monarch was baptized in the cathedral at Rheims. He seems to have been of simple mind. The fittings and the ceremonies of the vast church touched his spirit to submission. “Is not this the kingdom of heaven you promised me?” he asked of the bishop. Again, when he listened to the story of the crucifixion, he is said to have cried with an elemental desire for vengeance, “Oh, had I been there with my Franks I would have avenged the Christ!”

Sainte GeneviÈve died in 509 and the citizens of grateful Paris over which she had watched in wise tenderness for fourscore years, made her their patron saint. The hill that had been known as Mons Lucotetius they called Mont Sainte GeneviÈve, and on it they built a chapel to honor and protect her grave. Clovis replaced the little oratory by a church as long as the mighty swing of his battle-axe, dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul and serving as the abbey church of a religious establishment which bore Sainte GeneviÈve’s name. Except for a dormitory and refectory this monastery was torn down in the middle of the eighteenth century to give place to a new church of Sainte GeneviÈve, secularized to-day and known as the Pantheon. The abbey church, built and rebuilt, was destroyed during the Revolution, the tower (called the Tower of Clovis, but really belonging to a later period) being all that is left of these historic structures. The reaction against religion in those turbulent revolutionary years made it no sacrilege to burn the good saint’s bones on the GrÈve, but some of the devoted preserved the ashes which rest now in a stone sarcophagus, elaborately canopied, in the neighboring church of Saint Étienne-du-Mont built in the twelfth century as a church for the dependents of the Abbey.

The comparatively peaceful and prosperous Roman period of five hundred years was followed by five centuries of strife and disaster at the hands of the northern tribes. The Roman Empire had found in Gaul the last stronghold of its civilization. There were large cities, fine buildings, public utilities, institutions of learning. To the barbarians, a youthful race at the destructive stage, these represented but so many things to be destroyed. Terrible and repeated onslaughts ousted the Romans, and then the victors became embroiled with new tribes who sought to drive them out. Palaces and houses were destroyed, fields and vineyards were laid waste. Paris, the stronghold of the early Merovingians, suffered less than the other important towns of Gaul, but the Franks had no standards of fair living, and they did not build up where time or their own ferocity had cast down. Tottering walls were bolstered with rough buttresses, new dwellings were square hovels of the same heavy stonework, farming languished, commerce died.

The successors of Clovis for one hundred and fifty years tricked their wives, murdered their rivals, and assassinated their nearest of kin if they stood in their way. Clovis divided his kingdom among his four sons. One of them was killed in battle soon after and left his three children to the care of their grandmother, Clotilde, with whom they lived in the great palace on the left bank. Just like the wicked uncles in many a fairy tale two of Clovis’s surviving sons obtained possession of the little boys by stratagem and took them away to the palace on the CitÉ. Then they sent to Clotilde a messenger who bade her choose between the shears and the sword—the shears which should clip the children’s locks and thereby sever their claims to the throne and send them into the Church, and the sword of death. In a passion of indignation Clotilde exclaimed that she would rather see them dead than shorn. Claiming this cry as their authorization the two men set about the murder of their nephews. Childebert, king of Paris, proved somewhat less brutal than his brother (he loved flowers enough to plant a garden at the Roman palace) and would have saved the children—they were hardly more than babies—but Clotaire stabbed two of them with his own hand. Then he married their mother. The third boy escaped, came under the tutelage of Saint SÉverin and entered a Benedictine monastery. When he was a man grown he established a religious house at a spot a few miles from Paris called Saint Cloud from his name, Clodoald. Here, on a height above the river, stood the chÂteau where Napoleon effected the coup d’ État that made him First Consul, and whence Charles X issued the decrees that brought about the Revolution of 1830. The building was burned during the troubles of 1870, but the park with its fine allÉes of trees and its fountains is one of the playgrounds of modern Paris.

Clotaire had done away with the possible rivalry of his nephews but he had a bitter enemy in his brother Thierry. This amiable relative plotted his assassination. He invited him to a feast and stationed his desperadoes behind a curtain whence they should spring out upon their victim. Some friend of Clotaire’s, chancing to pass by, noticed below this apparently innocent screen a row of feet unaccounted for, and guessed the project of their owners. Warned of his danger Clotaire came amply guarded and caused his brother extreme annoyance by his evident knowledge of his plan and its consequent frustration. Thierry gave him a silver dish by way of souvenir of this pleasant occasion, but he repented him of this generosity as soon as Clotaire was out of sight and sent his son to replevin the gift.

One of Clotaire’s sons, ChilpÉric I (who died in 584) gave his daughter in marriage to the son of the king of the Visigoths in Spain. A great train came to Paris to fetch the bride, and the appearance of these rough Goths and the thought of her approaching separation from her parents and friends so afflicted the young girl that her father determined to secure companionship for her. He commanded some chosen young people—girls and youths of her own age—and also some entire families to go with her into Spain. So great was the opposition to this high-handed proceeding that it became necessary forcibly to seize the unwilling recipients of the honor in order to be sure of their presence when the expedition started. Some of those who were to be separated from their kindred committed suicide in despair over their banishment. “In Paris there reigned a desolation like Egypt,” says sympathetic Gregory of Tours. Robbed of their children the rich Parisians found the country also robbed of gold and silver vessels and of handsome raiment, for the queen heaped into her daughter’s bridal coffers the treasures that she had obtained from the nobles in the course of years under the guise of revenue. So loath were the princess’s attendants to follow her fortunes and so lacking were they in loyalty that her retinue on arriving in Spain was lessened not only by the daily desertions of all who could manage to escape, but by the defection in a body of no less than fifty men.

FrÉdÉgonde, the bride’s mother, was a woman of forceful will and of unbridled passions. The list of deaths for which she was responsible reads like a roster of the royal family. Although of low birth she attracted the attention of the king, ChilpÉric, and induced him to put aside his wife, AudovÈre. ChilpÉric then married Galsuinthe, sister of Brunehaut, wife of his brother Sigebert. FrÉdÉgonde soon compassed Galsuinthe’s death and then achieved her ambition and became queen herself. Brunehaut naturally was indignant as well as sorrowful at her sister’s death, clearly the work of an assassin. She urged her husband to vengeance and he declared war against ChilpÉric. His activity was not of long duration, however, for he, too, fell a victim to FrÉdÉgonde’s ferocity. Brunehaut saved her life only by claiming the asylum of the cathedral of Paris. Not long after she married MÉrovÉe, a son of ChilpÉric and AudovÈre. Then FrÉdÉgonde disposed of her by inducing Sigebert’s subjects to claim their queen and by insisting that ChilpÉric should deliver her over to them. MÉrovÉe, at her command, was shorn and imprisoned and hounded until he sought death at the hands of a servant. His brother was stabbed. Their mother, AudovÈre, was not safe even in the cloister, for she was murdered in her retreat. ChilpÉric himself was the next victim, killed by a knife-thrust as he returned from the chase. He was succeeded by an infant son, Clotaire II (613-628), and FrÉdÉgonde spent the rest of her life in alternations of affectionately fierce devotion to his interests and in scheming against the authority of his guardians.

Brunehaut outlived her enemy, FrÉdÉgonde, by many years and finally met her death at the order of FrÉdÉgonde’s son. After a stormy career during which she compassed much good for the subjects of her son and grandsons and earned her share of hatred from the nobles whom she opposed, she was captured by Clotaire. Her extreme age—she was eighty—did not save her from a brutal end. She was stripped and displayed to his army, then bound by a foot, an arm and her hair to a wild horse which kicked her to death. This hideous deed was done in Paris where now the rue Saint HonorÉ crosses the rue de l’Arbre Sec, and not far from the site of the house wherein Admiral Coligny was slain, the first victim of the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew.

Of all the Merovingian kings only Dagobert I (628-638), son of Clotaire II, proved himself a man of strength, incongruously fighting and praying, massacring captives and building churches, living a vicious life in private and governing with justice and intelligence. “Great king Dagobert” he was called, and he was regarded impartially as a “jolly good fellow” and as a saint. He lived in the palace on the CitÉ, and he rebuilt the abbey of Saint Denis, invited distant merchants to visit Gaul, dealt out justice to poor and rich alike in unconventional and hearty fashion, and hammered his enemies with the same vigor and enthusiasm.

In the century following his the Merovingian line degenerated into a race of “Rois FainÉants” (“Do-nothing Kings”), dissolute, lazy, leaving the task of government to their Mayors of the Palace while they rolled slothfully in ox-carts from the debaucheries of one country house to the coarse pleasures of another.

The only upbuilding accomplished during the Merovingian two centuries and a half was the establishment of churches and religious houses. The Frank was not aggressive in the less active relations of his duties as a victor. He was content to learn the language of the conquered race and the mysticism of religion spoke to him winningly. Throughout the years when nothing that fell was restored and the hand was busy striking, at least one kind of constructive impulse was manifest when Clovis built the church in which he was buried on Mons Lucotetius, when his son, Childebert, reared an abbey on the south bank to protect the tunic of Saint Vincent, when on the north bank a church was dedicated to the same saint and another to Saint Laurent, while the south side was further enriched by edifices sacred to Saint Julien and to Saint SÉverin, the tutor of Clodoald. It is not the original buildings that we see on these sites to-day, but it is a not uninteresting phase of the French spirit that has reared one structure after another upon ground once consecrated, so that a church stands to-day where a church stood fifteen hundred years ago.

The story of the foundation of the church of Saint Vincent is interesting from several points of view. Clovis divided his possessions among his four sons, giving Paris to Childebert. Childebert had no notion of staying cooped up in this northern town, and he went as far afield as Saragossa in search of war. During the course of his siege of that city he beheld its citizens marching about bearing what seemed to be a relic of especial sanctity. It proved to be the cloak of Saint Vincent in which they were trusting to save them from their assailants. It did not betray their trust, for Childebert became filled with eagerness to possess a relic which could inspire such confidence, and offered to raise the siege if they would give him the tunic. When he returned to Paris Saint Germain of Autun persuaded him to build a church for its protection and to establish an abbey whose members should make it their first duty to pay honor to the relic. This abbey was called later Saint Germain-des-PrÉs, the name which the abbey church bears to-day. It stands no longer in the meadows, but raises its square Merovingian tower above one of the busiest parts of Paris. Except for this tower the church was burned in the ninth century, but it was rebuilt in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the nave with its semi-circular arches is one of the few remaining examples in the city of the Romanesque architecture of which this was a characteristic. The choir shows in its arches and windows the hand of a later builder who was inclining toward the pointed Gothic.

The Merovingian kings were buried here. After the founding of Saint Denis the royal remains were removed to that abbey church.

The north bank church of Saint Vincent also received the name of Saint Germain, but this was to honor Saint Germain l’Auxerrois, the friend of Sainte GeneviÈve. This early edifice also was destroyed, but was rebuilt by Robert the Pious, and the later building held the bell which rang for the massacre of Saint Bartholomew a thousand years later.

These churches and monasteries were the means of preserving whatever of learning persisted through this period of return to primitive living. Every one of them was a center of information, and every one of them taught freely what it knew of agriculture and of the homely arts. Further the Church was thoroughly democratic. A bishop’s miter lay in every student’s portfolio, as a marshal’s baton hid in the knapsack of each one of Napoleon’s soldiers.

Of larger government, however, the bishops had small knowledge, and Paris, left to their guidance while the kings roamed abroad, lost her high prestige. She did not regain it under the next dynasty.