XVIII. FRANKS—FRENCH.

AUTHORITIES:

Augustin Thierry, Henry Martin, Bonnemère, etc.

Domestic slavery, aggravated by the oppression of the poor, the devastations of war, the insatiable necessities of the imperial treasury, the confiscations of property during the reigns of bad emperors, and other causes, ate into the very vitals of Roman Gaul. It has been already shown how the ancient relations of clansman and client merged successively into tributary colons, into adscripti gleb?, and into chattels. At the period of the final assault of the northern races on the Roman empire, in Gaul, as everywhere else, there was no people behind the imperial legions except rich slaveholders and poor degraded freemen, serfs and chattels; and the legions, too, were mostly recruited from among vagabonds and barbarians. Long before this time, Stilicon, in order to raise soldiers for his army, proclaimed freedom to the chattels who should join his standard; and by this means collected over thirty thousand men!

During the integrity of the empire, branches of the tribe of Franks dwelt in parts of northern Gaul, either as colonists, or as allies who recognized in the Roman emperor their lord paramount. From here[Pg 208] they dealt their conquering blows; they subdued to their rule the other German races already established in Gaul, and laid the foundation of the future Carlovingian empire, and finally of France.

The Franks permitted the conquered peoples to retain their own law, which was the Roman, for all civil suits between Roman and Roman. This benefited only the freemen—of whom there were but few—and the rich, so that they could oppress the poor and treat them as they did under the empire; for the Franks did not interfere in any of their internal relations, legal or illegal. The rich and cunning Roman magnates ingratiated themselves with their conquerors: they became antrustiones or commensals of the kings, thus acquiring a high social and political status and influence; and there were many of them among the powerful and influential aristocracy which sprang up under the Merovingians. All the conquered paid oppressive tribute; and the rich, as of old, used every means to increase their estates, serfs and chattels from the booty and exactions made by the Franks.

But although the rights of the free Romans were thus recognized in principle, their persons and property were by no means regarded as sacred. The Franks divided the conquered lands among them in lots, and often seized, along with the estate, the whole of the personal property of a rich Roman magnate.

The Merovingians were almost continually at war among themselves, and these wars were most ruinous to the cities and the rich free Romans. When a peace[Pg 209] was concluded, these Romans constituted the hostages for both belligerent parties; and when a peace was broken, the hostages on both sides were treated as prisoners of war; they became chattels, and their property was confiscated.

The Roman cities became the property of the kings and chiefs, the lands the property of the Frankish soldiery. The Franks also were perpetually at war either among themselves or with their neighbors. Military duty was a condition of the possession of land, so that Roman and other slaves and bondmen cultivated the soil and worked for their conquerors. During the imperial epoch, the opulent Gallic magnates and senators lived in magnificent villas, like the Roman nabobs and oligarchs in Italy, Spain, Africa, etc. During the early period of the invasions, an owner would often fortify his villa and defend it with his armed household and chattels. Such villas, changing masters, afterward, in many instances, became feudal strongholds, around each of which grew a village, which in the course of time became a borough, then a town, and finally a city. In this way the Gallo-Roman villas gave rise to the French name village and ville.

In general, with the new Frankish conquest, oppression became increasedly grievous, while the slave traffic, especially in prisoners of war, received a new impulse. In the first storm the Roman fiscality for a moment disappeared; but it was soon restored, and with it almost the whole of the Roman administra[Pg 210]tion. The Franks revolted against taxation when one of the kings tried to apply it to them, but the Roman populations bore its whole brunt. Tribute, taxes and other exactions finally became so oppressive that the poor and impoverished sold their children and sometimes even themselves into slavery. The Jews were the common mediators and factors in this traffic, as well as the most extensive slave-traders all over Europe, both then and in subsequent times; and a considerable part of the hereditary hatred of the European masses toward the Jews is to be ascribed to this historic fact.

The Frankish kings and their Frankish subjects had large estates, métairies, worked by serfs and chattels. The conquerors hated the cities, preferring the favorite old German life in the country, where they spent their time surrounded by their followers. The lordly mansions, the sala of the kings and the powerful, were erected amidst great forests in the style of encampments; and to this day the German word hoflager, "court-camp," is the name for the residence or court of a sovereign. Political power and prestige were no longer derived from municipal citizenship, but from the possession of land; and thus originated the feudal importance of the country and the barons, in contradistinction to the now powerless municipium. In the Greek and Roman world, the country was wholly sacrificed, politically and socially, to the city, which, in turn, acquired more and more political power and importance in proportion as do[Pg 211]mestic slavery destroyed the primitive yeomanry. In the early stages of feudalism scarcely any attention was paid to the cities; they are principally mentioned as sources whence taxes and tributes may be largely squeezed.

In the Free States of the American union, also, in the townships and villages, the significance of the country has reached its highest and noblest development. Here the free townships and villages are the fountains of healthy political life, and the genuine source of all civilizing agencies.

Under the Merovingians and Carlovingians, the frequent wars and oppressions proved destructive not only to the natives but also to the conquerors themselves. The Franks and other German landholders, by their violent and disorderly mode of life, were soon impoverished and became the prey of powerful neighbors of their own kindred. The savage rigor of the law regulating composition for crimes quickly drained and utterly destroyed the patrimonies of the reckless soldiery, and thus rapidly increased the number of landless vagabonds, who were neither tenants nor serfs, but became chattels to men of their own race, once their companions and perhaps even their followers. At the end of the second Salic dynasty very few free laborers existed, and kidnapping, especially on the sea-coasts, became common.

Charlemagne, as previously mentioned, tried to regulate and alleviate the condition of the bondmen and chattels. His capitularies forbade the selling[Pg 212] of chattels beyond the kingdom; and whoever violated this law became a slave himself. Slaves were to be sold in the presence of the count or the bishop, or their lieutenants, or notables, but not surreptitiously, or from one person to another, without being controlled by the authorities; and heavy fines also followed all violations of this law. Notwithstanding all this, however, Norman and Saracen wars and invasions, together with Frankish taxations and exactions, kept the country in the same state of desolation as during the centuries of the agonizing empire. Scarcely any towns existed, and the few large cities were scattered at enormous distances one from the other. Fastnesses, castles, burghs and fortified monasteries dotted the land; even they, however, being separated from each other by great forests and marshes. The poor and oppressed serfs and chattels were hunted and kidnapped, and no place of refuge existed for them.

Under Charlemagne, public order and protection to the free tenants, serfs and chattels, existed to as high a degree as was possible at that epoch; but with his death all this disappeared. The crisis which then occurred and which ended in consolidating the feudal social structure, was even more terrible than the epoch of invasions. The poor classes and the serfs and chattels, as we might suppose, suffered most. The tenth century marks the triumph of the feudal régime, and with this triumph chattelhood (mancipium) disappears from the laws and the usage of the oppressive masters. The chattels now became hered[Pg 213]itary bondmen or serfs, and were no longer objects of sale or of traffic. They could not be separated from their families, but were established in villages; and the slave traffic was carried on solely in Saracens and other heathen.

In all other respects serfdom preserved almost all the most revolting features of ancient domestic slavery. The feudal lord employed the serfs as tillers of his soil, and the harvests they raised were the chief sources of his income; while they likewise formed his followers in his feuds with feudal neighbors or with his lords paramount—the counts, dukes, and kings. The feudal lord did not sell his serfs—as the churches, synods, and councils all united in condemning the traffic in Christians.

The present serf, tiller, and laborer, all over Western Europe, was the younger, outlawed member of the human family, and so now are our Southern chattels.

For a long time the difference between serfdom and ancient chattelhood was discernible only with great difficulty. The collar worn by chattels since the time of Augustus remained on the necks of the serfs (and these, too, not adscripti gleb?), with the expression—"I belong," or with the name of the master cut thereon. This was the custom in England with the Anglo-Saxon serfs of the Athelstanes and the Cedrics, so that the ancestry of the haughty Anglo-Saxon slaveholding American barons of the present day wore collars!

The feudal order was firmly established. Below the social hierarchy, composed of free fiefs, and estates[Pg 214] belonging to nobles, churches, and monasteries (all of them free from taxation and public servitude), descend another social grade, whose only badges were humiliations, sufferings, toils, and martyrdom. Servitude and serfdom had similar gradations among the peasantry and workmen bound to the soil of their feudal master as existed among the barons, nobles, abbots, etc., in their various relations and duties of vassalage.

A few towns and boroughs began to spring up from the same social soil whence arose those of Germany. But the immense majority of the nobles and owners of cities considered their inhabitants, at the best, as but half free, as tributaries or censitaires, and continually attempted to plunge them deeper into servitude and villeinage. The remnants of the independent yeomanry, free tenantry, copyholders, etc., rapidly disappeared. These descendants of the conquerors—of kindred race, too, with the barons—accepted servitude in order to find patronage and alleviation from further oppression, or else sought refuge in the cities and towns, abandoning their homesteads, which were seized by the feudal baron and annexed to his estate.

All along the twelve or fifteen centuries which extend from the decline of the Greek and Roman republics and the first days of the empire down to the consolidation of feudalism, it is evident that similar causes were ever in operation, depriving the poor of their property, their labor, and finally of their liberty—a result, too, brought about in every case in an identical manner. In this, as in many other things,[Pg 215] the history of the human race and its disorders and woes is a record of almost continuous analogies.

The smaller feudal masters, afterward called hoberaux, were generally the most cruel and inhuman then, as well as afterward, during the long protracted centuries of serfdom of the French peasantry. Tyranny always becomes fiercer and more maddened in proportion as the circle of its power and action is diminished. Is it not so also on American slave plantations?

It has been already mentioned, that the kings and the more powerful feudal vassals began to erect towns, and that these towns served as refuges for the homeless, and also for the serfs. The lesser nobles and the feudalized clergy often upbraided the kings for thus depopulating their estates; while the barons who owned the cities soon exasperated their inhabitants by their exactions and cruelties.

Such were the prominent domestic and economic features of the times of feudalism and chivalry in France, as over the whole of Europe. It is for other reasons that, in the minds of some, a halo still surrounds their memory and their name. But, penetrating behind that halo, what a horrid spectacle of tyranny, oppression, and cruelty meets the eye! The sham chivalry of our Slave States has not even the shadow of such an aureola to hide its hideousness. The cruel and reckless barons sprang from a reckless race, in an age of darkness: they had no other traditions from the past, no other example before them. But the American chivalry and knight-errants of slavery spit[Pg 216] on all the noble traditions transmitted by their sires. They have before their eyes the spectacle of freedom generating prosperity in all ages. And yet with all this do they deliberately turn their backs upon the light, and rush heedlessly toward dark barbarity.

The feudal rights of the barons in the products and earnings of the tradesmen and workmen, as well as in the person and labor of the serfs, together with their right of civil and criminal jurisdiction, were all the result of successive usurpations.

Toward the end of the eleventh, and especially in the twelfth century, the cities and towns rose against their feudal oppressors. This great movement was not preconcerted, nor was it instigated by outside conspirators. The cities, goaded by exactions and oppressions, rose separately, and each one on its own account. The impulse came from man's natural aspirations for freedom and justice, and his hatred of tyranny. The true conspirators were the nobles who oppressed the cities. Louis VI., of immortal memory, aided the cities in their efforts to form themselves into communes, gave them charters, and relieved them from the power of the barons; in short, he did every thing possible to undermine the power of the nobles, and prevent them from pillaging, torturing, and murdering the people. But the emancipation of the cities was finally achieved only by blood; and the kings, moved by humanity as well as policy, supported the citizens in their efforts, and thus reduced the tyrannic and unruly barons and nobles. The nobles, small and great,[Pg 217] in France as in other parts of Europe, resisted with arms the communal emancipation. They proclaimed and treated as rebels and subverters of order and society, all who tried to reconquer their liberty, as well as all those who advocated the cause of the oppressed. Does not the same phenomenon reappear in our own time and country?

With the emancipation of the cities and the formation of communes, civilization began to illumine the horizon of France. But this great social event had not such a direct influence on the condition of the rural populations in France as it had in Italy. Still the serfs found a safe refuge in the now independent cities.

The crusades acted in the same way on the condition of the peasantry in France, as they did in Germany, Flanders, etc.

Successively, kings began to regulate and alleviate the condition of the serfs on their domains, gradually interposing to limit the power of the nobles over their serfs. A chronicler of that time (twelfth century), says: "Cetera censuum exactiones qu? servis infligi solent (nobles) omnimodis vacent." The French legists of the thirteenth century, inspired by Ulpian and Roman law, the study of which was again revived by a decree of Louis IX., declared that every man on the soil of France is or ought to be free, by right as well as by the law of nature. Subsequently this axiom was considered applicable even to Saracens, Mahomedans, Africans, and all races, creeds, and nationalities. Louis IX. was the friend of the oppressed and the re[Pg 218]dresser of the wrongs of the peasantry. He abolished the more oppressive servitudes in the domains, and tried to humanize the nobles.

The great principle of liberty asserted by the legists of the thirteenth century, was in the fourteenth embodied in a law or edict of Louis X., which decreed that the serfs might pay off their personal and rural obligation to the nobles and become free tenants. This law was very generally carried out in the royal domains, but did not find much favor among the nobles or in the feudalized church. At that time, moreover, many serfs and peasants, from poverty, mental degradation, and shiftlessness, and others from distrust of the law and the nobles, refused the freedom offered to them. In several provinces, disorders even resulted from their resistance, especially in those places where the conditions dictated by the seneschals (royal overseers), nobles, and priests, were so oppressive as to make free tenantry no better than bondage; and for this reason, also, serfs who had obtained their liberty often returned to servitude. In defence of American chattelhood, it is asserted that many chattels spurn the idea of emancipation; that many of them, when emancipated, return, of their own choice, into slavery, and that they are too degraded to appreciate freedom, and too shiftless to achieve its rewards. These very reasons, based on facts similar to those now set forth, were urged by the French feudal masters against the efforts of the government to liberate the oppressed whites.

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The consequences of a bodily as of a social disorder are frequently of protracted duration. The oppression of centuries so destroys the mind and manhood of the oppressed that they consider slavery their normal condition, even as physical monstrosities have sometimes been regarded by their possessors as the symbols of beauty and health. Such incurables may even be found among the now free descendants of social, political, national, and legal bondmen—among the descendants of those who in former times were covered with contempt, and who suffered unutterable social degradation. Such are the Irish, en masse, and some others who escape oppression in Europe only to support slavery in America.

Personal serfdom and vassalage began to be gradually modified; but on the estates of the clergy and nobility it lasted till near the eighteenth century, still preserving several of its worst features. Nowhere in Europe was the peasant so long and so grievously oppressed as in France; nowhere did he take such terrible but just revenge. Insurrections of the peasantry in various parts of France form an almost uninterrupted historic series, of which the great revolution was the fitting climax.

The repeated bagaudies of the Gallic peasantry have been already mentioned: the next revolt was in the tenth century, when the serfs and peasants of Neustr? (Normandy) rose against the Northmen, who had just established themselves, and who tried to transform them into chattels; and another rising[Pg 220] took place about the same time in Brittany. Beside many partial uprisings against particular strongholds or districts, the most general and most celebrated were those of the pastouraux, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—one of which was directed principally against the feudalized clergy—and the repeated jacqueries. Indeed, during the fourteenth century, the whole of Europe might be said to be divided into two great hostile camps: the nobles with their exactions and oppressions forming one, and the laborers, peasants and serfs, resisting their oppressors with battle-axe and fire, forming the other. And thus the oppressed everywhere hewed out their path to freedom and civilization.

The fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had their various revolts, sometimes evoked by governmental measures and maladministration, but far oftener stirred up by the reckless and cruel treatment of the laborer by the nobles—against whom both the law and royal authority were too often inefficient and powerless.

Then came the epoch of atonement and of justice—1789-1793. Then germinated the seeds which had been sown for centuries in the social soil by the oppressors, and then, too, was gathered the bloody harvest.

The present rural population or peasantry of France, the descendants of serfs and chattels, now possess the same civil and political rights as any other class in the nation—rights more ample than are enjoyed by[Pg 221] any other peasantry in Europe. They have, of course, still to suffer various evils arising from the common imperfection of all social structures; but no special degradation is attached to their birth or their condition.

The first glimpses of mental culture, in the earliest medi?val night, came from the monasteries—from monks who generally belonged to the conquered race, or sprang from chattels and serfs. Indeed, almost all the modern European civilization was elaborated in the cities by the so-called middle classes, and by peasants. Luther and Kepler were the sons of poor peasants; and the sires of the immense majority of the European middle classes, at one time or another, were chattels, serfs, or bondmen, who were for ages considered and treated as brutes by the nobles and barons. All over Europe many of the genealogies of aristocratic families ascend to slaves, serfs and villeins.