242 



KNOWLEDGE, 



[November, 1903. 



regeut or worlring king. The infant died, and in 656 the 

 mayor made his own son king. It was too soon. The 

 usurper was dispossessed by the vigorous sovereign of rival 

 Neustria, who annexed the kingdom. The victor died the 

 same year, also leaving only infant sons. The Austrasian 

 grandees then deserted the race that had proved unable to 

 defend itself, and made their mayor Duke of the Franks. 

 It was the first titular step to sovereignty. Power at 

 home leads to self-assertion abroad, and the Mayor of 

 Austrasia attacked the Mayor of Neustria in 687 and 

 defeated him in a great battle near Pcronne. 



Pepin brought back with him to Austrasia the king of 

 the vanquished people, but the Merovingian dynasty was 

 practically at an end. It indeed lived on for 6.5 years 

 longer, but as the mere shadow of a royal race. Most of 

 the kings died in youth or were old men before they were 

 thirty. They were known as the " do-nothing kings," 

 They retained the long hair and beard that were the 

 emblems of kinghood. They sat on a throne and received 

 ambassadors, to whom they recited dictated speeches. 

 Once a year they appeared at the assemblies of the 

 warriors. Generally they lived isolated on a farm, enjoying 

 a pension (very irregularly paid, we are told) assigned 

 them by the mayor. Of the two last surviving kings of 

 the two kingdoms, one voluntarily entered, and the other 

 was confined in, a monastery. 



Meanwhile, the Mayor of Austrasia steadily gained 

 gi'ound. The family of Pepin grew in wealth and in 

 sanctitv, and Pepin gained consideration by his equity. 

 He built up the executive authority and kept the nobles in 

 subjection. His famous son, Charles Martel, defeated the 

 Saracens at Poitiers, and saved northern Europe from 

 invasion. Charles's son, Pepin the Little, conquered 

 Burgundy and Aquitaine. He was then strong enough, 

 with the approval and aid of the Pope, to proclaim him- 

 self king in 752. The sti-uggle had lasted 150 years. 



There was no lack of battle in its primai'y sense, as we 

 perceive ; assassinations of rival kings, queens, and mayors 

 were not infrequent ; but the gist of the dynastic struggle 

 did not lie there. It lay in the steadfast advance of a new 

 and still incorrupt ethnical variety and the slow recession 

 of a race that died, not only of defeat, but of its own 

 internal decline. Nor does the defeat of a dynasty neces- 

 sarily involve its extinction. It may live on, driven into a 

 remote or an inferior habitat. The Dukes of Gascony or 

 Aquitaine and the Counts of Armagnac in the fifteenth 

 century were the lineal descendants of King Charibert in 

 the seventh. 



The Ministerial Steucjgle. 



The advent of a new dynastic variety commonly brings 

 with it a new administrative variety, which is of the same 

 race with it, like the Guises and like Sully, or which 

 moulds it in its own image, as the doctrinaires of the 

 French Kestoration moulded the Orleans dynasty. But 

 it may also spring up in sympathy with a new type of 

 sovereign, and then we observe in both cases the rise of 

 an original species. Charles V., well named the Sage 

 (1364-80), was a new kind of monarch in France. Staying 

 at home, while his luckless predecessors had gone out to 

 the disastrous fields of Crccy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, he 

 recovered by diplomacy as much territory as they had lost 

 by war, and governed the country like a " citizen king." 

 His Ministers, disdainfully called "s^nall people" and 

 " the marmosets " by the nobles, had risen up from the 

 ■wealthy and instructed upper middle class, and they ousted, 

 by mere choice of the King, the royal princes and feudal 

 nobles who had long misgoverned France. Driven from 

 ofiice at his death by the re-entrant seigneurs, they were 

 replaced in it eight years later by the new King, his son. 



and for four short years they ruled the country with 

 wisdom. Unhappily, the insanity of the King again led to 

 their exclusion, and another feudal reaction ensued. In 

 all this there was no encounter between the two bodies of 

 Ministers ; no victory and no defeat. It is true that 

 the chief Minister of the " marmosets " was assassinated, 

 but bv a noble in personal revenge. A change of moral 

 climate, so to speak, a return of the glacial epoch, as it 

 were, made the continued existence of the new men itn- 

 possible. 



The first Bourbon king of France inaugurated, or 

 revived, the modern type of Minister in the great Sully. 

 Heni-y's strong per.sonality survived his assassination, and 

 kept the Minister in office for a while, but a new- 

 political atmosphere soon made him obsolete. The Italian 

 Queen-mother initiated a foreign policy, involving a 

 Spanish alliance, with which the Protestant could have no 

 sympathy. His colleagues, Villeroy, Sillery, and Jeannin, 

 kept their ground during the first phase of the regency, 

 and then they too had to go. The " grey-beards " were 

 replaced by the " young people" — Barbin, Mangot Brienne, 

 and Richelieu. Again there was no battle. Aji Italian 

 favourite, Concini, had confirmed the new direction given 

 to the policy of France, and, from Protestant and German, 

 had made it Catholic and Spanish. There was no conflict 

 between the new Ministers and the old. As Gabriel 

 Hanotaux has observed, it was "the pressure of interests 

 and events " that bore the new Ministers to office. The 

 change of environment killed the old species and favoured 

 the survival of the new. When Richelieu subjugated his 

 eolleagties, and reigned alone, or in company with the 

 formidable Father Joseph, it was because his bold and 

 original genius had created a new environment once more, 

 and made French policy swerve back into the channel that 

 Henry had dug for it. The deposition of this Minister 

 or that was a mere incident of the struggle. 



The rise and fortunes of the Doctrinaire Party have 

 been nan-ated in the delightful Souvenirs of Duke Victor 

 de Broglie, the worthy son-in-law of Mme. de Staid, who 

 might perhaps be named the ancestress and spiritual 

 founder of the party. It inherited her brilliancy and her 

 rectitude. Guizot was its brain ; Camille Jordan its 

 heart ; de Serre its orator ; Broglie its cross-fertiliser ; 

 Barante its historian ; and Charles de Rcmusat its 

 philosopher. Planted before the Restoration, it sprang 

 into prominence in 1818. In the beginning of that year, 

 though numerically " almost imperceptible," it elected the 

 President of the Chamber, and before the end of the year 

 it placed in office a Ministry that was called the Doctrinaire 

 Ministry, because "the party was the nerve and brain" of 

 the Ministry, though only one of its members was a 

 Minister. Not till after the Revolution of 1830 did it 

 form a Ministry of its own, and that lasted for little more 

 than two months, but it may be said to have moulded the 

 French legislature in its own image. We need not further 

 follow its fortunes. Nor need we take too seriously the 

 military phraseology in which the party struggle is 

 described by the Duke, who had lived through the wars of 

 the Republic and the Empire. The doctrinaire party was 

 " a headquarters staff without soldiers"; it " planted its 

 flag " in certain positions ; it was " vanquished " on 

 certain grounds; a system or a law was "keenly attacked"; 

 a bill was " combated," and " during the height of the 

 combat . . ."; and so on. The phrases do not deceive us ; 

 we are familiar with them in our own histories and 

 journals ; and no one who has witnessed an oratorical 

 tourney in the House of Commons, especially in the great 

 days of Gladstone and Disraeli, will underrate the element 

 of battle in Parliamentary debates. It is assuredly an 

 essential part of the Ministerial struggle in free countries ; 



