FRANCE 



LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. One 

 of the Romance family of languages, 

 French had its origin in the popular 

 Latin (sermo plebeius or rusticus) 

 spoken by the Roman soldiers, 

 merchants, and colonists in Gaul. 

 Scarcely affected by Celtic influ- 

 ences, this popular Latin tongue, 

 one distinguishing feature of which 

 was the substitution of analytical 

 forms for the elaborate case and 

 verbal inflections of literary Latin, 

 had already established itself by the 

 end of the first century of the 

 Christian era. 



As they amalgamated with the 

 Gallo-Roman people, the Prankish 

 conquerors adopted it in their turn, 

 adding to its vocabulary a small 

 infusion of words chiefly of political 

 or military significance, e.g. vassal, 

 fief, haubert (halsberc), heaume 

 (helm), guerre (werra), but contri- 

 buting little to its phonetic or syn- 

 tactical development. By the 7th 

 century this lingua romana rustica, 

 spoken by all classes and accepted 

 by the Church, though not yet 

 committed to writing, had passed 

 into a form which can be recog- 

 nized as emb^onic French. 



The character of this transitional 

 tongue may be judged from the 

 first important monument of it, 

 the Strasbourg Oath, by which, in 

 842, Louis the German entered 

 into alliance with his brother 

 Charles the Bald : Pro Deo amur 

 et pro Christian poblo et nostro 

 coinmun salvament, d'ist di en 

 avant, in quant Deus savir et 

 podir me dunat, et salvarai eo cist 

 meon fradre Karlo, et in adjudha 

 et in cadhuna cosa, si cum on per 

 dreit son fradra salvar dift, in o 

 quid il mi altresi fazet. In modern 

 French this is : Pour 1' amour de 

 Dieu et pour le salut du peuple 

 chretien et notre commun salut, de 

 ce jour en avant, autant que Dieu 

 me donne savoir et pouvoir, je 

 soutiendrai mon frere Charles et 

 en aide et en chaque chose, ainsi 

 qu'on doit, selon la justice, sou- 

 tenir son frere, a condition qu'il 

 m'en fasse autant. 



Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oil 



But though now the common 

 language of the country, the pre- 

 vailing feudal confusion was fatal 

 to its uniform development, and 

 for a time it was broken up into 

 a number of independent dialects. 

 The principal division was into the 

 langue cToc of the south, which 

 approximated to the Italian and 

 Spanish modifications of the Ro- 

 mance stock, and the langue (Toil 

 of the north, the parent of mod- 

 ern French ; but in the langue. 

 d'oil itself there were four well- 

 marked varieties those of Nor- 

 mandy, Picardy, Burgundy, and 



33O1 



the He de France. But the election 

 to the monarchy of Hugh Capet, 

 duke of France, in 987, made Paris 

 the capital of the kingdom and 



five the dialect of the He de 

 ranee, or French as it was specifi- 

 cally called, an enormous advan- 

 tage over its rivals, and with the 

 steady political unification of the 

 country from the 12th century on- 

 ward this gradually became the 

 official language of the entire 

 people. The other dialects of the 

 north, and later the langue floe or 

 provencal, sank into the condition 

 of mere patois. It was not, how- 

 ever, till the 15th century that 

 the triumph of the French tongue 

 was complete and its stability and 

 uniformity definitely assured. By 

 this time the case-endings and 

 other synthetic features of the 

 lingua romana, which had lingered 

 in Old and Middle French, had 

 entirely disappeared. 



Evolution from Latin 



Philology has established the 

 fact that the evolution of French 

 out of Latin was governed by cer- 

 tain fundamental laws, of which 

 the most important are: (1) the 

 persistence of the Latin tonic 

 accent ; thus amdre became aimer, 

 porticus, porche ; (2) the contrac- 

 tion or loss of the Latin termina- 

 tion, as in the examples just given ; 

 (3) the disappearance of the short 

 vowel immediately preceding the 

 stressed syllable; e.g. bonitdtem= 

 bonte, claritdtem=clarte, septimana 

 semaine ; (4) the suppression of 

 the medial consonant : e.g. maturus 

 =maurus mur, confidential 

 confiance. These morphological 

 rules, however, apply only to the 

 natural and spontaneous evolu- 

 tion of the language and lapse 

 entirely in respect of that large 

 portion of the modern vocabulary 

 which consists of words afterward 

 imported from the Latin by scholars 

 and writers (mots savants). Hence 

 we can at once decide in the case 

 of the many existing doublets, or 

 words slightly differing in form 

 though ultimately derived from 

 the same sources, e.g. hotel and 

 hopital, confiance and confidence, 

 Her and liguer, which belong to the 

 primitive and popular founda- 

 tions of the language and which 

 are of later and artificial origin. 



LITERATURE. Though a few reli- 

 gious poems of earlier date have 

 come down to us, French literature 

 really begins with the epic poetry 

 of the llth, 12th, and 13th cen- 

 turies. This poetry, which is full 

 of the chivalrous spirit and is essen- 

 tially aristocratic in character, 

 falls roughly into two divisions : 

 the chansons de geste and the 

 romans epiques. Of the former, 



FRANCE 



largely concerned with the fabu- 

 lous exploits of Charlemagne and 

 his paladins, the most famous 

 example is the Chanson de Roland, 

 dating from the second half of the 

 llth century. Such chansons are 

 supposed to rest upon slight his- 

 torical bases ; the romans epiques 

 were legend or fiction. 



The Arthurian Cycle 



Most of these belong to the 

 Celtic legend-cycle of Arthur and 

 the Round Table, e.g. the poems of 

 Chretien de Troyes, of the second 

 half of the 12th century. Others 

 deal, albeit in a most extravagant 

 way, with classical antiquity (ro- 

 mans antiques) : e.g. the Roman 

 d' Alexandra of the 12th century, 

 which is specially interesting be- 

 cause it introduced the twelve- 

 syllable verse, later the standard 

 measure of French poetry and 

 hence called the alexandrine. 



After this epic poetry the most 

 important branch of medieval 

 French literature is the allegorical- 

 didactic poetry which reached its 

 culmination in the Roman de la 

 Rose, the first part of which, writ- 

 ten c. 1237 by Guillaume de Lorris, 

 contains a courtly " art of love " ; 

 while the second, written by Jean 

 de Meung, some forty years later, 

 with its bold satire upon contem- 

 porary society, illustrates the 

 rising reaction of the practical bour- 

 geois spirit against the fantastic 

 idealism of the aristocratic classes. 

 This reaction further appears in the 

 fabliaux, or short humorous stories 

 in verse, of the 13th and 14th cen- 

 turies, but its fullest expression is 

 to be found in the Roman du 

 Renard (12-1 4th centuries), which 

 is indeed a kind of anti-romance 

 or burlesque of the fashionable 

 chansons de geste. 



Although in the N. narrative 

 and didactic poetry flourished most, 

 lyrical verse was cultivated in 

 the S., notably by the Provencal 

 troubadours, who sang of courtly 

 love in elaborate and intricate 

 stanza-forms ; but as the old chiv- 

 alrous sentiments waned the poetry 

 of the latter became increasingly 

 vapid and unreal. The note of 

 sincerity was however, struck by 

 Rutebeul (d. c. 1280) and 200 years 

 later by the great Fran9ois Villon. 

 Concurrently the drama, which in 

 origin was the offspring of the 

 liturgy of the Church, evolved 

 through miracle, mystere and 

 moralite into two popular forms of 

 secular play the sottie, a short 

 satiric piece resembling the mor- 

 alite in its allegorical machinery 

 and didactic intention, and the 

 farce, which may be broadly de- 

 fined as dramatised fabliau. Mean- 

 while prose developed slowly, and 

 it was not until the 13th century 



